Migrating ISSA off a decade-old ColdFusion stack onto Shopify Plus.

What was needed.

ISSA (the International Sports Sciences Association) had been running on a ColdFusion + ElasticPath stack for over a decade. The system worked, but it was holding back every new initiative: slow to update, expensive to maintain, and increasingly fragile as integrations stacked up. The decision to move to Shopify Plus was already made. The work was getting it done without breaking a course-delivery business that processes thousands of customer interactions a day.

When the VP leading the project stepped away, I took over as technical program manager: building the Shopify Plus migration myself and driving deliverables across internal engineering, an external partner agency, and a QA team through a phased rollout. Data modeling, integration rebuilds, theme architecture, redirect strategy, and cutover planning all ran on parallel tracks. Each phase went live only after it was validated against production traffic.