Front End Architect Natural Cycles

Technical leadership role helping the Natural Cycles web team to unlock their potential. This was my first senior role, and I found I thrived with the ambiguity and openness that came with that.

Headless Wordpress

Coming into this role, I learned that Wordpress had been identified as a front end recruiting obstacle and so there was interest in replacing it. At first I focused on addressing the pain points, and after a while it became clear there were aspects of the Wordpress setup that were obstacles to things like continuous deployment and A/B testing as well.

I devised an incremental migration to Gatsby using the Strangler Fig pattern to replace the Wordpress theme with React components one page at a time. This migration took six months, and happened in parallel with regular development work. The fact that it preserved the Wordpress CMS behind the scenes facilitated onboarding Wordpress developers to the new approach to rendering. Once in place, the new system enabled the team to adopt a continuous deployment process and begin A/B testing.

A/B Testing

Natural Cycles had a PR crisis in 2018 shortly before I joined. The impact this had on the company created a commercial imperative to better understand the impact of each individual change to the messaging, design and structure of the website.

Immediately after the headless Wordpress migration was complete, I introduced the capability to run A/B tests on the website using Netlify's split testing functionality and Mixpanel events. For the remaining two years of my tenure after this, we averaged two A/B tests per month. Growth recovered during this period and we were happy to have played a part in that in the web team.

Shopify

Natural Cycles sells things like thermometers and ovulation tests via a web store, and when I joined this was still in its first iteration, on a seperate subdomain with its visuals lagging behind the rest of the company's online presence.

I proposed using Shopify's GraphQL API and their Buy SDK to integrate this e-commerce offering into the main website. Within about a month, the new store was live. Streamlining it into the main site like this meant it could benefit from the web team's UX analytics and A/B testing toolset, would no longer lag behind future branding iterations, and eliminated an entire alternative repository and tech stack for the web team to maintain.