Assessment response

Verdian Insights - Take Home Assessment

A structured approach to analytics recovery, attribution clarity, and scalable member portal architecture.

This page is my complete response to the Verdian Insights take-home exercise. I structured it the same way I usually work in real delivery: first making seniority and scope visible, then addressing the analytics problem, then outlining the portal architecture, and finally documenting AI usage clearly.

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Question 01

Competency Self-Assessment

The assessment below is meant to be honest and useful: higher where I already have real delivery depth, more conservative where I still want broader direct exposure in a specific editorial context. It also sets up the short open questions that follow.

Competency	Rating	Notes
WordPress — core	5/5	Core part of my day-to-day work. Strong hands-on experience with custom themes, plugins, field modeling, debugging, production ownership, and ongoing maintenance.
WordPress — Newspack	4/5	I understand the editorial model and the constraints of the ecosystem well. I still want deeper long-term delivery exposure on active Newspack implementations.
Front-end	4/5	I can build solid, responsive interfaces tied to business rules. My focus is usually clarity, performance, and tight backend integration.
PHP	5/5	I use PHP daily across WordPress, automations, and integrations. I am comfortable with application logic, APIs, sanitization, metadata, and legacy maintenance.
API integrations	5/5	Strong area. I have connected WordPress with CRMs, gateways, ERPs, PMSs, webhooks, and middleware, with practical attention to auth, retries, and observability.
DNS & email authentication	5/5	Real experience with DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, routing, and delivery troubleshooting. I treat this as part of technical ownership, not as a separate silo.
SEO & on-page optimization	5/5	Strong grounding in on-page structure, indexation, schema, metadata, internal linking, and technical hygiene. I usually handle it alongside content and performance work.
Analytics & tracking	4/5	Solid practical experience with GA4, GTM, UTMs, events, and QA. My bias is less toward pretty dashboards and more toward making the data decision-grade.
Performance optimization	5/5	Strong with caching, page weight, assets, queries, and runtime hygiene. I usually treat performance together with operational stability.
Front-end to CRM	5/5	One of the areas where I add the most value. I like designing the full path between form, validation, middleware, CRM, and the operational handoff.
Project scoping & docs	5/5	I regularly translate business needs into executable scope, with clear documentation, explicit trade-offs, and realistic delivery framing.

Question 02

Open Questions

Which 2 areas do you most want to grow into, and why?

The two areas I most want to grow into are WordPress — Newspack and Analytics & tracking. For Newspack, that is because I am very interested in editorial, membership, and newsroom operations inside a more opinionated WordPress product context. For analytics, it is because that is where technical work and business impact meet very directly: once measurement becomes trustworthy, the company makes better decisions.

Which 1 area do you most enjoy doing day-to-day?

The area I most enjoy day to day is Front-end to CRM. It usually requires understanding the whole process, not just the interface: lead source, validation, data quality, middleware, CRM, and downstream operational use. I like that kind of problem because it combines product, operations, and engineering in a very concrete way. The same bias shows up in the tracking analysis below: restore measurement first so decisions can be trusted again.

Question 03

Analytics Triage

Why Start Here

I would start by restoring the team's ability to trust the data before trying to optimize anything else. Without reliable conversions and a minimum level of tracking hygiene, any CAC, ROI, or channel readout becomes opinion wearing dashboard clothing. Once measurement is stable again, the next question becomes how to structure the benefits portal with clear boundaries between experience, middleware, and system of record.

What I would fix first

The first issue I would fix is missing conversion tracking. Right now GA4 shows traffic, but not outcomes, which means the business cannot clearly see what channels, campaigns, or user actions are generating revenue. Without that visibility, marketing optimization becomes guesswork. Fixing conversion tracking restores the ability to measure ROI, compare acquisition sources, and prioritize improvements based on actual business results.

30-day plan to restore attribution

Week 1 — Audit

Audit the current GA4 and GTM implementation, review event coverage, and identify tracking gaps across forms, subscriptions, and purchases.

