Author: Anthony

Categories
Leadership Process

Blameless Post Mortems

(8/21-Present)

Challenge

Engineering wasn’t benefitting from the most basic Best Practice around continuous improvement: the Post Mortem.

Action

Introduced Post Mortem template and process, led meetings to determine RCA, drove conversation from a blameless perspective seeking to learn and teach around ways to do better, and then messaged out findings to the company upon conclusion.

Result

Improved communication with Customer Success and the rest of the company, giving Engineering visibility as a value-added partner.

Categories
Integration Process Prototyping

Single Source of Product Truth

Challenge

Given numerous silos of product information, each with varying degrees of accuracy, evaluate and move towards reliable source-of-truth for driving intra-brand sales.

Action

Phase 1
  • Discovered sister brand developing real-time product DB (in Rails)
  • Evaluated pros and cons of approach with CEO around relying on that DB/dependency
  • Reached out to Prod Mgr for repo access and to facilitate intro to India dev team
  • Dusted off Rails skills / dug into codebase not having any documentation
  • Applied light-touch getting to know key parts of system (e.g. product ingestion, Solr-based search)
  • Worked backwards from UI to determine schema of API
  • Used Postman to prove out ability to programmatically upload products (and introduced the use of Postman Collections for knowledge sharing)

Phase 2
  • After CEO stepped down and interim leadership stepped in, reviewed previous progress, gaining buy-in.
  • Discovered a dust-collecting daily job of 10GB of product data sFTP’d to us.
  • Identified risks of reliance on product repo and charted a parallel path forward.
  • Prototyped Lambda for parsing and processing that data, ingesting into our our product DB.

 

Results

  • Delivered Lambda to process 10GB of product data daily to keep assortment fresh.
Categories
3D eCommerce Process

Product Catalog ftw

Challenge

To scale v2 of our shop-the-room experience, the business turned to me to understand how our process would grow cost-wise.

Action

The interim CEO asked me to determine costs as we considered beefing up our rendering pipeline by orders of magnitude.

Applying a KISS paradigm, I threw together an inital back-of-napkin estimate. That was good enough, but then the interim CEO needed a deeper level of understanding, so I worked with my Pakistani Technical Project Manager to build out a more comprehensive version of the model, taking parameters into account like the following:

  • Scale Factor
  • Model Throughput Per Week
  • Aspirational Efficiency Factor
  • Cost Per Model
  • Number of Modelers Needed
  • Model Category

Result

Delivered cost model iteratively for a 3D modeling pipeline to support shop-the-room.

Categories
Culture Execution Leadership Management Process

Lightweight Innovation Delivery

(10/20-2/21)

Challenge

Force-multiply in a process vacuum to deliver re-platformed SPA.

Action

At the beginning of December, the CEO announced we’d need to ship the next version of the application by Dec 18th. A BHAG for sure, it was ambitious but not impossible.

As most of the members of the team had not worked together for longer than two months, there hadn’t been much time for the usual storming/norming/forming.

Absent any process, I knew the path to successful launches would require as little overhead as possible. To that end, I peppered my stand-up updates with the terms of “divide-and-conquer,” “punch list” & “dog-fooding” – concepts that neither engineers nor marketers were familiar with.

When shortly before the 18th the cheese moved, and the delivery date became the 3rd week in January with the scope of the application changes increasing, and a new website was to be launched, I knew my efforts were succeeding when those same previously skeptical team members began using my terminology in their own updates, reinforcing a shared and common understanding of what it meant to keep eyes on the prize and ship “good enough.”

Result

Realized my thought leadership was succeeding when others began using same terminology.

Categories
Affiliate Growth Innovation Troubleshooting

Business Model Shift

(3/20-9/20)

Challenge

Given a steady stream of revenue, fundamentally alter the underlying business model towards CPC/CPA.

Action

Phase 1

In March 2020 pre-COVID, did a quick dive on Skimlinks documentation and put together a quick explanation/overview to demonstrate how easy it would be to include. Business climate wasn’t right so didn’t pursue.

Phase 2

Sep 2020, post-CEO-stepping-down and several months after Phase 1, explored use of Viglink (Sovrn) only to discover that business had previously been CPA-based before fulfillment was brought in-house ~2017.

Digging around, found some old Skimlinks code, then leveraged updated documentation to prove click-tracking with custom params could still work.

Phase 3

The business, being unsure whether to use one or several affiliate networks, needed partnership to figure out the best implementation path forward. For four networks, I kludge’d scripts into production and verified clicks, evaluating custom parameters as they’d flow through the lifecycle and eventually be reported through APIs.

When the business decided to focus on Commission Junction and Skimlinks, I led development to integrate JS libs (monkey-patching CJ to play-well on the same page as Skimlinks) and verify clicks / custom params.

Result

Overcame fits-and-starts to deliver affiliate model.

Categories
Budgeting Collaboration Roadmapping VR

3D Cost Modeling

(7/20-7/20)

Challenge

To scaleĀ v2 of our shop-the-room experience, the business turned to me to understand how our process would grow cost-wise.

Action

The interim CEO asked me to determine costs as we considered beefing up our rendering pipeline by orders of magnitude.

Applying a KISS paradigm, I threw together an inital back-of-napkin estimate. That was good enough, but then the interim CEO needed a deeper level of understanding, so I worked with my Pakistani Technical Project Manager to build out a more comprehensive version of the model, taking parameters into account like the following:

  • Scale Factor
  • Model Throughput Per Week
  • Aspirational Efficency Factor
  • Cost Per Model
  • Number of Modelers Needed
  • Model Category

Results

  • Delivered cost model iteratively for a 3D modeling pipeline to support shop-the-room.
Categories
Infrastructure Process Security

Shoring Up The Site

(10/19-6/20)

Challenge

Remediate CVEs without specialized resources.

Action

An annual process around springtime, I worked with corporate IT and its security consulting company acting in Red/Blue Teams to navigate rules of engagement, coordinate a window for the penetration tests, and then fix the identified CVEs.

Lacking other resources to replicate the penetration findings, I discovered and leveraged cobalt.io and detectify to reproduce an understanding of the vulnerabilities in order to create tickets for engineers to address.

Result

Remedied High severity vulnerabilities within 30 days and added those with Medium severity to the backlog.