Building an e-commerce site against the clock on a low budget
In 2021 I‘m working as a Scrum Master and Interaction Designer for a well-known security company. The 100% distributed team was hired to build an e-commerce platform on Magento, to substitute the platform that has been in use for over 20 years, and allow the Swedish company to expand their market and support high peaks of traffic on one of the busiest times of the year.
The project had a seven-month deadline, including time for testing and corrections. On top of that, half of the Scrum Team were junior devs on their first role, we didn’t have a researcher in the team and there was no Product Owner or backlog ready, so everyone had to multi-task and wear many hats at all times.
Main tasks
- Scrum Master: facilitating Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Review & Retro, removing blockers, assisting with PO tasks, onboarding new members of the team and forming a relationship with many other teams involved in the project.
- Stakeholder management: the company had big expectations and hundreds of requirements, most of them conflicting or not realistic considering the timeframe. Lots of back-and-forward conversations were needed between developers and non-technical decision makers to finally define a scope.
- Interaction design: whenever I had a free time slot between meetings, I’d review the current site to avoid existing friction points, or jump into Figma to adapt the Magento template to the existing Design System of the company, making sure that the edits wouldn’t add too much extra dev work.
- Visual design: the company’s Design System had been optimised for a mobile app, and this is a website, with a huge weight on SEO and also available on desktop, so most of the font sizes and colours needed tweaking for usability and accessibility reasons.
- More: workshop facilitation, presentations, backlog prioritisation and any other necessary tasks to support the team.
Process
What we have: the current platform
Understanding the fully-bespoke beast that was built over the years took time and lots of conversations with different people from multiple teams.
Not more than a handful of people in the company understood at first the importance of the project. But obviously, when a project takes so many resources, it’s important that everyone knows exactly why they are doing what they are doing and the magnitude of it. Otherwise your work becomes impossible instead of challenging and the morale goes down.
I managed to get in touch with the right people, who very kindly explained everything to me a hundred times and answered all my questions, especially the Solutions Architect and the Product Owner of the current site. Collaborating with them was crucial to be able to present the project to all the other teams involved, so we could get them onboard and engaged, as we would need their support on a daily basis.
I collected information and mapped it out for everyone to understand.
What we want: the needs of the business
The obsolete system was acting as a bottleneck, complicating the growth of the company and forcing the marketing people to constantly come up with new workarounds to avoid a breakdown. It was also ridiculously time-consuming to perform simple tasks that any modern e-commerce platform allows, such as updating the stock or allowing users to track their orders.
Also, the company had quite an ambitious vision of what the new site should offer, and they were very interested in improving the positioning and selling new types of product that weren’t available in the existing site.
What we need: the needs of the users
Users were mostly happy with the performance of the site, so the trickiest part here was to keep all the bespoke functionality that they loved so much, and making it fit into the fairly basic frame that Magento templates offer, so that we could save as much development time as possible.
Lots of the UX issues would be resolved just by migrating to Magento, but the transition between the standard and the bespoke parts needed extra attention.
And a very tight deadline
Considering all the data modelling that needed to be done before untangling the existing system and creating the new one, building a roadmap was a very useful thing to do in the meantime, so we could coordinate as well as possible with other teams once the work was ready to be done. Of course, as it always happens, accepting that you won’t be able to stick to the roadmap is the most important part of it! Every time a new team or supplier joined the process, the deadlines would change, but the roadmap helped us see the dependencies very clearly and adapt to the constant change.
What I learned from this project
- People are the most important asset: being nice to people allows shortcuts, and shortcuts are needed.
- But tools are important too: it took many weeks to get the developers up and running due to delays with laptops and software providers.
- Interaction across teams and live collaboration are essential when you work remotely: Miro saved my life putting everyone’s brains together.
- I like Scrum, but I’m a designer at heart: I love helping people and removing blockers, making my colleagues’ lives easier, but I also need some creative work to stay fully happy.
- It’s really hard to separate between work and personal life when you see your client’s logo all over the place every time you leave the house!
