It's time for me to get back into it.

Financial Site Rapid Prototype

This one goes back a ways, but is on the favorite list because of the novel approach, the skills I learned, and because it was just fun.

Myself and two others were given the task by our team’s leader to brainstorm and come up with a PowerPoint presentation showing a vision for where the financial services business’s website should be going.  At the time a central team in New York held accountability for all of the AXP website, and this project was seen as a means to help shift some of that responsibility to us.

The three of us met and started kicking around ideas of what we wanted to show; not too difficult of a task as it was a regular topic of conversation.  Maybe 30 minutes into our meeting, one of the guys who had more technical background said “Hey, instead of doing this in PowerPoint, why don’t we just do this all in HTML?”

The next day he came into the office and showed me 4-5 pages he had mocked up in HTML  and explained how we could run this off of our computers (news to me at the time).  I saw this was huge potential, and that day downloaded Microsoft’s WYSIWYG HTML editor and started digging into the world of coding and graphics design.  We had the luxury of being nearly fully dedicated to this effort, and we recruited 2-3 other forward thinkers into group.  The energy for this effort was high, and I recall one night sending out some new ideas to the group at 1:00am, and getting responses 30 minutes later!

So a little over 2 weeks later we had a working model with about 70 pages of content showing a vision for how the financial services website could be overhauled to better integrate our business, drive sales and servicing, and meet out brand obligations.  The initial demo of this prototype really opened a lot of eyes.  Working with our group, we made some revisions based on feedback and created a final version ready to start sharing outside of our team.

This prototype was shown over and over across our financial services group and in NY, and was an absolute home run.  Business units suddenly realized why we needed to do a better job of integrating online, and NY saw we had more to offer than the realized.  Largely as a result of this effort and the buzz it created, an organizational change was made and our unit became part of the digital development team in NY, with full responsibilities for the financial service digital assets going forward.  Our prototype was transformational. 

I probably coded about ¼ of the pages or so as I was not as fast, but it was hugely helpful to dig into learning HTML.  And thought his project was quite a while ago, It has been fun as I learned Agile how much we embodied many of the Agile practices; we were a self-managing team working a sprint, we dismissed being told how to solve a problem and worked the problem, we worked fast and made mistakes, got feedback, and made it better over and over.  And in the end our working software was well above expectations.