Using Technology With Purpose in a Post-Hype World with Jim Tattersall and Andy Jackson

“People sleepwalk without intent.”

That’s how Jim Tattersall, Founder & CTO at Rotate°, describes one of the most common causes of failed commerce transformations.

In the latest episode of The FODcast, Jim and Andy Jackson (Rotate’s Chief Creative Officer) unpack why brands often reach for tools, platforms and architectures before they’ve properly defined the problem they’re trying to solve.

They discuss:

• How hype cycles push teams into reactive decisions
• Why over-reliance on third-party tools creeps in unnoticed
• The risk of building teams around technology rather than outcomes
• Why intent matters more than architecture

The message is measured but clear: progress comes from clarity, not momentum.
 
 This really was a great 3-way conversation with our Director of Client Engagement, James…and really frames some of the background and points raised in Rotate’s recent Tech Report.

#DigitalCommerce #TechnologyStrategy #Leadership #FODcast
 

Simply Commerce is the leading supplier of talent into digital commerce across technology, digital marketing, product, sales, and leadership.

Find our more about our approach and our services within digital commerce recruitment here: https://simply-commerce.co.uk/

Transcript

Meet Rotate And Their Clients

Speaker 1 1:13

Hey James, thanks very much for having us.

Speaker 3 1:16

I'm Jim. I'm CTO and founder of Rotate. As you say, we're a kind of composable commerce, e-commerce-based uh agency. We kind of um, yeah, we've been going for 13 years and uh yeah, proud to work with um some amazing clients, uh Rafael Wilde, uh Edgar and Cooper recently, uh Track Smith, um, Jamie Oliver and many more. Um, so yes, uh I've been an engineer since started getting to code in the late 90s, so I'm really old.

Speaker 1 1:48

But uh yeah.

Speaker 1:51

Hey James, yeah, Andy here. Um yeah, CCO, that's creative, not commercial uh officer. Um yeah, pleased to be here. Yeah, rotate or a lean by design, sort of 30 uh experts, everyone's done their 10,000 hours uh holistic offering. Everyone's a strategist, a designer, an engineer. Um everyone's uh yeah, senior.

Why Run An Industry Report

Speaker 1 2:19

Yeah, that's that's us in a nutshell. Sure, I can take this one.

Speaker 3:04

So, yeah, as you mentioned, um we did an industry-wide report with Ingrid and Shopify, um, and it was aimed at um tech leaders, so CTOs, um tech directors, heads of e-com, founders, general C-suite, people that were the decision makers in their e-commerce offering of their businesses. Um there's lots of uh, I think it's fair to say lots of noise uh out there in the landscape. So what we wanted to do was really just speak to the people that are on the front line um doing the work, people that saw the day-to-day challenges rather than you know, maybe LinkedIn can be a bit of an echo chamber sometimes. Uh maybe that's maybe the algorithms got me, um, but it feels like that sometimes. So we wanted to get out there and um issue uh AI and just speak to people and get some some proper data. Um, so yeah, we're we're sort of calling it uh the now next later of e-commerce. Um spoke to about 40 brands, got involved. Um hoping to do it again uh this year, uh, do it again and and scale it further, get even more data and richer data, um more quantitative and qualitative actually. So just expand the the output. Um yeah, it's been a mix of uh large enterprise brands, um, such as curries, um to emerging brands across the board of um categories, so Pangaya, Club L from like Fashion, um, from home, people like DroolArt uh and Big Green Egg, who's a plant of ours. A handful were already on our roster. Um, I think the average revenue was 20 to 50 mil across the board. Um, as I say, yeah, lots of categories, sectors, fashion apparel, home and living, sports, uh, health and beauty, um consumer electronics.

Speaker 1 6:13

Yeah, yeah, cool.

