George Jagodzinski (00:00):
Today, we discuss headless commerce, how to better leverage commerce platforms, and keep the team aligned to top-line goals. This is a very exciting episode and part of a series where we showcase members of the Intevity team. This topic might sound technical, but we got into some juicy existential topics about team motivation, culture, and alignment.
(00:16):
For this series, I'm joined by Eric Webster, as always, as my co-host. And today, we have the privilege of chatting with one of our engineering leads, Josh Williams. Please, welcome Josh.
(00:37):
Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no-BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward. If you're looking to actually move the ball forward rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski.
(00:54):
So Josh, today, we're talking headless commerce and why you're excited about what you're excited about with headless commerce. So let's start there. What gets you excited about it?
Josh Williams (01:11):
Oh, man. A lot of it is the flexibility of implementation. A lot of the other modern tech is rooted in the notion of headless. So your allows you to pick and choose the pieces that work for you, stay current, get on that bleeding edge of the service providers and libraries that are out there.
George Jagodzinski (01:32):
I love to pull that thread, because I know plenty of people out there, some of our clients, I've definitely heard the, "I don't want to be bleeding edge, I just want to be standard. Let's use it out of the box. Let's not do anything tricky with it. That way, it's not a maintenance nightmare." So explain — what do you mean by cutting edge?
Josh Williams (01:50):
Cutting-edge, there's a lot that's there. It allows you to adopt the modern infrastructure much more easily than a lot of the traditional providers that are out there without additional hoops, and hurdles, and jumps to get it to play nicely.
(02:07):
So not only does it seamlessly integrate with modern infrastructure. It also makes developers happy because you can play with something fun, something new, something exciting that isn't this super archaic templating language or style. I know a lot of us shutter when we hear some of those old technologies and it's like, "Sweet, we have this great new product, this project coming up, but we've got to write it in Fortran. Cool."
Eric Webster (02:37):
There's a lot, Josh, to being on the cutting edge. That gives a lot of benefits and talk a little bit about some of the performance benefits of being not part of a monolithic platform but part of a more modern, cutting-edge, headless e-commerce platform.
Josh Williams (02:51):
So it allows you to adopt and to optimize very specific areas of your application. So if you adopt into headless, that allows you to have more complete control of the data, stand-up services in between, add caching layers where necessary.
(03:10):
So say you've got an old platform that is traditionally very slow at processing aspects of it. If you remove a lot of the other rendering aspects of it and just grab the data, you can massage, you can cache, you can do a lot of fun things in between to really expedite and speed up a traditionally slow system.
George Jagodzinski (03:34):
So I'm going to put on my CEO/CIO hat, and if I hear an engineer saying like, "Hey, Josh, we just bought this expensive platform, but we're paying a lot for it. We're doing an implementation. The vendors coming in, they're going to roll it out for us." When I hear an engineer saying, "But I want to do it headless because it's fun and exciting."
(03:53):
Well, my heart isn't into that. My CEO hat says, "Ooh, that sounds expensive. It sounds like we're going to be doing all this custom stuff. Do we need to do the custom stuff? Is that overall going to cost me more because of all the maintenance web?" And, Web and Josh, I'd like to pull this. Is that a fallacy? If we start building headless and we start customizing outside of the platform, will that be an overall total cost of ownership more?
Josh Williams (04:20):
It's tough to say. I can't say yes or no. It's one of those fuzzy answers, but usually what it allows you to do is to separate the aspects of your application so that way you're not all in on this one platform that does require maintenance, that does require upkeep. It's never a turnkey just, "Oh, we use the out-of-box solution. It's good to go indefinitely." There's always going to be changes required. There's going to be upgrades, there's going to be deprecation, there's going to be security patches of every single platform.
(04:55):
So if you first start via the headless approach and all you care about is the data that's there, then you have, via the data, the data might, and usually, does not change as often as the core platform. So data is data, and they do what they can to keep the data consistent coming out of it.
(05:14):
So then you wrote this application that is agnostic to that core, underlying application. So it allows you to, if ten years down the line, say you want to remove that original service provider, that huge investment you just made because you found something better, you have a better contract, that sets you up because then you have these two discreet applications and you just need to now use that new provider in that headless approach and make the data look like what your front-end application is expecting.
