Category: Distributed Teams

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3D Architecture Distributed Teams eCommerce Frontend Innovation Management Performance Engineering VR

New VR UX For Nurseries

(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.

Categories
Distributed Teams eCommerce Management Process Release Management

Managing Distributed Teams (pre-COVID)

(Decorist : 8/18-12/19)

Challenge

Inherited a new, flat, remote, full-time team (web) of 25 (mostly) junior engineers in Delhi when dominant local (SF) office culture was not optimized for remote work. Needed to transform them into Bay Area-level talent while maneuvering them into a manageable hierarchy while at the same time incorporating a contracting team (VR) of 13 in Lahore

Action

Team Organization

Re-organized (and became productive) as Tribes.

Transitioned work culture to remote by getting stakeholders more comfortable with off-peak-hour meetings.

Processes

Introduced Agile paradigm / SCRUM meetings.

Leveraged Google Forms to craft surveys towards quantitatively and qualitatively bettering processes.

Introduced story-point estimations.

Began mastering Jira / work-breakdown through Epics, etc. Started Automated Testing.

Introduced Coda for Program Management

Performance

Tried Koan for performance management and remote visibility.

Introduced reviews and performance tracking with PeopleGoal, empowering local Indian General Manager with structural tools.

Introduced OKRs.

Introduced accountability through personal / sprint goals.

Introduced bi-weekly series email “Get to Know Me!” (as managed through Google Forms); highlighting two Delhi team members per installment. Also eventally created team videos using smartphone-captured content, stitched together through iMovie.

Releases

Created branching and release strategies.

Provided team with Release Notes template for improving communication with stakeholders.

Speed

Incorporated Performance Engineering mindset.

Quality

Led by example by including hyperlinks and project IDs in correspondance.

Reminded people to provide more context in Jira stories.

Reminded QA to provide easy, concise steps-to-verify and testing credentials to stakeholders.

Introduced the concept of “Bug Severity,” Estimated Time to Resolution, and a simple Google Form for reporting (and emailing) bugs to multiple engineering stakeholders who can triage.

Overall, the whole company has seen a qualitative improvement of content of communications between distributed offices; we are all now incorporating more details leading to faster turn-around of higher-quality code.

Results

  • Created outcome-driven processes, best practices, structure, and mentorship for a new, offshore engineering team.
Categories
Distributed Teams Hiring Management

Hard Leadership Lesson

(Decorist : 11/18-12/19)

Challenge

In spite of multiple attempts to provide coaching over six months with repeated support and patience, realized team’s General Manager wasn’t working out as the technical peer/partner I needed for local representation.

Action

Given his importance, was wary of exiting him so did my best to coach him. After 6 months, realized the fit was never going to materialize and worked with local HR to exit him in an amicable fashion.

Then, worked with Manger’s line supervisor and Account Manager towards finding a replacement. Was delighted to find someone more technical, less traditionally represented in such roles, and seemingly eager to take on the challenge.

Worked with her for several months until she exited of her own accord.

Results

  • Replaced remote non-performant General Manager, twice.
Categories
Distributed Teams Hiring

Needle in a Haystack

(Decorist : 9/19-9/19)

Challenge

Kept receiving candidates sourced by onsite India HR more corporate than the startup profile actually needed for the team.

Action

Posted Technical Architect, Scrum Master, and Full-stack Django Engineer JDs to Linkedin India, then screened potential candidates.

Results

  • Paid ~$100 total for well-qualified Technical Architect (4/35) and Scrum Master (12/50+) applicants.
Categories
Building buy-in Distributed Teams Performance Engineering Process Roadmapping Strategy

Leveling Up

(Bluxome Labs : 6/18-7/18)

During the course of June and July 2018, I supported leadership (CTO/VP ENGR/Head of Platform/VP PROD/CEO) around engineering topics such at Brazilian-startup Pipefy around the codebase, Product Engineering, SDLC process, culture, and roadmap(s,) transitioning from a monolith to Service Oriented Architecture, platform strategy, scalability, maintainability, and uptime.