Week 2 — Definition

Define the key business conversions, standardize naming conventions, and clean up UTM discipline across campaigns, email, PDFs, and owned channels.

Week 3 — Implementation

Implement or repair conversion tracking through GTM, validate event firing, and ensure the correct parameters reach GA4 consistently.

Week 4 — Validation

QA the setup using real journeys, filter obvious bot traffic, compare GA4 with backend or CRM reality, and create a simple reporting layer for business visibility.

How I would explain “0 conversions tracked” to the CEO

We are measuring visits, but not results. GA4 showing zero conversions does not mean the business is generating zero value — it means the platform is not capturing the actions that matter. Because of that, we cannot reliably connect traffic or campaigns to revenue. The cost of doing nothing is that marketing decisions stay blind, attribution stays unreliable, and growth investments are harder to justify.

What I would verify before trusting the data

Before trusting the numbers, I would validate at least four things: whether the 60% “Direct” bucket is truly direct or attribution loss caused by UTM/cross-domain issues; whether the Vietnam traffic is bot noise or referral spam; whether form starts and completions fire with the same logic across pages; and whether GA4 roughly reconciles with the CRM, backend, or another transactional source. I would also verify consent mode, internal traffic exclusions, event deduplication, invalid-traffic filtering, and whether something recently broke in GTM or site publishing. Right now I would treat the data as an initial signal, not as an executive-grade source of truth.

Marketing dashboard with performance indicators — **Marketing Hub Dashboard**
Useful reference for the performance, campaign, and attribution reading layer.

Operational monitoring screen — **Site Monitor**
Helps contextualize validation, monitoring, and anomaly review once tracking is fixed.

Question 04

Member Portal Architecture

My approach here is to keep boundaries clear: Salesforce as the source of truth, WordPress/Newspack as the authenticated experience layer, and middleware responsible for service auth, transformation, caching, and observability. That reduces coupling and keeps the portal evolvable without exposing CRM complexity to the frontend. The diagram and system flow below make that design explicit at a quick scan.

Architecture Overview

WordPress/Newspack for login, member experience, and admin-manageable pages
Middleware/API for inter-system auth, payload normalization, and lightweight business rules
Salesforce as the system of record for benefits, eligibility, and account data
Short-lived caching plus event-based invalidation to reduce repeated lookups without creating a shadow source of truth
Logging and alerting for integration errors, timeouts, and permission failures

Data Flow

The member authenticates in WordPress/Newspack
The portal requests only the data needed for that session or screen from the middleware
The middleware validates permissions, queries Salesforce, and transforms the payload into a stable frontend shape
Where appropriate, short-lived cache serves repeated reads; critical events still come from the primary source
WordPress renders the experience and records operational telemetry without requiring direct browser calls to Salesforce

Roles & Permissions

End member: sees only their own benefits, eligibility, and permitted documents
Client admin: can manage account-related members, invites, and usage without gaining raw CRM access
Internal Verdian team: broader visibility for support, troubleshooting, and audit
Plan, brand, group, or contract segmentation should be resolved in the data layer or middleware, not scattered through the theme

Notes & Constraints

No Salesforce credentials, schema details, or sensitive endpoints exposed in the browser
Prefer modular components and predictable payloads so the theme or plugin does not depend on CRM internals
Log, retry, and alert because integration failures quickly become support problems
Plan graceful degradation: if the API fails, the user needs a clear state and the team needs to know where to investigate
Keep the structure ready to evolve into webhooks, queues, or async sync if complexity grows

Architecture Diagram

This diagram represents the full flow of the Member Benefits Portal. Users (both individual members and corporate admins) access a single authenticated experience in WordPress/Newspack, where dashboards and entitlements are presented. All business logic and data orchestration are handled outside the frontend through a middleware layer (n8n), which communicates with Salesforce as the source of truth. Salesforce defines which benefits each user can access, and the middleware translates that into structured responses consumed by the WordPress application.