Performance, Stability And Speed Priorities

Speaker 3 6:15

Yeah, I think what's amazing actually, you know, Andy was talking about like the breadth of uh different kind of brands that kind of like uh filled it out. And what's great is obviously we have the you know our own clients that kind of constantly reaffirm certain kind of like thematic ideas, but when you kind of push it out to a kind of a broad kind of um, you know, a fairly diverse kind of like mix of brands, as Andy said, like brands doing hundreds of millions in D2C to brands doing, you know, maybe 10 million or below, right, in uh in D2C revenue. And then you kind of look at to the problems, you know, are pretty pretty similar. So a big one that kind of um came out, I suppose it was around uh, you know, well, there's like integrations, performance, like personalization was obviously a big one, which I think obviously with AI is just getting pushed harder and harder. Um and then you know, in terms of like the actual front end or user experience, I think what I love about this is actually some of these are just timeless. In the age of like, you know, AI kind of evolution opportunities, actually, some of these kind of more fundamental basics uh, you know, are still the things that kind of keep these people up at night. So, you know, when we looked at their obviously um 40% of of the of the cohort that we kind of like spoke to, you know, put speed and performance uh in their top kind of three kind of priority. I mean, this is always you know those kind of stats that you see forever, right, about how speed is a competitive advantage and obviously the impact that has in terms of conversion. Um so it's kind of no surprise, but also nice that you know, amongst, you know, like we talked, the LinkedIn noise that brands are actually kind of seeing the more kind of fundamentals that actually can't be kind of uh, you know, can't be avoided, right? And they're that that kind of that you know important. And I think what's nice is you know, amongst it all that came through that a maturity, even when the smaller brands where they know that speed isn't just um a nicer have kind of uh, you know, our site should feel fast where they understand the kind of commercial impact of that and how it's a competitive advantage and it's a brand validator, right? Like it builds confidence um for your audience when the site feels kind of uh fast. Um and also just the idea obviously this isn't a one, you know, once once the thing that you do once, right? You kind of it's something you continually work at, a bit like a lot of these things, you know. I said um elevated experience, like you know, these are things that are constantly kind of iterated on, you know, the grass is never you always have to kind of cut cut that grass, right? Um so yes, um, I suppose, yeah, performance was obviously uh a kind of big one, um, along with things like you know, stability and scale. I said all those kind of like fundamentals, which was kind of really kind of uh good to see. I suppose what's kind of potentially not surprising also is that things like reducing complexity um also kind of came in a lot along with like government uh governance and empowerment and improving velocity. And I think to be honest, last year, James, when you mentioned the beginning, right, about how you know the taps coming coming back on, and you know, and actually this year being a year of um, you know, quite a lot of um instability, right, in terms of macroeconomics. And I think what that kind of resulted in is quite a lot of introspection for a lot of brands, um, kind of looking at how can we reduce complexity, how can we make sure that we can kind of move uh faster. There was a big piece about improving velocity in the um, you know, in the uh report. And you know, governments and empower governance and empowerment, how do we make sure that our teams, you know, feel empowered and move quickly? Um and I think there was that much more scrutiny when things were kind of uh when things were that kind of much you know harder. But regardless of the scale of the business, you know, to say like under 10 million or over like 150 million, 200 million, you know, in terms of uh DTC revenue, like those things such as reducing complexity, improving performance, governance and empowerment of teams, and improving velocity in terms of how quickly they can actually bring features to life, were were definitely kind of across across the board in terms of things that came through in the report.

Speaker 1 10:38

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 10:39

As as a CCO, it was sort of music to my ears, really, to uh see that brands still care about that elevators experience. Even like the the crowd we were talking to, right? It was fairly technical for some of the roles. And they and they still acknowledge that that's that's fundamental to the to the business. And I think you know, with AI and the homogenization of of e-comm, everything just becoming the same, um, that's only going to become more important in the year and years ahead, um, just to stand out.

Speaker 1 11:48

Okay, yes, so uh Yeah, look at this.

Speaker 11:54

This is a happy place, yeah.

Reducing Complexity And Increasing Velocity

Speaker 3 11:56

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Um yes, obviously, and I think this is like you're saying, um unfortunately, you know, in the LinkedIn kind of like sphere or whatever, this kind of everything is a binary thing, right? It's either it's either amazing or it's terrible. So I think you know, if you go into the real, and this is great again, like it's really insightful for us, right? Um to kind of see that kind of like survey and report data. Um I'd say actually, yeah, when you you know, if you get the chance to download it at the end, there's um the raw data there as well, which is is really great for you to kind of draw some of your own conclusions rather than the stuff that we've just set up. Yeah, it's the real trade-offs being monolithing composable, and it comes back to the previous point, right? About how there was that much more introspection this year, that much more kind of like, you know, does this really make sense? I think that's to be honest, I know it's hard, and I know a lot of brands and agencies would have gone through a lot of pain this year because it wasn't, you know, it's not been the easiest of um of years for lots of reasons, especially. I mean, that's not important to say, you know, tariffs, but but so it's but it's caused that kind of introspection and really kind of questioning, does this make sense? And to be honest, I think that's a great place to be, right? Um, you know, I wish the cons you know, circumstances which forced that weren't there, but kind of, and I think that's how we've always felt, right? You know, ultimately there always has to be a business case. And it's never the case that a monolithic is right, a monolithic architecture is right, or a composable architecture is right, or you know, you can argue this about so many different kinds of aspects of like technology, and ultimately you kind of go, well, what's important as a brand, right? It's never a clear like yes or no. It's like, well, what are you trying to achieve? What does that look like? And actually, how can technology kind of facilitate that? And sometimes you need to kind of go into a composable architecture to kind of have that velocity, and sometimes you don't, and you're much better off being in like a monolithic kind of architecture. And as I said, like it's just not a binary thing. And I think it's good that you know, unfortunately, there are some brands who went to kind of like, especially amongst that hype cycle, right? Like we've been doing composable architecture for you know uh almost 13 years, and I was doing it for that in my previous agency. And but in the last few years in the e-commerce space, there's definitely been this hype cycle, right? So lots of people have moved, and you've seen like actually lots of people have started moving, you know, lots of people moved back because it it wasn't some sort of dream. And that's always the case, right? Ultimately it comes down to you know, what are you trying to achieve? And I think that, yeah, this definitely kind of came across, right? There are definite strengths and weaknesses, and you know, ultimately things like poor governance, lack of clear intent, um, you know, and actually just poor execution of things as well. Um, you know, we've seen great monolithic setups, horrific kind of headless setups. Um, and ultimately, I suppose it's about partnering or, you know, or just working internally with the team to kind of understand what your needs are, and that's where you should always start. And that really kind of came through. Uh, there is a thing where, you know, in the kind of survey, you can see actually brands who are suffering with a monolithic setup because their business complexity has reached a point where actually it's quite hard without kind of breaking out to a kind of a more kind of customized, you know, e-commerce OS around the business, you know, and other instances where a business is probably over-architected, right? And so, you know, ultimately, this is not a simple answer, James, is it? Ultimately, it's really complicated and it's and it's nuanced and it kind of completely depends uh on the brand. Um and yeah, I mean, it's kind of all in there, but like, you know, survey findings, obviously, confidence of uh future-proof scores just you know very widely, regardless of this. So it's not uh, you know, it's not a silver bullet. Uh it definitely, you know, should start with um, you know, business requirements and need uh and needs, and you know, and then um maybe we're kind of working with a partner who can kind of support you with that stuff.