Eric Webster (05:51):
I would say that anytime that you're not using the out-of-the-box software, it's going to cost you more. That's just the way it is. And so there's a cost associated it, but there's also a cost with opportunity lost.
(06:03):
And so when you have one of these big out-of-the-box platforms that's genericized and monolithic, it doesn't speak directly to what you need and what your customers need. And sometimes modifications of those platforms are either more costly than it would've been if you just would've been on a headless approach or just not possible. So there's the cost of physically maintaining those platforms when those costs are going down day after day. The platforms and tools are getting better, the infrastructure is getting better, the connective tissue is stronger every day. So the cost to maintain those platforms is going down, and it's not zero, but you don't want to miss out on the opportunity to provide a unique experience or offer that giant monolithic platform has.
(06:48):
And one of the things that we were talking about with secondary performance is just thinking about it. Every one of these systems were like, if you're thinking about Salesforce or whatever large platform you'd be using for e-commerce, they start out really fast. It's over time, they get slower and slower as they go, due no fault to their own, just the capability and need of all their customers together. But you're basically supporting a bunch of tools and capabilities that you really don't need inside of that platform.
(07:14):
So the headless opportunity allows you to pick and choose which parts of those programs and tools you actually need and use versus having to take it all.
George Jagodzinski (07:22):
And that's the part I love is the picking and choosing. It's not an all-or-nothing approach because what I found is a good intention sales executive as they're selling the platform in that the client is asking, "Oh, can it do this? Can it do that?" They're like, "No, but we can customize it. You can customize it to do it." And they wave their hand, "Not a big deal. You can customize it, customize it." And I know I've seen so many clients where we go in, and now it's, I don't know, ten years, it's a decade later, they can't even update their platform with the same vendor because they've customized it so much that now the new version won't even support all the Frankenstein-ing that they do. So if you want to talk about total cost of ownership, that's a problem.
(08:02):
And what I find is, when we work well with these platforms, is if we're using it for the right parts, it actually makes the larger platform excel. It shows its strengths rather than trying to contort itself into weird shapes and sizes that it's never been meant for, right?
Eric Webster (08:22):
A hundred percent.
Josh Williams (08:23):
It couldn't be more accurate. It's funny the number of times that I've been on projects where we are trying to just get the upgrade to parity, and it's the amount of time and the investment just to get it to work the way that it previously did.
George Jagodzinski (08:40):
Oh man, that's straight to my soul. As a homeowner who just fixed a lot of wood rot, I'm sure people listening will strike a chord with, you spend so much money just fixing that wood rot just to make the house look the same way that it did before. And that could have been a pool, that could have been something cool, exciting rather than that.
(09:00):
Evolving Industry is brought to you by Intevity. We bring order to chaos wherever people, process, and technology converge. Our culture drives our solutions, and we are solution-obsessed. We see every challenge as an opportunity, every partner as a collaborator, and every project has a chance to share our values and commitment to excellence. Give us a shout. We'd love to hear your challenges and turn them into opportunities. Find out more intevity.com. Now, back to the show.
(09:27):
And that's it. That's real revenue for you. So all that time that you're spending just to make your platform what it was before could have been spent on making your purchase flows better, making card abandonment better.
(09:38):
So, Josh, I'd love to hear some stories out in the trenches on what are some techniques or approaches that have helped in improving those things.
Josh Williams (09:47):
So, honestly, we've mentioned it before, but it really comes down to speed and efficiency.
(09:53):
If your users are able to just navigate and flow throughout your website seamlessly and very, very quickly, as if it's a standalone application on their phone, it makes them happy. It keeps them engaged throughout the entire flow. They're not sitting and getting distracted. We've all got ADD tendencies nowadays, and if you wait even a second, a second and a half, for a new page to load, you're looking elsewhere, and all of a sudden, you're disengaged, so you never actually get to the point of checkout because your mind's starting to just travel away.
(10:32):
So it really comes down to, I think, the number one... The most important enhancement that I found is just speed and efficiency.
Eric Webster (10:41):
One of the things Josh was talking about earlier is developer satisfaction at wherever they decide to choose to work. And developers will always choose to work somewhere where they're valued, and they have the tools they need to be successful. And I think this is a very important conversation here.
