[00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome to this episode of Commerce Today. This is another fun one I'm excited about. There's actually an old Homer Simpson quote from a very early episode of The Simpsons where. Homer says, ah, beer, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems. I actually want to rephrase that slightly for commerce today and say, executive teams, the cause of and solution to all of your replatforming problems? Maybe not all. Maybe I'm beating up on executives a little bit too much, but I've just been thinking about some of the projects that I either I've been involved in or I've heard from other agencies about, or sometimes just at conferences like the, adobe Summit or Shop Talk or the conferences like that the fun stories that we agency owners share and one of the big ones is always, what makes a successful project? Or on the flip side, what makes a failed project? And I've realized that. So often it starts before any contracts are signed and it [00:01:00] starts in the boardroom or with your executive team if you don't have a board.

What do I mean by that? There are three big blind spots that I feel like executives typically have that can really set up projects to fail. And especially if you're talking a big replatforming project, major new front end design, really any of these big endeavors. If it doesn't start right with the executive team, in the very early days.

It's, you're gonna be in for a bad time, but there are basically, like I said, three blind spots. We're gonna jump into the very first one, and that is the why now gap. Sometimes some executives, and I've been guilty of this myself, so don't worry, you're, this is a safe space. You're among friends. Sometimes executives can get distracted by shiny objects.

Sometimes they hear about a cool new technology and really the reason that they want to undertake a project is because they call, saw this cool new thing that they think will solve all of their problems. It's gotten better over the years, but this always really. Seemed to happen back in the [00:02:00] early days of creativity.

Maybe 10, 15 years ago back, the old IRCE conference have clients that would go to IRC. They'd walk the show floor. There's hundreds of vendors there. They hear about all these amazing cool new things. They come back to the office and suddenly at creativity we get this huge list of here's the 15 new things we wanna implement our site.

In the next three months. We say whoa. What? What's happening here? What's going on here? And we realize that there wasn't really a. Business need behind each of those things. It was that there was a cool shiny object. So really you need to know why, and your executive team needs to have a solid why behind the replatforming, the major project, whatever it is that you're you're about to kick off for your e-commerce site.

You need to know why, and that why needs to be just true urgency, like a true business outcome. So obviously the simplest one sometimes is just our old e-commerce platform is being shut down, no longer [00:03:00] supported. Maybe the contract is ending and the renewal terms, the financial terms just aren't that great for your renewal.

Sometimes it's the platform itself just doesn't meet your needs anymore. I see this a lot in the B2B space especially. So a lot of different reasons why you might be considering replatforming. But make sure that starting at the executive level. You really know what that why is and it becomes a north star for the project.

It becomes what you really focus on. And I'm gonna talk actually at the end of the episode about a a nice little hack of how you can make sure you and the rest of your executive team, or if you're managing up your entire executive team stays focused on that. Why and why now? So the next blind spot number two is when you have a scope and you have an outcome.

But you don't have a person that is responsible for and accountable for that outcome. That is a true profit and loss p and l owner. And what I mean by that is [00:04:00] lots of times to get executive teams like to delegate the e-commerce project down to an e-commerce manager. And they just tell them, all right, go have fun.

Go get the new e-commerce site launched. Go get the new front end launch, whatever major project it is, go take care of it. So they wanted to be involved in the decision making process. They wanted to have sign off on, the final decision to go or no go on this project. But beyond that, they basically will push it down to either a subordinate or lots of times a committee of subordinates.

And then all of a sudden what I see happening is every department is adding to the wishlist. Every department is basically weighing in on what they think should happen. You don't have one clear person focusing on what is the cost of this project, what is the scope and budget? And what sort of financial results are we gonna drive from it?

And that is the kind of rigor that honestly you need on a major project, like launching a new e-commerce platform or a new front end or another big [00:05:00] project. So typically what I recommend, there's some people that go so far as saying that. If you're a company where the executives get bonuses, then tie their bonus into the success of this project.

I think sometimes that can drive some other unhealthy behaviors, so maybe don't go that far unless that is your company's culture, then it can make sense. But I do feel like there needs to be one person that already has an existing p and l responsibility that is also responsible for the scope of the website.

And when I say the scope of the website. They get the final say on change requests. They get the final say on items that impact either launch date and timeline, or the scope and budget of the site itself. So you pull that out of the committee, you pull that out of the subordinate level, and you put that at the executive level, and that will make your project so much more successful, and that'll help a lot also.

With the third blind [00:06:00] spot I want to talk about. And this third one is actually two in one. I see companies err on either side of this one, and this is what I like to call kill switch chaos. I. So one of two things happens. Either you have zombie projects where nobody dares to kill them off, where the project is clearly not successful, something's not working right, but it's just easier to just keep throwing, good money after bad and just keep pushing forward on the project even if maybe it no longer meets your requirements, maybe it just no longer is relevant in a changing economy, a changing business climate, but no one wants to kill it off.

Flip side of that though is I have also seen executives especially. That and CFOs, sorry. This is, so oftentimes you where the very first hiccup, they're like, alright, killing the project, it's done, it's over, not gonna do it. And that is so disruptive for e-commerce operations and for an e-commerce project.

