Background
Michaels Stores is an arts and crafts retailer that holds educational classes and experiences both in-store and online. With the sudden onset of COVID-19, the company pivoted from 100% in-store to 100% online for classes and experiences. They quickly found a vendor who provided a robust software that enabled the education team to schedule, list and host virtual classes. Eventually it was decided to replace the system with an internal system in order to save cost.
Objective
Set requirements for, test, and contribute to the overall development of a proprietary software to be used by the Michaels Education and Experience department. This software was to simultaneously launch alongside a company-wide website reboot.
Role
I was assigned stakeholder for the proprietary software being created for my department’s functionality. I was fortunate to be given direct access to the UI designers, project managers, and developers throughout the entire process. I had daily meetings where I contributed feedback, provided mockups and wireframes of my ideas and discussed bug and functionality tickets I had entered through the project JIRA board.
Process
Beginning in December 2021, the Director of Product Management introduced my team to the newly created proprietary software Event Hub. The software existed in a testing environment ready to begin user testing, or so the dev team thought. Unfortunately the requirements given to the development team were outdated, in result creating a system that did not fit our education team’s needs.
Collectively my team set new requirements and a plan was created to complete the needed enhancements in phases. Myself and two others were added to the JIRA project board to enter tickets correlating to requirements. We recorded all findings and tickets in multiple locations so all team members were kept abreast of progress. Weekly meetings were set with the stakeholders and development teams to discuss concerns and talk through any tickets as needed. This development process continued for several months until we transitioned from the testing environment (tst) to the uat environment.
Much the process heavily cycled through testing, providing feedback, ideating, and then testing once again. As our program was only a small portion of a much larger company initiative, we were often challenged to adjust our plans timelines to fit the scope of the project.
As stakeholder and end user of the product, I had a very unique opportunity to provide meaningful feedback to the development team. I created detailed wireframes and possible solutions to problems I encountered to assist the design team and shortened the time in which it took for them to turn around new prototypes to test.
The software contained both an admin portal functionality as well as a customer-facing side. This duality deepened the extent in which testing was performed. Not only were we ensuring the end users on the Education team could complete their goals effectively, we had to ensure the customers were able to do so as well.
I was tasked with stress testing the software and tracking all functionalities to ensure the logic was working as intended. Things such as email triggers were tested with many variables, the trigger as well as receipt times recorded and all content examined to ensure accuracy.