skype.com

Skype. 2004 to 2005

Skype, architecture, design, HTML, PHP, Perl, payments, management, content, design, copywriting, scheduling, deployment, version control

Brief

Manage the team responsible for Skype web presence and payment frontend.

What I did

I co-managed the Skype web team responsible for all aspects of Skype web presence production and deployment. This included maintaining the skype.com web site and developing internal and external tools and interfaces to enable business on Skype web store.

I was responsible for project prioritizing and scheduling, and supporting team members to ensure smooth flow of projects from architecture/design to content production, technical development, QA, deployment and maintenance. I worked with external parties (payment providers) and developed some technical site components myself where need be. For example, I remember writing a reconciliation script that screenscraped the dashboard interface of our payment provider and did some chargeback reconciliation with our own internal systems. This was the time before everything had a clean API, so screenscraping turned out to be the most economical solution.

My major accomplishments as the team lead during this period were enabling PayPal payments on the site, and launching SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail purchasing and support. As an innovation, we designed the above interface for selecting a SkypeIn number: you enter characters and can pick an available number that has those characters.

Outcome

I ensured operations continuity, business growth and smooth team operations. I’d be surprised if there was any of my code from that period still running though, I’m sure it’s been rewritten and redesigned many times over.