Bloomingdale's
Bloomingdale's is a luxury department store under the Macy's Inc. umbrella, a top-10 e-commerce retailer in the United States. As a Software Engineering Manager (UI), I manage teams of direct reports (employees and offshore contractors) on dual-brand Purchase & Delivery projects for bloomingdales.com and macys.com, partnering with Product Owners to plan and deliver on roadmap commitments.
Apart from delivering projects such as ‘Save for Later’ and ‘Same Day Delivery’ that increased functional engagement multifold, I led efforts to streamline implementation of Web Accessibility (WCAG 2.1), and organized a focused effort on Web Performance resulting in a 30% improvement in RUM and synthetic metrics. In addition, I provided expert advice from my previous experience on implementing a common style guide utilizing BEM methodology with utility classes and reusable components.
Prudential Financial
I was fortunate to join Prudential during a time when the industry was shifting its strategy to the digital world. I had the opportunity to lead a number of transformations within the company, primarily stemming from an M&A style initiative in which we were integrating systems from five independently operated business units with over $1 trillion in assets under management.
I worked on many projects at Prudential, taking on progressively more responsibility over the years. As a Senior Developer, I helped lead a complete redesign and overhaul of all of our digital properties. As the Lead Front-End Architect, I led the transformation of the company’s front-end architecture to a modern automated development environment. And as a Consulting Manager, Platform, I led multiple teams of front-end (Angular), back-end (WebSphere Portal), and API (Java Spring Boot) developers, partnering with Product Owners to plan and deliver on roadmap commitments with weekly Production releases.
Along the way, I wore many hats, including serving on the Scrum Governance Team that led our migration from a Waterfall to Agile process. I designed data models with the Oracle team to manage user profiles for all prospects and customers. And I worked extensively with the DevOps teams to set up CI/CD pipelines to AWS with appropriate quality gates in place.
Most importantly, I learned how to lead and transform development teams, providing focus not only on development best practices, but stressing the importance of non-functional requirements (NFRs) such as security, scalabilty, performance, and maintainability.
RAISE Initiative
In 2006, Columbia University, in collaboration with Marie Stopes International, founded the new $80 million RAISE Initiative. I took this opportunity to return to my alma mater, taking responsibility for the digital enablement of the organization — managing the entire web presence, building internal applications, and guiding the design direction of this program.
This project offered a very unique opportunity, as a fairly large portion of our clients were based internationally in areas with spotty internet connections, yet were headquartered out of the West. Thus, while they may have had the latest laptops, their connections were unreliable. To address this unique scenario, I decided to utilize Ajax to reduce the amount of overhead being loaded. This in itself was a challenge, as Ajax-based websites offer their own nuances. I was able to workaround most of these, such as creating a dynamically-generated alternate site for search engines and non-javascript clients, and enabling bookmarking through the use of anchor tags. And as a matter of personal pride, the RAISE website passed both the W3C XHTML and CSS validations.
In addition to the public-facing RAISE website, I built a number of internal applications, such as an online user-driven 'social' Library. This Library was both contributed to and read by many organizations across the field, and had an administrative area to easily manage the resources being submitted. To enable sharing of resources, I integrated an online file management system for our staff and partners. I also created a state-of-the-art Abstract Review System for the Reproductive Health in Emergencies Conference 2008. This system greatly simplified the process of abstract submission and review, from a very labor-intensive manual process to an automated one. Along with this, I built an online registration system for the conference, seamlessly integrating with a merchant system to accept credit cards
I also was responsible for guiding the design direction of the program. I designed the logo for the RAISE Initiative, as well as banners, letterheads, business cards, and other stationary. I also worked with design firms to outsource our larger print publications, providing them with a sense of the look and feel the program wanted to convey.
AMDD Program
After seeing my work with RAISE, the AMDD Program came calling to ask for my help to perform a complete overhaul on their website. This was not just a simple redesign, though. As AMDD had changed considerably since their inception, this project served as a catlyst to determine their current identity and mission statement. Through many meetings and multiple revisions, we came up with a clean modern design, a simplified information architecture, and new content with a clear focus.
From the back-end perspective, I used Acquia's Drupal solution as a CMS. I selected this system after a thorough evaluation, as AMDD had become very excited about the possibilities of their new website. We came up with wonderful ideas about how we could enhance the website in the future for team interaction, discussions, and learning. With its huge userbase and availabilty of modules, Drupal was the perfect choice.
I built a custom theme from scratch for Drupal. As with any other system, Drupal had its own way of doing everything, and so I completely absorbed myself in the Drupal environment while working on this project.
The results were immediate. Within the team, morale was raised with a website that finally reflected the professional image that AMDD had worked so hard to build around the world. Within two months, traffic to amddprogram.org shot up over 1000%, the truest measure of success.
JetBlue Airways
As an integral member of JetBlue Airways' Interactive Marketing Department, I was directly responsible for maintaining, enhancing, and updating the jetblue.com and jetblueairways.com websites, which bring in over $1.5 billion of yearly revenue via 10 million monthly visits.
My projects at JetBlue could be classified into five categories - enhancing the brand, reducing costs, generating revenue, day-to-day maintenance, and a website redesign.
One of my first projects to enhance the JetBlue brand was to design and manage the new Inflight Experience section for the Brand team, to highlight JetBlue's unique product offerings. I worked on this from initial wireframes through mock-ups, deployment, and maintenance. I also created a new Corporate Travel section for the Sales team to showcase new partnerships, and use when they are on the road.
To generate revenue, I worked with Marketing to put up various promotions. I also streamlined the booking flow, and added upsell opportunities and special offers.
In order to reduce costly phone calls, I implemented various enhancements to the booking engine, including online award redemption, and a new "Manage Your Flights" section with functionality to view, change, or cancel your flight online from one location, as well as weather-related operation updates and cancellations.
In order to save time in daily maintenance, I worked on process enhancements with Revenue Management for sale fare updates, reducing the time required by 90%. I was also responsible for coordinating the announcements of new cities and routes, as well as various promotions, working in conjuction with Revenue Management, IT, QA, BFT, Reservations, Legal, Brand, and Corporate Communications teams.
Finally, I participated in a complete redesign of the JetBlue website in partnership with a third-party design firm. All of the coding and web production work was left to my team, and we very proudly unveiled this new look on schedule.