These were internally developed tools, so nothing we really marketed externally but yes we definitely could have done a better job at our marketing within the organization. A lot of the criticism to our approach was typically not so much that the ideas were bad, but that they were "different from how everyone else does it" and by everyone else they typically meant Facebook and Google.

For example, global state management approaches like Redux were more or less incompatible with how we approached state management. We thought it was insane to build apps around the idea of global state stores (and I still do) but Redux became all the rage and eventually won the day. There was a lot of collateral damage as people then tried to shoehorn Redux everywhere. I left around that time, but hear that the cycle have repeated a few times since. Redux (and other tooling) didn't work out as expected so wheels have been invented again over and over. It's the way things go I guess, I don't dwell too much on it.

We probably could've done a better job at communicating why our approach was better, but ultimately we had limited ability to force anyone to use our tooling. There's also a hiring aspect in there. As Redux and other libraries that were "the thing" started to make their way into job descriptions it became harder and harder to convince talent that they should join us, because we didn't have that brand recognition and used in-house tooling. At some point you have to make trade offs and sadly top tier financial institutions aren't necessarily known for leading the pack in terms of innovation. It's kind of sad really.

Anyway I'm not particularly hard on myself or bitter about it at all actually. The self deprecating jab about poor execution should be read as tounge-in-cheek really, I'm very proud of the work we did back then.