Speaker 1 16:46

Sliding scale, right?

Beyond Hype: Composable Vs Monolith

Speaker 3 16:47

Like there's like really composable architecture, and then there's like I mean, I would argue there aren't really any true, well, very few kind of really true kind of like monolithic architectures. Even when people have got a simple Shopify store, you look at it, and actually Shopify acts as a bit of an orchestration lane, they'll have loads of different services kind of coming out of it, right? Like it's not a one single monolith, it's just that they don't really see it like that. So they'll have, you know, I don't know, uh, you know, Algolia or whatever, kind of like powering their search, or you know, Clavio or whatever, like doing something else and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, well, you're already kind of starting to sort of break things out, and that's great, right? Because you're breaking out when you kind of go, oh, as a business, our needs aren't met here, right? You know, so actually from a CMS perspective, we want to break out and just do something with sanity or search is not powerful enough. That's great, and that's kind of the route it should be in some respects, as you kind of go as a business and for the experience we're trying to create for users, this is a problem we have at the moment. How do we overcome that rather than our dream is to create composable architecture? Like that's I mean, maybe my dream, but like, but not you know, for most that's I would say probably unhealthy.

Speaker 1 17:51

Um, yes. Would uh I I say ultimately we consult on this quite a lot and we do a lot of vendor assessments.

The Sliding Scale Of Architectures

Speaker 3 18:18

I think if you're if you're starting up, I would say it's almost certainly the place I would kind of push someone to, right? And until you start feeling pain, and I think this came across in the survey as well, right? Like people grow up on Shopify and then their business reaches a certain complexity, and even at that point, it's not the case that Shopify is wrong, but you just need to change how you're working with Shopify and how you're kind of treating it. Um I would say it's not always, you know, it's not always perfect. Like it's I would say it's there isn't a platform that kind of fits so many kind of uh different kind of shapes of business uh apart from Shopify. But then say if you are a very complex business, or I mean we're working with a uh a partner, a brand at the moment who, you know, they have like 350,000 SKUs, millions of orders, and actually the kind of really kind of bespoke nature of what they do and how that doesn't really fit into any kind of mold in the marketplace means actually Shopify actually can't fulfill their needs um for lots of reasons, actually. One is they need completely bespoke and custom comment checkouts, for instance, but there are loads of different aspects where it doesn't kind of like um you know fit things. But to be honest, ultimately that is again, that's in the gray, right? Where you kind of have to understand these things. Shopify, I think, does cater for the majority of the audience out there, and that's obviously clearly kind of uh reflected in in the numbers, you know, um in terms of the number of stores that they kind of uh you know look after kind of globally. But um there's definitely kind of cases where um it's it's not kind of right. And I think as I said, when people kind of get bigger, the challenge is that all of a sudden they build up, they work within a certain way of the business, and the business reaches a certain maturity and they don't change how they work. All of a sudden they're building up massive like reliance, like over-reliance for the kind of party tools. They've like in terms of how they run as a business, like the teams end up working around the tool rather than like, cool, we want the tool to work for us, we want the tools to empower us, and these things that just naturally kind of um happen over time, right? So they're kind of like failing to design for the long-term scale, and they're just kind of you know dealing with that now. And I think that's when we looked at service thing that we kind of saw the most, right? It's weird. You have people who are doing way more kind of light revenue, way more kind of complex business, very happy on Shopify. And then you've got business who maybe are like 15 million and they're like, Oh, we we this doesn't work for us anymore. And it's like this is actually not the platform. The problem is is actually you've not changed how you're working with the platform as your business has kind of evolved, and rather than kind of thinking how can Shopify work for us and how can it evolve and change with other kind of like tools, you've just kind of built loads of people around it, which causes governance and all sorts of uh issues. I mean, with like these are you know, we've seen this with like lots of clients. I mean, like um absolute collagen, can't we kind of like uh working with awesome client as a whole lot of clients, but really lovely client. And I think we went in there and there's a massive overreliance of uh there was a massive overreliance in terms of like third party schools, and aside from the complexity that adds, and you know, again, oh monolith is simple, like composable is like complicated. It's like, no, you can have a monolith and you can have lots of you know reliance on third parties, and things can get really complicated. And even from like uh I think the other one which kind of creeps up on brands is that you know the total cost of ownership gets really complicated as well, right? Actually, you do an order of these things and you kind of go, Oh, we can cut your costs by I mean like 80% by actually building some of these bespoke, using other tools and not kind of purely relying on like um the shop like on third party kind of um you know ecosystem. So yes, yes, I said gross bloke is a problem, you know. Architectures, people, processes, these are all things that kind of become a problem. Problematic as you scale and just need constant review of those things. Otherwise, you can sleep walk into some kind of pretty challenging problems. And I think Shopify is such a great gateway for people getting into selling e-commerce that often they think it's a set and forget, which it can't ever be.

