Category: Leadership

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
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
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
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 withĀ 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
Leadership Optimization Performance Engineering supply-side

Improving Speed and Conversions

With no-one on staff having formal performance engineering experience or training, I led the effort to address a 6s sitewide page load average. Over approx. 6 months, stealing time from each sprint as I could given other responsbilities, I assessed bottlenecks using performance tools, including procuring a contract for Insights, Browser Pro, and Synthetics.

In a nutshell, assessing some of the pages having a roughly 13s page load, skewing the overall site’s average, I determined that the bulk of the performance issues were in blocking JS libs and then crafted a remediation strategy and established SMART goals for baselining/measuring impact of changes quarter-over-quarter with intent to drop from 6s to 3.5s by the end of 2017. Below you’ll see a spreadsheet I kept, noting the average Page Load Speed every Monday morning. Finally, in May, we address the bulk of the blocking JS libs and reversed the upwards trend.

The CEO was amazed at how much faster the site felt.

Results

  • Intro’d performance engineering, leading to page load speed reduction by one full second and 11% bump in mobile web conversions.
Categories
Innovation Leadership Process Prototyping SOA supply-side

Phoenix Homepage POC

(The RealReal : 2/17-3/17)

Early in 2017, a Tiger Team formed of me, a Lead ENGR, the CTO, the VP PROD, and a PM.

The CTO and VP PROD had an idea to empower Merchandising and Marketing to further drive content/conversions from the Homepage. While they previously had some power to manage that content through an admin interface with a limited schema, the idea was to give them even more creative expression, allowing them free-reign over their HTML.

A few weeks into the project, the Lead ENGR, who had been tasked with building out the intial POC, left (leaving us in a lurch.) Under pressure, I still delivered basic CMS functionality via Rails and demo’d same to the C-suite.

Shortly thereafter, when requirements radically changed and the mandate from the CTO was suddenly to move towards a WYSIWIG experience through a 3rd party Content-as-a-Service provider as rendered via Phoenix, while moving away from a lazy-load landing page to a 3×3 grid, I built out a simple placeholder homepage in Elixir and then evaluated and prototyped against several CaaS vendors (e.g. Prismic, Kentico Cloud, Contentful.)

When the CTO settled upon Prismic for us to move forward with, I conceived the project plan for engineers to carry the effort forward while also developing the initial migration plan for porting route-by-route from Rails to Phoenix.

Results

  • Built MVP of company’s Rails-to-Phoenix migration.
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 happenedĀ 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
Agile Leadership Optimization Process

Filling Shoes of Scrum Master

Adopting Agile methodologies and nomencalture, our team chose to make sprint commitments in points (using Fibonacci numbers.)

Seeing an opportunity to use discipline towards making our performance go up-and-to-the-right, I began tracking some key metrics in a spreadsheet, some of which are displayed below

Figuring that the data would resonately at a gut level if visualized, I charted it as well

Results

  • Took on Scrum Master role (in addition to IC and Tech Lead responsibilities) and used a data-driven paradigm to achieve a 69% trailing-3-sprint-average improvement.
Categories
demand-side eCommerce Frontend Leadership SPAs

WYSIWIG Platform UI

(CrowdFlower : 7/15-8/15)

The team knew that our most-important customer-facing UI needed an overhaul. Approximately a year before, a contractor had come in to attempt that. His prototype, built early in 2014 in React, lay dormant because it had not had a project champion to fully see it into production. In the summer of 2015, the timing was right for our team (with me as the Tech Lead) to pick up the banner and carry it forward.

We revisited the prototype, shown below

No usability tests had been done on it so we didn’t really know how customers would take to it. Product handed us a design and we promptly set about its realization.

Though I attempted to introduce the use of Webpack and Hot Loading, given how much re-writing would have been necessary to move from the Sprockets dependency management paradigm of Rails to that of Webpack and with the looming deadline, that intitiative had to be abandoned.

We made progress as we extracted some modal functionality into a right-hand pane.

The UX really began to come together: the following screen capture demonstrates one of the key interactions.

We launched something similar (but more polished, see doc link) and that is running in production.

Results

  • Led a team of three Rails engineers (two local, one remote) to upgrade and overhaul a React app towards improving usability and throughput in the system.