Could you tell me about a project you are very proud of?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

The accomplishment that i am most proud of is leading the development and launch
of Order Service API at my previous company . The project is significant to me
due to technical challenges we faced , the skills i applied and the substantial
impact on the company’s operation
At the time , our ecommerce platform was hindered by monolithic architecture and
outdated order management system which led to inefficiencies and frequent
failure. My task was develop a new Order Service API that could handle order
creation, inventory fetching , product details while also integrating 3rd party
tools for communication . We updated the programming language and underlying
architecture to scale the platform and manage it  and integrated with 3rd Party
apps .One of the major challenges was to maintain backward compatibility and
ensure the new platform works hand in hand with existing platform and manage
real time data effectively.After months of rigorous development and testing and
iterative improvements based on user feedback we successfully deployed the API .
The new system streamlined order management , provided real time order tracking
and automated communications with customers. It resulted in 30% reduction in
order processing and significant decrease in customer complaints . It was a
great learning opportunity that challenged my technical and leadership skills
and positive results validated the value of using latest technology

Anonymous · Answer

In my role as Team Lead Manager at Flexport, I led a team of six engineers
tasked with building a Kafka-based streaming data infrastructure deployed in
Kubernetes. We encountered a significant challenge at the start of the project:
integrating with existing products while meeting the requirements for products
still in the design and planning phases.
To address this, I implemented several key strategies:
Clear Communication: I set up design review sessions with the entire engineering
organization to ensure everyone was aligned and any potential issues were
addressed early.
Team Collaboration: I encouraged regular pair-programming sessions and
implemented pairing rotations to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing
within the team.
Agile Approach: We adopted an Agile methodology, breaking down the project into
manageable sprints. This approach helped us tackle the problem incrementally and
adjust our plans as needed.
Early Data Contract Discussions: We initiated discussions about data contracts
with other teams early in the process. By co-publishing data contract proposals
and seeking feedback, we ensured that our solutions were well-integrated and met
cross-team requirements.
Task Management: I made sure tasks were broken down into manageable sizes with
clear descriptions and acceptance criteria. This approach helped maintain team
velocity and clarity on deliverables.
Transparency and Accountability: We conducted bi-weekly public demos to track
our progress and maintain transparency. These demos allowed us to gather early
feedback and hold ourselves accountable to our target dates.
By employing these strategies, we successfully launched our platform and
onboarded the first production workflow within three months. The production
workflow was to provide reporting for our customers. We reduced reporting
latency from 24 hours to near-real-time. Additionally, we introduced a
self-service template and comprehensive documentation, which reduced the
workflow onboarding time from one week to less than two days.
This project was a team effort, and the team was highly motivated and proud of
the result. It taught me the importance of breaking down large projects into
smaller, manageable pieces, which has since improved my approach to leading
technical teams through complex problems. Regular demos and project updates were
crucial to the success of this project, as they allowed us to gather feedback
early and stay on track with our deadlines.

Anonymous · Answer

Situation: The North America Transportation (NATS) organization, which is
dedicated to managing the design, speed, and connectivity of the transportation
network, previously did not have a formal process for reviewing and tracking the
impact of new pilots and initiatives. This led to issues with communication,
lack of network-wide visibility, and unknown impacts on key metrics.
Task: I was tasked with creating a new pilot tracking program from scratch to
address these challenges and improve the NATS organization's ability to evaluate
and scale successful initiatives.
Action: I built a comprehensive pilot program within the Asana project
management software, consisting of four main components:
 1. Pilot intake with a white paper outlining success criteria and risks
 2. A monthly pilot review panel with NATS leadership
 3. Ongoing pilot tracking for approved initiatives
 4. Post-mortem and scaling process for successful pilots

Result: The new pilot program was launched in Q3 2022 and has already
demonstrated a 35% cost savings in transportation execution costs through the
successful implementation of new innovation programs. The structured review,
tracking, and scaling process has improved visibility, risk assessment, and
performance monitoring across the NATS organization.

Anonymous · Answer

The accomplishment that I am most proud of is when my manager asked me to move
to Malaysia to set up a new Factory and the Operations department in Kuala
Lumpur.
It was my job to get all licenses and permits required to allow our factory to
run under the country's regulations. I had to define the different roles needed
like Product, Process, Quality, and Planning engineers. In addition, it was also
my responsibility to manage the transfer of 3 different product lines from China
to Malaysia.
To make that happen, I kicked off the project with the stakeholders to define
the goals, budget, and plan for the opening of the new factory. I defined all
milestones, and I collaborated with HR team to define the total HC needed, the
different roles, the timeline for each incorporation, and the budget. With the
Legal department, I worked closely to get the licenses and permits required for
our company to operate in Malaysia. Together with the Operations team, I worked
on the factory layout, material readiness, staff training, and the assembly
lines transfer plan from China to Malaysia.
After 9 months of deep collaboration with cross-functional teams, I completed
the project on time and within budget. It was a great learning opportunity that
challenged my program management and leadership skills. Finally, the transfer
resulted in a cost down of 5% for our customer in the products transferred to
Malaysia.

