Client: National media publisher with gated content and user subscriptions
Role: Project Planner • Systems Strategist • Architecture Whisperer
Timeline: ~2 months
Stack: Custom Subscription Platform, WordPress, API Layer

🚨 The Problem

The subscription system had become a fragile, sprawling mess:

  • Hundreds of cloned modules, layered with ad-hoc logic
  • Up to 30 API calls per page load, triggering recursive bugs and performance failures
  • Invisible dependencies between three codebases, creating security risks and surprise outages
  • Every minor update was a gamble—break user flows? Analytics? Navigation? All of the above?

The business couldn’t build, test, or scale without tripping over itself.

🧠 My Role

I was brought in to untangle the mess, design a scalable architecture, and give the internal teams a step-by-step escape plan. This wasn’t just cleanup—it was a structural rethinking of how subscriptions worked across the stack.

🔧 What I Delivered

  • Performed a full audit of logic touchpoints across three platforms
  • Mapped dependencies, duplicated logic, and API misfires into a single coherent view
  • Designed a modular architecture plan to centralize business logic and define access boundaries
  • Proposed an API-first architecture to eliminate backend chaos and admin-ajax dependency
  • Created a multi-phase implementation roadmap with actionable, team-specific tickets
  • Flagged key security vulnerabilities and performance drains with prioritized mitigation strategies
  • Built a foundation for testing and scalability, aligned with business and tech growth

📈 Business Results

  • Delivered a clear, actionable transition roadmap now being used across dev teams
  • Estimated 30% performance improvement, just by removing redundant API calls and logic
  • Projected 60% reduction in developer debugging time and 70% increase in business user efficiency
  • Introduced governance and access clarity, reducing future risk from logic leaks and side effects
  • Gave leadership a realistic, strategic path forward from a system that was once a blocker

* * *

Got a tech mess of your own?
I can help you untangle it — and design something that actually scales.
Let’s map a better system → 🧠

← Back to all case studies