I worked as a vendor at backcountry.com to help them build a number of landing pages and e-commerce tools. Part of this effort was creating a collections page that could populate entire product collections based on an array of skews.
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Collections
As a consultant, often when diving into a large online retailer environment you can expect there to be many pieces of proprietary company knowledge to pick up. Between learning a new API, using Foreign CRM tools, and adapting to the conventions of their business operations and hierarchy expectations, it can be a lot to keep track of.
In doing so recently at Backcountry.com, I was able to help strengthen their business with immediate solutions and leverage my position as a consultant to speak the truth without any political or superior ties. This put me in a great position that harnessed a relationship based on trust and helped push toward the company’s progression in their development.
Specifically, I was tasked with maintaining a new web series they’ve started called ‘collections’. I came on at week two of their launch and was helping to maintain these weekly releases while a team in Costa Rica was building a tool that automated the process. After producing one collection: http://www.backcountry.com/sc/bottoms-up I realized that I never wanted to maintain these pages the way that they had in mind. There has to be a better way, I thought. So after a few conversations with some engineers and a couple days passed, I cobbled together a PHP based solution that effectively generated an entire ‘collection’ page just by passing in a set of product SKU arrays. Take that! Make the computer do the work. Don’t be a developer doing production work.
Essentially, I developed a slightly less robust tool than the team in Costa Rica. But you know what? It took a few days and was getting implemented in a real world fashion right out of the gate. Not to dog what their team in Costa Rica built (which ended up being pretty amazing in its own right) but I think the multiple job offers speak loud enough.
Read this testimony on the blog at my old gig at STG consulting
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