That works out especially well for our website agency since one of these new teammates has experience as a cartographer, but we’ll get to that in a moment. Folks, meet the two new technical strategists added to team WDS: Bonnie Martin and Ryan Archer.

The addition of these two experts to our website design and development team is essential because technical strategy is an important part of the project lifecycle. It includes identifying the client’s requirements, defining solutions, and recommending the approach.

Having two professionals who are passionate about planning, development, and consulting be in charge of all our clients’ technical strategies is a huge benefit. Please take a moment to get to know Bonnie and Ryan.

Bonnie Martin, Technical Strategist

Bonnie enjoys understanding a client’s business needs and figuring out how to make them a reality with the WordPress framework, saying, “I participate in a series of calls with the client that includes discovery, requirements gathering, needs analysis, and design.”

As a technical strategist, she works closely with engineering and design to create solutions to the requirements discovered during this process.

“The goal is to create a project plan that details every aspect of the project,” Bonnie explains. “The project plan is used by engineers when they are building out the website, and it also serves as confirmation for our client that we’re creating what they need.”

Sounds complicated, right? Well, that doesn’t deter Bonnie. In fact, she reports that when she read the description for her job, she knew she’d found her new career role.

“Based on the website, WebDevStudios seemed like a fun agency, and I was impressed by the fact that the founders had written books on WordPress,” Bonnie says.

Bonnie’s professional background is really interesting. For the past 20 years, she’s been working on websites in a myriad of ways: development, design, SEO, online marketing, content creation, project management, and more.

“My long history in web development means that I’m familiar with many of the ways our clients will be using their websites and what they need their websites to do for their business,” Bonnie expounds, adding, “Of course, every website brings its own unique mysteries and challenges. As a strategist, I can rely on my experience and knowledge to help our team successfully meet the needs of our clients.”

The onboarding experience at WDS has been going well for Bonnie. She describes the team as welcoming and friendly. Also, she appreciates starting her new role alongside Ryan. Bonnie says she’s impressed with the depth of knowledge of our engineering team and the organizational skills of our project managers.

Now, while Bonnie is an impressive technologist, she loves to have fun when she’s not working. For her, that means gaming.

Video games she’s been playing lately include “Assassins Creed: Origins,” “Portal 2,” and “Psychonauts 2.” Additionally, Bonnie likes virtual reality (VR) games, too. She claims they’re a good workout.

“There are VR workouts, and there are also VR games that aren’t intended as workouts, but still give you a workout while playing them,” Bonnie clarifies. “For me, exercising along with a game is a lot more fun than doing a standard workout.”

According to Bonnie, virtual reality tracks movement at three points: the two controllers you hold in your hands and your head movement based on the headset you’re wearing. This lends itself to a common mechanic of VR games where you move your hands to shoot or slice targets.

“For head movement, you can look all around the environment, but games also have you ducking and dodging game elements. That ends up resulting in a lot of squats that you have to do to duck under objects,” Bonnie explains. “You definitely look like a dork while playing, but there’s nobody else here except my dog, so I don’t mind.”

Ryan Archer, Technical Strategist

“As a technical strategist, it is my job to jump headfirst into new projects before the engineering teams begin their work,” Ryan explains his duties. He goes on to say that it’s his responsibility to collaborate with the client to identify all the details of their project.

“Once complete, a detailed project plan is created that outlines the path our developers need to follow,” he continues, “The technical strategist role is split, with half of my time spent talking and researching and the other half writing documentation.”

Whew! You can see how intricate and detailed being a technical strategist at WDS is. We’re glad Ryan applied for the position when it was listed.

“The opportunity to work with a diverse set of clients and a team of incredibly talented people was too great to pass up,” Ryan describes what inspired him to submit his application. “It also helps that for the past three years, my brother-in-law, Oliver Harrison, has been telling me how much he enjoys working with WebDevStudios.”

Glad to hear our reputation proceeds us. However, Ryan’s past is pretty impressive, too. He jokes that his background mirrors the meme that says, “I’ve seen some things….”

For example, Ryan began working in eCommerce in 2000, before the emergence of most content management systems.

“Everything back then needed to be carefully planned and strategized as the resources available now simply did not exist. This experience has given me a solid foundation in strategy and planning,” Ryan says.

