[00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Commerce today. I am Joshua Warren of the e-Commerce Agency Creatuity, and today we are gonna be talking about org charts and organizational design and e-commerce teams. And if you're still running your e-commerce team like it's 2015, then even before you start a single task where write a single line of code, you are probably losing money and you don't even realize it. So we're gonna jump in and look, and this comes from a lot of great conversations I've had with people in my 30 minute e-commerce problem solving sessions, how you structure and. E-commerce team has been a question that comes up a lot, and even with the new clients that we have been working with here at Creatuity.

So often the question is how can my team best work with your team? And the team design can just have a whole lot to do with that now, I always like to keep things very actionable and relevant to your business. It's in the name of the podcast, even Commerce Today. So it's something that you can apply to your business today.

With that, I also [00:01:00] like to remind y'all that, there's not one size fits all solutions. So in thinking about org charts and organizational design for e-commerce teams, I am really bucketing about 90% of the businesses out there that deal with e-commerce into three different types. The first I call sidecar B2B, this is where the e-commerce team is along for the ride.

And a sidecar B2B might make up or e-commerce ride there might make up. Less than 20%, maybe less than 15% of total revenue. So it's not the main driver of the organization, but it's a growing and important part. Lots of times e-commerce is actually seen in these companies, these sidecars as sales support.

So kind of sales and the sales team comes first. You often have to fight for some of your resources. Working with a number of B2B companies right now that fall into this category where most of their revenue is coming from. Sales reps, from phone orders, things like that. So as we dive in to the [00:02:00] kind of universal design of e-commerce teams, I'm also gonna give some ways to tweak it for sidecar B2B type companies and for the other two types.

And so the second type is, and this is a simple name, omnichannel retailer. I think you probably know what that means, but you have stores and a website, lots of times online can be, 5%, 10%, sometimes online sales, 60%, 70%. It can vary, but really the commonality here is there is always this interplay and this dance between e-commerce and stores and store operations.

Because the things you're doing, if you're driving more traffic to the website, there could be resistance from the stores thinking, Hey, you're taking sales away from us. There can also be frustrations from store managers of, oh, all these ship from store orders or taking up my store associates time, and they're not able to help customers, smart companies that structure this well actually attribute the [00:03:00] revenue and the traffic lift.

From E-commerce? They get store operations and store managers on the side of the e-commerce team. Doesn't always happen though. We actually have talked about a few different companies we've worked with that fall into this bucket. Rural King is probably the biggest example. They have over a hundred stores but also a very large e-commerce presence.

Buy online, pickup in store actually drove foot traffic increases to every single one of their stores. Again, as we talk more about the structure and design of e-commerce teams if you are an omnichannel retailer, listen for my call outs for specific adaptations for that type. Now the last type is pure play.

And when I say pure play, a lot of you're gonna think D to C or, just B2C. But lots of the examples I've been coming across lately are pure play B2B. There are these younger companies that basically set up a 100% e-commerce driven B2B business and are doing great. And this is really interesting, these companies, because [00:04:00] e-commerce is just woven into their DNA, it's woven into their org chart already.

Lots of times these companies don't have a specific director of e-commerce even, because while. The CEO is the director of e-commerce because e-commerce is the business. Definitely worked with a number of distributors, especially that this is how they work. So again, as I walk through the examples and the different ways to structure e-commerce teams just.

Just go ahead and stop now and think, is my company more like this sidecar setup? Are we an omnichannel retailer or are we pure play digital? Or at least which one of these are we most like? Because I will make some call outs and tell you, okay, if you're a sidecar setup, then you may want to tweak this team structure in this way or that way.

Alright, next up, diving right in there is a universal core. Two e-commerce teams in my opinion, and it is a three layer engine, so titles might change. A lot of these roles, I'm actually gonna call out. [00:05:00] I'm name them based on what they will be doing. Chances are you have someone in your company that's already doing this thing, they just may have a different title.

So I break it out into three kind of pods groups, the growth pod. The platform team and the enablement team, every e-commerce company needs to have someone in-house or externally serving on each of these three teams. So what do these teams look like? So your growth pod, this is your revenue.

Factory, this is where your new e-commerce revenue is created. And this is the biggest group that you're gonna have. Again, smaller companies, you might have an agency fill in for some of this. You might have people wearing multiple hats, but you have basically five different roles within the growth pot that you need to have.

