The Journey to Composable Commerce: Unlocking Success Through Incremental Development

In the ever-evolving world of ecommerce, businesses face the challenge of transforming outdated platforms to meet the demands of modern consumers. A path to composable commerce offers a solution—a modular approach that empowers businesses to build agile and flexible ecommerce ecosystems. However, attempting a full big bang platform replacement project can be high risk, complex and slow to deliver time to value. This article delves into the power of an incremental approach and how it successfully enables businesses to navigate a steady incremental transition to composable commerce.

The Power of One Step at a Time

Embracing an incremental approach is vital to successfully achieving a composable commerce transformation.  Rather than pursuing a large-scale, all-encompassing implementation, businesses break down the implementation into manageable increments.  Each step delivers immediate business value while paving the way for subsequent progress.  This incremental approach allows for quicker adjustments, continuous learning, and reduced risks.

1.  A Path to Success by Decomposing the Customer Journey

If you are an architect or a technologist, you might be tempted to define components for an incremental approach based solely on the technical systems in the stack. Unfortunately, this can often lead to a more waterfall approach to deal with the dependencies of these technologies across many different touch points on a customer journey.

An alternate method to start an incremental approach for a composable commerce implementation is to divide the customer journey into meaningful components. These consist of landing pages, home pages, category pages, brand pages, product details pages, and functional areas like search, basket, checkout, orders, and account management. To identify these components, I've described a series of high-level steps that involve defining the customer journey and refining it through an iterative process. Below is a brief overview of this process:

• Map the High-Level Customer Journey: Create a high-level customer journey map that illustrates the stages a customer typically goes through, from initial awareness, consideration and decision stages to post-purchase engagement.  For each stage, map how different customer personas interact within your customer journey to help you understand how and where you engage with your customers. This map visually represents the overall journey, and transitions between stages and forms the foundation for the next steps in the process.
• Define Phases: Break down the customer journey stages into smaller, phases.  Each phase should represent a specific subset of the customer journey, focusing on a particular aspect.  For example, you could have phases dedicated to product discovery and product selection, checkout and payment, post-purchase engagement, and customer support.   You can map these phases to underlying systems, business activities and business goals
• Break Phases into Smaller Components: Within each phase, further break down the journey into smaller components or tasks.  These components should represent specific functionality, features, or interactions within the respective phase.  For example, product discovery could include search, Product and landing pages.  Breaking it down this way helps you focus on tackling specific challenges and will allow you to measure the impact of each component as you start to build out your composable platform.

The Advantages of Incrementally Developing Customer Journey Components

The approach of businesses dissecting the customer journey into manageable components offers several benefits:

1. Incremental Progress: Breaking down the customer journey allows businesses to tackle smaller, achievable goals in each iteration.  Instead of attempting a massive overhaul all at once, the incremental approach focuses on delivering immediate business value at each stage.  
2. Early Value Delivery: Incremental development enables the delivery of tangible value to end-users early in the project.  Each increment provides a functional and usable piece of software that can be deployed and utilized, offering immediate benefits to stakeholders.  This early value delivery allows for faster return on investment and increased user satisfaction.
3. Improved Time to Market: By delivering functional software increments at regular intervals, incremental development allows for faster time to market.  Instead of waiting for the entire project to be completed, valuable features and functionalities can be deployed earlier, providing businesses with a competitive advantage and the ability to respond swiftly to market demands.
4. Reduced Risks: When transforming an entire customer journey at once, there is a higher chance of encountering unforeseen issues, bottlenecks, or disruptions.  By tackling smaller components, businesses can identify and mitigate risks more effectively.  They can thoroughly test, validate, and refine each piece before moving on to the next.  This iterative approach allows for the early detection of challenges and provides opportunities for adjustments and improvements before the transformation scales.
5. Agility and Adaptability: The incremental approach enhances agility by enabling businesses to respond quickly to changes, insights, and emerging market trends.  As each component of the customer journey is addressed individually, you can adapt their strategies, technologies, and processes based on real-time feedback and evolving customer needs.  This flexibility allows for faster iterations, quicker course corrections, and the ability to seize new opportunities as they arise.
6. Focus and Resource Allocation: Businesses can allocate resources more efficiently by breaking down the customer journey.  Specialized squads can be assigned to specific components, ensuring dedicated expertise and attention to each area.  This focused approach allows for deep exploration, innovation, and problem-solving within the given scope.  It also prevents resource bottlenecks and ensures efficient progress across the transformation journey.
7. User-Centric Optimization: Breaking down the customer journey lets businesses prioritize user-centric optimization.  By addressing smaller components individually, you can gain deeper insights into user behaviour, preferences, and pain points.  This knowledge can be used to iterate and fine-tune the experience, resulting in an improved and more personalized journey for customers.  The incremental approach ensures that customer-centric enhancements are implemented continuously throughout the transformation.
8. Continuous Feedback and Improvement: Incremental development encourages regular feedback from stakeholders and end-users throughout development.  This feedback loop enables the team to make necessary adjustments, improvements, and refinements in subsequent increments, ensuring that the final product aligns closely with user expectations and requirements.
9. Flexibility and Adaptability: Incremental development offers greater flexibility and adaptability in responding to changing requirements, market conditions, or business needs.  As each increment is completed, the team can reassess and adjust the project's direction or priorities, accommodating new insights or changing priorities without disrupting the entire development process.

