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To build it or to maintain it. That is the question. It’s a classic question in organizational design. The answer of course is you have to do both. I’m not talking about the decision of a product nearing the end of its life cycle where you decide between adding additional features or putting it in maintenance mode. Rather, this is about allocation of people and teams within an eCommerce organization to maintenance or operational activities versus allocation to projects.
I’ve seen terms like “run the business”, “keep the lights on”, and “operations”. Those terms refer to activities that an organization does to maintain service to existing customers or to maintain …Continue reading >>
The work of eCommerce deployments doesn’t end with go-live sign-off. If you work with eCommerce platforms then you know the happiness of after go-live deployments. The actual events of go-live deployments can be an adventure when unplanned events ‘happen’. But the work doesn’t end with the final sign-off and completion of the deployment plan.
There are a series of tasks after deployment. One important step is to gather information from listening posts such as voice of customer collection areas. The success of the deployment is really based on how the customers use the system. Unwritten and unspoken voice of customer responses are visible by monitoring the key metrics of the …Continue reading >>
Solution owners have the responsibility of performing a competitive analysis for an eCommerce team. It’s the process of knowing exactly how your site compares to the competition. We define if we are ahead, behind, or on par with key features that the industry and customers require. I’ve seen projects justified in the name of competitive alignment and at a larger scale entire strategies formulated in order to copy the competition.
But who says the competition is right? Are they right because they are your competitor? If a competitor has an eCommerce site with a certain feature does that mean that my site must have it also? The answer is maybe. …Continue reading >>
An important role in an eCommerce operation is responsibility for solutions ownership and the results delivered to senior management and other stakeholders. It’s a senior role that focuses on the macro level results that define the success and viability of the eCommerce team. In addition to the traditional financial and market metrics, the solutions owner must deliver customer focused results. It’s the customer focus that provides the building blocks for the traditional results and helps to set an eCommerce team apart from it’s competitors.
Traditional financial results
A solutions owner is responsible for profitable results with positive contribution margins. The contribution margin of a product is defined as the revenue …Continue reading >>
Statistically speaking, the posts I’ve written about the organizational aspects of an eCommerce operation get more views on the Merchant Stand than any other posts. It’s telling me that people are interested in ideas for how they can structure an eCommerce team and what areas of responsibility they should cover. I think the greater interest is that people are looking for ideas and ways that their teams can operate more efficiently to be more agile. I plan to explore more thoughts around organizational layout in an eCommerce operation in future posts. To help with that, and to invite others in the community to discuss this with me, I’ve captured my …Continue reading >>
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