Omnichannel

Leveraging the benefits of headless commerce to stay relevant

Drew Lau, VP of product at Mobify, explains why 'relevance' as a brand is ultimately all about staying in the sphere of awareness of consumers, and that there's no better starting point a headless commerce foundation.

Photo by istock.com

September 29, 2020 by Drew Lau — VP Product, Mobify

For professional career development, we're taught we need to upskill, retrain, reinvent and constantly push our personal brand. Stay relevant in skills or be relegated to stagnation as other, younger or more savvy peers pass us by.

For some artists, it's constant reinvention every several years (or decades). Think Dylan trading in his acoustic for electric power chords, Dicaprio going from boyhood poster heartthrob to award-winning drama actor, or Madonna doing what Madonna does, sprinkled with the right mix of controversy and free publicity.

But how does a brand, company or retailer stay relevant to consumers?

Hopefully it's not the epic artist reinvention cycle every 5-10 years, as that sounds suspiciously like the endless cycle of replatforms and rebuilds. For brands, relevance is easiest to achieve with constant iteration and customer-centricity.

Agile as a precursor

One of my recent conversations with a customer focused on the similarities of organizations adopting agile and organizations adopting headless. Neither are really about the technology and tools (JIRA, Trello, etc) or process (SCRUM, Kanban, etc), but about the culture and what it enables for teams.

I advocate reviewing the Agile Manifesto and 12 principles every so often, as a reminder that the goal of agile is to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, customer collaboration over contracts, and responding to change over a strict plan. Agile is meant to satisfy the customer early, welcome change, encourage developers and business to work together frequently, and empower self-organized teams.

Headless is similar in that it's a cultural and organization preference that puts power in the hands of smaller, empowered teams to focus on the customer by shipping more often, readjusting more frequently, and collaborating more extensively by having clearer separation of responsibilities between experiences and capabilities. An agile mentality is a game changer in staying relevant to shoppers, and headless is a continuation of that mentality that allows teams to adjust their approach and areas of responsibilities.

Outside-in decision making

With digital and SaaS providing retailers superpowers in regards to staying constantly connected to consumers and data, we see the rise of customer/human-centric trends that enable outside-in decision making. One such trend is design thinking, where empathy, ideation, and experimentation and testing are key to making decisions based on customer needs and wants. This shifts away from the longer learning cycles from previous inside-out paradigms and is key to staying relevant.

So what does headless commerce have to do with outside-in decision making? Well a key piece of the puzzle is empowering teams to test, experiment, and implement what works quickly — and that's where headless commerce comes in. Let me be clear, headless commerce is an enabler, but it won't be the end-all solution. Even if you were leveraging a headless commerce architecture, you still need the right leaders, team structure, diligence and process for tackling large questions around strategy and business ideas. For that, I'd recommend thinking about how you could apply manuals like Testing Business Ideas to your organization. But if that up-front, experiment-led, quick iteration paradigm doesn't scare you, then headless commerce is a great enabler for relevance.

Headless commerce as an enabler

Headless commerce reduces the dependency of experiences on back-end systems, letting teams closer to the consumer iterate and experiment much faster on the front-end, collecting more data and emphasizing more with the end user.

This modular, best-of-breed approach allows you to not only mix and match the front-end with any back-end, but also any relevant services that best serve your users. Search isn't hampering your ability to stay relevant? Swap it out for another API-first SaaS product.

Shoppers shifting over to social shopping or marketplaces? Take advantage of your new APIs that drive headless commerce to experiment with alternative channels, and base decisions quickly on qualitative and quantitative data points collected early.

Headless commerce drives the ability to iterate, ideate and experiment much quicker by giving teams more options in exploring what are the right problems to solve and ideas to explore.

Relevance is ultimately all about staying in the sphere of awareness of consumers, and there's no better starting point than moving to a headless commerce foundation.

Drew Lau is VP of Pproduct at Mobify.