Recently, I've rolled out a "small" but important project our team was working on. We have decommissioned the old registration UI and enabled a new registration UI for 100% of our customers.
There were some peculiarities to this. The old registration was available on route
X, the new one on route Y (because we were A/B testing them for some time). And we had to move the new one to the route Y* and decommission the old one. At the same time — the links to the old registration should continue to work because we have thousands of them on the internet, in the customer mail, and hardcoded in the old application versions.This project does not require lots of coding, but it requires a lot of coordination. Let me share the tools and practices that helped me to plan it and release it without major issues.
🖼 Mural board. I love collaborative whiteboard tools. You can add any content there — text, images, link this to each other or to the outside sources.
I gathered lots of information about the old and new registration to the board. How do people get to it? Which links are there? How can we map the old links to the new links? How is the old registration setup from the infrastructure level? How is the new one? I put everything to one place.
👥 Interview. I talked to all parties that are related to the registration — the application team, marketing, and sales. I showed them what we know on the Mural and together we have added missing information. We have identified what shall continue to work and for which reason. This way I ensured that all stakeholders are aware of what is happening and are aligned with the process.
📝 Rollout plan. Together with the platform team member, we have brainstormed and visualised the rollout plan. What was important for me, that each step is small and reversible. We have created two stickers for each step: what do we do and what is the effect of that step.
During the rollout I was marking each step as completed to maintain consistency and transparency.
🗣 Communication. Registration is quite important at our company, because otherwise customers can not start using our service. Therefore, it was important to inform everyone about what is going on, how this affects them and when it is done. I have communicated important steps in our public slack channel, so all stakeholders are informed and confident that we know what we are doing.
🎉 Celebration. After the rollout was performed and initial monitoring confirmed that everything is fine (registrations are coming). It is time to celebrate. We were able to decommission a relatively old front-end project, which was difficult to maintain within the last years. Also, we reduced the amount of services that our team shall maintain. In our department, we have a public slack channel where we share the great things we did. So I posted a wrap-up message there and we celebrated!
Celebrating small wins is a great practice, on the job or in our private lives. Do not waste an opportunity to release dopamine as a group.
🔮 Plan the future. A major part of the job is done. But we do not want to keep these redirects forever. So I have planned the meeting with the stakeholders to agree to start using new registration URLs only. This way, after some time, we will be able to reduce complexity even more.
▪️ Orchestration is also an important part of the role of Senior+ engineers. Small, but confident steps, will eventually bring you to the result.
