Tackling the Silent Margin Killer: A Leader's Guide to Tech Debt - Episode 138 of Commerce Today
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Joshua: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of Commerce Today. This is the next one in a series pulling straight from my new book, the E-Commerce Growth Playbook. And we are gonna talk about tech debt. So chapter 3.1 actually dives into tech debt. Can't cover everything from the chapter. The audiobook version for that chapter is about.

Hour and a half long. So not gonna make an hour and a half long podcast, but I do want to talk some about what you can learn about solving your tech debt woes through that chapter of the E-Commerce Growth Playbook. And like all the chapters, I started out with a story a. Real life story where some of the names may have been changed to protect the not so innocent.

But in this case, it was actually about a company that reached out on Black Friday because their biggest promotion of the year wasn't working. Promo codes were failing at checkout. Revenue was just in a free fall. And as we dug into it for them, we [00:01:00] discovered there was a quote, temporary piece of code written years ago by their previous agency that they knew was a patch fix, a less than ideal solution, and they would fix it later and later, never came around.

And that is tech debt. And that is the silent killer of your margin. So technical debt is the hidden cost of shortcuts. It's not just bugs. It's slow, fragile code, it's outdated systems. It's all those little things in your code base that make every improvement a painful effort. And this isn't just a coder problem, a developer problem, an IT problem, it is a business problem.

It is a black hole in your p and l. So the latest estimate shows that tech debt costs us businesses and the US economy about $1.5 trillion a year. So it's an unseen force that can make you slow, fragile, and fall behind your competitors. And honestly, [00:02:00] so often there's these wonderful debates on LinkedIn, but, oh, this platform's terrible.

That platform's terrible. This platform just costs so much to maintain and typically pretty much every statement out there where someone says all of blank is blank. It's not true. It's very contextual. It's very situational. When I hear people complaining about a specific platform being slow or expensive, or having all these problems, when I dig into it, typically I find that, oh.

You had an experience with a merchant that had a very high level of technical debt on that platform. Maybe they went with a super cheap partner to implement it that didn't quite know what they were doing. Maybe they had a super low budget or a super tight timeline, and that caused a lot of tech debt to accumulate, but for whatever reason, their implementation at a lot of technical debt.

And if you, especially if you don't address that technical debt, yes, your site's gonna be slow. It's gonna have a high total cost of ownership. You're not gonna have a good ROI. That's why you'll see these cases [00:03:00] where there's plenty of people happy and excited about a given platform and what it's doing for them.

And that exact same platform is being badmouthed by people that had a bad experience. It has nothing to do with the platform and everything to do with the implementation and the amount of technical debt that accumulated around that implementation, but. Stepping off of my soapbox there for a minute in chapter 3.1 of the book I actually give you a framework to get a handle on tech debt.

And the first thing, and this is always surprises people, that's why I wanna start here, is the most counterintuitive parts of tech debt and of what I teach about technical debt is that trying to be safer by slowing down and deploying less actually makes you more fragile. I call it the deployment paradox.

Teams with high tech debt typically fear deployments, so they slow down their release cadence, they batch changes to quarterly or twice a year, or sadly even once a year, and that basically just kicks the risk down the road and builds a bigger [00:04:00] and bigger stockpile of technical debt. When you finally deploy, it's gonna be this monstrous high stakes release where it's impossible to pinpoint exactly what went wrong if something fails, and then look at the opposite of that.

And please, let's not go to this extreme, but Amazon deploys on average 11 seconds, every 11 seconds. There is a deployment going live. Onto amazon.com. And they do this because small frequent deployments are actually much safer. The businesses that grow fastest are iterating faster than their com competition.

So if your release cycle is measured in months, you are losing. So actually later in the book, when we talk about metrics and scorecards, we talk about how you should be tracking your deployment frequency, and it absolutely should be measured in deployments over weeks, not deployments over months. And I know for a lot of y'all that's a big shock and a big change.

But it is absolutely important to wrap your head around that, to start lowering your technical [00:05:00] debt. Another item from the book is the creativity tech Debt scoring framework. So you can't fix what you can't see when everything feels urgent, when every problem on the site seems urgent and important, nothing gets done.

