Improving iOS Intangibles with Tactical
Article Summary
Medium's iOS team was scattered across product teams, causing their codebase and user experience to fragment. Their solution? A biweekly meeting format borrowed from holocracy that transformed how they ship.
Alaina Kafkes from Medium Engineering shares how their iOS team uses 'tactical' meetings to maintain code quality and team cohesion despite being distributed across different product squads. The structured format creates space for engineers to address pain points beyond sprint work.
Key Takeaways
- New engineer feedback at tactical sparked complete Swift migration from Objective-C
- Meeting format: check-ins, crash reviews, tensions discussion, and action items
- Newcomers contribute immediately, proposing modular architecture and process improvements
- Tactical builds trust and custodial mindset beyond individual sprint goals
Regular role-specific meetings empower small, distributed engineering teams to collectively improve their codebase, developer experience, and product quality through structured collaboration and shared ownership.
About This Article
Medium's iOS engineers had trouble keeping the UI and UX consistent across the app. Designers and developers weren't collaborating well, which led to inconsistent experiences across different screens and features.
The team built a service that enforced the design system through Swift methods, making it easier for developers to stay compliant. They added view test coverage for key flows like sign-in and started an internal book club focused on Thinking in SwiftUI to get everyone on the same page about implementation.
The team ended up with a more consistent user experience and was able to use SwiftUI on new screens. Code quality improved and the design stayed more faithful to the original system across the app.