Speaker 1 22:20

Is that the short answer?

Speaker 22:21

I feel that was pretty short answer, Jim. It's a good rule of thumb, though. A good rule of thumb though, right? You feel the feel that pain, make ensure there's a real need for it rather than a want, and then be a bit pragmatic with how you approach it. And generally revenue comes in, business gets more mature, and then complexity goes up, right? And that's where you need to look at things a little bit. And maybe you can get away with a super simple tech stack with very high revenue, enterprise revenue. Um, some brands have more, you know, it's a bit more complicated than that, like the ones that uh the one that Jim's just mentioned.

Speaker 1 23:55

No, Jay's, I you you say it so eloquently, and uh I feel like you could have uh, you know, this wouldn't have to be a three-hour podcast if I uh I know, I mean absolutely, absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 3 24:10

But yeah, yeah, you're you're you're spot on. I mean, I will say, you know, we are partners like Commerce Tools, Commerce Layer, Centra, like lots of kind of platforms. And they are they all have um they all have like certain attributes. We wouldn't be partners with them all unless we felt that they had um a niche in certain areas where they're a kind of a better fit than you know, kind of others. Um, so you know, absolutely. And I think ultimately, like Andy said, and you say, you know, it's it's waiting until you kind of you kind of actually hit the need. I think quite often brands have their USPs, right? They have their unique kind of like selling point that different differentiates them from the competition. Ultimately, what we're trying constantly trying to do as a partner is kind of going, how can we let you focus on that, right? How can we just let you focus on the differentials between your competition and not get bogged down by worrying about some of these things which actually are not the kind of true kind of heart of like the brand and what you're actually trying to do out in the world, you know, you're just managing uh tech teams and all this kind of stuff, um, you know, worrying about scalability and all these kind of things rather than kind of going, how do we make our experience amazing for our customers? How do we differentiate from the competition, all this kind of stuff? But um, in fairness that agencies, you know, although we've been doing that kind of composability stuff quite a long time, you know, if you are very heavily in the Shopify ecosystem and Shopify and it said that hype cycle of like headless, headless, headless, a lot of agencies overnight were offering kind of headless implementations. And to be honest, it's not an easy kind of path. There are so many learnings and built-up knowledge within the business that it takes a long time. You know, like I look at how we built, you know, uh composable infrastructure for like e-commerce brands, you know, even 10 years ago or five years ago. Like it's completely different to like we've gone through so many iterations and learnings of that stuff. So I think you can't be surprised when there's a hype cycle, and agencies have to kind of jump onto that, you know, who aren't who it's new to, and then be surprised, I suppose, when there's implementations that, you know, have their kind of challenges. You know, unfortunately, these are lots of agencies at the same time, you know, uh finding a new kind of like service that they're kind of like refining. And this is, I suppose, part of the problem with like hype cycles.

Shopify’s Fit And Its Limits

Speaker 26:15

Yeah, friends in the in the Nordics, etc., they they don't say headless, they just say custom. Like in the Nordics, there isn't uh you know, there's no such thing.

Speaker 1 26:26

It's just just building a custom site. But yeah, but yeah. I mean they're too cool, they're central too cool. I mean they're just they're just they're kind of uh yeah, you see them, they all look like models because kind of it's an impossible question, but I'm gonna give it to you anyway.

