Owen Nicol's Achievements in 2021

Go to Objectives

Strategy/Leadership

Instigated the creation of a Front-end blueprint project to let teams get started building PDP applications quickly. So far, 7 teams are using it, saving an average of 2 months dev time in starting a new project
Created a Front-end strategy pack, with 9 pillars of strategic considerations. This was eventually rolled into the Tech Profession strategy pack.
Created FED learning pathways to help guide Product Engineers to what they should be learning at differnent levels of experience.
Led the Endorsed Tech workstream, gathered lists of current tech used across Digital and built a Tech Finder tool. Ensured John Roberts and Andy Ruler were happy with the tool v.s. Alfabet.
I was able to get the Design System team re-instated, with engineers working with me to improve the codebase and help teams work with the Design System in a more efficient way.
Running the Front-end dev community.
Wrote two articles for the TP site around the Front-end blueprint work and Front-end developer complexity

Technical

Built the Comments and Likes system for the TP Engineering website
Gave a tech talk on Finite State Machines to force me to learn about them.
Worked with Nomensa to build a list of accessibility recommendations for Mono and the JL website.
Getting teams to upgrade their version of Node.js on a regular cadence to keep up with security and feature updates etc.
Helping the Live Chat team with their app architecture design and guiding them to a sensible technical solution.
Helped the JL Insurance team understand the value and importance of testing having reviewed their testing practices, or lack thereof. This was triggered by a comment in a conversation that "they didn't have time to fix broken tests"
Working with a couple of PDP teams in JL to work through a different model of building PDP pages, potentially with a more config-driven or CMS approach instead of having multiple teams essentially building the same page.

Worked on a POC to prove the concept doesn't work as a pure config-driven approach. I'm setting up an experiment to see if we can build a PDP page within our AEM Content Management System (CMS), trying to answer the question "should we use a CMS + bespoke journey components to speed up how we create customer journeys?"
I got a group of engineers together to agree how we can make our website more resiliant to ATG being unavailable. Some new processes have been put in place, including removing whole site holding pages and not blocking customers from browsing, where ATG has less of an impact.
Worked with the AB team to build better resilency processes after we had 100k JavaScript errors per hour being logged in New Relic, due to a badly implemented site-wide AB test, which could have adversely affected 20 miliion customers per day.
Working with Basket team to help them make improvements in their codebase, which wasn't up to standard.
Worked with various people to deliver the AnyDay brand launch on the JL website.
I helped shape what the Christmas virtual store walkthrough would be and recommended engineers to work on the project.
Raised awareness of the Front-end Blueprint project and Mono in Product Engineer people management team meetings.
Worked with the 27 different JL FE teams to sychronise upgrading to the next version of React (v17) for all applications.
Worked with Peter O'Shaugnessy on a strategy for Waitrose Front-end, looking at micro-front-ends for Waitrose.
Involved in conversations with Mary and others about Partnership-wide engineering principles.

Influencing

Put Core Web Vitals on the agenda for teams prior to Google's SEO algorithm being released. I spoke to Heads of Product across JL and Waitrose to raise awareness, get it on the agenda and backlogs and help them to understand the impact on SEO ranking as well as customer experience.

I got performance dashboards and leaderboards created so teams could compare their apps against others, made sure teams were engaged, had the tools to measure any impact they were making and they created tickets to complete the work.

We got to the point where our SEO ranking increased when the changes came in because of all the work we did upfront. I also worked with Waitrose engineers to raise awareness and spoke to Heads of Product to enable backlog integration .
Involved in the PS5 resiliancy conversations about how we make the site more resilient to periods of extremely high traffic
I spoke to the 2 Heads of Product in JL to agree that we should stop supporting IE11 on JL.com 🎉 Walked through a deck and they were easily convinced.
Built up a good relationship with Rachael Rae-Palmer (Head of Product), engaging her in Core Web Vitals, the Mono design system, performance, accessibility and consistency.
Supported Peter O'Shaugnessy in talking to the two Heads of Product at Waitrose about performance and micro front-ends. Went down really well with some good conversations and buy-in.
Secured the purchase of a variable font for JL.com. Variable fonts enable us to use one font file for light, regular and bold typefaces in one file, instead of multiple large font files

UI Refresh project

App Refresh

Gave "introduction to Mono" sessions to 4 suppliers on the shortlist to bid for the App UI Refresh project. Worked closely with Product leaders and delivery to decide which supplier would be a best fit for the work. Worked with Checkout and Identity teams, along with Mono team, to bring the new design changes to their apps, which are shown in webviews within the app. This was done to a short deadline
The App UI Refresh project was successful, albeit with some long hours worked by some of the team and a very tight arbitrary deadline. I have fed this back to those involved.

Web refresh

I'm part of a working group including Rachael RP, Neil Dodd, Christian/Roula etc. to work through what Joyfully Bold means for the web. We're working into Cassandra and Matt Richmond to agree what an MVP looks like, getting to a final look and feel through an iterative approach up until September, potentially through to 2023.

This is no small task, with 26 Front-end facing teams likely to be affected and a large co-ordination/communication overhead, but I am determined that we learn from the App Refresh project.

Working across boundaries

Helping Jags Shergill with the OKRs section of the new Omnichannel website.
Worked with Claire Nelson to help her get started with Front-end technologies as she has aspirations of becoming a FED.
Built a form to help Product Engineers claim on call hours.
Made some good progress on collaboration between FEDs and UI Designers, which was lacking. Met with some design managers to start working together in a more cohesive way.
I've been working with Roula to figure out where new joiners should be placed within Customer Journeys and deal with under performing people.

Resourcing

Working with EE and Deloitte to ensure we remove people who are not working as expected, had 3 causes to remove people.
Reviewing 3rd party CVs and interviewing contractors to ensure quality before they go into teams.
Working with Mike, Mary and recruitment team to define assessment criteria/process for current Product Engineer roles.
Large amount of work recruiting FEDs - reviewing CVs and writing a new Tech Test. Recruited 3 senior Front-end engineers for JL Digital

Security

Worked with Stuart Gunter, we sent out a security knowledge questionnairre to gain an insight into the security knowledge and awareness the Tech Profession have.
We sent out a survey to engineers and used the results to get security training arranged for 10 Partners, which involved writing a Business Case (for the first time) and getting quotes from suppliers.
These 10 Partners then became our Security Champion community and we are rolling out more training to other Product Engineers soon.
Worked with Sharon on PCI compliance security requirements
Worked with Sian Hastings and her team to enable better collaboration with Security/Info Sec.