(10:57):
When you start talking about rolling out a giant, monolithic platform where developers are really hamstrung the entire time they're trying to work on the platform, that's developer dissatisfaction. That's a surefire way to kill a team, versus adapting the new tools and new performance metrics that we have inside of our engineering teams. But those more modern tools, they give developers freedom to build great experiences, and that's all developers really ever want to do. They want to build something they're proud of, they want to build something that helps drive company revenue.
(11:26):
And those giant monolithic platforms, they're intentionally hamstringing developers because that's, to your point a minute ago, George, just about cost. And it's like, "Hey, you don't need developers on this platform because we have basically rolled it out so that it's a low-code or no-code environment." But that's really where then you always inherently will need to modify that platform, and you've put the developer in an impossible situation of they don't have the tools necessary to be able to do the job that you've asked them to do. There's the developer dissatisfaction.
George Jagodzinski (11:56):
And then, you've lost most of the team. You have one engineer left that knows where all the bodies are buried, with the best job security in the world.
Eric Webster (12:04):
And he's grumpy.
George Jagodzinski (12:06):
Grumpy, and they'll threaten to leave every six to nine months, and that's a nightmare. And you're running millions of dollars of revenue through this website, and it's all hinging on one grumpy, sour engineer's shoulders. But, guys, do we need those engineers? I thought I could just ask AI to change the site as I wish and it'll just happen.
Eric Webster (12:28):
I can't wait for us to unpack AI because there's so much back there. I think AI is going to be an amazing tool for smart engineers that are trying to figure out how do they do less of the work they don't want to do and do more of the work they do want to do, and AI is going to unlock so much of that.
(12:43):
But unfortunately, that grumpy engineer, he's sitting there trying to spin gold out of a platform that he just can't move, he can't change, and the company's path is on a different one than what the product is, and it's just the two boats are going in different directions. It's harder or harder to hold them together.
Josh Williams (13:01):
That's exactly it. And who's going to review the other robots and make sure that the integration actually works with your Frankenstein platform?
George Jagodzinski (13:07):
Well, the thing is, it's the same exact pattern. So the monolithic platform, it doesn't replace everything. Use it for the right things. Don't use it for the wrong things. Same with AI, you're going to use it for the right, but there's always going to need to be someone doing something. And if we look at the trend of every industrial revolution, there just always tends to be more of the work to be done rather than less because there's just constant growth and constant growth.
(13:32):
So one thing that we were exploring is some people out there might say, "Eh, I don't know if I want to jump to headless commerce. I've already invested in what I have." But you might have headless commerce already. You might not know it. So let's talk about that a little bit.
Josh Williams (13:46):
Surprisingly enough, most of the e-commerce service providers, they have a headless solution that's there. It's just whether or not it was adopted, and it may have been snuck in one of these enhancements. If you've been using this particular provider for years, and years, and years, then you likely — they didn't have it, and you implemented it when they had just their own out-of-the-box templating solution, or some very rudimentary implementation for the front-end.
(14:16):
But in time just about most providers have adopted that headless capabilities, because there are plenty of other service providers that specialize specifically in that, that they have to keep current, keep modern, and compete. So a lot of times it's there, you just don't know about it.
Eric Webster (14:36):
I think Shopify's a great example of this. They have both. So if you think about it, if you're a company and you're building a product, you're going to build microservices so that your internal teams can build a product on top of it. So when you go headless, you're basically just exposing those internal APIs to net customers at the end of the day so they can do it themselves. And I think this is really cool, what Shopify has done, and Salesforce is going the same way, too, is the giant infrastructure backend databases are met with a layer of microservices that they are slowly starting to release out to engineer.
(15:08):
I don't know if in 20 years time you're basically going to have two solutions for everybody. "Hey, I just want to use the out-of-the-box solution that you guys provide to me. Here, I'm going to hit a growth level that just don't fit on that platform for whatever reasons." Switch over to microservices, all your data will travel with you, and we're seeing that a lot of products are going that way.
George Jagodzinski (15:29):
What have you guys seen as those inflection points for when that makes sense? Like, Web, you just said growth, but what are other reasons that someone might need to... By no means saying out of the box is bad. It's good in a lot of cases, but there are points where you need to be aware of, "Hey, we've reached a stage of growth," or "We're unique in some certain way." What are the factors that you guys see?
