DFDS's first responsive web platform

Head of Department, Customer Experience (CMS & Booking) · 2014-2017

First responsive DFDS website
Zero-downtime deployments
5 to 25 person Customer Experience department

Context

Before this work DFDS served customers through web applications that were not built for mobile and were slow to change. The customer-experience teams needed a way to release more often and to meet visitors on the device they actually used.

What I did

I scaled the department from two teams to five and took the customer-facing web through two steps. The first was DFDS’s first responsive website, built on SharePoint 2013, where I also brought in zero-downtime deployment so releases no longer interrupted the site. The next step moved the architecture to a headless CMS on React and Contentful with serverless functions, which gave the teams a faster and more flexible way to build and change the site. Across both, I added A/B and multivariate testing over the web teams and brought design and UX into the delivery flow, with continuous delivery and infrastructure as code making releases routine rather than risky.

Outcome

DFDS gained a modern, mobile-ready web platform and teams that could experiment and ship on their own cadence. The testing and delivery practices set here became the way the web teams worked, and the architecture carried the customer experience for years.