[00:07:00] I feel like you have to really find that balance and ride the middle here between, you have to know when it's time to kill a project off. But you also have to know whenever it's time to keep going. And so to help with that not only again does it need to be a member of the executive team that has final say on this, ideally someone who has some type of responsibility for the profit and loss of your e-commerce operations.

And you actually need to define in advance what does success look like. What will cause you to stop, pause, or completely end the project. And how often are you going to review those items? And I'll actually talk a little bit at the end of the episode about a simple way to bundle all of that up and keep everyone on the project focused on it.

But basically you need to be able to stop, say every 30 days. Review the progress on the project and say, okay, is this still going in the right [00:08:00] direction or do we need to make a change? And lots of times the change doesn't have to be completely in the project. Sometimes it is. Okay. Maybe we bit off more than we could chew.

Maybe our internal team can't quite keep up with what we need to do for this project. Maybe we need to bring in more outside help, or maybe we need to cut the scope and launch with a simpler site and then add on these other items. And so often not setting the scope right. Is what leads to having to make that adjustment 30, 60, 90 days into the project.

And being smart about setting a reasonable scope up front, making sure that, again, like I talked about earlier, you don't want this to be ruled by a committee where everyone is just throwing more and more into the scope. You really want to make sure that your executive team is aligned around the idea of let's design.

Kind of a minimum viable project of what can we launch that will deliver true p and l results. It will meet our goals, but it's not everything we've ever wanted. It is the [00:09:00] most important things to get us where we want to go, but sometimes that's hard to stick to, like I mentioned, and I would recommend, what I call the 90 day pilot playbook, and it doesn't have to be 90 days, although I really like that timeframe. But some projects it should be more like a six month pilot playbook, but especially if you're talking about. Major front end changes and not a full re-platform. Like depending on the scope of the project, 90 days can fit really well.

So 90 day or six month pilot playbook. Pick one specific area, one specific revenue source, one specific brand. Find basically the smallest area of your business that it makes sense to focus the initial efforts of this project on. Then. As an executive team, draft a one page success contract. And this is, doesn't have to be a formal contract.

You don't have to get legal involved, but this is an agreement between the executives that you can then [00:10:00] share with everyone that's working on this e-commerce project to say, okay, here's how we're gonna measure success. Here's what our key performance indicators are. Here is what our budget ceiling is.

Here is the criteria at which we will pause the project. Here's the criteria at which we will completely stop the project. And if you wanna get fancy, even the criteria at which you would consider pivoting the project and who the final owner of the project is, which executive with some type of p and l accountability is going to have.

Their name up on the list for being accountable for this project. Put all of that around this success contract. Share it with the e-commerce project team. I would say even if you're working with an agency or outside vendors, share it with them as well so that everyone is aligned around this. And then review it.

Don't just file this away on your Google Drive or Dropbox or wherever you happen to keep documents. Review it. Maybe not weekly, but at least once a month. Review this, make sure you are sticking with it. [00:11:00] And make sure that if you're starting to veer off course, there's some type of correction that you make to make sure that as an executive team, you are supporting this e-commerce project and you are really aiming it for success.

If you then get to a spot where you're like, wait, we're outside the lines of this success contract of outside the lines of this pilot playbook we've put together, decide, are we gonna pivot? Are we gonna stop the project or. Sometimes you have to admit, Hey, when we first drafted this, we didn't expect, say, sudden extreme tariffs to be implemented overnight.

We actually wanna stay the course. We want to continue because while certain aspects of the project are changing, we think this is still a valuable project to complete. So you got your three blind spots. The why now gap. The scope without a p and l owner and the kill switch, chaos. And. All three of those blind spots that I see from executive teams on e-commerce projects can really be [00:12:00] mitigated through that 90 day pilot playbook.

This will get you to success faster. It will get you to value faster. It's gonna reduce the risk of technical debt because if you can focus down this pilot to a smaller surface area, you're gonna have less opportunities to introduce technical debt. Also, this is a way to. Remove some of the emotions.

Like I see some executives, they're either so emotionally supportive of e-commerce projects. I see others that maybe aren't as emotionally supportive of e-commerce projects. But by putting this all in writing, structuring it this way, you really remove a lot of the emotion from it so that you can do what you should do as an executive and focus on what are the best outcomes for the business.

So that is what success looks like when you follow this. If you would like an example of one of those 90 day pilot playbook. Playbooks or success contracts. Just drop me a DM on LinkedIn. I'm Joshua Warren. I have a creativity gold background [00:13:00] behind my headshot on LinkedIn. So super easy to find me.

My dms are open, so drop me a message there. Ask for the 90 day pilot playbook. I will shoot it right over to you. It's just a one page success contract template and example. Otherwise I also do free e-commerce problem solving sessions. You can find that link also on my LinkedIn profile. And would love to sit down and talk to you for 30 minutes about integration challenges maybe some project charter type challenges, like what we've talked about in this episode or whatever happens to be on your mind and on your project list.

Thanks, and I hope y'all have a great day, and I'll see you next week for another episode of Commerce Today.