So we developed a very simple framework to turn that chaos into a clear action plan. So first step is to identify and we outline a number of, things in the book, but basically different tools you can use for both a quantitative scan, so linters, security scans, performance tests, et cetera. But also talking to your team to identify what I call the qualitative platform smells, the parts of your site that everyone avoids touching.

'cause typically there's tech debt there. Once you have that list built out, where you've identified the tech debt, you assess and score for each item. You score at one to five on three different factors. Urgency is it on fire. Business impact? Is it actively costing you revenue or customers and complexity?

How hard is it to fix? And then step three, you plot it out, you prioritize. So you're looking [00:06:00] for quick wins, high urgency, high impact, low complexity. Whenever we see one of those, we get excited because we know we can deliver a really high impact fix very quickly and easily. At the same time, or I guess on the flip side something that's low urgency, low impact, high complexity.

That's the debt that honestly is strategic technical debt. You may actually consciously decide to live with that for now. And by using this framework, and I've used it with a number of clients, it really removes emotion and aligns everyone around their heart. Highest, ROI fixes. So in the book, every chapter, I give you an action plan and a list that you can run through with your specific team, your specific site to implement what you learned in that chapter.

I will share real quick three quick wins to cut technical debt now. So first up, restore native features, revisit areas where you've bypassed your e-commerce platforms, built in capabilities with custom code. I've seen merchants with completely broken [00:07:00] promotions because they forgot the native engine could actually handle 90% of their needs.

Or maybe lots of times the developer that built their site didn't know that the native engine could handle 90% of their needs. Sometimes even it's that the developer was scared to go to the merchant and say, Hey. How about for that last 10%? You change your promotion slightly so that a hundred percent of the native features cover your promotion needs so that all your promotions can be provided by native functionality.

Using native features is cheaper to maintain, it's more stable and it just eliminates that as a source of technical data. Next action is to remove unused extensions or plugins or whatever your platform calls these. Lots of times your site will be dragging around dead weight from old modules or plugins, and every extension is a potential failure point.

A lot of those extensions are adding JavaScript code that is slowing down your site. I actually had one client that just decided, Hey, let's remove 20% of the [00:08:00] plugins that we have. Let's just make it a point that we have to go through. Eliminate 20% of them. They immediately saw performance improvements that led to conversion rate and revenue improvements.

And then finally upgrade whatever runtime system you're running on. So this is just for those of you that are still in that brave world of self-hosting your e-commerce platform. But if you're running on an outdated PHP version, an outdated node JS version, not only is that a security issue, lots of times you can see a 20 to 30% performance improvement just by upgrading to a new version of your runtime.

Lots of times that's something that clients just don't even think about, but then absolutely kick themselves for not doing sooner. So tech debt, lots of times when you were stuck in that, my platform's expensive, it's hard to maintain, it's slow world because you have a lot of tech debt. It feels like you can't escape.

It feels like you're stuck and you just, you either have to throw it all away and re-platform, or I've actually seen people. Go find a new job at a different merchant to escape tech debt. But [00:09:00] it doesn't have to be that way. You absolutely can start paying down that tech debt today using the tools that I have in the book as well as the things I've shared on the podcast today.

The full scoring framework, including a downloadable worksheet, is actually available to anybody that buys a copy of the book. By the book, check out the link to get those items. And if you are struggling with tech debt, if you want someone to come in and just give you an independent third party overview of where the tech debt might be on your site, please find me on LinkedIn.

My name is Joshua Warren. I have a creativity gold background behind my headshot. You can actually book a free 30 minute session with me there on my LinkedIn profile, and I would love to talk to you about tech debt or whatever challenges you're having in e-commerce and of course have to mention. So please go by the E-Commerce Growth Playbook.

It's available on Amazon, audible and in bookstores. And I would love it if you would leave a review on Amazon as well as send me your feedback, and I hope to talk to you [00:10:00] again next week for the next episode of Commerce Today. Thanks.