Category: Roadmapping

Categories
Budgeting Collaboration Roadmapping VR

3D Cost Modeling

(7/20-7/20)

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 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
Capacity Planning Collaboration Culture Forecasting Process Program Management Roadmapping

Introducing Program Management

(11/19-3/20)

Challenge

Absence of project or program management made it challenging to forecast delivery and could not get engineer time set-aside for maintenance.

Action

Investigated a few tools (Portfolio for Jira, BigPicture, Aha) for visually depicting dependencies and estimating team capacity.

Ultimately introduced lightweight (spreadsheet-based) processes to support capacity planning and crafted a business case for the CEO on why we should invest in infrastructure.

Results

  • Empowered the organization by increasing capacity planning visibility.
Categories
Architecture eCommerce Management Process Re-platforming Roadmapping SOA

Changing Engine Mid-flight : Again

(Decorist : 8/18-12/19)

Challenge

Take a half-baked v1.5 SOA and continue re-platforming to support scaled integration with corporate parent and its subsidiaries.

Action

Aug 2018

When I joined, it was with the idea that I would be instrumental in helping scale the Decorist relationship-creation paradigm leading to higher AOV to its corporate parent – Bed Bath and Beyond – and its subsidiaries: Buy Buy Baby and Cost Plus World Market.

I inherited the beginnings of a movement away from a Django/Angular/MySQL monolith and towards a Django/React/Postgres multi-tenant platform; a v1.5 of the application architecture. My predecessor had extracted some facets of the monolith to build out the initial stages of the SOA in partnership with another Bed Bath and Beyond subsidiary: One Kings Lane.

Although labeled a multi-tenant platform, it had been built quickly – effectively as a prototype – to service one tenant and was not truly extensible for other silos, though it did encompass solid SOA principles for reuse.

Dec 2018

As part of roadmapping for 2019, wanting to strategically position ‘scalability’ for the corporate org, I worked with my boss – SVP Prod/Tech – to detail a project plan to leverage the exisitng nascent SaaS paradigm for the next generation of the Decorist user experience.

We were sanctioned by the CEO for reduced scope on the roadmap; it would be the very first effort internally for moving towards a new platform to future-power the site. We focused on porting a back-office, manual task of determinging supply-side match and availability with demand-side need.

Wanting to keep a engineer engaged, I shepherded him and helped him understand the Cost-Benefit trade-offs we would need to make in order to meet the deadline, setting a course of re-using the User service for authentication, builidng out a new React-based UI, and integrating with the monolith.

Feb 2019

A few months later, we delivered the feature of supply-side Matching and Availability:

Shortly after launch, business priorities shifted towards a focus on a new eCom offering and we had to back-burner re-platforming efforts.

Dec 2019

Given guidance that 2020 might be the year we could re-visit re-platforming, I ideated around what was still lacking in v1.5 and what would need to be built out, creating a project plan and technical roadmap for the go-forward.

I worked with my boss again around planning and prioritization and we again provided guidance to CEO. Ultimately, we could not secure the necessary corporate integration buy-in for further progress and have had to defer any further progress given other priorities.

Results

  • Mentored Lead Engineer towards implementation of first feature for new SOA paradigm.
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.