New Store Platform MVP
A legacy OMS that retail clients had outgrown. The hard part was deciding what to leave behind — and finding the one net-new capability that would turn a defensive migration into something clients actually wanted.
- An enterprise OMS built on legacy .NET/SOAP that retail clients had outgrown. A full rewrite was not feasible; the challenge was finding where modernisation would deliver the most visible value.
- Used support ticket analysis to scope the MVP around the highest-friction workflows, and turned a defensive migration into an offensive play by including Customer 360 View — a capability the old architecture could never support.
- MVP to pilot in 6 months with two clients. Customer 360 View became the standout feature in client feedback and sales conversations.
- Key decision: course-corrected to contract-first API design mid-project after discovering parallel development coordination was failing — required admitting the original process was not working.
The Problem
Tecsys OMNI is an enterprise Order Management System serving retail clients. The platform was built on legacy .NET with SOAP-based integrations — expensive to maintain and difficult to extend. A full rewrite was neither feasible within the timeline nor politically survivable: retail clients depended on existing workflows daily and would not tolerate disruption. The challenge was to find the slice where modernisation would deliver the most visible value, prove the approach to sceptical stakeholders, and create a foundation for subsequent phases — all within six months.
Insights
Support tickets revealed where to start
Rather than relying on stakeholder opinions, we analysed support ticket volume, workflow completion times, and client escalation patterns. Two areas dominated: warehousing operations and customer support flows. Together they accounted for the majority of daily usage and the highest density of friction-related tickets.
The modernisation could fill a gap the legacy system never could
Customer 360 View — a unified screen showing a customer's complete order, return, and support history — had been on client wish lists for years. The legacy SOAP architecture made it prohibitively expensive. Moving to REST APIs meant it could be built as a natural part of the new architecture, turning the modernisation from a defensive 'keep the lights on' project into an offensive 'here is something you could never have before' story.
What We Built
Migrated Returns Processing and Order Creation from the legacy .NET/SOAP system to a Vue.js frontend backed by REST APIs, preserving all existing business logic and client-configured workflows. Delivered the Customer 360 View as a net-new capability — replacing a workflow that previously required navigating three or four separate screens.
The REST APIs served both the new Vue.js frontend and the legacy .NET frontend during the transition, so clients could be migrated individually with rollback capability rather than in a single cutover.
Results
Delivered within six months and began piloting with two existing clients. Customer 360 View was the standout — the most-cited feature in client feedback and a reference point in sales conversations. The REST API layer and dual-serve architecture established the template for all subsequent modernisation phases. This was an enterprise B2B context where adoption metrics were measured in client migrations, not conversion funnels — the MVP validated the approach and the methodology, which was the goal.
What Didn't Work
Parallel backend and frontend development created coordination overhead we underestimated. API contract changes mid-sprint meant the frontend team was either building against stale assumptions or waiting. We adopted a contract-first approach partway through, but the early sprints absorbed more rework than they should have. The six-month timeline also left no room for visual polish — first client feedback was positive on capability but lukewarm on aesthetics, which made the initial conversations harder than they needed to be.
My Role
Led product modernisation for the Retail org, reporting to the VP of Product.
- Scoped the MVP based on support ticket analysis rather than stakeholder wish lists — choosing warehousing and customer support workflows over candidates with louder internal advocates but less user-facing impact.
- Made the case for including Customer 360 View in MVP scope — arguing that net-new capability would change the client narrative from 'you are making us switch' to 'you are giving us something we could never have.' Accepted the timeline risk because the adoption benefits outweighed it.
- Introduced the contract-first API approach mid-project — a course correction that required admitting the original process was not working and convincing both backend and frontend leads to change.
- Mentored a product co-op through an accessibility audit of the platform — by the end, she knew the WCAG guidelines, the audit tooling, how to break accessibility requirements into actionable stories, and had led part of a sprint planning session independently.