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.