Speaker 3 27:46

I'm really not right. So um uh TCO is a really complicated thing, and it's so many, it's like obviously multifaceted, and when you look at it, there are loads of hidden costs. In terms of raw costs, if we look at, I mean, if we even take the third parties out of it at a certain scale, and historically, I mean we talk, you know, when you say Shopify, you know, used to be uh the clear kind of winner. I don't I think if anything, Shopify's become more and more kind of competitive around kind of like pricing, although you know the upfront cost has kind of changed in recent kind of like years, things like um, you know, Shopify payments and actually that kind of stuff is like definitely kind of been down. And actually, as a team, they've been as they kind of push into more kind of enterprise kind of uh options, in terms of having the conversation about pushing down you know, transaction fees and stuff, which is where a lot of the cost actually ends up kind of being, um, they've been pretty, I mean, they've been great in terms of moving that in that direction. But yes, I mean, even five years ago, we were looking at clients where actually from a TCO perspective, when you looked at, you know, for instance, you'll fly payment fees versus you know working with you know like uh PayPal Braintree, and then you kind of like factor in, you know, maybe like a central or commerce layer, you know, or commerce tools, you know, and kind of the ongoing fees with them, actually, you know, it it can end up, I would say, beyond the point of you know, probably like 15 million. There starts to be the point where actually it's not as quite a clear kind of like slam dunk for should file. It kind of gets you know more complicated. I mean, for some of our clients in the past, it's been you know upwards of uh, you know, like 750 grand in savings, like annually in terms of the difference would be kind of between those things. I think where it gets kind of complicated is um, you know, then you've got to factor in, you know, so this is the thing with like composable architecture on this and all this stuff is kind of go, okay, so you've got this and you've reduced these kind of costs, but then where are you bringing in other costs? You know, extra development time, actually, how much engineering time do you have to, you know, is required to just to kind of stand still. So it is complicated, but from a binary, which I know we hate, from a binary kind of like uh cost of the platform, uh definitely from about 15 million onwards, we kind of start to see that kind of like divergence of actually the just the platform cost. You if you shop around and you kind of like uh you know, you can definitely kind of uh get significant um savings by kind of moving off shopify. But as I said, it's way more complicated than that. And ultimately it's not as clear. And when we do a TCO analysis, right, it is all of the infrastructure and then the extra engineering kind of like time, like how do these kind of compare? So it's always pretty nuanced and complicated, but yeah, we've definitely seen some pretty dramatic kind of um cost differences uh between enterprise, what we would probably deem as like enterprise commerce platforms, like enterprise by default, you know. So I said, like your commerce layers, your century, your kind of commerce tools, compared to something like Shopify, which I think in the in the kind of the mass mindset, I suppose, a lot of people see that as being cool, this is just the default very good value for money, which it is, of course. Um, but yes, it's more complicated than you want when you kind of get to a certain scale.

Overreliance On Third‑Party Tools

Speaker 30:57

This it's a good uh opportunity to plug our CCO calculator in the works. Um yeah, we're we're actually gonna. Sorry, Jim. Yeah. We're launching an initiative just to really look at like the true cost of friendship. And yeah, a big part of that is like org structure as opposed to just tech stack, like they work hand in hand. So that's something we're we're working on at the moment. And as part of that, which I know Shopify will sort of uh bang the drum for, is sort of time to market, time to value. So that's like the opportunity lost of like the big, even if maybe something's cheap on paper, it might still take a year, nine months to deliver. Whereas Shopify, you know, you can spin something off pretty quickly. Uh and that community lost is kind of that delta can be the difference.

Speaker 1 31:54

Um yeah. It's it's not black and white, right? These straight questions from James and these really kind of like murky responses. Do you say is any? I feel like I'm uh I'm taking up a lot of their time.

Speaker 32:44

Yeah, I feel like you're you're the you're the one closer to this one though. All right, cool. It's fine.

Speaker 3 32:50

You don't have to ask me to talk twice, it's fine, actually.

Speaker 32:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can intro it, but you wrote down the examples.

