Scholastic

What my colleagues said

Rachel is an amazing individual -- there is possibly no limit to her potential. She has moved effortlessly between several roles within the business: product to business analysis to e-commerce management to a UX and design role. This mix of experience and her natural empathy for others has given her the ability to balance our business requirements while keeping focused our user's needs. The result is an incredibly effective user experience professional who creates lovely, usable web sites that achieve business goals. If that wasn't enough, she is a very good designer and front-end coder.

Rachel has been a pleasure to work with and I expect great things from her in the future. One to watch.

I unfortunately only worked with Rachel for a short while when she had joined the web team. However, I have had previously worked with Rachel on collaborations outside of Scholastic and when she was working in other departments outside of Scholastic.

I am truly amazed by her multiple talents and the variety of her skill, for example I had never encountered anyone outside of IT who could write SQL but, at the same time be a skilled designer making some of the most awesome designs I had ever seen.

A truly talented individual who can bring a lot to the table.

Rachel is a talented and insightful data analyst and ecommerce professional. She is a quick troubleshooter and has a practical approach to detailed and complex data requirements as well as a commercial sense of customer and market needs.

I have had the pleasure to have worked with Rachel for many years. Rachel manages to combine the needs of the business with the practicalities of eCommerce effortlessly. I have no hesitation in recommending Rachel's work.

Having worked with Rachel on different projects covering a range of developments her work is always exemplary and she never misses a deadline.
Her attention to detail and understanding of the customer needs and experience make her stand out and is a perfect colleague to develop a new area or project.

My role

My time at Scholastic feels like a long time ago now, but there is one story which connects the dots between my different roles and maybe helps explain my journey a little, and that is the story of the 'precalc'.

When I started at Scholastic, driven by a love of children's books, as essentially a buying assistant on the leaflets and metal-cased book fairs which might be familiar to you from your school days, one of my responsibilities was entering details of those 'offers' into a large and unweildy spreadsheet known as a precalc. The precalc was basically the bible of what books were included, where they would be positioned on the leaflets, what their buying and selling prices were, how they would be expected to perform, and thus how many books should be purchased. They involved a lot of complex calculations, were passed back and forth between people (this was in the days before everything lived in the cloud) and were always breaking.

I became frusted with the user experience of these spreadsheets, for myself and my colleagues, and took it upon myself to redesign and improve them. I created summary sections that let you see the overall figures for the offer at a glance, fixed up the forumlae and added protections to cells where necessary and learnt a bit of how to write macros too. All of this information still had to be entered manually though in a delightfully antiquated system, the AS/400 by the Inventory team elsewhere, and Product Assistants still had to look up and print out all the book covers to be laid out on the floor of a big meeting room to see the offers visually.

It was this demonstration of proficency with spreadsheets that allowed me to succesfully apply for the data analyst role in the marketing team. In this role I had the opportunity to learn more about how the back-end systems worked, get my hands directly on that AS/400 and learn a bit of SQL to allow me to get the data out I wanted. As I progressed in this role I was promoted to Senior Data Analyst and recruited a junior who I mentored and who freed up some of my time to allow me to expand my role into more digital areas. By then I had been involved in a couple of web projects from the business side, I watched with wide eyes as (to this day, one of the best web teams I have ever worked with) followed a new and alien Agile process to get things done and cared deeply about user experience vs. code efficency. It was a whole new world and one that I knew I wanted to be part of.

I had proved some technical chops and my abilities with data in my role, but it was the front end, design and user experience aspects that really excited me. I set about campaigning to join the web team, bought some books, learned a bit of rudimentary HTML and CSS and started to show my basic design capabilities using photoshop. Art and design was one of my passions, having done art at A-level and become involved in the theatre scene at university by making posters for productions. Eventually my campaign was succesful and a role was created for me as an eCommerce Coordinator on the web team.

From here I could participate fully in the team process, and learnt all about the Agile philosophy in general and the user stories methodology particularly. I became heavily involved with Google Analytics and A/B testing. As I was still learning, I was also tasked with updating and creating some of the internal tools on the company intranet, I designed and built a leader-board for the company 'green week', for example. And, most importantly, from the User Experience Design Manager (and later my other half) I learned the importance of, and how to conduct UX processes such as usability testing, stakeholder interviews, card sorting, collaborative sketching, and many workshop techniques.

Eventually, the story comes full circle, as a project that I had been pushing for since the beginning was initiated, online precalcs. I absolutely loved having the opportunity to talk to my former colleagues about what would make their lives easier, and helping to identify iterative improvements we could make by building online tools which would eventually replace the mega spreadsheets. The first thing we built was a visual offer tool, showing all the covers of the books included in the offer, which did a lot to ease the burden of those in my former role!

When eventually the web team was trimmed back and many of us made redundant as part of a major restructure, I was ready to go out into the world and test my new skills as a freelancer. It was just a shame I never quite got to see the precalc project finished!