Phoenix - Bluxome Labs

(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%.)

(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.