Lessons, Regrets And Long‑Term Design

Speaker 3 32:59

Um yes, as I said, like I suppose in terms of lessons and regrets and the things that thematically said, like validated by the by the report, right? Is uh and we kind of like touched upon all these, right? And massive over reliance on their parts of tools. And I think that's just that is often a uh indicative of sleepwalking without intent, you know. Um, think of the need before you think of the tool, right? It's quite often has this kind of uh reaction where people kind of go, oh, this tool is good, rather than kind of going, what are we trying to achieve? And actually, what kind of tool can we use to kind of actually allow us to kind of reach that kind of destination? An over-reliance on third-party tools has lots of issues, uh, adds lots of complexity quite often. Um, actually, it's you'll have one bad tool which actually impacts up, you know, the worst tool is like affects your performance for the entire experience quite often. This judgment in terms of internal capability and resourcing. So again, it's kind of being mindful of um what's our internal capability, what we're kind of you know, what's possible, and actually quite often just growing a team around um around stuff and scaling, instead of scaling from a smart engineering perspective of like what does tech, it's it's the difference between being a slave to technology or technology, you know, being your slave, I suppose, to a certain extent, right? So you all suddenly see these businesses who've grown teams around the technology, right? Rather than kind of going, actually, no, this is what we want to do, this is what we want our team to look like, and actually this is what we want technology to kind of support us with. So that often comes down to like misjudging internal kind of capability and resourcing and says what's possible. You know, again, the thing we keep on talking about is like like failing to design for the long-term, long-term scale, right? And that's kind of thinking, where are we as a business? What are the things that are kind of fundamental? And that touches loads of things, both from do we want to be a tech, like we're a brand and we believe in this and we're doing product development, do we want to have a massive internal team, right? So it's not just the design of the technology and the architecture, but also the design of your internal team that interfaces that, you know, what should they look like? What do you want them to look like? You know, if you've all of a sudden got like 20 engineers literally just keeping the site up, you know, which is something we see, unfortunately, like from time to time when we kind of come into things, or do you want people who've got unique domain experience around your brand, have a deep understanding that they want to focus on the problems that are unique to that kind of you know, uh experience of like understanding the brand and really understanding the technological, you know, technological kind of capabilities. And then yes, it also does come down to the platform. What kind of business are you? Where are the complexities in that? How can technology, you know, kind of leverage that? And the big thing about composability, here I go, Andrew, the big composability jump. But the big thing that, you know, the reason why we went that way all those years ago was mainly around like business agility. Like we were sick of like seeing every three years a client ripping something up, losing all their learnings, all this kind of stuff. It's like this is this is not the way. This is this can't be the way. This like this is not so, you know, and I'm proud to say, you know, sites that we launched, you know, eight, nine years ago, we've never rebuilt them from the ground up. And they look better now than ever because it's like you we've just constantly iterated. And I suppose that when we say like failing to design for long-term scale, it's also how much business agility is worthwhile. And I think that's where it gets confusing with monolithing composable because it's like, oh, business agility, so it's fully composable always. It's like, no, looking at the costs of composability and the opportunities, what's the right level of agility so that you as a business aren't locked in, you can move quickly, you can kind of change the user experience quickly based on like uh trends and you, you know, and differentiating you as a brand rather than technology for technology's sake. In short, in terms of the kind of thematic kind of big points, yeah, as I said, massive reliance on third-party tools, which is always a bit of an alarm bell, misjudging like internal capability and resourcing, you know, thinking about the longer term, um, long-term planning for long-term kind of scale, um, from like an agility uh kind of perspective.

Speaker 1 37:49

Yeah, yes, exactly.

Speaker 3 37:52

Yes, yes, yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, and I think that, yeah, with that TCO, like you're saying, across 10 years, right? And I not to kind of go off again, but within that kind of architecture, there are there's different life cycles of different parts, right? And again, it's like thinking about the user experience differentiating differentiating you as a brand from like competitors, and you kind of go, okay, well, your WMS or your OMS or whatever, but that's not really going to be that important. That might have a life cycle of like 20 years or 15 years or whatever, you know, and whereas something like the front end experience or maybe search or maybe even like the e-commerce platform might will have shorter life cycles, right? The closer it is to the user experience, closer it is to just defining you as a brand and differentiating you, definitely the kind of shorter kind of iteration cycles that you'll kind of have. So being cognizant of that and not kind of going, okay, we have to rip it all up and start again, like big migration from one platform and everything and throw out all this stuff, yeah, is it's totally bonkers. I'm I'm super proud that we've for all of our clients, like we've never had a rebuild, you know, from scratch for for anyone, you know, any of them. And given the fact that a lot of our clients uh are with us for, you know, for definitely like longer than most agencies, right? Like I think some of the smaller tenures, like the our newer clients are still, you know, with us for like three, four, five years, you know. Um, having never had to rebuild from the ground up is definitely something I'm really proud of just from um, yeah, for many reasons.

Speaker 1 39:13

But yeah, yeah, sure.

Total Cost Of Ownership Nuance

Speaker 40:09

I mean, Jim's literally done podcasts on AI, so um I'm sure he'll he'll enjoy reading this. Maybe I can I can kick it off though, hey. Yeah, I mean AI is cropping up in every conversation, right? It's it's I think we need a swear jar uh at work. Um it's in every I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Quite right. Uh but yeah, you're right. Um smaller brands, sort of um in the survey at least, like the one to ten mil, they were, I guess the you could argue the stakes were a bit lower, so they were they were happier to experiment with AI and be on the cutting edge a bit more with sort of the sort of new frontier technologies. And um, whereas the bigger brands, you know, there there's more bureaucracy. We talked about complexity of stack, it's just harder to get it working seamlessly. And again, we talked about integrations being tricky. So I think they're just moving slower. Some brands, in fact, and platforms I've spoken to, they're waiting to see where the dust settles a little bit before they then figure out what they do with AI and how they they they work sort of uh meaningfully. Um, but yeah, I mean, I'm reading a quote here from a CTO of a a brand doing 20 to 50 mil. They said their biggest technical challenge is the implementation of AI. And I'm sure they're getting lots of pressure from the board. The board's reading the news. Maybe they've probably got some some stocks invested somewhere and they're going, you know, where's what you're doing with AI? Come on, come on, how how are we going to um accelerate our business with this? But as you mentioned, there's so many opportunities. Patent support is like an obvious one. I know, like gorgeous pushing AI. Been on a couple of events recently, and I think that's pretty much what uh gorgeous talk about now. AI sort of first chat, it's great for triaging. Um personal shoppers. Um, I think generally though, AI is particularly useful for just yeah, well, those the internal legwork, right? Those things that you you you don't want to duplicate. Um that's broadly, that's what we're seeing.