He’s been involved with various platform and database changes, point-of-sale integrations, and just about everything else that exists in the eCommerce space. Simultaneously, he was also involved with graphic design, marketing, IT, and creating custom maps for clients as a cartographer.

“One of my most successful projects was for the Greater Bragg Creek Trails Association—a not-for-profit group building and maintaining hiking and biking trails,” Ryan mentions.  The association wanted to create and sell a trail map as a fundraiser for building and repairing some of the trail infrastructures after a fairly devastating flood.

Like the strategy process at WDS, creating the map involved a series of collaborative meetings between Ryan and a wide variety of stakeholders in the private and government sectors. Ryan says, “To this day, the map turned out to be their most successful fund-raising venture.”

We told you that you would be impressed! What client wouldn’t want Ryan involved with the technical strategy of their website?

However, like Bonnie, there’s more to Ryan than being an experienced technologist. The word in the virtual hallways of WDS is that Ryan is a wine expert.

“Oddly enough, wine is something I’ve only become interested in for the last few years,” Ryan explains, “Working with a wine and spirits retailer gave me the luxury of being involved in wine tastings of dozens of bottles each week. Trying so many different wine styles and grape varieties gave me an appreciation for some of the nuances wine can have.”

Ryan has completed the Level 2 Award in Wines from the Wine & Spirits Education Trust (WSET) program, which is an international certification on the other side of the coin from the sommelier programs. Where a sommelier is focused primarily on the service and hospitality industries, the WSET program focuses on deeper knowledge of the varietals, regions, and growing conditions to answer the question of why a particular wine tastes the way it does.

“This approach appeals to me, and even though I’m no longer in the industry, I plan to keep going with the education, at the very least, to the next level,” Ryan states. “My advice for anyone trying to get into wine or expand their enjoyment of wine would be to continuously try something new.”

Ryan says that some of his recent favorite wines have been from regions that don’t get talked about nearly enough like Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria.

Join WebDevStudios as an Engineering Manager

WDS just listed a new open position for an engineering manager. After reading Bonnie’s and Ryan’s stories, surely you’re curious about making a career move to our web agency, aren’t you?

Then consider applying as an engineering manager. Read the job description for all the details and apply online today.

The post Two Technical Strategists Join WebDevStudios appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Corey Collins

Job Title: Technical Strategist
Years at WebDevStudios: 9

Before moving into the Technical Strategist role at WDS, I wore a bunch of different hats.

When I first started at WDS, I was a part-time frontend engineer (or, as we were called nine years ago, “designers”). I helped make the web a beautiful place as we experimented building with different WordPress themes, including some of our own creation. This is also where the company began to get a taste of LESS and SASS.

As things evolved, the “designer” term used to encompass frontend engineers faded away and the lines between backend and frontend engineers began to blur. We all began to work more toward our strengths and passions than being pigeonholed as just one thing. This growth, and stepping more and more out of my comfort zone, led to my eventual promotion as a Lead Engineer.

From Part-Time Designer to Lead Engineer

As a Lead Engineer, I led a team of engineers to ensure our projects were completed on time and with a focus on delivering the highest quality of code possible.

As a Lead, my days involved checking in with the team and having a daily standup at some point throughout the day. As teams changed over the years, this would fluctuate from morning to afternoon depending on when it worked best for everybody.

Aside from calls, I’d review code with a frustratingly sharp eye for detail, user test functionality on the frontend and backend, and just generally try and break as much code as possible in as many different ways conceivable to make sure every scenario had been accounted for.

When I wasn’t diving into writing, reviewing, or testing code then you’d probably find me on a client call discussing the weekly updates for a project, running demos of our progress, providing client training, or running full-site QA and user testing on a project from another team.

As our processes continued to evolve, the responsibility of writing project plans for each project shifted to the Leads who would be running the project. This would translate directly to the Technical Strategist role; as it turned out, I was in the very slim minority of Leads who actually enjoyed writing project plans!

Current Status: Technical Strategist

With the move to the Technical Strategist position, I’m not longer writing code most days, aside from working internal projects here and there, or giving back to the community during Five For The Future.

My days as a Technical Strategist kick off with the usual check-ins: Slack, emails, and Jira/Confluence. The Strategy department will drop a quick message in Slack to let everyone know what we’re planning to work on that day and if we have any blockers. Then it’s off to the races.

