Nestlé is a Fortune 500 multinational food and drink corporation headquartered in Switzerland. It is the largest publicly held food company in the world.
Nestlé's products include breakfast cereals, coffee and tea, confectionery, dairy products, baby food, medical food, bottled water, ice cream, frozen food, pet foods, and snacks. Nestlé has 354 factories, operates in 189 countries, has over 2000 brands, and employs around 330,000 people. More numbers .
I joined the Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) team at Nestlé NBS Lisbon, Portugal during Q4 2021 as a Frontend Developer in order to help with web forms development and API integration challenges.
Project overview
The core team of the CIAM project (Consumer Database Specialists, IT Project Managers, Web Developers) was created to achieve an ambitious goal: converge multiple Nestlé customer data silos from several markets and multiple company brands into a centralized and well-structured privacy-compliant database under the SAP Customer Data Platform (SAP CDC, formerly Gigya).
The new data platform is designed to help build better relationships with customers through transparency and trust.
The process involved remote work coordination and cross-alignment with Data Scientists, Project Managers, Brand Managers, external agencies, and other stakeholders.
Progressively all the registration forms and marketing campaigns which collected data had to be revised following standards and specifications of the company's CIAM.
Frontend Responsibilities
My main daily responsibilities rounded around the following tasks:
- Support the markets in creating, updating and improving user registration forms on company e-commerce websites (up to 300 websites in several languages) via SAP CDC Screen-Sets (HTML/CSS/JS code) and Drupal CMS .
- Preparation of technical specifications and frontend code reviews with Jira.
- Create and review technical documentation on the company team workspace on Confluence.
- Work on continuous improvements of the registration forms (functionality, design, performances).
- Find optimal ways to automate and speed up standard activities.
- Participate in end-to-end testing with other team members.
- Create frontend and content performance reports with actionable recommendations based on agreed KPIs and business objectives.
Key learnings
I learned what it means to work for a big corporation on a large scale multinational project with several stakeholders involved.
I know much more about CIAM techniques and technologies, CRM, database management, API integration, and privacy laws.
Furthermore, I understand well that organization, collaboration, and communication on big scale digital projects are key to success.
Finally, I also learned more about Internationalization (i18n ), namely the adapting of a webpage to different languages and technical requirements for different countries.
Conclusion
Web forms can be tricky to style properly via HTML/CSS/JS and make them well accessible and secure, but it's possible to do so. They are a very powerful native key component of the Web to get data from users, and it's amazing what can be achieved by using them properly.
Enterprise Web Development is a puzzle where every piece fits together to create a powerful system to bring efficiently a business online. It's mainly focused on collaboration, teamwork, expertise, and vision.