Speaker 1 42:26

Um yeah. So there's no stopping anyway.

Speaker 3 43:04

Um, yeah. Uh yeah, no, I think I would to be honest, I think Andy covered it really well. Like, I suppose, I think thematically coming back to other points we've made, right? I think the the biggest danger of AI is that people reach for a tool rather than thinking about a problem they're trying to solve, right? Which I think is the biggest danger amongst all of it, is you kind of go, Oh, how are we putting AI in? And that's not really the case. It should actually be cool. How can we make our make this experience better? How can we help differentiate us between like other kind of customers? And how can AI help and support with that, right? You know, us as an agency, there's loads of touch points that AI are touching. And you know, it's not like we should reach for reach for AI, it's just the fact that AI is a useful tool in some of these instances. I mean, for us, I mean, sanity you mentioned, like it's a really I mean, they are incredibly what you can do with sanity, and AI is incredibly powerful. And I for a lot of our clients, we already leveraging um. A lot of the kind of like uh built-in workflows you can kind of have have within um sanity from like many other perspective. Things like translations is like just a real no-brainer, and that's kind of I think pretty well established now, but also tailoring content to different cohorts based on personalization, right? Like, hey, we've got a you know, we've got uh a site and actually we have quite a wide demographic, and actually this older cohort, there's a different product selection selection, there's slightly different language and tone, different models that we're using. And actually, you can just use AI for a lot of these things. Yes, you could write like you know, you could, you know, write scripts that kind of like handle that to a certain degree, but you kind of go, actually, AI at the moment is so cheap. I mean, obviously, you know, it shouldn't be as cheap as it is, you know, for every dollar you're spending, like the uh the platforms are actually normally spending about three, but but you know, that's kind of great. And even things like you know, prototyping, I think this is great for brands, you know, where they're even if they're working with an agency, right? They they're thinking about what they want to bring to life and actually doing quick prototyping in some of the tools now, you know, just to help them align as a business about opportunities and stuff is is kind of great. Um, I mean, where we're kind of, I suppose where we're using it at the moment is we're bringing it in quite often as like um a supplementary kind of like supporting kind of AI in terms of the e-commerce experience at least. You can kind of see it like Amazon actually doing something similar, right? Where it's like actually what you're looking for, you know, a different way to interact with the site. So uh we launched one I think a couple of weeks ago where there's a yacht website that we kind of look look after Y.co where actually, yeah, you can search and you can filter for yachts and all this kind of stuff, or actually you can search and do all this stuff with just uh, you know, an AI agent, right? And it's like, hey, what are you looking for? And it's like, oh, I'm looking to go on holiday in this time of year, want a bit of sun going with this family. Cool, okay, that's great. Here are some suggestions. It's just a different way, you know, just as when a consumer kind of goes, I want to go to Amazon because of XXX. I'm not about the brand, I just need something that is pretty functional. It's just another way to interact with the web in like a more kind of like humanistic kind of like way. I said the crux of it is, I suppose, James, as we've been talking about focus on like what the objective, right, and the outcome rather than you know, AI, AI first, right? It's like I'm trying to achieve this. AI might be able to support in that kind of mission, or it might not be able to. And if it does, like great, right?

Speaker 1 46:22

Like it's definitely opening up kind of uh opportunities. I think there is adding more problems in uh many spaces.

Time To Value And Org Design

Speaker 3 46:42

Like, you know, uh GitHub released their kind of like Octoverse, which is you know, um in October, which is their kind of like the report basically on how the platform's being used and stuff. And you kind of go the amount of code committed by AI, actually the homogenization of certain programming languages because it's kind of feeding off, you know, it's code in the wild at the moment, um, the amount of bugs that are getting kind of sh*t. I mean, there's a lot of vibe-coded, terrible, very security risky kind of um stuffing written, which is worrying, to be honest, especially in the e-commerce space, right? Like these are these are areas that you can't really have that sort of risk, right? Um, so I think that's one of the danger. Like you're right, AI is touching everything because to be honest, if you want investment these days, you have to put AI somewhere in.

