Understand the business. Recommend the smallest fix. Build it properly.
Every project moves through the same seven stages. It's deliberately slow at the start — that's usually where the biggest mistakes get made.
- 01
Discover
A working session to understand your business: revenue mix, margins, operations, and where the current setup gets in the way. No code review yet — this is about the business first.
- 02
Analyze
Structured audit of the theme, apps, integrations, and data model. I document what's fragile, what's redundant, and what's actually holding up load.
- 03
Recommend
A written recommendation with the smallest change that solves the real problem. If a marketplace app or a different partner is the right answer, I'll say so.
- 04
Develop
Short cycles, frequent check-ins, work reviewed in a staging environment. No black-box handoffs at the end.
- 05
Test
Cross-browser, mobile, and edge-case testing. Checkout, tax, and shipping paths get particular attention because that's where quiet regressions cost the most.
- 06
Launch
Coordinated deploy with a rollback path prepared in advance. Monitoring in place before traffic hits the change.
- 07
Support
The engagement doesn't end at launch. Most clients move into a retainer so I stay on for the next quarter of work.
A mid-market beverage brand on Shopify Plus was running three overlapping discount apps to handle bundles, subscription promotions, and B2B pricing. Checkout latency spiked during promotions and their finance team couldn't reconcile the totals cleanly.
Discovery and analysis took two weeks. The recommendation was to consolidate the logic into a single Shopify Function, retire two of the apps, and simplify the reporting pipeline. Development ran in three cycles over six weeks. Launch happened between promotional windows with monitoring already in place. I stayed on as their retained technical partner afterwards.