The situation
MAG-O ran the digital products for Manchester Airports Group's airports: car park reservations, transfers, retail click and collect, and the websites around them.
Most income came from parking bookings, and developers spent much of their week on routine content changes for marketing teams. Then, in a late-night boardroom conversation, a question came up that sounded far-fetched: could the airport's own web infrastructure be sold to other airports as a product?
What I did
- Architected and built, with the team, a real-time content management system so marketing teams could run their own pages.
- Proved a multi-tenant architecture that turned the web, retail, reservations and account platform into a B2B-ready SaaS offering, and won board approval to build it.
- Planned and led delivery with a team of seven engineers of mixed experience, writing code alongside them.
- Set a performance bar of Google Lighthouse 90+ in all four categories, and held the team to it.
- Designed the multi-tenant model, so every airport ran on one shared codebase with its own branding and content.
How it was built
A React and TypeScript front end on .NET and Node.js services, hosted on AWS, with Storyblok as the headless CMS. MUI and Tailwind CSS gave each airport its own look on top of one shared codebase. I wrote code across the stack alongside the team.
- .NET
- Node.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- AWS
- Storyblok
- MUI
- Tailwind CSS
- Multi-tenant SaaS
The result
It started as a boardroom question that sounded far-fetched.
Developer time spent on routine requests fell by around 85%, and savings on overheads and licensing approached six figures a year. The sites consistently scored 90+ across all four Lighthouse categories.
The platform beat every expectation. Resold to airports worldwide, its commercial value to MAG runs to hundreds of millions of pounds.