Eric Webster (15:55):
Number one is conversion. You'll get your conversion rate as high as you possibly can on a brought-to-you platform, but then you'll start to note that your customers are asking for things that are just really hard for you to do on your platform. And that's when you're going to have to start saying...
(16:11):
And again, to your point a couple of minutes ago, you don't have to jump over to headless all at once. You can start to slowly eek over. Maybe that one component on your page is actually tapping into the microservices and building it out, and then slowly, over time, more and more of those components go that way. But I think performance and conversion rate are uniquely tied together, and I think that's usually the first place that we see this.
Josh Williams (16:33):
Absolutely.
(16:34):
And then customization and flexibility of your unique services. A lot of times when your particular service, your product, requires very specific implementations that you've got the option to force out-of-the-box solution to work the way you need it to, or write it intelligently once, harnessing just those APIs, just those headless facets in that particular area. So adopt and extend where you need to, but a lot of times, it's really when you need to customize for your specific needs.
George Jagodzinski (17:10):
I think that raises a really good point. We've been talking a lot about technology reasons, and microservices, and headless versus monolith, but this ultimately... What it is taking a much higher-level view that's customer-obsessed and experience-obsessed for the whole team, engineers included.
(17:30):
I can't tell you how many times I've seen insert platform name here. People, that's what their meetings are. They're like, "Hey, we're having a platform meeting today, platform meeting tomorrow." Or, that's even the name of the project that you're doing, or when people get off at it, they're walking down the hallway, and they're cursing the platform, but it's like, "No, we sell sneakers, we sell makeup, whatever it is, that's what the meeting needs to be about."
(17:55):
And it's not just your e-commerce executives and your product executives, but it's all the way down to the engineers, and the QA, and the DevOps, everyone really thinking about what is that customer experience, what's the customer need? I don't know if that resonates with you, Josh, but curious what stories you've seen out there.
Josh Williams (18:15):
Oh, that's exactly it. When you use out-of-the-box solutions, you have to consider all aspects of it.
(18:23):
The number of times that I've seen the email blasts come out that still have some of the templating placeholders there, or some of the other templated pages that just say "product name" or "company name" that are still displayed, just forgotten about because it's, "Oh, it's template. It's out-of-the-box. It just works." Well, it still requires consideration and replacement implementation.
Eric Webster (18:47):
I think a surefire way to tell if your team is operating at a very high level is if they're excited to do their job and if they're looking at the opportunity for them to offer a new way to connect with customers that is novel, and it's new, and it's distinct, but yet your engineering teams, or your product teams, they're on a platform that doesn't allow them to do that, it's going to slow them down and it's going to dishearten them.
(19:16):
So I think seeing that your team is fighting against your platform, that's a very good sign. It's a sign that your team has some fights left in them. Foster it, give them the tools, give them the opportunities to be able to speak directly to their customers, and to really impress upon them the value of working as a cohesive unit.
George Jagodzinski (19:33):
Let's dig into that team aspect because earlier we talked about when I put on my CIO/CEO hat, I get worried if the engineers are just geeking out about new technology and get it excited about that, but I feel like that's the wrong problem to solve. You should want your team to be excited, right?
Eric Webster (19:52):
Totally.
George Jagodzinski (19:53):
But making sure that... How do you point it at the right way? A Finnish carpenter could end up custom-building every aspect of your home. It would be crazy expensive. And so how do you keep the team excited, but maintain that balance and also keep them reminded of, "Hey, we're here to make money. We're here to grow and service our customers"?
Eric Webster (20:14):
That's the point. Help them understand what is success. Success is increased revenue, and sales, and these sorts of things. And then ask that team, "Great, how do we do that? How do we move from where we are to increase sales?" Bring them along with you for that journey. Ask them to be a part of driving force there. Ask them, and when they say like, "Hey, the challenge is this platform doesn't really allow us to do this." You got to say, "Great. What platform would allow you to do it?"
(20:40):
Bring them into that conversation. Take that energy and passion and excitement they have and churn it, and have them focus your revenue and sales targets as the primary thing that shows that we are doing the right job, that we are doing the parts of the work that we need to do to make sure we're all successful together.
