FFC NL 2025 TALKS

FFC UK 2025

Dance Moves: implementing a UI platform for flow - lessons from the dancefloor

This is a case study from the middle of the dance-floor - an honest look at what it’s really like to introduce a new UI platform across a 150-person engineering group. Our goal five years ago was clear: build and introduce a new UI platform that would reduce cognitive load for engineers and dramatically improve UI/UX quality for our core enterprise software product. We’ll be honest here - the introduction of this platform has been *painful* at times, and not because we got the architecture wrong, the tech wrong or the team structures wrong. We’ll get into the reasons in the talk and some of the things we’re trying to do to make things better (this is very much a live issue :)). We’ll also talk about how, in a related move, we created a platform engineering group at Alfa as a way of introducing Team Topologies more generally to the company, ahead of a more fundamental restructuring of our engineering organisation to enable us to be more flow-oriented. We’ll get into some of the challenges we have getting a sense of coherence across this platform engineering group.

MEET THE SPEAKERS

Eva Coffield

Principal Software Engineer and Digital Accessibility Lead at Alfa

Eva Coffield is a versatile digital professional with over 20 years of experience in web and enterprise software development. She has expertise in Digital Transformation, User Experience, Front-End Architecture and Development, Accessibility, and Inclusive Design. In her current role, Eva leads the development of the Design System that powers Alfa’s new UI platform, which underpins our flagship product, Alfa Systems. She also heads digital accessibility at Alfa, including defining the strategy, policy, testing methodologies and implementation. In addition to driving adoption of the new UI platform across Product Engineering teams, she also strategically manages the legacy systems to ensure continuity and uninterrupted user experience across platforms.

Grahame Williams

Transformation & Sustainability Lead

Grahame Williams is an experienced technology leader with a focus on transformation and sustainability. He has over 20 years experience as an engineer, project and programme manager across product, platform and delivery teams. Most recently he has led an organisational transformation project aimed at optimising flow across the development process of an enterprise software company.