A technological renewal also requires a renewal of the leadership culture to succeed, aiming to enable the functioning and meaningful development of multidisciplinary teams. 

In our new Crasman Insight publication, we delve into the major technological shift in e-commerce — the journey from monolithic giant systems towards distributed and more rapidly renewable Composable Commerce architectures. 

Technological renewal is also a renewal of organisational thinking. The benefits of technological shifts often hinge on the organisation’s ability to adapt in such a way that human activities and the opportunities provided by new technology work well together. Unfortunately, the result is often new systems with negligible usage or frustrated and angry people who no longer feel capable of performing their own work.

To avoid this pitfall amidst change, it is crucial to actively renew the leadership culture of the organisation engaged in e-commerce. It is also important to consciously build new skills within teams, where there is more multidisciplinary expertise and more power for independent decision-making.

What kind of skills should such teams have, and how should they be led? Based on our own experiences, we divided the skills tightly into three categories:

1. Leading multidisciplinarity

The technological shift from monoliths to Composable architectures has been driven by the pace of change in business requirements. The same pace of change applies to teams and their leadership.

Team responsiveness and broad expertise. Leadership styles and teams must be able to quickly adapt to changing customer needs and business requirements. Teams must also be multidisciplinary to maintain speed and possess the necessary expertise for independent decision-making.

Conscious and long-term change. It is significantly easier to throw around concise requirements than to implement them in practice. Genuine multidisciplinary thinking and considering areas beyond one's own expert knowledge equally requires very conscious and long-term effort from individuals and teams.

In leadership, the key is the ability to lead the equality of perspectives and areas of expertise in development work – from planning, technical development, data analytics, marketing, and e-commerce processes to forming a whole led by business goals and customer experience.

The team leader is thus required to have a holistic vision of e-commerce as a broad whole and the ability to interpret business goals and customer understanding into concrete goals for their team. 

2. Leading collaboration capabilities

The transition from monolithic systems to modular architectures and comprehensive entities composed of several independent parts requires close cooperation among different teams both within the company and with external partners.

Collaboration skills and open communication. This practically means that strong communication skills and willingness to cooperate are required from team members and partners. The team leader, on the other hand, needs the ability to lead multiple parallel teams towards common goals.

Individual experts need the ability to see their work as part of a broad network of collaboration and to recognise which other experts their work most impacts. 

The sum of its parts. The leader of the team and partners requires a new kind of openness to build cooperation between different actors: they must be willing and capable of communicating expectations to various actors in the network and articulate how they hope responsibility and ownership will be spread across different tasks.

Partners, in turn, must understand themselves as part of the customer's network and competitors as part of the same team; instead of undermining, the aim should be everyone’s success.

3. Leading innovation thinking and psychological safety

Transitioning from e-commerce monolithic systems to composable commerce architectures offers faster development cycles and development opportunities than before.

In practice, this means the ability to quickly create and test new aspects related to customer experience or business processes.

Quick trials, innovation, and permission to fail. Team leaders are tasked with building a culture and practices where making trials, “quick failures,” and innovation is encouraged and desirable.

Hence, psychological safety should be led purposefully, encouraging the team to conduct continuous experiments (and thereby fail regularly) in an environment where the success of the team has traditionally been measured quite straightforwardly by revenue growth, conversion rate, and the size of average purchases.

The quick trials brought by fast development cycles indeed enable the team to find significant improvements more rapidly.

Where can one find a person who can understand and lead such a wide-reaching entity? 

Most likely, the organisation must grow such a leader on its own. 

It is important to enable an environment in which the person building a modern e-commerce team and partner network can learn their role and receive sufficient support from their own organisation.