So first of all, merchandising leads. Someone needs to be responsible for owning your product assortment that you're selling online. Your pricing, your promotions everything related to. Making sure you are selling the right items [00:06:00] that people actually wanna buy from you. Next up would be user experience, a user experience designer, someone that's gonna make sure that the design of the site is something that is pleasing to your customers, is helping them as they go through the purchase process.

A data analyst. Lots of companies was actually talking to someone just yesterday where their data analysts, their main focus is just cleaning up a lot of historical data that before they had an e-commerce team structure their data got into kind of rough shape. But beyond that, this is also personally would be building out dashboards.

Lots of times they can actually recommend the best AB test for you to run because they can see the trends in your data and they can definitely analyze the results of those AB tests. Then obviously. E-commerce team, especially if you're doing all of this in-house, you're gonna need developers. So I would put a backend developer and a frontend developer that may change based on your platform, but a backend and frontend developer or a full stack developer in your growth pod.

They're [00:07:00] obviously the one that is gonna actually write the code, do the deployments, all that fun stuff. Finally, and the role that I see missing the most and is the best way to derail an e-commerce project and to really get things. Off on a bad path if you don't have this role, is a product owner. So a senior business voice that is going to set priorities, that's gonna own the actual p and l results.

And that is really the one that's making the decisions about what does the e-commerce product look like from your company. And we're gonna talk a little bit later about how product owners and project managers are two different things. So the biggest mistake I see is people not having a product owner.

The second biggest mistake I see is people making one person, both their product owner and their project manager. Please do not do that, and I'll tell you in a little bit why not to. So that's the growth pod. Next up is the platform team. And I will say before we dive into the platform team if you're [00:08:00] on a fully managed platform, if you're running on something like Adobe Commerce Cloud, Shopify, BigCommerce these platform as a service or software as a service setups.

You may not need a platform team you may not need this function at all, or this may be a function that an agency plus that platform can fill in for you. So before I name off these two roles realize you may not need this depending on your platform. So first up is a systems architect. So lots of times I see this coming from someone in IT that will serve in this role because they are gonna help choose the tech stack.

They're gonna ensure that. Your servers and your e-commerce software remains stable. They're responsible for the overall architecture, basically the design of the tech stack. Alongside that person, you would need a DevOps engineer. So they're gonna automate some of your deployments, some of your infrastructure, and take some responsibility for some of that infrastructure.

Keeping things running again, lots of times. This will come from your IT department. [00:09:00] You probably already have someone doing this. They just may not have this title or for it team members, you probably have seven different titles that you're doing the work of, and this is just one of them. So at a sidecar size business platform team, this may actually just be like a few hours of an IT staff member's time each week, or as I mentioned, this might come from people at an agency or at your platform.

Finally, the. Enablement team. They make the other teams smarter and more successful. So three roles here. An analytics specialist, so someone that really owns the attribution. Attribution can be so hard. I mentioned earlier, especially if you are an omnichannel retailer, you can have some fights between your e-commerce team and your sale or your store teams on who really owns this revenue.

I see that as well at sidecar B2B setups where. The sales team will say that was a sales order. I once had a [00:10:00] conversation with that customer. Therefore, I think all their orders should be attributed to me. Versus an e-commerce team that might say hey, all of their reorders are coming from a quick reorder functionality on the website that should be attributed to the e-commerce team.

This is why I would not have someone in the Growth Pod be responsible for deciding how attribution's gonna work. I would keep that on this enablement team with this analytics specialist. Now, I will say. Smaller companies. You may have your data analyst role also fill in for this analytics specialist role.

You may also wanna look at an agency and have them be your independent voice for attribution and for analytics. Second person on your enablement team should be your customer experience coach. So they should document the service standards, review your customer service chats and emails, make sure that you are.

Delivering on the experience you want to deliver on. Again, good chance, this is not a dedicated role at most companies. This could just be your [00:11:00] customer experience manager or customer service manager that fills in this role. But I would absolutely make them part of your e-commerce enablement team.

Let them know the importance of serving in that role and involve them in your projects. Finally, your training coordinator so they roll out new tools and processes again, how to. Great conversation just a few days ago with a company where honestly their biggest need as they move to a new platform is gonna be the training side and the change management side.

So having someone that not only when you're doing a big new platform, but just when you're doing any e-commerce project, they're thinking, okay, how is this gonna change things for our internal teams and what sort of training do they need to have? And even how is this gonna change things for our customers, especially on the B2B side whether you're.

