Jesse Gortarez

Initiated a cross-functional team to build a design system

Through my work building the shared component system, I identified a gap in our design process and initiated collaboration with the design and UX teams to begin creating a design system our components could leverage.

See more

Led a small development team on a high-value, high-visibility, cross-functional project to redesign and rebuild the homepage of okta.com.

Given 3 weeks, as the technical lead, I worked with a broad cross-functional team of copywriters, designers, and UX, product, and marketing leaders to conceptualize and bring to life a completely new homepage and brand experience for our customers.

See more

Modernized and unified the front-end architecture

When I arrived, the majority of Okta's digital marketing properties were built on a Drupal monolith. Separate back and front ends were in place for the main okta.com site as well as each of the major microsites (e.g. oktane.com, trust.okta.com, etc.). This resulted in fragmented capabilities and the need to reinvent the wheel each time a new event occurred. For our small team, this meant no ability to scale to the needs of the business.

With the support of my colleagues, I established a new architecture based on a decoupled front-end built in GatsbyJS that would allow us to build UIs faster and scale our work by creating a shared library of components that all sites could leverage.

The impact this had was seen in the first year it was used to build an updated Oktane site. The prior year it had taken me and the 2 other developers on my team nearly two months to build. The first year we used the shared componentry, I was able to build the entire site by myself in just two and a half weeks.

Redesigned and rebuilt eCommerce experience for faster page loads and better analytics

Driven by my desire to improve the customer experience during shopping and checkout, I rebuilt all eCommerce pages, removing the dependencies on Shopify which had limitations on how a page could look and perform. I built a blazingly fast static front end that leveraged the Shopify API instead. This had the benefit of maintaining the data infrastructure and pipeline essential for running the business while enabling much more customization of the design and performance of our shopping pages.

See example

Created a new shopping experience that improved overall site conversion by nearly 10%

After a conversation with a member of the support team about the types of calls and requests they receive, I noted that a majority were questions about which of our systems to buy. To address this, I rapidly prototyped an interactive quiz that allowed users to answer a few questions and receive a recommendation on which system would be best. After presenting it to the broader team, we iterated and readied it for production. Once live, this tool became the top converting user flow on the site and lifted overall conversions by nearly 10%.

See example