Weight Watchers

It began in the 60’s with one woman inviting her friends to her home once a week to talk about how to best lose weight. Today, Weight Watchers has helped educate, support and transform millions of people’s lives all over the world.

My Role: Front-end Developer

The Team: Me, Creative Directors, Information Architect, Project Manager, Designer, Developers & QA

The challenge: To code the new online member tools landing page for my first project at WW. This involved quickly learning new systems, processes, and team dynamics under an initial two-month timeline.

My role & approach: My first priority was to onboard very quickly, focusing on the company's specific CMS, user experience, design, and coding processes. As a front-end developer, my core responsibility was to translate designer layouts into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I collaborated with information architects and designers, reviewing their proposed interactions and designs with the help of my boss, the head front-end developer, to determine what was feasible within the timeframe. My background in design proved invaluable, making it easier to explain development limitations to creative directors, designers, and information architects. I researched better ways to implement their designs and dedicated extra hours for several weeks to ensure I met the project timeline.

The impact: The onboarding process taught me how the creative team used personas, journey mapping, and user flows to strategize with customers and internal teams. During the project, I observed how our waterfall development process excluded key people early on, which created difficulties iterating later and led to pushback, changing requirements, and timeline adjustments. Coming from a startup, working late was my norm, but I learned that leadership valued people over product, preferring to push deadlines rather than have the team work long hours. In the end, the updated tools led to a significant jump in user retention and engagement. Members were very excited about the new look and feel, and the project was awarded a Webby.