With west and the CMake build system Zephyr already offers a lot to address many of the challenges of embedded software development. Rooted in the Open/Closed principle, many of these tools and subsystems can be extended to increase productivity. The Bridle open source project aims to serve as a comprehensive blueprint for the development of embedded software. Teams can use it as a scaffold to implement product specific applications, subsystems and test suites as well as hardware descriptions and documentation. Making use of the available extension points Bridle implements strategies to efficiently migrate to newer upstream versions, prepare contributions for upstream while making sure that those parts meant to be kept private remain so during the entire product lifecycle. Using examples from the Bridle project the talk will explain how to add useful west commands for downstream tasks and how to extend to tailor document generation for downstream needs. The talk will also show how to extend Zephyr's CMake system with downstream modules and how even a project specific package can be created. In the talk's last section the presented possibilities will be compared to typical project requirements encountered in regulated environments such as the medical industry.