Anonymous · Answer

I want to talk about a project to scale our push notifications backend platform.
One day, we were getting paged for replication lags. This was a sign for
database clusters getting pushed to their limit. We double-checked whether this
was a one-off or we are facing a scaling issue. We concluded we were facing an
issue. The problem here was not only we needed to scale up but we sharded our
database just about a year ago with what we thought would be fine for at least 3
years. Instead of just working on scaling the database, we talked to our clients
and saw how much more volume they were demanding and it came to our surprise our
clients were actually looking for 3x the current quota. Instead of just scaling
our database, we decided to look for a longer-term solution.
My role in this project was not only accountable for delivering the project but
also making sure technically the new solution made sense and was not
over-engineered. I was more technically involved than in other projects and
asked a lot of challenging questions while empowering ICs to look for creative
solutions involving re-architecture. I had my team investigate options while I
was talking to my manager about this work. Our clients were asking for 3x the
traffic so that was our goal for this project. We also set a stretch goal of
supporting 5x the traffic if possible. After investigations and talking to
experts, we decided to utilize an auto-scalable cloud component to replace some
of our in-house managed components such as the database and queuing infra.
The project involved some architecture to utilize cloud components. Especially,
our data access pattern made it possible to efficiently utilize DynamoDb with
its autoscalability allowing us to actually meet our stretch goal. We faced some
challenges around hidden limitations that were not documented well but we were
able to overcome those by talking to experts and implementing best practices.
After delivering the project, we talked to our clients again and allocated 3x
quota to teams that were demanding it. One team had a campaign that took 10+
hours to send out but is now sending the whole campaign within 1 hour increasing
user engagement and being able to better target time window to send messages.
We learned from this project that while the cloud provides very interesting
tools and solutions, they don’t magically solve scaling problems. Our experience
and learnings from this project helped us tremendously with our future cloud
migrations.

Anonymous · Answer

While I was working on the Fuchsia Team I had to architect and implement test
beds, services and workflows to simulate the upgrade process of the operating
system from Linux to Fuchsia. The manual validation process required a sequence
of button presses to trigger the upgrade process and downloading and installing
the production version of the operating system.
I had to collaborate with the team building the upgrade engine to allow
replacing the upgrade APIs to a testing version. I had to design a new version
of the upgrade APIs to ensure we could validate downgrading, upgrading and
controlling the versions for testing.
I also had to collaborate with the electronic engineers of the team to modify
the smart display devices to programmatically generate the button push events.
This was a very complex workflow that was going to be used to validate the
upgrade process for devices already in production around the world and even
small failures could render the devices unusable.
The test beds, the test upgrade service and multiple rounds of validations and
fixes made the upgrade process a success with more than 99.5% success rate. In
fact it was such a success that nobody noticed it until people found in the news
their devices were already running Fuchsia. I’m really proud that the level of
detail and the hard work replicating the upgrade progress made the infield
migration a success.

Anonymous · Answer

A project I am very proud of is creating and implenting the perferred employer
program at my community. In part of creating this program I had to dive deep
into our communites demographcs as well as coming up with a list of employers
that have employees we would like to attract. I focused on large surrounding
businesses like state and medical employees. As part of the PEP program I
offered free application fees as well as a $400 move-in credit. Once I saw what
an impact this made on occupancy. I increased the amount of the resident
referral program to get the employees we attracted through the PEP to start
referring other emplyees to us. The resident referal program went from a flat
$500 referral fee to a tiered program that started at $500, went to $750, then
to a $1000 and for the fourth referral $1500. This increased revenue by around
$200,000/year which is nearly 20%

Anonymous · Answer

I was involved in a project where we have build a statistical model to leverage
the historical data related to meters that print labels and predict the
likelihood of the different issues in the meter so a correct kit can be ordered
to in first attempt to service person visit

Anonymous · Answer

I am particularly proud of the last project achievement. The purpose was to
integrate a translation management tool to handle outsourced translation
request. The tool was very complex and we had to map its items with our datas
and coect the tool with all our applications and integrate all our processes
like translation requests, reinternalization, cacelation, assigments, creation
of purchase orders and invoices....
The project is a total success and is actually used by our stakeholders.

Could you tell me about a project you are very proud of?

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