Upgrading the platform under a peak-season deadline that couldn’t slip
01 / Context
Large-scale ecommerce platform on SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris), managing distributed engineering teams of 24+ across 6 time zones, including 3 direct reports in PM roles.
$10M+ in program budget, 85,000+ billable hours, coordinating platform integrations that required hardware/software alignment across distributed manufacturing and fulfillment networks. Global team: SF (PM/BA), NYC (principal tech lead), Guadalajara (DevOps/dev/QA), Chișinău (dev), Buenos Aires (dev).
02 / Problem
Three things had to land at once, and none of them could slip: a platform upgrade, a new country launch, and a backlog of bugs that predated the project.
Hybris 5.7 needed to become 6.6, an Australian storefront needed to launch from scratch, and existing bugs needed remediation — all before peak holiday traffic, non-negotiable.
03 / Approach
Take the safer technical path, then run delivery and program management as one job, not two.
04 / What I did
Orchestrated the international launch (the client’s new Australian storefront domain) on time and on budget despite timezone complexity. Implemented standardized sprint ceremonies and metrics tracking across the distributed team, improving velocity 35% and cutting sprint planning time in half.
Managed the full tech stack coordination — Nexus, Jenkins, Gitflow, Bitbucket, Apache Solr, JMeter for peak-ready performance testing, Groovy/Spock for unit testing, Java backend, Avalara for tax, RabbitMQ, Braintree, PagerDuty, Chef, Angular.js frontend — while also running budget/resource planning against PTO and regional holidays across 5 countries.
Role: ScrumMaster & Program Manager · Digital commerce consultancy · May 2017–Sep 2019 · Team of 24+ across 6 time zones05 / Outcome
11 releases (3 hot-fixes), every pre-existing bug fixed, the Australian site launched in time for the holiday season, and every project landed within budget because scope changes were managed and communicated with the client throughout. The Hybris upgrade itself launched in February 2019 — after peak season — because of delays in client-side scope sign-off, not delivery.
06 / What I would do differently
I’d have required peer review on major technical decisions from day one. The incremental-upgrade approach was the right call, but we made it without that check, and constant regression testing became the tax we paid for skipping it — trust, but verify.
I’d have flagged my own bandwidth sooner. I was working 10–12 hour days for months because we couldn’t hire or contract additional PMs — that’s a resourcing risk I should have escalated earlier instead of absorbing it.
I’d have built the ‘Sprint Mood’ survey on day one, not after noticing engineers were going quiet. A cheap, anonymous channel for team temperature should be standard, not a reaction.