Category: eCommerce

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
crm documenting eCommerce Innovation Leadership supply-side

Increased Leads

(The RealReal : 11/16-9/17)

Late Q3/2016

Upon joining, I inherited a lead-gen project that had gone deeply awry. Earlier in the year (March,) Product and Design had come up with an alternative lead-gen flow. An offshore company was procured to follow-through with implementation. The consultancy tackled the project but their implementation sat on a feature branch gathering dust (six months!) and lacking documentation until I arrived.

In order to get the feature into production, I tasked a Senior Engineer with soup-to-nuts verifying the feature branch. When he failed, I marshalled other engineers (at yet another near-shore company) to do the verification. They succeeded and we were able to roll out the new user experience, meeting a company objective to have it in production by the end of the year.

Mid-Summer 2017

Another executive decision was made to revisit the (same) flow and try yet another alternative, this time, in the new Phoenix environment. I spent time running point to assess the basics of the necessary (information) architecture in the new framework and then forumulating a project plan to implement. In October, the new user experience went live.

Results

  • Championed way-over-schedule experimental lead-gen flow into production, improving quantity/quality of sales leads.
Categories
eCommerce Growth Leadership Prototyping supply-side

Beat Company Plan

(The RealReal : 1/17-6/17)

In January, peers in different areas of the company came together in a cross-functional guild with the goal to beat company plan around yearly supply-side user acquisition. Over the following months, we ideated and executed on a few ideas to make that happen.

Where I saw opportunity to realize the most gains for the least amount of (engineering) effort, I acted as Senior Engineering Representative and spoke to the likely costs of implementation, overseeing the ideas we as a guild prioritized.

Re-consign

To realize an idea around “re-consigning” – that is, enabling demand-side to re-sell an item they purchased from supply-side, I threw-together a “reconsign” link with an Javascript alert and beaconing usage via Segment, worked with PROD and DSGN to flesh out the feature in-full, and then managed a remote team to to get the feature (fully-baked) into production.

Friendbuy

Long championed by the CFO, and by consensus of the guild, we scoped out and delivered an integration with Friendbuy; which wound up being beneficial for user acqusition on both sides of the marketplace.

Funnel Optimization

The guild sanctioned a prioritized idea around optimizing the supply-side user funnel. DSGN built out wireframes and I managed the team to realized the new acquisition funnel in Phoenix.

Results

  • Led best 2017 revenue-gen (adding $3M to the bottom-line) and best 2017 lead-gen features (boosting leads by 50%.)
Categories
eCommerce Innovation supply-side

Hackathon : Browser Extension

(The RealReal : 2/17-2/17)

Results

  • Won “Best Hack” while pairing w/DIR Design to create Chrome Browser Extension (similar to Honey) to cross-sell inventory on related retailers.
Categories
demand-side eCommerce Frontend Innovation OOJS Process Prototyping

Better NUX

(Bluxome Labs : 6/16-6/16)

Towards improving the New User Experience, Design came up with the idea to use Callouts around page elements whose affordance wasn’t intuitive.

Given the mockup, I set about implementing it pixel-perfectly.

For the first pass, I simply crafted the markup based on Bootstrap’s Alert and hid it by default, revealing it with JS if logic was met.

Then, realizing that the Bootstrap Alert wasn’t sufficient for Design’s needs and that the Bootstrap Popover was, as well as that there would be opportunity to re-use the code elsewhere in the platform, I created a JS Class for the NUX (a.k.a. “Callout”) and subclassed (example) accordingly, modifying the markup accordingly.

Results

  • Established team habit around refactoring and improving OOJS.
Categories
Architecture Building buy-in Collaboration demand-side eCommerce Frontend Leadership Performance Engineering Process

UI Tech Debt

(Bluxome Labs : 3/16-6/16)

A remnant of the legacy codebase from the company’s origins eight years ago, the two most important routes on the platform for quality assurance had never been moved from the company’s original Merb app to its companion (upgraded) Rails experience (back when a first movement towards SOA happened three years prior.)

They were rightly regarded with trepidation given their dependence on MooTools when the rest of the platform had been moved to jQuery, especially as the Jasmine suite for their coverage had been mothballed about 18 months before and those same MooTools libs were tightly-coupled between two platform applications.

