Six of the world’s best-known spirits brands — Johnnie Walker, Ketel One, Tanqueray, Buchanan’s, Mr Black and more — were being consolidated onto a single platform as part of Diageo’s global digital transformation. My role varied by brand, and that’s the honest shape of platform work.
On Mr Black and Buchanan’s I went deep: near-fullstack delivery alongside two to three other engineers per site — building the frontend in Next.js and TypeScript, wiring Node.js integrations, and plugging the sites into the unified Contentful content model. On the remaining brands the work was investigative and structural: researching legacy implementations, planning their migration, and porting old frontends into the new stack — adapting them to the shared component library and CMS models so editorial teams could work the same way everywhere.
None of that ports well to screenshots — the sites have since been redesigned, and the deepest work lived in the platform layer anyway. What it proves: I’m as effective in the unglamorous middle of a multi-team enterprise migration — reading legacy code, making it fit a new architecture — as I am shipping a brand site end to end.