Most days will include calls with clients in some stage of strategy. Along with our Digital Strategist and Digital Designer, we’ll discuss the needs and goals of the client so that we can begin to formulate the game plan for what the team will be building.

This is generally not a single call, especially if we’re going to be doing design work or a hefty data migration. Once we have a solidified data and design plan, though, another step in the process kicks into gear. I’ll begin to review everything we’ve done up to that point—call notes, requirements, goals, and designs.

I’ll usually have some UX questions around the mock-ups leading to conversations with our Design Strategist on how they expected a specific feature or design element to work both for users on the frontend and admins on the backend. This is one of many steps along the way where I’ll get into the nitty gritty of everything to a (probably) annoying degree.

For instance, if we’re building a block with a set of cards with images, headings, and buttons, how does all of that data get populated? Does it come from a post type dynamically? If so, does the admin need to be able to customize the query in any way? What happens if the post for a specific card doesn’t have a featured image set? Or, is the content all manually entered?

The Deep Dive

Digging into the designs and functionality in this way allows me to dive into two of the main sections of the project plan: technical requirements and user stories.

Technical requirements are the details that describe what a feature does and what it means for it to be complete. This will include the “done” criteria for a feature with additional notes for clarification for our engineers and our client.

User Stories detail out how everybody will use this feature. This includes administrators down to any different user roles that may need to be considered as well as users on the frontend. Will a logged-in user use a feature different from a logged-out user? What happens on mobile versus desktop? What are all of the actions that a user can take when using the feature?

Everything we gather, in the way of features, technical requirements, and user stories, gets boiled down into the project plan in Confluence. This includes detailing out every custom post type, each custom taxonomy, custom post meta, page templates, and any other functionality we’ll be building as part of the project.

We also like to include a future enhancements section of the project plan for pieces of functionality that were discussed during the strategy process but, for any number of reasons, will not be included in the first phase of the project. While we won’t be building these features in the first phase, we feel that it’s important to acknowledge that they were discussed along the way.

Once we feel the project plan is complete on our end, we’ll schedule a call with the client to review the plan and make any final adjustments as needed. When the project plan has final sign-off from the client, we’ll schedule an internal handoff call with our engineering team and the reigns are passed to Project Management and Engineering.

Wrapping up my day, I’ll check through Slack to see if anyone has any lingering questions for me, do one more quick pass through my inbox, and drop any end of day updates into any Slack channels requiring me to chime in. Then, it’s off the computer and to rub some pet bellies (take your pick of one of our four cats or two dogs), play some video games (a lot of Stardew Valley and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 lately), and catch a show or two (crossing my fingers for no soggy bottoms on The Great British Baking Show).

This isn’t the last I’ll see of the project, though. Once the project is complete, I’ll come back in to run QA and user testing on the site to confirm we’ve met all of the requirements and to test the overall user experience. Anything I log as a ticket in Jira will get addressed by the team before we hand things off to the client for their internal testing and QA.

A Badge of Honor

When thinking about what I like most about the Technical Strategist position, it’s basically everything about the job. I love figuring out how things are going to be built and, for whatever reason, truly enjoy writing the technical requirements and user stories for these features. This seems like a trait that has skipped a lot of other folks, so I’m glad I’ve been able to turn it into a big part of my day job!

I also have a deep love in my heart for QA, user testing, and digging into the UX of a project to get everyone thinking about why we’re doing something a certain way and how it may affect the people actually using the site. We can design and develop something in any number of ways, but which way is best for both the site and the users in order to achieve the overall project goals?

I can’t explain what it is about all of these things I love so much. Maybe it’s my love of solving problems, quietly judging things, and smashing the system. When I find a bug in QA, it’s like a badge of honor for me. The team has built this great thing, and through some wizardry, I was able to find the right combination of actions to take in order to get an unexpected result.

In the end, I’m still helping to deliver a rock solid final product to our clients. I’m just doing it in a different way than I did as a “designer,” Frontend Engineer, or Lead Engineer.

Now that you have an understanding as to what a day in the life of a Technical Strategist at WebDevStudios is like, contact us about building your next website with a strategy and project plan in place. Interested in joining our team? We’re hiring!

The post WebDevStudios Day in the Life of a Technical Strategist appeared first on WebDevStudios.