Marketing Insights app

JD Sports is sportswear retailer, prominent in the UK but also having a presence across Europe, North America and ASPAC. The millions of customers who shop as JD Sports either do so at their physicals stores located nationwide or digitally through their app and website respectively.

The marketing team within JD Sports were having difficulties sharing content in a unique which would not only enable the dissemination of information/content across the marketing department but also promote collaboration across the marketing content. WM Reply/Canvas Reply were tasked with creating an internal digital app which utilised the Microsoft stack to come up with a solution to this challenge.

Project outline

The team was responsible for the design, development, QA and delivery of the JD Marketing app, involving the following:

• Producing a set of designs of what the new Marketing App would look like
• Creating a proof of concept app, UI based which the client could play around with as well as give as a gauge of what is working and what isn’t.
• Developing a react application where the data would be stored in a SharePoint list/library, utilising the Microsoft SharePoint and Graph endpoints to serve the front end.
• Utilised Azure Devops to manage the backlog, tickets, pipeline and deployment process to production.

Project outcome

Canvas Reply’s involvement in developing an internal tool for the marketing app meant that the marketing team were now self-sufficient in managing their content as well as sharing it across to the wider team. It provided them with a slick solution which was initiative and easily approachable by member of the marketing team, in turn promoting collaboration with the wider marketing team members.

• Utilised mock's to keep development unblocked, worked out areas of the blockers instead of sitting idle for the endpoints to be delivered
• Assisting with the endpoint development to speed up the process
• Building endpoints which confirmed with the app Canvas Reply delivered to keep the development unblocked as well as provide an opportunity to go live whilst the replacement endpoints are being worked on
• Worked with the relevant teams within the engineering discipline to help establish a new deployment process to keep development unblocked