Speaker 1 47:30

Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 3 47:33

Um, so yeah, so I think that's a challenge, but I said from um a code and a security perspective, I think that's a worry. And I think actually one of the great things about something like Shopify actually is them having a very tight ecosystem and guardrails. So actually, AI working in that space, yeah, they actually have like huge opportunity, right? And I know there's you know some vibe coding kind of uh opportunities within uh Shopify since you know they release Horizons and and uh the kind of code gen stuff that kind of came wrong at the same time as that. But it's kind of much safer space because they're you know it's within like um within a walled garden, as it were, where security is kind of way more kind of managed than you know doing something way kind of more uh open and wide in in the world. But um for brands, every tool they touch will bring in some sort of AI opportunity. Um, but as I said, yeah, focus on the opportunity and what you're trying to achieve, and then there'll definitely be a tool to kind of support that if AI is required in the I would love to see personalization, AI-powered personalization really on steroids, the opportunity to do really niche cohort analysis, interpret that like on-the-fly surface different kind of imagery and language, look at like microinteractions and how that changes the user so that experiences kind of evolve to kind of be more empathetic to that kind of like user. And and that's not just kind of like being trickery, it's even just surfacing the stuff in a more kind of like respectful way. And as I said, the other side of it was literally AI as a supporting person on the site, not kind of going, oh, I'm just being to AI, actually having this hybrid kind of experience where it can kind of search the web for you, you can search the site for you, highlight stuff whilst you're kind of jumping between, you know, diving into the details on the site, but then also having an AI companion. So there will be the two areas: discoverability on the site as a companion, but also hyper kind of customization into like impersonalization through AI as well.

AI Adoption Patterns And Pitfalls

Speaker 50:30

Yeah, so I guess there's so much in the survey, in the in the report. Um it's it's it's kind of hard to summarize, but I'll try. Um I guess there's a few key key points that keep coming up. Simpler stacks, um, this sort of consolidation of of uh people's technologies, um, clearer responsibilities within the within the internal teams, um, better internal tooling to enable, you know, uh D2C, um, cross-functional collaboration, uh, silo departments uh becoming a problem. So how do different departments um e-commerce speak to retail, speak to marketing, speak to brand, etc.? These are challenges that we see quite frequently, uh the couple sort of front of mind. Um and yeah, just leaning on strategic partners. Again, like bang on about AI again, you the barrier to entry is lower than ever to do things right. Um, but actually, all the more the reason to uh to use experts, that you'll need experts um to um to just enable that really and just make or just to make sure that uh you're de-risking it for the business because there are there is a lot of risk at the moment, um particularly with AI exposing sort of sort of uh securities. Um, but yeah, I think we know that the cost of acquisition has gone up for brands uh and costs of business um gone up across the board, thanks to Trump. Um, so yeah, everyone's getting squeezed, right? And with that in mind, like um teams are stretched, uh, they have to do more with less. I think you know, key takeaway, an obvious one, is to sort of um measure twice and cut once. So really invest in like product thinking, stop, reflect on the brand, um, just pause on velocity for a moment, reassess your systems internally, look at what your customer actually needs, maybe wants, um, and then just move forward with real purpose, which again sounds so obvious, but it's something we really instill with our clients. Do sort of strategy summits biannually, just to really enforce that. Um, because it's so easy to just build stuff that isn't very valuable, and then then the someone will get annoyed that hey, there's no return on investment for this. Um, so just being really deliberate with that stuff um is is crucial. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um measure thrice, maybe measure as many times as you want, but just take your time and then yeah.

Speaker 1 53:54

Yeah, I mean, I think coming back full circle, right?

Speaker 3 53:56

This comes back to at the beginning, you know, when when we're saying, you know, doing obviously things with intent and you know, just having greater focus on what you're kind of trying to achieve and all this kind of stuff. And I think that's the mentality that kind of really rings true in terms of when we see great, great, you know, we work with great teams. You realize that actually the technology is just an instrument for what they're trying to kind of uh achieve. So yeah, great brands that we work with and that we even kind of come through in the survey are ones that have just really clear focus on the vision and the brand and what they're trying to achieve. Um, they obviously have like business agility, so they can kind of like move um quickly, which is obviously really important, especially in these kind of like turbulent times. Um empowered teams, you know, like where there's not bloat, it's quite easy to kind of sleepwalk into having really bloated teams, really bloated kind of technology, so just being intentional. Um, pull in experts when they needed, please note rotators available. Uh and and they just get done, they action things, right? Um, which I think is, you know, uh, which is obviously kind of really crucial. And I suppose this is great. I I love this about the survey is that in a time where a lot of brands are probably feeling a bit fearful and unsure about like, oh God, AI, AI, AI, like we have to change. It feels like technology is moving at an incredible rate that I've not seen uh, you know, in my career, which is, you know, I say quite a long time. And I think what's great is actually you look at the fundamentals and you say, actually, all the fundamentals of having really great empowered teams, you know, being intentional about what you're trying to achieve, all these things are actually the things that really seem to differentiate success. Um, so don't get worried by the hype, focus on what you're trying to achieve and what's right for your brand. Um, and it will it will kind of take you to a good place.

Speaker 55:49

Yeah, the the exercise, the uh the servo, I guess, was uh an exercise in social proof, right? It was just about reassuring people what's going on uh behind the scenes, because as as we say, there's there's lots of noise out there. Um so we think it was a really great exercise, and we're gonna double down on it next time around.