Shape
A multi-brand merchant running product enrichment across spreadsheets, the Shopify admin, and a wiki. Releases were error-prone and the team couldn’t scale to new categories or locales without breaking something. They were about to commission a PIM but hadn’t decided what should own what.
What the engagement looked at
- Content model design at a high level — attribute groups, families, locales, completeness rules. Worked through with the merchandising team in the room so the model reflects how they actually think about products.
- Source-of-truth map — for every attribute that matters, naming the owning system and the sync direction. The point: one entity, one owner, no field edited in three places.
- Middleware shape — what the sync orchestration needs to handle, what idempotency requires, and how failure modes should surface to a human.
- Enrichment workflow — who completes what, when a product becomes eligible to publish, how exceptions get caught.
What was handed over
An architecture document and a workflow specification the merchant’s internal team used to brief the delivery work. Implementation was the merchant’s engineers; the model and the boundaries were the engagement’s contribution.