From July of 2010 to February of 2016, I worked at Best Buy. In 2011 I pitched EVP Shari Ballard on a plan to rewrite BestBuy.com. Shari greenlighted the project and I found myself suddenly in charge of 1200 engineers. Here’s how that story worked out.
With an aging ATG commerce engine and daily outages, BestBuy.com was failing, as was Best Buy in 2011.
After spending 15 years working as an software engineer in Minneapolis, MN, I found myself in 2010 at BestBuy.com, hired as a Hadoop Architect.
Over the next six years I went from the position of Senior Architect to Best Buy’s Chief Architect, Head of Digital Engineering and only VP level technologist. I inherited a team of 1200 mostly outsourced engineers and turned it into a trim force of 250 engineers and product managers that rewrote BestBuy.com from an aging ATG Commerce system into a home grown eCommerce platform based in AWS’s cloud.
During that time we became the foremost team of Agile engineering talent in the Twin Cities. We created a modular architecture, product engineering teams, and maintained a furious pace of development to go from 6 deployments of ATG Commerce per year to well over 1000 deployments of individual components per month.
How did it work out?
In 2015 BestBuy.com had zero downtime and record sales.
The Story Starts Here
A Digital eCommerce Transformation – A Multipart BestBuy.com Story
The article:
The Presentation
The original presentation from the Saturn Architecture conference in 2013 that led to the article in IEEE Software magazine.
Platform Centric 