Google Learn Digital

Partnering with Google, Beyond ran the direction, design and build of their online learning platform, Digital Workshop/Garage. The focus was building and implementing a 3 year product strategy for the platform to become the learning platform of choice. This was initially split up into three parallel streams of work, the primary Digital Workshop/Garage website, the native mobile apps and the Grow With Google site.

The Build

For Digital Workshop/Garage, the Back End was built with Python using Secure Scaffold and hosted on Google App Engine. The Front End was built using Angular in combination with SCSS and Gulp as it’s task runner. Gerrit was also used, a code review and project management tool for Git based projects. As with all Google products, we were required to develop this following their strict coding guidelines and standards.

My Role

• Technical Lead for six months at the start, ensuring a smooth transition of all knowledge/code to Beyond and overseeing Development of key new features.
• Worked closely with Google’s stakeholders, technical leads and ATL’s to flesh out requirements, provided scoping/estimations and created all relevant process and technical documentation (including the TDD’s).
• Responsible for interviewing/hiring the necessary resource to ensure this project had a team capable of developing a product that could meet and surpass Google’s highest standards, on time and within budget.
• Managed a team of around 10 Developers from various disciplines including Back End, Front End, Quality Assurance, DevOps and Mobile,  ensuring they were all set up for success.
• Helped to define and run Agile ceremonies including sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review and retrospective’s.
• Identified and presented potential improvements and new business opportunities by assessing new platforms and technologies.

Results

• 14 million new users in 2018
• Reached 53 countries
• Directly impacted 228k learners in 2018