Josh Williams (20:58):
Absolutely. That transparency there, and giving the developers the sense of ownership of part of these areas, because they're going to foster it, they're going to care for it, they're going to love this entire aspect that they were able to be part of from the other ground up, implement and do it in a way that actually suits them and their team. They're going to love to actually enhance it, patch it when need be, but as long as they're part of the entire process of its inception, that generally keeps developers happy and excitable, and happy developers are happy products.
Eric Webster (21:33):
Josh, if one of your clients came to you tomorrow and be like, "Hey, I need to figure out how we're more efficient, how we reduce the number of hours that we spend in maintenance, and how we make maintenance of these platforms faster, smoother, whatever have you." You're like, "Yes, let's figure that out!" Because you don't want to do that either.
(21:52):
So figuring out ways and focusing on, "Hey, we need to cut costs." That's the big thing we need to do. Engineers come on in, "How do we cut costs?" Here's all the cost model. Here's where everything costs. Help bring them in. Engineers and product people — they're all solutions-focused, their main job is to see a problem and find the way out of it, and I think giving them tools to be able to do that, or listening to them when they have those thoughts, I think, that's probably one of the most important things you can do.
George Jagodzinski (22:18):
It's the same exact root thing across any part of your organization is everyone needs to be connected to what are your five goals, and they need to know every day what is I'm doing, connected with that. And I feel like somewhere along the way, people just thought engineers are different humans, and that doesn't apply to them. And they're just, "Oh, those guys and gals are over there in that room, and they just want to build cool stuff, and we just need to keep them happy, and keep them quiet, and get what we need out of them."
(22:48):
But it's like no, every single part of your organization, they just want to be connected with the ultimate vision. As a CEO, if you could sell them on the vision, then as long as they're connected to it, they're going to do everything they can to make it successful.
Eric Webster (23:01):
Every engineer wants to make a finely-tuned engine that doesn't rattle, and it goes 900 miles an hour. That's what every engineer wants to do. Whether you're working on a car or you're working on a website, it's all the same thing.
Josh Williams (23:11):
That's it. We like solving problems, and it doesn't always have to be in the same box. We like solving problems across the entire organization.
George Jagodzinski (23:20):
So, Josh, well us as a company, and then we get to go into these different clients and help them through different challenges. Do you have a story or two that we can protect the names of the innocent, where maybe we've moved them into a headless commerce area, we've been able to fine tune something that comes top of mind for you?
Josh Williams (23:40):
Absolutely.
(23:41):
When you start adopting these, and some recent engagements I've been part of, you can do so in small steps. You can adopt part of your application at a time, and even keep a lot of it live, and just be able to send very small amounts of traffic, ramp it up, dial it back, and ensure it's working or not, and seeing how it affects similar to an AB test along the way. And that also provides some peace of mind that, "Oh, okay, sweet. We adopted this new platform that everybody said would help everything, and it is actually working."
(24:20):
That's a huge misconception there is, it's all or nothing. In today's day and age. It's never all or nothing. You can pick and choose areas. So say the actual checkout funnel is most important. We don't want to touch that. It works. And a lot of times if the end user has gotten to the point of checkout, they're likely going to complete it because they have their basket. They're already excited about these products. So you could pick and choose areas.
(24:47):
So say we just want to enhance and optimize our product detail pages or our search pages. Start there. Just have those adopt the modern, cutting-edge tech and send to some of the other traffic there, see how it works, see how it improves. And chances are it will, and it's fun to add features to. And in addition, your UX team will be excited because now they can actually start exploring all of these new features and enhancements that previously you had to say, "Sorry, yes, we can do it, but it's going to take a substantial amount of effort."
(25:28):
So starting sneaking in all these new features one at a time, bit by bit, is a possibility. And that's how we've been adopting it in a lot of my new engagements.
Eric Webster (25:38):
I'll throw this one out there, too. I think lots of times, especially with a lot of new technology and new platforms, the one thing I will say is I think it's really helpful to build a concept of how you're going to do something.
