By Stark Systems Editorial Team
Featuring hands-on leadership from our CEO, Alex Souza

When digital products outgrow their original architecture, scaling becomes a bottleneck. That’s the situation System1 faced with its suite of marketing and research products: Test Your Ad, Test Your Idea, and Test Your Brand. Built on a shared, monolithic codebase, these platforms struggled to support evolving product demands, integration needs, and innovation speed.

To unlock agility, scalability, and long-term growth, System1 partnered with Stark Systems to lead a complete architectural redesign.

And this wasn’t just another consulting engagement—our CEO, Alex Souza, personally led the initiative, ensuring a high-impact, future-proof outcome.

🧩 The Challenge: Innovation Stalled by Monolithic Constraints

System1’s original monolithic structure caused a range of issues:

• Code entanglement across products, making updates risky and time-consuming
• Shared infrastructure that limited scalability and testing independence
• Difficulties launching new features without affecting core products
• Redundant data flows and inconsistent master data across systems
• No unified data architecture for integration, analytics, or reporting

With new product ideas in the pipeline and increasing demands from enterprise clients, System1 needed to break the monolith and build a modular, service-oriented architecture.

🔹 Key Services and Modules Delivered:

• Video Ads Module – for reusable creative testing across multiple products
• Integrations Layer – API gateway and standardized connectors for 3rd-party tools
• Calculation Engine – abstracted logic layer for product scoring and benchmarks
• Orchestrator Service – workflow controller enabling flexible feature combinations
• Master Data Service – centralized source of truth for brands, users, clients, and templates
• Data Lake – ingestion layer for external data sources and internal services
• Data Warehouse – structured layer for BI tools and custom reporting

Each module was designed to operate independently, with clear ownership, automated deployment, and cross-product compatibility.

📈 The Results: Speed, Stability, and Product Innovation

The redesign yielded significant benefits for both engineering and business teams:

• 🚀 Reduced time-to-market for new features by 50%
• 🧪 Improved test coverage and stability due to separation of concerns
• 📊 Centralized data sources feeding both real-time integrations and executive dashboards
• 💡 Greater flexibility for the product team to innovate without dependency bottlenecks

🤝 Executive Leadership That Delivered Results

This wasn’t a hands-off project. Stark Systems’ CEO, Alex Souza, personally led the architectural review, service design, and implementation oversight—ensuring that both engineering and business stakeholders remained aligned throughout.

💬 “We knew this project would define System1’s future capabilities. I stepped in directly because I wanted to ensure the architecture we delivered would unlock years of growth—not just fix short-term pain.”
— Alex Souza, CEO, Stark Systems

🏁 Final Thoughts

Breaking a monolith isn’t just about rewriting code—it’s about reshaping how your organization scales, innovates, and integrates with the world around it. Stark Systems was proud to help System1 evolve into a modular, data-driven platform ready for the next decade of growth.

Interested in modernizing your architecture or untangling your product stack?

Click here to book a free 30 minute call with us !

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