Businesses are increasingly turning to composable commerce as a transformative solution to maintain technical agility and seize emerging market opportunities. How can they structure their organizations to take advantage of the technology they’ve chosen? This was the question that moderator Matt Alberts, VP of Global Solution Consulting at commercetools, posed to customers at Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit™, the inaugural global conference dedicated to composable commerce.
From redefining roles and responsibilities to fostering a culture of agility and innovation, the panelists shared their experiences and actionable strategies for navigating organizational change post-digital transformation. The panelists were Suchema Oyetey, VP of Engineering at Moonpig, Sree Rallabhandi, Director of eCommerce Engineering at Express, Dhaval Shah, Principal Software Engineer at Cimpress, and Michael Rasmussen, VP of Composable Practice at Valtech, recently named commercetools Partner of the Year for the Americas.
Each of the panelists represents a long-term customer, and each began their composable projects with different platforms, organizational structures and project goals. “One of the most common questions that we talk about as we get closer to starting projects is, how do I set up my organization to take advantage of the technology that I’ve chosen?” explained Matt. “So, one of the things I wanted to do is give our customers, prospects and partners the opportunity to hear directly from our customers.”
Moonpig, a retailer headquartered in London and Guernsey specializing in personalized greeting cards, flowers and gifts, adopted an organizational strategy that put the technology in the hands of product squads structured like startups. These squads have the autonomy to make decisions and prioritize customer needs without requiring constant oversight from leadership.
“We have really discrete, really well-defined, really strong ownership product squads with a product manager, an engineering manager, and a designer heading up like a triumvirate for every single engineering squad,” Suchema said. “So each of these teams owns a specific vertical of the product they can release almost entirely independently of every other team that exists. And the idea is that we try and break dependencies as much as possible in order to allow teams to move really, really fast,” he added.
Empowering frontline teams is also a theme at Cimpress, which invests in and builds customer-focused, entrepreneurial, mass customization businesses that are managed in a decentralized, autonomous manner. “We have customized commercetools at a platform level, and then the brand uses our APIs,” explained Dhaval. “In that way, we have provided a lot of autonomy to our brands as well to have their own features live, which are brand-specific,” he added.
Cimpress also has a unique challenge due to its multitude of stakeholders. With operations spanning 12 separate brand identities globally, each with its distinct identity, the company navigates numerous demands. For Dhaval, having a lot of stakeholders translates into a constant steam of requests for immediate or near-future action; hence, for his team, prioritization is the key. At Cimpress, that roadmap is decided along revenue lines.
“One thing we have identified is that, since all brands are into mass customization, they more or less want the same features. Some may want it right now, some may want it six months down the line,” Dhaval explained. “So, for example, if somebody wants a cash-on-delivery feature on a cart, and if that's going to bring in x million dollars of revenue in a particular region, that’s what we prioritize.”
Prioritization is a dual approach at Moonpig as well, with some key initiatives driven from the top down and others from the bottom up, based on what the metrics tell them and what the customers want.
“It’s always through the lens of what makes sense for the customer,” Suchema said. “What are the metrics that we're trying to drive, how is that related to the customer experience? How does that in general make the customer experience better? Because if you’re not thinking that way, you generally tend to make short-term decisions that don’t necessarily play out across the course of multiple years. You’re always wanting to understand what your 5- to 10-year goal is in order to understand how that breaks down and informs what it is that you're doing in the now,” he concluded.
For some of the customer panelists, their organizational structure was very different prior to adopting a composable solution. Fashion retailer Express initially relied on an ATG full-stack development team focused predominantly on operating the monolithic environment and doing the occasional update. Sree remembered the stress of supporting holiday shopping traffic, from midnight triages to lost sleep.
“It’s a flip of a coin. You never know if it works or not,” he said. “There can be malicious traffic vectors and you strategically plan your infrastructure, but that’s not enough because you’re on premises and you cannot scale. So, in our organization, we were distracted from feature delivery to operations just because of the nature of the beast there.”
And then came composable commerce by commercetools. Sree said, “We were able to take advantage of the elasticity that the cloud platforms provide. Availability and stability are not a concern anymore. So we are able to focus on feature delivery and we’re able to deploy much faster — almost every day if we want.” Plus, because of the microservices-based architecture, “the impact radius of every change is very restricted,” he added. “That gives confidence to developers; nobody wants to be the person that introduces an outage in production. Now it’s much more contained.”
Michael Rasmussen, VP, Composable Practice at Valtech, makes recommendations to companies about how to make the organizational changes to unlock the benefits of composability. As a veteran of system integration platform builds in eCommerce, he referenced Conway’s Law: The concept that a company’s architecture mirrors its team structure, as a way to foster a new environment where teams can work independently and deliver change quickly. By moving away from a single platform with rigid release and development protocols, engineering teams can respond directly to customer needs based on data insights and promptly address them.
“The trend is that the closer you bring your engineering team, the closer you bring your product ownership to the customer and to the data, and the more that you allow them to be able to make those decisions independently to optimize, the better the experience is all around,” Michael said.
“This is the theme we see in customers we work with that are mature in the composable space,” he added, “that they’re able to do that versus the customers who are very early on or still in a monolithic space where they still have to think platform-first rather than customer-first.”
To learn more about Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit, including keynote highlights and other session spotlights, visit the event website.
Anita J. Temple is the Corporate Journalist at commercetools. She was a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and W Magazine before launching a career as a freelance writer and creative producer. She has written content and worked on a wide range of marketing projects for companies including Dreamworks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Adidas.