Among other contributions, I:

  • Coached CTO and VP ENGR around operational excellence, particularly thinking in terms of AS-IS versus TO-BE.
  • Introduced idea of maturing IT processes towards forecasting, in particular via a Capacity Plan.
  • Provided thought-leadership around managing remote teams, partly out of own experience, partly as informed by Best Practices.

Results

  • Identified strategies and tactics to qualitatively improve processes.

 

Categories
Coordination Distributed Teams Leadership Process

An American Helps Ukrainians Transfer Knowledge to Indians

(Decorist : 8/18-9/18)

Challenge

One week after joining, I realized that a Knowledge Transfer trip (T-3 weeks) for the 8-person Kiev team to handover reins to the newly-formed 25-person Delhi team based was in jeopardy because travel logistics had not been taken care of.

Action

I persistantly followed-up with six East coast corporate travel coordinators over two weeks, advocating on behalf of the Ukrainian team while also securing my own travel.

Early Sep 2018, I hopped on a flight to Delhi. Before we got down to business, we enjoyed a day outing.

Then, we gathered to kickoff the week.

Results

  • Coordinated travel, led the agenda, and ensured a smoothly-faciliated-transfer while on-site.
Categories
Building buy-in Distributed Teams Growth SOA SWOT Analysis

Beginnings of a Platform Strategy

(Bluxome Labs : 5/18-5/18)

After reviewing the company’s developer docs and Platform Roadmap, I addressed low-hanging fruit around improving readability and structure while working with key stakeholders (Head of Platform, VP PROD) to organize growth priorities regarding platform adoption over timeframes of 1, 1-3, 3-6, and 6-12 months.

Upon further iterations around growth KPIs while learning about constraints of the platform engineering team, I advocated for the creation of a separate Developer Relations team of a minimum of a Lead, Partner Engineer, Developer Advocate, and a Product Manager (and provided the basic job descriptions for each.)

Also, upon discovering that the Hello World experience of integrating with the platform was less-than-intuitive, crafted the following How-To in one take without a script and using QuickTime:

Result

  • Laid foundation for Developer Relations.
Categories
Building buy-in Distributed Teams Frontend Optimization Performance Engineering

Making an Operations Excellence Frontend Excellent

(Bluxome Labs : 4/18-4/18)

For the client, I probed their UX using multiple tools to determine low-hanging fruit, worked with the CTO and VP PROD to understand resourcing constraints given the product roadmap, and enumerate several tactics in a (prioritized) phased approach towards improving performance.

Heuristic discoveries included FE perf bottlenecks such as:

  • multiple inline JS snippets causing slowdowns
  • un-optimized JS libs, including of React components
  • multiple 3rd party JS libs that were no longer necessary
  • JS libs that loaded neither async nor defer
  • retrieval of multiple styling resources

I found that the greatest opportunity to optimize existed for two key user experiences at ~6s avg page load and ~4.5s average page load respectively.

During one iteration, changes lead to a 52% reduction in the Webpack bundle of React components, improving page speed by 10% or better across four key user experiences.

During another iteration, one key UX was sped up by 39.4% without Cache, 53.8% with Cache.

During a final iteration, changes lead to a 20% page speed improvement on one key user experience and 10% or better on two others.