(25:50):
So Josh was saying like, "Hey, we're going to rebuild search." Let's use that as for example. And it's very easy for you to go and say, "Here are the 10 tools out there that we could rebuild search with to make it better, faster, whatever have you." On paper, you commit to a plan, you go get the buy-in for the resources you need, and then you just start marching.
(26:11):
I think the part that I would probably say that you don't want to skip is prototyping. It never hurts to build a pretty high-quality prototype that proves the main challenge has been conquered. So if your main challenge is speed, take all the data that you have, move it over to a second platform, and that's your prototype. So focus on not just prototype, as in “it worked,” that the prototype defeated the main problem that you're having with that system. I think that is probably something we've seen happen often to help us solve problems versus, "Hey, we'll just build a plan, and we'll go do it."
(26:47):
And it's tough, too, because a lot of customers don't want to think that, "Hey, you don't have confidence that you're going to be able to do it." It's like, "No, we have confidence that we can do it, but also we also know that our plans are just plans and that we need to change them when we get new information." And I think building a robust prototype is one of those keys.
George Jagodzinski (27:07):
I love that.
(27:08):
And not just prototype, but really setting yourself up a prototype factory. That's your flywheel. Prototype factory, some AB testing, man, you want to get your team excited. Engineers, user experience product people, if they know that they have this factory that they can just spitball ideas, and get it out there, and test it quickly because you're not just going to learn information from that, but information changes as life goes on, as the business evolves and all that, and if you have that factor that you can lean on, that becomes really exciting.
(27:35):
And I wish I could remember which episodes we've talked about this, maybe in the show notes or in the comments, we can do some call-outs, but there's been multiple episodes where we touch upon that aspect of organizations can sometimes be really engineer-driven, or really experience-driven, and I feel like if you're solving problems this way, that goes away, does it? Or is that naive?
Eric Webster (27:56):
Well, you got to be solutions-driven, and it doesn't matter if that solution comes from product or it comes from engineering. And I think the part that we're talking about today is use modern tools. Modern tools help you solve hard problems easier.
(28:09):
20 years ago, we had all the same problems, but we didn't have good tools to solve them. We have better tools today. Use the modern tools. But I think the overall point is that everybody that's on your team that's worth their salt wants to solve problems. You just got to show them the problems that your business actually has and then give them the tools to solve those problems.
Josh Williams (28:27):
That's it. Give them the runway to dive in and explore, just a stretch week, or a stretch couple of weeks, where you find a goal, you find a goal or a problem that the business actually has and tackle it any way. Grab a small little pod team that you've got and just tackle it, do so in whatever way embracing whatever technology you want, and that can become, and oftentimes is, that prototype. And that's it with these modern tools, and with the other will that most developers have, you'd be amazed at the other problems that will actually be solved.
George Jagodzinski (29:07):
Well, this has been a great conversation. We could go on forever, but hearing that from you, Josh, if I put on my CEO hat again, if I knew that the teams are solving things in that way, I'd sleep so well at night versus the, which we've seen many times, the team is just spinning around in circles, miserable, trying to get a monolithic platform to stand on its head, when it never should have tried to do that in the first place, just to end up where they were a year ago, if not worse than what they were a year ago. And so stop being a silly goose. Let's solve the right problems with the right tools and keep team excited as you do it.
(29:42):
Josh, we always like to finish this with the fun question, which is, what's the best advice you've ever received in life or work?
Josh Williams (29:49):
Oh, man. Best advice that I've ever received. Keep learning and stretching and evolve with the industry. That's pretty much what it comes down to is we live in such a rapid, changing world, and our industry is ever-changing, so don't get stuck. Just evolve with it and roll with the punches.
George Jagodzinski (30:11):
I love that. And that staying happy energy, you bring that to our company, very lucky to work with you, Josh, because of just the positive vibes that you bring. Thanks so much.
Josh Williams (30:22):
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
George Jagodzinski (30:25):
Thanks for listening to Evolving Industry. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform, and pretty please drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and smash the bell button for notifications.
(30:38):
If you know someone who's pushing the limits to evolve their business, reach out to the show at evolvingindustry@intevity.com. Reach out to me, George Jagodzinski, on LinkedIn. I love speaking with people getting the hard work done. The business environment's always changing, and you're either keeping up or going extinct.
(30:54):
We'll catch you next time, and until then, keep evolving.