2. Form Multi-Disciplinary Product Teams

I recommend forming fully cross-functional product squads.  A product team or squad will focus on a specific area of the ecommerce journey and plays a crucial role in iteratively transforming that area.  Therefore, they need to have all the technical skills and business expertise they need to understand, develop and deliver those elements.  By narrowing their focus, the squad can delve deep into understanding the intricacies and challenges of that specific area.  This allows them to identify pain points, explore innovative solutions, and implement incremental improvements effectively.

The iterative approach followed by the product team squad enables continuous learning and adaptation.  Teams can break down the development process into manageable increments, working on specific features or enhancements within their designated area.  Through this iterative process, the squad can gather feedback, measure the impact of their changes, and make adjustments accordingly.  The product team squad ensures alignment and shared understanding by closely collaborating with stakeholders.  Regular meetings, workshops, and feedback sessions enable the squad to refine their approach and incorporate valuable insights.  

3. Embarking on the Path of Discovery with The Proof of Concept (PoC)

Before committing to a full-scale implementation, initiate a Proof of Concept (PoC) stage to validate technical approaches and architectural decisions.  This phase is a critical step in gaining a deeper understanding of various options available for the transformation journey towards composable commerce.

During the PoC stage, you can explore different technical approaches and evaluate their suitability for the specific context.  This may involve experimenting with micro apps, which allow for the development of modular and independent components that can be easily integrated into the overall architecture.  Additionally, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) can be tested to assess their potential to deliver fast, responsive, and app-like experiences across different devices.

Front-end frameworks like React, known for their flexibility and scalability, can be explored to determine their compatibility with your requirements.  The PoC stage also provides an opportunity to assess the integration possibilities with vendors like Amplience.

Through the PoC, businesses can test and validate the technical decisions made for the transformation journey.  This includes evaluating the performance, scalability, and compatibility of different approaches, frameworks, and vendor integrations.  It allows you to gather crucial insights, assess the feasibility of various options, and make informed decisions before committing to a full-scale implementation of a selected vendor.

Although a PoC or several PoCs should be used to kick-start the move to composable, a PoC is a valuable tool to use throughout the implementation project.  A product Squad can use PoC to identify potential challenges, uncover hidden custom solutions in the legacy platform, and validate assumptions early on.  The team can gain confidence in their chosen path by conducting experiments and testing specific technical components.

4. Validating and Implementing with an MVP

After the proof-of-concept stage yields positive results, I recommend pinpointing a low-risk area for a Minimal Viable Product (MVP).  This will function as a real-life testing ground, enabling you to confirm assumptions, gauge performance, and gather valuable insights.  The success of this initial implementation will lay the groundwork for your journey towards composability and instil the necessary confidence before expanding into other areas of the customer journey.

To do this, analyze each component to determine its significance, impact on the overall experience, and potential areas for improvement.  Prioritize the components based on factors such as customer pain points, business goals, and strategic importance.  This prioritization will guide the iterative development process, ensuring that the most critical areas are addressed first.

5. Allocate Your Product Squads

When the time comes to decide on the formation and allocation of your product squads, it's important to consider the size of your organizational size, platform complexity, skillsets, cross-functional collaboration, and resource allocation.

If your organization is larger, it may be necessary to have squads dedicated to specific areas. On the other hand, if your organization is smaller, squads may need to cover multiple areas. 

A good approach I advise is starting with one or two squads and gradually expanding as the incremental development on priorities progresses. It’s important to facilitate cross-functional collaboration among the teams to enhance a greater understanding of the customer journey and interdependencies.

Building Momentum and Enhancing Agility

The incremental approach to a composable transformation has many. Each successful iteration builds momentum and confidence within the organization.  As smaller, manageable pieces of the transformation are completed, teams gain a sense of accomplishment and a belief in their ability to tackle the remaining challenges.  

Furthermore, the iterative approach fosters continuous learning and improvement.  With each iteration, teams gather valuable insights, feedback, and data that inform their decisions and actions.  This iterative feedback loop enables you to make informed adjustments, refine your strategies, and optimize your processes.  It allows for identifying inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas for improvement, leading to more effective and efficient outcomes.

Breaking down the transformation into smaller pieces gives you a deeper understanding of the technological landscape.  It allows you to analyze and evaluate each component individually, considering factors such as compatibility, scalability, and performance.  This granular examination of the technology landscape empowers businesses to make informed choices about the tools, platforms, and solutions they implement.

Additionally, the iterative approach cultivates a culture of agility and responsiveness.  By focusing on smaller increments, you can more swiftly adapt to market demands and changing customer preferences.  They have the flexibility to pivot, refine, and optimize their offerings based on real-time feedback and market insights.  This responsiveness is necessary for businesses to stay ahead of the competition, deliver value to customers on time, and seize emerging opportunities.