Tell me about a hard technical call you made

The one I would point to is the replatform to composable, headless commerce at Rapha. I led it in full, and it is still my strongest single area. A replatform is the kind of decision you cannot quietly undo, which is exactly what makes it hard: the architecture you choose shapes what the business can and cannot do for years afterwards.

The middleware. Composable commerce means a lot of separate systems that have to agree with each other, so the integration layer is where the real risk lives. I designed that layer myself, event-driven and domain-driven, and spent most of my attention on the unglamorous parts: webhooks, APIs, reconciliation, idempotency and failure modes. Getting those right is the difference between a platform that degrades gracefully and one that fails in ways nobody notices until a customer does.

I did not trust the interesting version. I frame technology commercially, so cost, forecast and return sat inside the argument rather than beside it, and I run technology evaluations in a structured way rather than on instinct. I would also rather be told an idea is bad early than defend it later. Composable was the right shape for Rapha. I would not pretend it is the universal answer; I know commerce platforms and how to integrate them, and the job is choosing the right shape for the business in front of you.