A sidecar B2B setup or a pure play digital B2B. Your customers are probably used to buying from you in a pretty specific way, and they may have some industry specific needs in the purchasing process. So if you're gonna make changes to [00:12:00] that, you're gonna want to provide, you may not wanna call it training but you may want to provide some content to them.

Before and during the rollout of those changes. So that is the team structure. I would recommend having that growth pod, that platform team, that enablement team. And I think we're gonna talk in a little bit about meetings. Everyone's least favorite subject, but I think that, it's really important not only to label these individual roles on the e-commerce team, but to split that team up into those three areas and have those teams really within that team, working with each other, communicating with each other and then really being smart about the cross team communication by doing this, and especially if you're a company like you're an omnichannel retailer.

And maybe e-commerce hasn't been a big priority. You don't have a dedicated director of e-commerce. Maybe you're just now realizing that you need that product owner and someone to serve in that role by structuring it in this way and just using existing, maybe there's some marketing team members. You can pull in some store ops [00:13:00] team members from it, team members, but point out to them when we're working on e-commerce, you are our product owner or you are our e-commerce user experience designer, not.

Just the person in marketing who happens to be good at design, that we're asking some website questions to, 'cause that will shift the way the team works, that will shift the mindset they have as they approach new projects and challenges. And I think that'll make a huge difference. Now I work for and run an agency, so there's always an agency angle here.

And actually I got a great question from someone recently that we started working with that basically said, how can I best work with you? Like, how can I leverage my in-house team, but also. So the agency team and set it up in a way where we're making most efficient usage of our internal resources and of the resources at your agency.

Number one thing have that product owner on your side and have them make them a empowered point of contact for [00:14:00] your agency. And what I mean by that is if we have a question, say we decide we're redesigning the homepage, our goal is to do this redesign to improve. Conversion rate, we have all of our metrics and everything.

We start working on it. Then we realize, wait, there's these two critical decisions we still need to make. If our team at Creatuity then goes to a project manager on your side and asks that question and they say, oh no, I actually, I need to go talk to the designer. Oh, the designer needs to go ask our CTOA question.

Oh, the CTO actually needs to run this by the CEO. And then maybe the CEO themselves has a question. So then they ask the question of the CTO and it just, it's a game of telephone back and forth. It takes forever. It slows the project down. Instead, if there's a product owner for e-commerce on your side, that when your agency says, should we do X or should we do Y, which do you prefer?

They can look at it and say, we do X. And just make the [00:15:00] decision that will make your project so much faster, less expensive. You'll get to market faster, you'll get better results. Also realize. Is that the agency can provide some of the roles from this team if you need it, if you don't already have it in house.

So definitely the software development piece, the UX piece, lots of times the project manager may sit within the agency instead of within your company. And if you're self-hosting and you don't have 24 7 coverage, or your IT team doesn't want to provide 24 7 DevOps coverage, then lots of agencies can also fill in that role.

Now I mentioned earlier, project manager versus product owner. People like to combine those two, do not combine those two. A project manager is 100%. Thinking about timeline and resources, how do we get, how do we meet the commitments we've made on how long it's gonna take us to get this new feature?

Live product owner needs to decide what is the value of this new [00:16:00] feature? How important is this new feature? What does this new feature need to consider? System of, and those are two very different roles, and sometimes they're in conflict with one another. So if you try to make one person do both, then for instance when there's a timeline challenge, they may say let's just cut this feature in half.

But if they're thinking from a true product owner perspective, they may realize if we cut this feature in half, we're not actually gonna get a positive ROI on it. We should just not even do this feature. So that's why you want to keep those two roles separate. I would recommend that you have a one page decision charter that lists who can approve copy.

Creative code dollars and share it on day one with your team. A few quick adaptations. So if you are a sidecar B2B type business, your growth pod you may only need the product owner, the merchandising lead, and the UX designer. Your agency can provide the [00:17:00] development piece and lots of times the product owner also in those smaller setups is your data.

Analyst or you have your agency provide some of the data analyst work omnichannel companies, omnichannel retailers. You may actually wanna have two growth pods. You may wanna have a growth pod that is focused on the pure digital experience. So those customers that aren't located anywhere near your stores and are only gonna buy online from you.

And another growth pod that is focused on the omnichannel in store experience, that is really led by. A store team from people that come from your store ops sides they could still sync up, share a common backlog, maybe meet up every Monday to stay in sync. But blending those two perspectives through two different growth bots can be really helpful.

