Headquartered in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, Kohl’s operates as one of the largest department store chains in the world. The company’s business line features apparel, footwear, accessories, beauty and home products through its stores and website.

At Kohl’s, technology teams are constantly exploring, designing, and developing new ways to make the customer’s shopping experience more effortless and unique to them. In order to accomplish this, developers need to be able to share their questions and technical issues with each other.

Previously, the Kohl’s development teams shared a massive group chat of over 500 developers, where their questions were not only difficult to track, but were also redundant, creating a very disorganized and confusing forum.

Our Athenaeum web application provides an effective solution to this disorder by acting as a centralized platform for the Kohl’s development teams to better coordinate collaboration.

Athenaeum is an organized platform that brings order and clarity to the Kohl’s development teams; with Athenaeum, Kohl’s developers can find solutions to their technical issues with ease. Athenaeum’s web interface provides an easy place for developers to ask questions, receive feedback from other developers, search for related questions, and collaborate with their colleagues.

The platform’s simple and intuitive user interface gives developers the visual clarity for their collaboration, so that they can easily navigate their way to a solution for each technical issue that arises. Moreover, Athenaeum makes collaboration fun, utilizing a point system to gamify the experience of sharing solutions and resolving each other’s issues.

With a ReactJS front end, Flask back end and MySQL database, Athenaeum is deployed on Google Cloud Platform, making the web app fully cloud native.