Delivering
high-stakes
e-commerce success on a tight deadline

The client was tasked with coordinating an extensive e-commerce initiative involving multiple workgroups, including e-commerce, backend, merchandising, and UX teams.

This project included three major objectives:

• User interface redesign: Revamping the website for an improved user experience.
• Platform split: Separating brands from a common platform into three distinct sites, organized by product type to enhance SEO.
• Payment provider migration: Transitioning to a new payment provider.

Simultaneously, the client aimed to complete, test, and launch a marketing initiative to unify customer IDs across all brands on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Both projects required the same testing environment and needed to be completed before the holiday lockdown, creating a significant scheduling conflict.

For the e-commerce project, New Elevation took a methodical approach to ensure successful delivery despite the complex environment.

It began with aligning stakeholders by conducting interviews with workstream owners to assess effort, status, and timelines. This helped to identify the areas that needed focus and prioritization.

Next, a comprehensive cross-workstream project plan was developed and implemented, allowing for clear tracking of resources, timelines, and milestones. Weekly status meetings became a critical touchpoint, where progress could be monitored and adjustments made accordingly.

To tackle immediate challenges and keep things moving smoothly, daily stand-up meetings were established. These brief sessions enabled the team to address issues as they arose and ensure that all workstreams remained in sync. On the user experience side, New Elevation thoroughly reviewed Figma design documents, creating a detailed checklist of UX elements that needed validation and sign-off from the UX team. Alongside this, brand-specific user acceptance testing (UAT) plans were developed to ensure business validation and ultimately, project approval.

For the Client ID Marketing Project, a robust quality assurance (QA) plan was put in place to ensure the accuracy and quality of customer email touchpoints across all brands.

This plan addressed every potential issue and helped guarantee a seamless user experience. However, challenges arose when a conflict emerged due to shared environment requirements. The delays in the Client ID project began to threaten the larger e-commerce initiative, which had a crucial holiday deadline.

New Elevation quickly identified the problem and proposed a strategic solution. The environments and the order of project releases were swapped. The e-commerce project was moved to the staging environment, where it could proceed with QA and UAT testing, ensuring that it met its holiday deadline. Meanwhile, the Client ID project was moved back to development for completion and would be deployed to staging after the e-commerce project’s release, allowing both projects to be completed on time.

• The e-commerce project was successfully released before the holiday lockdown, meeting all objectives, including improved UX, enhanced SEO with the platform split, and the migration to a new payment provider.
• The Client ID marketing project followed shortly after, deployed to staging, and released a week later, also meeting the holiday deadline.

By coordinating resources, resolving conflicts, and aligning deliverables with timelines, New Elevation enabled the client to achieve critical project milestones during a high-stakes period.