Ergatta - Internal Tools

The Opportunity

At Ergatta we were looking to begin scaling and optimizing our operation to free up engineering bandwidth for business critical initiatives by building out internal tooling.

The Audience

The customer experience, marketing and content teams who normally require engineering support for simple backend changes and content creation.

The Role

Product Manager:

• Walked through all our processes with the stakeholders who own them to determine their needs and current pain points.

• Worked with the engineers to understand our APIs, technical needs and hardening/validations needed to prevent bad data from getting through.

• Built out and owned our Internal Tooling Roadmap in parallel with other product roadmaps for our customer facing software.

• Explored tools that could assist in making self-service dashboard for non-engineers to use.

• Created user-friendly Excel inputs and concatenated them into JSON payloads which can submit POST requests to our API via Postman.

• Worked with engineering to setup our internal tooling dashboards with ReTool.

Key Performance Indicators

• Time spent on the given process by stakeholder

• Complete removal of the need for engineering resources to execute the given process

The Outcome

• Reduced cycle time by 90% in the fitness content pipeline

• Enabled fitness content to scale at 4x the pace, while still saving time and bandwidth.

• Empowered the Customer Experience team to make self-service changes to customer data, giving engineers 4 days worth of bandwidth back each month.

Lessons Learned

• Once we validate that a feature or action is valuable and will be used MANY times in the future, optimizing that process helps A LOT.

• Giving non-engineers POST or EDIT access to backend data can introduce risk of bad data breaking things. I worked with our engineers to identify which variables were high risk and helped setup backend hardening where needed to catch and prevent bad inputs from getting through. Some hardening was setup at various levels from Rudder, to the API, to ReTool.

• Each time we launch a new feature or game, many of these processes require small updates to accommodate the new data for that feauture or game. We would include that in our scoping for all new feature or game launches.

Key Skills

• Product Management

• Internal Tools

• APIs

• Process Optimization

• ReTool

• Databases