Adding the 50th developer should make you faster. It usually makes everyone slower. Builds take longer. Pull requests queue up. A change in one module breaks something in another. Teams start waiting on each other instead of shipping. You didn't hire more engineers to produce less. But here you are.

I've worked on two large platforms where this scaling problem was front and centre: a CRM replacement serving thousands of call-centre agents across European markets, and an industrial automation platform that needed to grow from one team to many. In both cases, the technology worked fine. The coordination didn't.

Why coordination becomes the bottleneck

When five developers work on one codebase, coordination happens naturally. People talk. They know what everyone else is working on. Code reviews catch conflicts early. The shared mental model of the system fits in everyone's head.

At 50 developers, that breaks down. At 200, it's impossible. You can't rely on people knowing what other teams are doing. You can't have everyone review everyone else's code. You can't merge everything into one branch and hope for the best.

The instinct is to solve this with process. More meetings. More approval gates. More coordination channels. But process doesn't scale either. Every layer of coordination you add creates waiting time. Teams block on reviews. Features stall in staging. Releases become ceremonies instead of routine events.

The real question isn't how to coordinate 200 developers. It's how to make coordination unnecessary for 90% of what they do.

The governance stack

Governance is a loaded word in engineering. It sounds like bureaucracy. In practice, good governance is what lets teams move fast without breaking each other's work. It's the set of agreements, boundaries, and shared foundations that eliminate the need for case-by-case coordination.

A governance stack for large-scale frontend development typically has four layers:

Pattern library. A shared set of UI components that every team uses. Not guidelines, not suggestions. Actual tested, documented components. When every team pulls from the same foundation, visual consistency happens by default instead of requiring design review on every pull request.

Contracts between modules. Clear definitions of how modules communicate. What events can a module emit? What data does it expect? What's the API surface between independently deployed pieces? These contracts are the boundaries that let teams change their internals without affecting anyone else.

Ownership boundaries. Every module has one team that owns it. Ownership means they decide what goes in, they review changes, they're on call when it breaks. Shared ownership is no ownership. When something can be changed by anyone, nobody is responsible for keeping it healthy.

Deployment independence. Each team can deploy their module on their own schedule, without coordinating with other teams. This is the payoff. If you get the first three layers right, independent deployment becomes safe. If you skip them, independent deployment becomes chaos.

Microfrontends as an organisational tool

Most conversations about microfrontends focus on the technical implementation. Module federation, import maps, web components, iframe isolation. These are implementation details. The real value of microfrontends is organisational.

A microfrontend architecture maps code boundaries to team boundaries. Each team owns a section of the application. They can develop, test, and deploy it independently. They make their own technical decisions within their boundary. They don't need to ask permission to ship.

This is why framework choice matters less than people think. I've seen microfrontend architectures work with Vue, React, Angular, and framework-agnostic approaches. The architecture succeeds or fails based on how well the boundaries are drawn and how well the contracts between modules are enforced. The framework is just the thing that runs inside the boundary.

On the Deutsche Telekom CRM platform, we designed a framework-agnostic microfrontend architecture that let 200+ developers across European markets ship independently. Feature velocity increased by 30%, not because of better technology, but because teams stopped waiting on each other.

Independent deployment without chaos

Independent deployment sounds great until the first time it goes wrong. Team A deploys a change that breaks Team B's module because they depended on an undocumented behaviour. Now you have an incident, finger-pointing, and a push to add more integration testing and coordination. Exactly what you were trying to avoid.

The solution isn't more testing at the integration level. It's better contracts at the boundary level. Here's what that looks like in practice:

Define explicit integration points. Every place where modules interact should have a documented contract. Events, shared state, routing, and UI slots. If it's not in the contract, it doesn't exist. Teams should be able to change anything that isn't in the contract without affecting anyone else.

Version your contracts. Contracts evolve. A module might need to add new data to an event or change the shape of a shared state object. Version the contracts so consumers can migrate at their own pace instead of being forced to update in lockstep.

Test contracts, not integrations. Each team tests that their module honours its contracts. If every module fulfils its contract, integration works by definition. This is faster and more reliable than end-to-end integration testing, which becomes exponentially expensive as the number of modules grows.

Use a canary process for shared changes. When a contract does need to change, roll it out incrementally. Deploy the new version alongside the old one. Migrate consumers one by one. This is slower than a big-bang change but eliminates the coordination bottleneck.

Getting governance right: too loose vs. too tight

Governance fails in two directions.

Too loose and you get fragmentation. Every team builds their own component library. UX is inconsistent across modules. Technical debt accumulates in silos that nobody can see until a team leaves and someone else has to maintain their code. The Siemens SIMATIC AX platform started here: everything in one codebase with no clear boundaries, which meant no clear ownership.

Too tight and you get the bottleneck you were trying to escape. Every change needs approval from a central architecture team. The pattern library becomes a gatekeeper instead of an enabler. Teams route around the governance because following it is slower than not following it.

The right balance looks like this:

  • Mandatory: contracts and ownership. Every module has a defined interface and a responsible team. This isn't optional. Without it, independent deployment is a liability.
  • Strongly encouraged: pattern library adoption. Using shared components should be the path of least resistance. Make the pattern library so good that teams prefer it to building their own. But don't block a team from building a custom component when the pattern library genuinely doesn't cover their use case.
  • Flexible: technical choices within boundaries. If a team wants to use a different state management approach inside their module, let them. As long as they honour their contracts and their module meets performance and accessibility requirements, their internal decisions are their own.

What to watch out for

The "shared everything" trap. Sharing a runtime, a build pipeline, or a deployment target across modules reintroduces the coupling you split apart. Shared infrastructure should be limited to what's genuinely shared (authentication, routing shell, design tokens) and nothing more.

Governance without enforcement. Written guidelines that nobody checks are decoration. Use automated checks where possible: contract validation in CI, pattern library adoption metrics, bundle size budgets per module. If you can't measure it, it won't be followed at scale.

Ignoring the migration path. Most teams don't start with a clean microfrontend architecture. They start with a monolith and need to get from here to there while shipping features. Plan the migration in phases. Each phase should deliver value on its own, not just set up the next phase.

Scaling engineering teams isn't a technology problem. It's a governance problem. The technology (microfrontends, module federation, whatever comes next) just gives you the mechanism. What makes it work is clear ownership, enforced contracts, a shared component foundation, and the discipline to let teams operate independently within well-defined boundaries. Get that right and 200 developers really do make you faster.