In the final part of our two-part mini series with The Gym Group discussing their major replatforming project to evolve from legacy systems to a modern headless technology stack, we dive into the operational challenges and learning.
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Tl;dr
- The operational implications of large scale change
- Bringing internal teams on the journey
- Lessons learned and advice for other ecommerce businesses
The Gym Group provides the lowest cost no contract 24/7 gym nationwide, an impressive offering. Its online presence is more than an ecommerce store, it’s a bookings engine, content portal, exercise hub and customer service tool rolled into one that has to connect a vast customer base across more than 100 gyms. Its digital ecosystem handles millions of interactions every week, so technical performance and scalability is critical to success.
They recently invested in a large scale replatforming, evolving to a headless architecture to fix known issues and provide a more flexible and scalable ecosystem. In this podcast Digital Product Director Jim Hingston and Digital Trading & Ecommerce Leader Seanpaul Walsh share the inside view on how they made the project work as seamlessly as possible.
Discussion notes
- Maui was born out of a concern over future scalability: how did you assess scalability of the tech to make sensible cost model decisions?
- Operational implications: how has the business had to change or adapt its processes and ways of working to align with the new headless stack?
- Let’s talk about pain points: what surprised you, what are the gotchas other orgs should be aware of?
- How do you plan for new tech adoption so the business is ready to make use of new improved systems – it’s not something all businesses take seriously enough?
- Can you give us a walk through their whole systems diagram or tech landscape and shared this with the full stakeholder set
- What internal comms tools did you use to connect stakeholders and keep project communication under control, avoiding email wars?
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