Adopting composability is more than technology. Explore what makes a business composable and why it’s key for enterprises to become adaptable in a constantly changing landscape.
What’s a composable business?
A composable business applies the technology principles of modularity and flexibility to organizational structure and mindset. In other words, it’s all about taking the idea of composability — breaking something large into smaller, bite-sized pieces — and using it to create flexible and agile teams and processes, as well as influence corporate culture.
It all started with the rise of composable technology. Instead of relying on a rigid, all-in-one platform, companies migrated to a modular architecture where each component (checkout, product catalog, pricing engine) operates independently. This allows for faster updates, seamless integrations, and scalability without disrupting the entire system. This component-based approach enables companies to adapt quickly, keeping pace with changing customer expectations and market demands.
Gartner, the leading market analyst that coined the term “composable,” defined “composable business” further by recognizing that it transforms strategies, processes and structures from rigid and long-term plans into flexible, continuously evolving frameworks. Policies are no longer set in stone — they are regularly updated, replaced or retired to stay relevant. Additionally, security and operational integrity become more adaptable as business capabilities are broken down into smaller, manageable components that align with composable principles.
In a nutshell, a successful composable business is built on four key pillars:
Modularity: Businesses must break down their structure into independent, reusable components that can be recombined for new opportunities, products and/or services.
Autonomy: Teams should be flexible to make decisions and implement changes quickly.
Orchestration: Systems, processes and workflows must be well-integrated to ensure seamless functionality.
Discovery: Companies must continuously seek and integrate new capabilities to stay competitive.
What’s the difference between composable business and composable thinking?
While composable business focuses on structuring an organization for flexibility and adaptability, composable thinking is the mindset that drives this approach.
Composable thinking is a strategic mindset that encourages businesses to break down rigid structures, embrace modular decision-making and stay adaptable in the face of change. It’s about questioning the status quo, identifying where agility is needed and designing business processes, teams, and strategies that can evolve with market demands.
A composable business puts this mindset into action by structuring teams, processes and technologies into interchangeable, scalable components. This allows organizations to reconfigure and optimize their operations quickly — whether that means launching new products, entering new markets or responding to customer needs with agility.
How can enterprises apply composable principles to their businesses?
Businesses apply composable principles to drive agility, innovation and efficiency across their organizations. Here are some concrete examples:
Rather than large, siloed IT teams, businesses divide teams into specialized functions (e.g., payments, search, product recommendations). Each team owns its domain, empowering employees with greater autonomy and leading to faster innovation, decision-making and adaptability to change.
Composable principles enable businesses to test new features, integrations and customer experiences without massive overhauls. For example, a retailer might experiment with AI-driven recommendations in one region before rolling them out globally.
Composable thinking extends beyond IT — companies break down traditional silos between departments so that sales, marketing and operations can collaborate more effectively. By working together, teams ensure that real customer insights and data drive business decisions.
Companies rethink workflows to eliminate bottlenecks and streamline operations. This could mean simplifying approval processes, automating routine tasks or ensuring that insights from one department are easily accessible to others.
Composable principles help organizations become more resilient to change by encouraging modular thinking in strategy, partnerships, and market expansion. Businesses that embrace flexibility can seize new opportunities faster — whether entering a new market, adjusting to supply chain disruptions or responding to evolving customer demands.
Business leaders in composable businesses see opportunities where others see risk. They empower employees to speak up, share ideas, and experiment with new strategies. When it comes to a composable approach, senior leadership must take the reins and foster a digital-first, customer-centric culture.
What are the top benefits of a composable business?
A composable business model enables organizations to quickly adapt, innovate and scale without being held back by rigid structures or outdated processes. Here are the benefits in more detail:
Market responsiveness: A composable business can pivot quickly in response to market shifts, customer demands or unexpected disruptions. Instead of being locked into long-term strategies that might become obsolete, organizations can adjust operations, launch new offerings and enter new markets faster.
Continuous innovation: Businesses following the composable model can experiment and innovate faster. This modular approach fosters incremental innovation, keeping the organization competitive.
Cost and operational efficiency: Composable principles help businesses break down silos, streamline workflows and minimize inefficiencies. With a composable structure, companies invest only in what they need, optimizing costs and overall performance.
Composable business in action: Real-life examples
As a pioneer in composable commerce, commercetools has been instrumental in helping enterprises transcend the benefits of composability into their organizations. By providing a versatile commerce platform, commercetools enables enterprise businesses to modernize their commerce technology while laying the groundwork for a fully composable business model.
The leading eCommerce destination for personalized greeting cards, gifts and more, Moonpig transitioned from a monolithic homegrown platform to composable commerce to gain flexibility, agility and scalability as a foundation for growth. The company started to break down its monolithic platform into bite-sized, more easily manageable components, gradually migrating to a composable environment.
Moonpig embraced composable technology and transformed the organization with the same principles. For instance, the company has well-defined and strong ownership product squads, with a product manager, an engineering manager and a designer heading up like a triumvirate for every engineering squad. Each of these teams owns a specific vertical of the product and can release it almost entirely independently of every other team. The idea is to break dependencies in order to allow teams to move fast.
According to Suchema Oyetey, VP of Engineering at Moonpig, “The biggest thing that's happened since we adopted composable commerce has been the speed we’ve had in terms of being able to build and release features to our customers,” he said. “We’ve seen a huge uptick in the number of features that we release per week, per month and per year — and that in itself is a driver of growth. Thanks to smooth integration with commercetools, we’ve also significantly improved time to value.”
Norway’s favorite bookstore, ARK Bokhandel, adopted composable commerce and immediately saw positive business results, including a lift in conversion rate and improved scalability.
More than technology, the company embraced the principles of composability for its development organization. The result: Accelerated development, reduced time to market and reduced eCommerce costs.
These impressive business results are driven by a significant boost in internal efficiency, enabled by best-in-class eCommerce tools and a modern architecture that developers enjoy working with. This streamlined approach reduces the time needed to bring ideas to market and fosters a culture of continuous innovation. With the ability to push updates frequently, ARK can refine its platform on an ongoing basis — allocating 80% of development efforts to new enhancements and features while spending less than 20% on bug fixes.
The first step in adopting a composable approach is identifying a specific, pressing customer-facing business problem. This could involve challenges related to promotions, product catalog management, data handling, checkout processes or any other operational inefficiencies. Once a clear issue is defined, the organization can develop a composable solution tailored to it.
Rather than attempting a full-scale transformation overnight, businesses should start with a focused initiative and execute it effectively. Solving a smaller challenge lays the foundation for gradually increasing composability over time. Transitioning to a fully composable business is an incremental process driven by continuous improvement and competitive necessity.
Want to explore how composable commerce can transform your business? Download the guide: Why composable commerce is driving the future of business.
Manuela Marques Tchoe is a Content Writer at commercetools. She was a Content and Product Marketing Director at conversational commerce provider tyntec. She has written content in partnership with Facebook, Rakuten Viber and other social media platforms.