Towards a future of less frontend tech debt, I seized on the opportunity to champion and shepherd the project (as a Q2 engineering goal) through to completion.

Over the course of three months, I led the effort around project scoping, weekly communication around engineering effort, and architecting and leading the implementation, interfacing with Product and Design to ensure quality in light of the absent test coverage.

Results

  • Delivered on decoupling strategy for static asset management / Webpack’d bundles while collabratively iterating with VPE/VP PROD and Sr. Engineers
Categories
Architecture Backend demand-side eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Innovation SPAs

Demand-side UX Refresh

(Bluxome Labs : 4/16-4/16)

In a unique position given my previous experience with the UX, I took an opportunity when tasked by Product and Design to not only reskin the Listing but also to upgrade it.

Given that no one besides me really knew how RequireJS was working in the application and given its falling-out-of-favor in the general community as a module-loading solution, it was time to upgrade it to Webpack.

Here’s what the Task Listing looked like before

Here’s the mock from Design

In chronological order, here’s what I did

  1. Upgraded DataTables from 1.9 to 1.10
  2. Refactored JavaScript towards more of an OO paradigm
  3. Applied new skin
  4. Ported JavaScript for RequireJS to CoffeeScript for Webpack
  5. Deployed

…and here’s what I delievered

with modal

Results

  • Successfully advocated for adoption of Webpack to replace RequireJS and then ported most-trafficked page, while achieveing near-pixel-perfect re-skinning.

 

Categories
Architecture Building buy-in Collaboration demand-side eCommerce Management Process

Overhauling Quality

Bluxome Labs : 4/16-4/16)

Test Questions have long been the quality assurance mechanism of the CrowdFlower platform.

The interactivity behind them was created around 2008 in MooTools as part of a Merb application; that interactivity was never ported, even as the company increasingly adopted Rails and jQuery. For over three years, discussion has been of porting the Test Question interface out of Merb (the last presentation-layer in that app) and into a company-standard Rails app. Given the expected amount of effort with little user-benefitting ROI to be realized for simply a straight port, it’s easy to understand why it had only ever remained a discussion.

Finally, in April, 2016, the stars aligned when the VP of Product expressed a desire to spend time on improving Test Questions usability while the VP of Engineering decided the time was right for moving forward on a micro-service architecture, dividing “frontend” and “backend” responsibilities accordingly. I seized on the opportunity (without being mandated to do so) because I saw that we could kill two birds with one stone

Following is an inventory (I created the initial format for) of JS libs across three different routes (completed by a junior engineer)

I then used this inventory in conjunction with a Jira report to help scope the effort and parcel out work to likely candidates, an example of which can be seen below

Finally, I tracked progress in a wiki page, providing status updates to key stakeholders.

Results

  • Laid groudwork for complete FE overhaul, including success criteria and risks, after shopping technical ideas around with Lead engineers, VP PROD, VP ENGR.
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.
Categories
Architecture demand-side eCommerce Frontend Full-Stack Innovation Machine Learning Management

Delivering AI

(CrowdFlower : 8/15-9/15)

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

In the months leading up to that, the CTO had been prototyping an intial verion of the app in Rails which, for the conference, was to supposed to be integrated with other legacy apps (Rails 3.2 and Merb) and have its UI overhauled to be compliant with the newly-created company Styleguide.

Week 1

  • Given Balsamiq wireframes, put together a few layouts
  • Put basic routes in place
  • Began architecting common styling solution between AI app and legacy apps
basics coming together

Week 2

  • Continued work on common styling
  • Made choices aobut JS libs and prototyped interactions given wireframes; got buy-in from CTO, Product, and Design
  • Began work integrating with ML Python web service

first index page of models

Week 3

  • Given higher-resolution mockups by Designer, started to polish look-and-feel
  • With architecture in place, began to parcel work out to other engineers

first version of export

Week 4

  • As conference neared, knew we weren’t going to be able to deliver everything; worked with Product to focus on MVP
  • Oversaw work of other engineers

adding data to the model

Week 5

  • Continued to lead other engineers and refine interactions
annotating a model

Week 6

  • Applied final polish
  • Delivered for the conference! Following are a few screenshots demonstrating some of the deliverables

Results

  • Led team in coordination with CTO to deliver AI application (Rails) for company-sponsored conference on Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science.