Enablement obviously is gonna need to be a little bit bigger just because you're gonna need in-store training and more customer experience coaching to help them understand the omnichannel customer service expectations. Pure play company. Companies you might actually have multiple [00:18:00] growth pods especially if you're a larger B2B brand and you have a division that is selling to very large enterprises versus a division that is selling to entrepreneurs.

Those growth pods may actually look a little bit different and it may be worthwhile to separate those two out. You might have I see really on the pure play side is the most times that I see people that really want to try these platforms where they're hosting it themselves. They're hosting an on-premise, they need a full in-house platform squad in that case.

A few quick edge cases, if you're thinking my company isn't really a sidecar setups on an omnichannel setup. It's not a pure place setup. A few quick edge cases I'll cover if you're a like private equity backed portfolio of brands, then I would treat each brand as its own sidecar or pure place setup, and I would share a platform.

Form team amongst the brands just to save time and money. But then you're gonna have separate [00:19:00] growth pods and separate enablement teams per brand. If you're very marketplace heavy, if majority of your sales are coming through marketplaces look at the pure place setup, but add a marketplace specialist into your growth pod.

If you're subscription driven, if you're selling consumables and majority of your revenue's coming from auto ship subscription type services, you can do that pretty much with a pure play setup, but you really need to focus on churn metrics with your analyst and make sure they're really keeping those metrics top of mind for all of the teams.

If you're a manufacturer that is going direct, that all B two B2C set up that is so popular you really. Start as a sidecar setup and then start to evolve into either omnichannel or pure play as the e-commerce revenue grows. So that's how to structure the teams real quick. I would recommend setting up a.

Our a CI RACI set up into these [00:20:00] teams, raci, if you're not familiar with it, means you actually call out who's responsible, who's accountable, who's consulted, who's informed, so who's gonna do the task that's responsible. Who's accountable for the results? Who's gonna be answerable for the results?

Can only be one person. So you might have multiple people responsible, but only one accountable. Who's gonna be consulted on the task? So who it gives input before the work is done, and who's gonna be informed, who's gonna be kept in the loop on the decision. So an example of this, if you're doing a checkout redesign your product owner.

Is the person that should be accountable for that. Your software developer or developers could be responsible. You might want to consult your systems architect, your DevOps engineer, and then inform your enablement team, your training coordinator, and your customer experience coach. I would recommend you sit down with your team and you map out your pod and your teams, and then actually list their tasks.

And just write up a [00:21:00] letter RACI and make sure that the biggest thing is you only have one person accountable for each task. As you then solve that and make sure that's the case, you're gonna see a lot less finger pointing. One other quick thing you can do is actually do a handoff audit. So map out your org chart.

Map out these teams and how your growth pod's gonna work, how your platform team's gonna work, how your enablement team's gonna work, and then draw it out and draw out handoffs, draw lines. And I call this the rule of three. You only want to have at most three handoffs required. If you do more than three on anything, you're losing money, something's gonna get dropped, and your efficiency's gonna drop for sure.

Because every hand. It adds delays, it adds knowledge loss. It could be a place to add bugs. So for instance sidecar company, you might wanna look and say, okay, our merchandising lead has an idea for a change [00:22:00] that needs to be made. They can go to the product owner. The product owner approves it, and then the agency developer implements it.

You have basically two handoffs there. You're good. But let's say you are a bigger pure play company and. You don't have this set up of these pods and these teams yet. And so someone in marketing goes to the product owner with an idea. They then have to go to an IT manager to get it approved. The IT manager then talks to the external developer.

External developer, then talks to your qa, that goes back to your merchandising lead and then goes back to your IT team, and then it gets approved, or then it gets implemented. That's way too many handoffs. So you gotta simplify that with this team structure. So I. Hope this helps. Hope this helps you see how you can take even your existing employees and overlay this structure into your organization.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn as Joshua Warren. There's a Cree Tweety Gold [00:23:00] background behind my head because there's a lot of Joshua Warrens on LinkedIn. You can schedule one of those free 30 minute consultations with me, and I would be more than happy to walk you through how to best structure your e-commerce team.

Also, stay tuned. Throughout the summer this year, I am putting the final touches on a new book, the E-Commerce Growth Playbook. It's a field guide for scaling mid-market brands. It's gonna cover organization setup and org charts and a lot of other things that. I have found that people need to be thinking about in order to grow their e-commerce revenue.

So stay tuned for that and for the next episode at Commerce Today, and hope you're having a great day. Thanks.