Taking on the pilots
In 2025, I became web lead for MGM’s guest-facing apps. I was also brought into an AI development pilot to build GPAP, the guest deposit payment app.
After that pilot was successful, I moved on to the mobile bellman app, Bell Desk Express, as a second pilot for AI development.
Those projects were part of why my role on the existing apps changed. I was still building new products myself, while four engineers took on most of the feature work in check-in and the other guest apps. My responsibility there increasingly became helping their work move through reviews, testing and release.
Keeping the existing apps moving
We had three major additions to web check-in underway: checking in several rooms at once, a shared payment widget, and joining MGM Rewards after check-in. I owned the web delivery while the engineers built the features.
Multi-room check-in touched nearly every part of the existing experience. I reviewed the ten core changes with the whole flow in mind: how reservation data moved between pages, what happened when a lookup failed, and where guests should go if they opened a page without the reservation it needed.
Those reviews often led beyond the code. I asked for error wording to be agreed with product and design, missing cases to be covered by tests, and decisions to be explained for the next engineer working in the app.
I also kept deployment separate from turning features on. Feature flags let us make the new behavior available for testing while leaving it off in production until QA signed off.
Sharing ownership
With my time split across the existing apps and the pilots, reviews and releases needed to be responsibilities the team could share.
I moved code ownership to the team, introduced a review rota, and shared release responsibilities. The engineers building features could also review one another’s work and help maintain the apps after release.
One teammate whose early changes I’d reviewed closely now runs production promotions for Trips, check-in and checkout. In 2026, he also reviewed more than a hundred changes from other engineers.
That shared ownership let me keep contributing to the established apps while taking on the next build.