Before launching on Shopify, Melier ran a small wine store using WooCommerce. As their business began to scale and evolve to offer new services, such as the wine membership, it became increasingly obvious that WooCommerce was an inadequate platform, and the company made the decision to replatform onto Shopify. Shopify would provide a stable basis for upcoming new features as well as to improve logistics for the growing business.

But that doesn't mean the migration was without challenge; the designs called for a minimal change from the WooCommerce-powered site, the business' growing size meant that heeding regulations was increasingly necessary, and the timeline to launch before a large marketing push was tight.

I recognized quickly that sprint planning would be important on this project, both from the standpoint of maintaining an aggressive schedule, but also as a checkpoint for ensuring adequate success criteria for each new feature.

Some of the headlining feature challenges included:

• Ensuring that wines would only show up and ship to states in which the selling wineries were eligible to operate.
• Creating an Airtable-style database to surface all relevant information about a wine, winery, or other metadata such as a sponsored event. For example, a wine's product page would need to display information about its winery, but the winery page would similarly need to display all the wines on offer.
• Complex shipping rules, determined by the selling wineries, as Melier drop ships most wine orders.
• Future planning for upcoming new features including a customizable wine club and a vendor section for wineries to manage their Melier orders.

I facilitated success criteria to be written by a solutions architect and agreed to by the development team, UX team, and of course the client. I used these success criteria to break the project into logical batches of work in order to create sprints for the development team. I led a regular standup to ensure consistent progress and provided regular updates to the client.

There were some problems that we encountered during the QA process. For instance, the complexity of the shipping rules required us to use a fairly unknown app. When shipping wasn't calculating the correct amounts during our end-to-end testing, I was able to explore the app and, eventually, figure out how to configure it correctly to accommodate the complex rules.

Launch Day was chaotic. The client had waited until the very last moment to complete adding their product catalog to Shopify. It's normal that content population leads to bugs, because until that point, the site is running off of "perfect" design placeholder content. But actual data is imperfect and may, for example, have more or fewer images, lack some data, or have a very long description. All of these things that can lead to undiscovered bugs because the templates were previously not asked to handle such circumstances.

Still, I maintained a steady head and positive morale with the team. We created a launch day war room video call, where we diagnosed and prioritized bugs; I created tickets and passed them along to developers to troubleshoot.

Ultimately, we fixed the highest priority tickets and launched by the end of the day; we fixed the remaining bugs the following day.

While I would have preferred to have resolved these launch day issues at an earlier time, in a less stressful manner, there are situations where that isn't possible, and this was one of them. Even so, we finished the project on time and approximately on budget. I'm very proud of the team's resilience in the face of last-minute challenges and our collective ability to rally in the face of adversity and meet our goals.