By the time we came to rebuild this portal, people had found plenty of ways to work around it. Coaches wrote feedback in Word documents for another team to re-enter, clients phoned to request changes, and routine requests travelled through email. Delegates and clients also shared a single account, despite needing different things from the service.
The workarounds kept things moving, but they gave the client-services team a lot of repetitive handling. We needed to look at the journeys underneath the interface, rather than simply put a newer front end on the same process.
Understanding who needed what
I helped lead the rebuild from discovery through delivery, mapping user needs and shaping flows and prototypes with the development team. The different roles were central to that work: client-services teams managed bookings and sessions, coaches planned agendas and entered feedback, client managers requested sessions for delegates, and delegates needed to see their own feedback and ask for updates.
Once those responsibilities were clearer, we could design access and approval steps around them. Coaches would be able to enter rich-text feedback directly, send it for review and receive it back for changes before publication. Delegates would have their own login, rather than sharing an account intended to cover more than one role.
Working through the build
I recommended a React and Strapi approach and helped guide the structure and component decisions with the developers. Alongside the user journeys, my work included planning the legacy-data migration, supporting testing and preparing the rollout. It was a shared delivery effort, with my development background helping me connect the early requirements to the detail of what we were building.
The migration needed particular care. Information was spread across WordPress content, ACF fields, custom post types, spreadsheets and seven tables across two databases. Some relationships depended on manually entered values rather than reliable IDs, so moving the data meant first understanding what those relationships were supposed to represent.
I analysed the sources and wrote transformation and comparison scripts, working on copies rather than the originals. Duplicate and outdated records needed checking, transformed outputs needed spot checks, and retention rules needed to be explicit. The comparison work gave us a way to examine what had changed instead of assuming that a completed import meant a correct one.
What changed for the people using it
After launch, direct requests to the client-services team fell substantially. Coaches could manage feedback in the platform instead of handing over Word documents, and the separate accounts and approval flow made the service easier to navigate. Clients also gave positive feedback.
The platform continued to improve after that first release. For me, the important change was that routine work could happen where it belonged, with fewer people having to carry information between systems to keep the service running.