1. Context

City’s website ran on a monolithic system with an Angular front-end, encountering numerous performance issues and challenges in maintaining and upgrading the platform. The existing architecture slowed down development, impacted user experience, and required significant engineering effort for even minor changes.

2. The Challenge

• Customer Pain Points: The site performed slowly, often spiking to 30-second response times for page loads, leading to poor customer experience and high bounce rates.

• Operational Problem: Simple configuration updates required engineering involvement, often necessitating full website deployments, limiting agility for marketing and merchandising teams.

• Technology Challenge: The platform suffered from technical challenges, affecting both the digital consumer-facing experience and backend IT systems, making it difficult to scale or introduce new features.

3. My Role & Responsibilities

As the Product Lead and Product Owner for the scrum team, I drove this initiative from discovery to execution, ensuring alignment across business, technology, and customer experience.

• Leadership & Collaboration: Partnered with UX and Design to define an aspirational, best-in-class user experience, ensuring customer needs remained at the forefront of decision-making. Worked closely with Marketing, Merchandising, and Pricing teams to align on core business rules, promotional strategies, and seamless adoption of the new platform.

• Technical Execution: Led the transition from a monolithic system to a microservices-based architecture, improving performance and scalability. Oversaw the end-to-end development of the entire UI, including backend APIs, integrations, security, and payment systems.

• Operational & System Enhancements: Worked closely with IT and Operations teams to configure the commerce platform and enhance backend systems, improving data operations and performance.

• Process & Agile Implementation: Embedded Agile principles into the scrum team, fostering a culture of accountability, ownership, and outcome-driven development. Managed and conducted User Acceptance Testing (UAT), supported SOP creation, training and onboarding for the administrative portion of the commerce platform, and ensured a smooth transition at launch.

• Data-Driven Decision Making: Supported the pre-launch process using server-side AB testing, controlling traffic allocation to monitor performance and adoption, ensuring iterative optimization post-launch.

4. The Solution

• Platform Modernization: Migrated key functionalities from the monolithic system to a microservices-based architecture, improving maintainability and flexibility.

• Performance Enhancements: Optimized API response times, introduced React for all web-front end experiences along with implementation of advanced caching strategies.

• Agile Implementation: Established clear product roadmaps, structured sprints, and introduced continuous integration & deployment (CI/CD) to accelerate feature releases.

5. Measurable Outcomes

• Page Load Speed Reduction: Improved average page load times from ~15-30s to under 3s, significantly enhancing customer experience.

• Conversion Rate Improvement: Increased checkout conversion rates resulting from performance optimizations and UX enhancements.

• Operational Efficiency: Reduced engineering dependency for business updates, cutting deployment cycles for simple changes from days to minutes.

• Business Agility: Enabled marketing teams to launch promotions and content updates in real-time, improving go-to-market speed.

• Scalability: The new microservices architecture provided a foundation for future growth, allowing for faster feature rollouts and integrations.