Results
Streamlined system communication
Replaced meetings with async reviews
Faster planning and decision-making
Introduction
Madhi is one of four Tech Leads at Fashion Cloud, where he focuses on organization-wide architecture across ~50 engineers and multiple product teams. Fashion Cloud is a B2B fashion wholesale platform with a growing suite of products, each owned by autonomous teams.
Problem
Following a merger and acquisition, Fashion Cloud faced the challenge of unifying systems that varied widely in maturity, architecture patterns, and data semantics.
Key problems included:
1. No cohesive system view
Teams lacked a shared understanding of what each system contained, exposed, or depended on. As Mahdi explained: "We lacked a cohesive, shared view of how everything fit together… and it was hard to show this to teams and leadership in a way that got buy-in for improvement."
2. Inconsistencies across domains
As a hands-on architect, Mahdi could see the inconsistencies in implementation styles, business logic, and data contracts, but had no effective way to show this across teams.
3. Ineffective communication
Architecture conversations lived in long documents, ad-hoc slides, or meetings, none of which stayed current or drove alignment.
"It's the most 'full-stack' modeling environment we've found for modern software teams: C4-first, easy web sharing, team-oriented collaboration, and conventions that help enforce consistency."
How IcePanel helped
1. Ecosystem mapping by system owners
With IcePanel (and onboarding support from Tim 😉), Fashion Cloud mapped their ecosystem directly with input from the teams who maintain the systems, creating a single, accurate source of truth.
2. Faster proposals and reuse of context
Mahdi can now compose new proposals in minutes, pull in another team's context without re-explaining, and reuse the same diagrams across design reviews, documentation, and leadership briefings.
3. Shared language for planning
IcePanel has become the visual backbone of Fashion Cloud's domain-driven design efforts, providing a shared language for cross-team planning and system evolution.
Why IcePanel vs Alternatives
IcePanel stood out as the most complete modeling environment for modern software teams:
- • C4-first approach for clear abstraction.
- • Easy web sharing for async collaboration.
- • Team-oriented workflows for consistent adoption.
- • Built-in conventions to enforce alignment.
Other tools felt either too low-level (requiring heavy manual governance) or too shallow (lacking end-to-end workflows). IcePanel offered both flexibility and structure in one place.
Impact
IcePanel has fundamentally changed how Fashion Cloud communicates and governs architecture:
- • Living documentation: Updating IcePanel is now part of most teams' project templates.
- • Async reviews replace meetings: Teams propose changes directly in IcePanel for lightweight reviews instead of scheduling long alignment sessions.
- • Faster understanding and decisions: Reduced time to grasp cross-team systems and proposed changes.
- • Improved consistency: Clearer governance of business logic and interfaces, leading to a more consistent user experience across products.
Is IcePanel for your team?
Try it out for free and see what you think.
