Aurora Medical Shopify Store

About the project

Background

Aurora Cannabis is a licensed Canadian medical and recreational cannabis producer.

PROJECT AIMS

This project aimed to amalgamate three of Aurora's eCommerce platforms, each belonging to one of Aurora's major brands. Bringing the brands together under one unified store would allow patients to browse from a larger selection of products rather than just one brand.

Project Role

I was the project manager responsible for the development and launch of the Shopify eCommerce store. As this project was a massive undertaking involving other systems aside from Shopify, I was one of several project managers, with others managing aspects such as ERP, CRM, and other systems which were all connected.

Apart from managing the team sprints, I also helped with functional QA during UAT testing and provided training to other teams on the Shopify CMS so they are able to manage products within the system and change website copy.

Project challenges

Due to the nature of the company, we had to heavily modify the Shopify eCommerce store to fit our unique business needs, rules and regulations. Fields such as THC and CBD units were not just static values but affected whether individual patients could view and buy the product depending on their allowed limits on their prescription.

We also had to connect multiple external systems to Shopify, including a dedicated patient registration portal (which we also developed within the Software Engineering Team), SSO and CRM systems to handle patient accounts, and ERP systems to handle product tracking and inventory. This heavy customization meant we had to do a lot of up-front research in order to see what was possible within the Shopify ecosystem and had to work extremely closely with other teams to define API architecture.

With many teams working in parallel, we initially had challenges with the communication of sprint items with dependencies on other teams, which affected team workload. However, after streamlining our processes using JIRA and creating a unified project management process, we resolved these issues early in the project.