System Flow

User (Member or Corporate Admin) logs into the portal
WordPress/Newspack handles authentication and loads the dashboard
The application requests user data through the middleware layer
n8n orchestrates requests and retrieves entitlement data from Salesforce
Data is normalized and returned to WordPress
The dashboard renders available benefits (LPEC, CW News, Events, HQP, Connect) based on entitlements

Architecture Diagram — End-to-end flow between Member User and Corporate Admin, WordPress/Newspack, middleware (n8n), Salesforce, and the downstream platforms Thinkific/LPEC, CW News, Pheedloop, HQP, and Circle.
WordPress/Newspack handles only presentation and authentication. n8n handles orchestration and data transformation. Salesforce defines access rules and entitlements. No CRM credentials or business logic are exposed to the frontend. The system remains modular and scalable across multiple brands and benefit platforms.

Solution architecture diagram — **Architecture Overview**
High-level visual showing the separation between interface, middleware, and system of record.

Event flow between system layers — **Event Flow**
Good reference for explaining orchestration, data transformation, and response delivery to the UI.

Authentication and login schema — **Login Schema**
Helps reinforce the authentication and access-control design.

Question 05

Visual References

The visuals below act as visual support for the architecture above. They do not replace the proposed system design, but they help show how that experience could surface for the end user.

Portal login screen — **Login Experience**
Visual reference for the portal entry experience.

Executive dashboard with consolidated view — **Executive Dashboard View**
Dashboard with consolidated readouts for stakeholders.

Monitoring dashboard — **Monitoring Dashboard**
Example of a visual layer for operational monitoring.

Tracking and events flow — **Tracking Flow**
Useful visual support for showing the GA4 + GTM + middleware flow.

Question 06

AI Usage

Tools used

Tool used: ChatGPT. I used it as a drafting and structuring assistant, mainly to test framing options for the analytics plan, refine wording for the CEO explanation, and organize the AI disclosure section. The final architecture, seniority assessment, and WordPress/PHP implementation were completed manually by me. I keep this section last intentionally because, to me, AI is process support, not the center of the submission.

Prompt 1 (verbatim)

Prompt 1: "Draft a concise 30-day recovery plan for a GA4/GTM setup where traffic is visible but conversions are missing, with actions grouped by audit, definition, implementation, and validation."

Prompt 2 (verbatim)

Prompt 2: "Outline a WordPress/Newspack member benefits portal architecture where Salesforce is the source of truth and a middleware layer handles data access, transformation, and permissions."

Prompt 3 (verbatim)

Prompt 3: "Give me three executive-safe ways to explain why GA4 can show zero conversions even when the business is still generating leads or revenue."

Rejected or rewritten example

One clear example of something I rewrote: the AI suggested a more generic architecture answer that was too “dashboard”-centric and not focused enough on data governance and the boundaries between WordPress, middleware, and Salesforce. I rejected that direction because it sounded plausible on paper, but did not reflect the operational care the problem actually requires.

What was not done with AI

I did not use AI to determine the self-assessment ratings or to implement this submission in code. I handled both manually because they depend more on personal judgment, real delivery context, and execution consistency than on text generation.

In short: I used AI as support for structure and wording, not as a substitute for technical judgment. Everything included here was reviewed, cut down, and manually rewritten to fit the real brief.

Question 07

Final Note

This submission is meant to show not just answers, but working style: honest seniority assessment, business-aware prioritization, pragmatic architecture, and enough documentation to support execution. The bonus page remains connected as supporting proof of the WordPress environment used for the delivery, but I kept the main assessment complete on its own instead of relying on the bonus to cover required parts of the brief.

Next steps

Review the bonus page and, if useful, schedule a conversation.

The bonus page shows how this response was structured inside WordPress itself, with an ACF-like model, CPT-like logic, and a custom plugin. If useful, the next step is a short call to discuss execution, architecture, and ownership.

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