Results

  • Introduced Performance Engineering mindset leading to 20% page-load speedup.
Categories
Distributed Teams eCommerce Management Mobile

Managing @ TRR

(The RealReal : 9/16-9/17)

Execution

Provided research support around pre-IPO due diligence of SDLC metrics, teams’ productivity, and intellectual property

Shepherded months-long-overdue supply-side user acquisition feature into production (which had been built by third party vendor but then mothballed) by delegating to senior engineer for verification

Evaluated dev work towards long-term financial capitalization

Made introductions leading to offers for data science intern and candidate for Director of Estate Sales

Supported business’s most-important monthly accounting processes

Participated in Erlang and Elixir Factory 2017 and Google I/O 2017

Performed requirements analysis/discovery around 3rd party video chat solutions as a tactical way to increase supply-side engagement/retention

Proposed and shepherded build-out of Rules Engine POC (using Wongi) to simplify item pricing; abandoned because of time constraints

Hiring, Retaining

Led 21 Software and QA Engineers across seven web/mobile engineering teams (incl. in Russia, Canada, Central America) for:

  • web : Rails/vanilla JS/Resque/MySQL/ElasticSearch on Heroku
  • mobile: iOS and Android

Filled capacities of: Release Manager, (acting) Lead Engineer, Technical Recruiter, Scrum Master, Software Architect, Senior Engineering Representative (C-suite,) and Manager.

Partnered with HR to:

  • identify ways to plan direct reports’ performance improvements while effectively managing reports through direct communication and engagement when issues arise; crafting Performance Improvement Plans as necessary
  • start the engineering internship program in a bid to recruit highly-engaged, motivated potential future junior engineers; bringing on and coaching a female CS major from Columbia
  • to ensure diligence around off-boarding consultancy in favor of a more performant agency

Increased capacity by:

  • collaboratively establishing and tracking against 2017 objectives while engaging direct reports through periodic 1:1s as well as yearly performance reviews, including providing feedback as part of peripheral teams’ review processes
  • making introduction to highly-performant near- (Canada) and offshore (Russia) teams to augment local web teams while organizing and managing engineers and deliverables
  • fielding request to procure more resources on a Tuesday, re-established communication to previously-contacted near-shore agency immediately thereafter, and by Friday of that week, had a contract signed for two engineers to start two weeks later
  • facilitated Agile SDLC through leading standups, backlog grooming, commitment-based sprint planning, and retrospectives

Increased engagement by:

  • mentoring junior engineer in taking on time-sensitive accounting change having major impact to business and shepherded that effort to complete without bugs while meeting the deadline
  • organizing company-culture events for promoting team spirit (holiday party, cocktail contests, bowling, bocce, Exploratorium)
  • doing daily code reviews of teams’ PRs
  • drafted leveling plan

Continued search after multiple Lead engineer candidates ghosted/fell off the radar after offer; including the time after a candidate accepted job offer only then to inform us the day before he was to start that he had accepted another offer

Quality

Took over QA when QAE suddenly left; picking up Ghost Inspector, Runscope, and TestPad

Led eval efforts around Rainforest QA/on-boarding seasoned QAE replacement

Results

  • Led diverse co-located and remote web and mobile teams to deliver the user-facing experience for the premier luxury reseller.
Categories
Architecture demand-side Distributed Teams eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Management Process Prototyping supply-side

Styleguide

(CrowdFlower : 8/15-10/15)

In late August 2015, given previous successes in the year, I was tapped to lead the engineering team for delvering a visual identiy refresh (in conjunction with conference-ready AI deliverable) by early October.

Week 1

  • took Bootstrap 3/Flat UI/custom styling from Designer and created a static page as ‘gold standard’ for other engineers to reference
  • identified priority routes on which the new design would need to be rolled out
reference page

Week 2

  • created a new layout for and and began rolling out new design on the Rails app
  • drafted a plan for updating the Merb app seamlessly
  • began to onboard other engineers

Weeks 3-5

  • prototyped and tested the idea for asset precompiling in the Rails app and replacing the base assets of the Merb app
  • continued polishing
  • guided other engineers on implementation
  • continued polishing

Week 6

  • coordinated bug-free deploy in conjunction with Marketing (who was working for similarly refreshing the third-party-hosted home page)

Results

  • Organized work of four engineers (two local incl. CTO, two remote) as Tech Lead while planning (and tracking against) engineering sprints and deliverables over two months.