Over the last five years, digital commerce product teams have undergone a quiet revolution. Teams that were once built around fixed-scope projects have evolved into long-lived, product-focused squads. For organisations serious about agility and customer experience, this hasn’t been a gradual drift – it’s been a deliberate pivot.
At Simply Commerce, we’ve seen first-hand how delivery models, team structures, and hiring expectations have all shifted. Today’s leading businesses aren’t measuring success by deadlines and budgets. They’re tracking product adoption, customer satisfaction, and long-term resilience. And as this shift plays out, it’s reshaping the way people work, the roles that matter, and the qualities that define a standout hire.
The Decline of the Traditional Project
Back in 2019, most engineering work was still structured around projects. Teams would form, deliver against a static set of requirements, and then disband. Budgets were approved annually, and departments operated in silos – development, QA, ops – each with its own agenda and priorities.
That picture looks very different today. The leading approach now is continuous value delivery, where long-lived, cross-functional squads are responsible for the end-to-end health of a product. These teams don’t just build features; they evolve services over time, guided by real user data and live performance metrics.
This isn’t just theory either. According to Gartner, 80 percent of large engineering organisations will have adopted internal platform-as-a-product models by 2026 – up from just 45 percent in 2022. But while the model is catching on, it’s not always easy to implement. The 2023 Project-to-Product report by Team Topologies revealed that only 2 percent of organisations had fully matured in this space. Culture, more than tooling, continues to be the hardest thing to change.
How Teams Are Built Has Changed
With the rise of product-led delivery, the anatomy of software teams has changed too. Where once you’d find rigidly defined roles and clear lines between departments, today’s high-performing teams are flatter, more integrated, and much more autonomous.
Full-stack engineers now work shoulder-to-shoulder with QA, DevOps, and platform specialists. Funding models have adapted too. Instead of ring-fenced annual budgets, many teams receive ongoing investment tied to real-world impact – things like customer retention, NPS scores, and adoption metrics.
A lot of this shift has been influenced by the thinking behind Team Topologies, which championed the use of platform and enablement teams. These groups focus on internal developer experience and compliance, helping product teams move faster without being bogged down by infrastructure or red tape.
Front-End and Full-Stack Roles Are in Demand
One of the clearest shifts in hiring over the past couple of years has been the rising demand for engineers who can work across the stack. In particular, front-end and full-stack roles have surged, often outpacing traditional back-end requirements.
This change reflects a broader truth about today’s digital commerce landscape: the front-end matters more than ever. Whether customers are shopping, browsing or returning an item, every click is compared to best-in-class experiences from the likes of TikTok, Airbnb, and Figma. That bar has risen fast, and businesses are investing in the skills that help them meet it.
React remains the dominant framework in most enterprise environments, but newer tools like Astro, Svelte, and Solid are pushing things forward in terms of performance and developer ergonomics. Serverless platforms such as Vercel and Cloudflare Workers are also reducing the need for heavy back-end infrastructure, which means developers with front-end fluency and API integration experience are increasingly valuable.
We’re seeing this play out in our own data too. Across Simply Commerce roles in 2024 and 2025, front-end and full-stack engineers consistently make up the bulk of new vacancies, particularly in businesses moving to headless or composable architectures.
A Flatter Structure, Fewer Layers
Alongside technical change, many large organisations are rethinking their management structures.
Over the last 18 months, companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all cut layers of middle management. Microsoft’s restructure in May 2025, for example, saw more than 6,000 roles removed in a bid to streamline reporting lines and widen manager spans of control.
For product squads, this has meant fewer approval gates and quicker decision-making. But it also means senior engineers are taking on more leadership responsibilities; mentoring team members, supporting delivery, and handling stakeholder engagement. The traditional team lead has evolved into a more strategic, hybrid role.
This isn’t about removing leadership altogether. It’s about shifting it closer to the work. In many teams, the most effective leaders are those who combine technical depth with soft skills and a strong product mindset.
What About the Back-End?
It would be easy to assume that back-end roles are in decline, but the reality is more nuanced. There’s still strong demand for engineers who can manage complex domains like payments, data pipelines, and real-time analytics. What’s changed is that generic CRUD-based work is increasingly being absorbed by platforms and managed services.
Engineers working in back-end environments today are often wearing additional hats – platform, data engineering, or infrastructure – rather than building isolated microservices. The work is more specialised, and often more strategic.
AI, Agent Assistants, and What’s Next
No conversation about delivery trends is complete without mentioning AI. Over the past 18 months, generative tools have moved from novelty to necessity. GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, and similar products are now part of daily workflows across enterprise teams.
In fact, Google has said that over 25 percent of its new code is now AI-generated. Within the startup ecosystem, the figure is even higher. Y Combinator reports that 25 percent of its Winter 2025 cohort are generating more than 95 percent of their code using AI.
The implications for teams are significant. In the next two to three years, we expect most product squads to be supported by agent “sidekicks” – AI tools that can open pull requests, triage bugs, and run automated tests. These agents won’t replace engineers, but they will reshape the work engineers do. Governance, ethics, and quality assurance will take centre stage as more of the mechanical work is automated.
And as these tools mature, they may further reduce the need for manual reporting and coordination – accelerating the trend towards flatter, faster teams.
What This Means for Hiring
These changes have real implications for how teams are built and how people are hired. Technical versatility is more valuable than ever. Engineers who can flex across disciplines, especially front-end, platform and infrastructure, are commanding premium salaries. Hays recently listed platform engineers among the top ten roles for salary growth in the UK, with a median of £80,000 in London in 2025.
Soft skills also matter more. In flatter structures, engineers often step into mentoring and decision-making roles earlier. Product thinking has become a baseline expectation, not a niche skill. And fluency with AI tooling is fast becoming a requirement, not an advantage.
For hiring managers, this means looking beyond CVs and job titles. The best candidates may not come with a traditional path, but they’ll have the adaptability and mindset to thrive in modern delivery environments.
Final Thoughts
What we’ve seen over the past five years is more than a shift in methodology. It’s a full reimagining of how software gets delivered in a fast-moving, customer-led world.
Organisations are moving away from fixed deliverables and handovers, and towards continuous product ownership. At the same time, developers are being asked to own outcomes, learn new tools, and build user experiences that meet an ever-rising bar.
At Simply Commerce, we sit at the heart of this evolution. We help clients build delivery teams that are not just technically strong, but strategically aligned to product success. And we support candidates as they adapt to new roles, frameworks and ways of working.
The delivery landscape has changed, and for those ready to evolve with it, the next few years offer exciting opportunities to lead, shape and redefine what great software teams look like.
About Simply Commerce:
Simply Commerce is a specialist recruitment partner for digital commerce businesses, helping brands build high-performing, product-led teams. Contact us for a no-pressure chat whether you’re looking at your next career move, or focused on growth for your team and need to hire.
