dfki.de Website Relaunch

DFKI’s institutional website, dfki.de, wasn’t a typical corporate site — it spanned more than 180,000 pages across 25 research departments, each with its own content, stakeholders, and way of doing things. I served as tech lead for its full relaunch, a project that was as much about organizational coordination as it was about engineering.

The Challenge

A site of that size and age accumulates a lot of technical debt and a lot of competing stakeholders. Twenty-five research departments meant twenty-five sets of requirements, content owners, and expectations, and the relaunch had to happen without breaking the institute’s public presence mid-project. It also had to involve people well outside my own team: internal development, internal IT, and external consultants all needed to move in the same direction on the same timeline.

My Approach

I led in-depth requirements analysis and conceptualization before writing a line of the plan into action, then directed cross-functional collaboration between internal development, IT, and external consulting teams throughout delivery. A large part of the job was stakeholder communication — translating between departments with different priorities and making sure the technical plan actually reflected what 25 research groups needed from their piece of a shared, 180,000-page site.

Outcome

The relaunch shipped on time and on budget — not a given for a project of this scale and stakeholder count. It’s a project I point to as evidence that the hardest part of “tech lead” is often not the technology at all: it’s requirements analysis, cross-team coordination, and communication discipline applied to a genuinely large, multi-stakeholder system.

Focus areas: Large-scale web platform relaunch, requirements analysis, cross-functional / stakeholder coordination.