Universal Music Group

The Challenge

Universal Music Group - one of the world’s three major music labels - needed to overhaul its global music metadata systems. These systems were the foundation for everything: digital rights management, royalty calculations, and content delivery for a catalog spanning millions of tracks.

The technical challenge was significant, but the organizational challenge was harder: coordinating 120+ engineers across 5 cross-functional teams, spanning multiple countries, time zones, and vendor relationships - all while keeping existing business operations running.

Our Role

Served as Project Delivery Manager and Architecture Head, responsible for both the technical architecture and the delivery organization:

• Architecture: Designed the SOA integration backbone and enterprise service bus that connected rights management, digital asset management, and content delivery
• Standards: Defined unified metadata schemas that enabled consistent data exchange across previously siloed systems
• Team leadership: Built and coordinated the 5 delivery teams, implemented Agile practices across the organization
• Vendor management: Integrated external development partners into a single delivery rhythm

Results & Impact

The platform delivered a globally scalable foundation for UMG’s digital operations during the most critical transition in music industry history - from physical to digital distribution. Coordinating 120+ engineers over three years without major delivery failure validated the development factory model. The Agile practices introduced during the program became the engineering organization’s standard way of working.

Why this matters for our clients: This engagement demonstrates our ability to lead large, complex technical organizations - not just write code. The skills that made this work (architecture thinking, team coordination, vendor management, delivery discipline) are the same ones we bring to smaller-scale engagements today.