Marks & Spencer — MCFP (Multi-Channel Foundation Program)

I was a relatively newly minted manager when I raised my hand for this project, so it was a pretty intense first assignment in that role. But overall, the experience provided tremendous growth—and a bit of magic, since we were there for the 2012 Olympics in London.

After settling in and working through some initial rough patches on the project, it became a really great opportunity to live and work in London, experience the Olympics in that incredible city, and take advantage of weekends and bank holidays to travel around Europe. We wouldn't have been able to do that much travel otherwise, so it was pretty special.

I met a lot of great people from around the world. London was such a cosmopolitan city, and the people I worked with were not only ethnically diverse but diverse in nationality as well. I worked with a Vietnamese colleague from Australia, Brazilians, Canadians, Germans—it was probably the most culturally diverse team I've ever been a part of.

As the project wound down, we were offered the option to stay—either localize in London or relocate again to Milan, Italy for a Ray-Ban project spinning up there. We chose to return home, but we still wonder what life would look like for our doppelgangers in the alternate timeline where we stayed.

This project marked my transition from senior engineer to manager, and the first three months were a trial by fire. I was extremely hands-on—trying to right the ship while also pushing to get deliverables over the next milestone.

With coaching from leadership in the London office, I learned to advocate for added resources and more budget, and to work with project management to set more realistic timelines. The complexity wasn't just in the code—it was also in the requirements, the change management within Marks & Spencer itself, the coordination between offices, and some of the relatively new technologies we were using at the time.

This experience taught me how to delegate, how to advocate for my team, how to push back on timelines, and how to manage scope. It was definitely formative—those first three months shaped how I approach leadership to this day.

Marks & Spencer retail stores had concierge kiosks in place for guided shopping—a concierge person in the store could help customers search inventory, add items to a cart, and so on. There was a functional requirement for our website (and the concierge version of the site) to work on these kiosks.

The problem? The kiosks were outdated. They were old Windows NT machines running ancient versions of Internet Explorer, and the cost to upgrade them to modern hardware was estimated to be in the millions. We spent far too much time trying to make the site work on what was essentially an obsolete browser.

At the same time, we were also building the site to work across different devices—mobile and iPad. The iPad was still relatively new at the time; I think we were on the second generation.

We suggested: why not just use iPads in the store and descope the outdated kiosks entirely?

The Marks & Spencer stakeholders were actually very open to the idea, but we had to prove that the concierge experience would work well in the iPad format. We dedicated resources specifically to building and validating the concierge experience on iPad, and it turned out to be a much better use of our time and scope than trying to create a bespoke version of the site for outdated Internet Explorer.

In the end, the clients were thrilled. The experience was more futuristic and polished—a concierge holding an iPad and assisting shoppers felt modern and personal, compared to guiding customers to a kiosk tucked in some corner of the store.

And the cost difference was staggering. Instead of spending millions to update legacy kiosks, they could deploy tablets for less than $100,000 and deliver a better brand experience for their customers.