Health and beauty e‑commerce

Introduction

The client mission is to provide a quarterly subscription box that delivers a selection of 8-10 full-size premium products. Each box will include the latest in beauty, fashion, fitness, and wellness products curated by the client's team. Customers will be able to customize each seasonal box by either selecting the products beforehand or choosing to keep the box a surprise.

Customers can decide to buy products independently of the box subscription. They also are encouraged to use their favorite social networks to share their experiences, as well as to interact with the staff.

The client believes in having a close relationship with customers, so its Customer Support Center has a back office that allows it to do almost anything to sort out any customer service issue.

In 2018, DevBorn was hired to provide a small team of engineers. A few months later, the partnership started to grow. IT engineers participated on several pods (teams) with different needs, with full stack engineers enabling the client to organize resources very easily. DevBorn also participated with DevOps and QA teams.

The Team

Tech Stack

Their website is based on WordPress with some extensions using Node.js and PHP for the backend. Now it is in the process of migrating to React with microservices developed with Java. Additionally, infrastructure is migrating from Docker to Kubernetes.

Their mobile app is an embedded web app that is currently being migrated to React Native.

Project plan

Product Goals

These are some of the product main features

• Sell subscriptions boxes with beauty and health related products.
• Sell hot items.
• Marketing communications of new products and sales.
• Provide a social network and share content for customers.
• Provide a back office for the Customer Support Center.
• Handle the delivery process with state change notifications.

The challenge

The product core is on PHP with code that is very complex, hard to understand, and with low readability. The main challenge was to scale on top of this tier and refactor using vertical slices.

The Extra Mile

The relationship with DevBorn began with the mobile team. At the time, the client was using React Native and needed to adapt some native components to the project. The client realized that it would be perfect to have a React Native developer with a strong native background, but finding someone with those skills was difficult. DevBorn provided two lead developers: one with a strong background in Android, and another with deep iOS experience.

Since the mobile pod was 100% DevBorn's, and based on the trust that DevBorn generated, the client decided to delegate product ownership of that pod. The project manager started acting as a product owner, alongside with two other project managers who took the project ownership of two other pods.Eventually, DevBorn provided a team of DevOps to join the IT team.

Finally, DevBorn took control of Quality, providing a team with junior analysts to run manual tests and senior analysts to take care of automation, plus guide the junior team.