Mykhailo Nykoliuk is a Full-Stack Engineer at Ajax Systems, one of Europe’s biggest security system manufacturers. Here, he talks about the complexities of working on massive projects and how a unified design system has dramatically sped up partnerships worldwide.
Good design and adaptable digital products are crucial for international businesses – they help companies get noticed and understood in new markets. Research from Kinesis shows that up to 75% of users judge how reliable a brand is based on the quality of its interface and user experience.
But for large enterprises, it’s not just about looks. Just as important is whether a product can evolve quickly and safely – scale up, get updated, and adapt to new challenges without sacrificing quality or stability. We sat down with Mykhailo Nykoliuk, an expert in building digital ecosystems for business, to talk about creating solutions like this for major companies. He built Ajax Systems’ digital ecosystem and design system from the ground up, creating a scalable digital infrastructure to support the company’s international expansion.
In this interview with TechBullion, Mykhailo breaks down which tech stack works best for developing large-scale digital ecosystems, why companies need to invest time and resources into a unified design system, and how to make sure these investments actually pay off and drive business growth.
Mykhailo, you’ve worked with companies that are growing fast and expanding into new markets. When does it become obvious that the current website is actually holding the business back?
The biggest red flag is when everything just grinds to a halt. When I joined Ajax Systems back in 2017, that’s exactly what we were dealing with. The company was growing exponentially, but the web presence? Just a static site with a handful of pages. No component library, no design system, no way to quickly add new products or languages. Every single page had to be built manually from scratch – insanely time-consuming. The real problem was there was zero scalability and no standards whatsoever.
I needed to quickly spin up a WordPress site that could scale alongside the business, make it easy to add content, and eventually implement country-specific content logic and integrate e-commerce into the main site.
You can’t run a business long-term on a static website. If you’re expanding into new markets, you’re eventually going to need localization for different languages and regional pricing. My job was basically to turn these scattered pages into an ecosystem where you could add new elements like Lego blocks.
You spearheaded the creation of a unified design system that’s now successfully implemented across all the company’s digital products. Not every company immediately sees the value. How do you think experts should approach conversations with business stakeholders and make the case for this kind of investment?
A component-based design system is absolutely essential. The best way to justify it? Show them the economics. Certain tasks that take weeks can be knocked out in just a few hours with a proper design system. Without one at Ajax Systems, development speed was tanking – every new landing page had to be built from scratch, and the quality across different projects was all over the place. I showed them very clearly that investing resources into development, documenting components in Storybook, and ditching manual landing page assembly would save us a ton down the road. And it did. The speed of churning out new pages increased dramatically because we were reusing ready-made blocks, and quality became consistent across everything.
We also integrated the design system into the CMS so content managers could independently create high-quality, visually complex pages that matched the design perfectly – no developers needed. This massively sped up new page launches and freed up the dev team to focus on engineering work with greater business impact.
Ajax Systems operates in more than 180 countries. What architectural and tech decisions did you make to support that kind of scale?
When you’re dealing with that broad of a geographic reach, you need a systematic approach and you’ve got to be willing to switch tools when the time’s right. For a quick launch, we started with WordPress + PHP – we needed to get the site ranking fast without breaking the bank. As the project grew and we needed higher performance and more complex logic, we migrated to Next.js + Strapi CMS. This stack gives you everything: fast loading speeds even though connection quality varies wildly across countries, easy translation management, modern approaches to scaling content, and the performance you need for global operations. We also set up localization through separate translation files with English as the source, and built the ability to add new languages in just a few hours by uploading files from translators. We also worked out logic for showing and hiding products depending on the region and displaying different graphics and banners for different markets.
From both a developer’s and business perspective, this is a complex, multi-layered product where each area has its own quirks. One of your tasks was automating partner workflows. How’d you use web tools to make that work smoother?
Frontend actually helps a ton with complicated business processes. We created tools that let partners and distributors work on their own without having to involve company managers. For example, device configurators that figure out what set you need based on what you’re asking for, or a white-label configurator where partners can upload their own logo and pricing and embed it on their site. We developed a fully automated tool so partners could create their own designs and send them straight to print themselves. Since the e-commerce platform we were using didn’t have an API for integrating with the main site, we built our own proxy API. It became this unified connecting layer between e-commerce, CRM, and the main site, so users could place orders directly on the site without getting redirected somewhere else. For the business, this meant complete order integration into one digital ecosystem, plus automatic calculations for order costs, shipping, taxes, and passing all that data downstream to the CRM. It really cut down order processing time and manual work.
As businesses scale up, their internal structures become more complex. How do you maintain alignment between design and development as workflows evolve and the project grows?
A lot of teams struggle with the gap between design and code – sometimes mockups are really hard or straight-up impossible to build. We solved this by having designers and developers discuss components together before design even starts. When both sides are working from the same catalog of existing blocks, you end up with way fewer revisions and everything moves quickly and smoothly.
The project started with just me. Now we’ve got five developers, two QA specialists, and several designers. Our approach let us properly structure key processes no matter how big the team got. Code reviews and strict standards also helped us maintain quality consistently.
Looking at how Ajax Systems has transformed, which metric do you think is the best proof that your approach worked?
First off, it’s speed. Landing page launch time went from weeks down to a couple days. Adding new languages now takes hours instead of weeks. Thanks to optimizing the architecture, page load times got over 2x faster. Second – automation. Partners can now create materials on their own without needing designers, and they can add new elements without looping in managers. The marketing team can launch campaigns in dozens of languages in one evening without pulling in developers. When that’s happening, you know the architecture’s built right. My contribution here was digital transformation – building a foundation that speeds up sales and drives efficiency on a global scale.
