(3/19-10/20)
Challenge
Ship new, web-based, VR-powered, eCom experience as requirements changed.
Action
Act 1 : 3/19-5/19
While on my trip to India in April 2019, I formed a Tiger team of one of my best Lead Engineers, a project manager, and two junior engineers, coaching them to see the similarity between what was the business was asking for and current existing components of the system (PLP, PDP, NUX, and Checkout,) setting a plan in motion towards delivering an MVP for the 6/26/19 deadline.
They went heads-down and we successfully shipped v1 (following) on 5/29/20.
ecom landing page
Business priorities shifted and the project was moth-balled, leading to Act 2.
Act 2 : 8/19-10/19
Having shifted focus to more product-based eCom (see Act 1,) the business decided to leverage existing shop-the-room modeling infrastructure in a more user-friendly, web-based purchase flow.
While the original plan was to have them spin up a completely new POC with a new checkout flow, I intervened and met with the remote Technical Project Manager and Architect, providing guidance around the existing monolith marketplace system, knowing it could serve as enough of a “buy” to meet requirements so as not to have to “build” a custom solution.
Shipped v1 in Oct 2019:
Landing Page
Room Detail Page
I saved $40K in redo work after guiding the non-primary, remote, web team around component re-use while then shipping web-based, VR-powered shop-the-room.
Act 3 : 3/20-10/20
Under tight deadline, coached the Pakistani team to iterate and improve perceived and actual load times using CSS Sprites, caching via HTTP headers, use of a spinner, and gzipping in order to get a usable UI to market sooner:
Landing Page
Drilling down, a user looking to design a nursery can swap out items (made possible by a compositing technique with Three.js and photo spheres)
Room Page
Lastly, recognizing future strategic value-add within corporate partnerships, guided the team to decouple the frontend as a Single Page App for iframe embedding after having decreased page load times, introduced progressive enhancement / graceful degradation, and led the SPA strategy.
Results
New VR-powered site finally launched in Feb 2021.