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We had to decide whether or not to keep investing in, or sunset a feature that came out of a hackathon project. The feature itself was well-coded, and the design was created by a designer, and functionally it worked. However, it was built on an untested assumption that customers would actually get value from automating and thus losing some control over a fairly sensitive and infrequent workflow. That meant that the feature was launched as quickly as possible due to the hackathon nature, and (i) confused customers, as it wasn't in our public roadmap or well packaged in the app, and (ii) led to low adoption and thus no meaningful testing feedback to further develop the feature. While there were hypotheses that an adapted version of the feature could be more valuable (and verified during sales demos) for a new, larger customer segment - we decided to instead deprecate the feature as it was a distraction, and not a high impact investment at the time given other priorities. 

Learning: 

- Have a product person leading any new feature, so that there is a clear value hypothesis and alignment with GTM functions to launch and communicate the feature successfully to customers 

- Do not assume that customers will want to adopt something just because they mention it 

- Well coded, designed feature without a clear value prop is still without value 

while reviewing one of the older projects that was currently implemented in the company I noticed that there was no alerting in place if the data pipeline breaks, the data pipeline has never been broken and it never failed for the last 2 years. it was a pipeline where the data would be dropped into an sftp bucket by the customer every hour and then it was moved to an s3 bucket where s3 triggers were implemented to moved the data in to queue. So in case there is an issue with the data not being processed we would only know when the we see a drop in volume. I identified it as a potential issue with the system and worked on a proposal to have monitoring in place so we are notified when there is an error. I worked with the program manager and devised a plan on how to implement the alerting and the time lines as well as the effort that will be needed to implement it. I mapped the impact of not having it to the current goals of the company and then put forward a proposal of implementing the alerts to the business and took their buyins. after getting the buyins I proposed the task to my team and some of the sr devlopers were not too keen on implenting the alerts, I gave the task to some of the Jr devlopers and the alerts were implemented. after the implementation we discovered that for some hrs in a day we werent getting any files so instead of getting 24 files in a day we were getting 20 files a day in an average. This was rectified by talking to the customer and the missing data was solved. but this made the whole team realize the importance of monitoring and alerting. It also bosted the moral of the Jr developers seeing the direct impact they made to the business goals

I look after our email platform and our existing solution wasn't flexible enough to handle targeted messages at scale. We were missing an opportunity with users to send personalised messages at the right time to help increase engagement. I embarked on a project to implement a new marketing automation software. This project required alignment across our product, data, retail, security and legal teams. I spent time researching the availble tools in the marketing and workshopping requirements with relevant stakeholders, we created an RFP and sent to a number of suppliers. Each round of the RFP I assigned a score to the company and gathered feedback from stakeholders. This ensured the decision making process was fair and we had strong evidence when sharing the business case to senior leadership.

Once we decided on the supplier, I was responsible for implementing the tool which required support across various teams within the business. Implementing something cross-functionally

I would analyze the following for each of the tasks at hand

• I would first evaluate if there are alternative solutions to temporarily address one task. A quick fix might free up the resources to completely focus on the next task and reduce urgency on this task

• I would evaluate to see if one task can be broken down further and still be able to deliver value to the customer. For Example - deliver functionality over trendy user interface

• I would assess potential risks on business metrics if the tasks are not delivered - revenue, retention rate, operational efficiency

• I would evaluate the team expertise and identify if there is anyone with a higher expertise level who can help expedite on one task

Once I have gathered this information, I will prioritize the tasks based on my assessment on impact on business goals and customer outcomes. Throughout this process I ensure transparent communication with the stakeholders, aligning their expectations and ensure that the team understands the rationale behind the decision.

I have handled several such situations. For example - I had to choose between an important feature update and a performance issue affecting all users. By assessing the risks and leveraging team’s expertise, we delivered a partial feature update while simultaneously fixing the performance issue. This approach ensured we addressed immediate concerns without losing sight of broader goals.

The last conference I attended was the Open Source Security Foundation. As I was leading the Dart & Flutter security program I wanted to learn about the innovations, tooling and services that other open source projects were using.

There were interesting conferences for tooling to sign artifacts with a single command and how the open source community was working in tooling to build, sign and release artifacts in a secure way for everyone using GitHub.

I learned that there were many technical innovations that I could use to speed up the Flutter Security Program, for example implementing secure build workflows using github actions. I also met several people working on similar projects and took the opportunity to share our lessons learned and challenges. Later on the connections with the open source security foundation proved very useful during technical reviews and collaborations.