Alan Mooiman, Engineering Leader in NYC

Team effectiveness

• Established Content team technical vision and quarterly OKRs for each team
• Stabilized foundation of team technology, which eventually allowed the team to shift focus. This was done by leading initiatives such as: reducing publishing times, eliminating linter warnings to reduce bugs, and migrating away from CSS-in-JS
• Shortened engineer feedback cycles by implementing preview applications and better local development best practices
• As a result of weekly 1:1 conversations with my reports, I regularly brought forth suggestions for team communication and process improvements
• Established technical vision and stewardship model for cross-team component library to ensure stability as a new business strategy was built on top of it
• After Policygenius was acquired, I was tasked with leading a newly formed team focused on an emergent business line. In a short time I established communication norms and project planning best practices based on those we had in place at Policygenius

Business impact

• Leveraged aforementioned OKRs to drive performance improvements on the content site, resulting in Google indexing new articles in one day rather than three
  • Lighthouse scores (a signal used for search enginge ranking) moved from 40's to 80's
  • Total Blocking Time on the content site reduced by 50%
• Demonstrated the importance of performance improvement across applications for SEO, leading to an engineering organization culture shift and 3 additional teams creating performance related OKRs

People

• Coached Senior SWE II into EM role
• Course corrected two under-performers, one of whom was later promoted
• Identified cross-team growth opportunities for two other engineers who each achieved two promotions over two years

Impact

• Established quarterly OKRs including improvement of mobile Lighthouse scores for key SEO pages, improving from scores in 20's to 70's, resulting in company's excellent SEO staying in place after Core Web Vitals became a ranking factor in June 2021
• Proposed and drove a major upgrade on the web application's foundation and development workflow, which had core dependencies many years out of date (e.g. Node.js v6 when v13 was the most recent).
• Championed migrating main SEO pages to Next.JS, resulting in Lighthouse scores in the 90's, and improved rankings on Google Search.
• Spearheaded a successful transition of the team project management workflow. This was driven by a need for better asynchronous communications on a distributed team and to reduce time spent in planning meetings, while ensuring predictable project delivery.

Impact

• Regularly wore a product hat, listening to the needs of stakeholders to determine what problems engineering could solve ourselves
• Recognized significant disconnect between capabilities of the organization's CMS and what was needed from it; After building support to move to an alternativem, I led the project in a successful migration to a platform that is still used today.
• Led the team's development of *Privacy Not Included, which has gone on to become a recurring conversation point on the internet and forced companies to respond publicly to its research
• Facilitated relationships between internal support and external contractors hired to rebuild the donation platform, which brings in millions per year. Successfully launched and held up reliably during its first December fundraising push.