Service Canada Labs
User testing for future Canada.ca services
In July 2021, my team released Service Canada Labs, the first cloud native product shipped at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), opening the door for agile prototyping and user testing in an old-school department.
Working at ESDC was more of a hands-off leadership role than I am used to: more meetings, more word docs, more stakeholders, and less GitHub contributions. As Senior Technical Advisor, I was responsible for building teams, creating tech standards, overseeing development, and, ultimately, getting things shipped.
Service Canada Labs is built in Next.js using Strapi CMS for its listing upcoming prototypes. It’s tested using Cypress and axe , and it uses Azure DevOps to build and deploy containers into App Service. Because this was a precendent-setting deployment (read: cloud is new for the dept), I was also Chief of Scribbling for the oodles of requested technical documentation.
During my 6-month tenure, I stood up 3 different development teams, led sprint plannings, reviews and retros, wrote docs, reviewed code, liased with stakeholders, and got our first product shipped on time and in the open.