A successful technological transformation also requires a renewal of leadership culture, aimed at enabling the operation and meaningful development of multidisciplinary teams. 

In our new Crasman Insight publication, we delve into the major technological revolution in e-commerce – the journey from monolithic mega-systems towards decentralised and more rapidly renewable Composable Commerce architectures. 

Technological transformation is also a renewal of organisational thinking. The benefits of technological revolutions often ultimately depend on the organisation's ability to adapt so that people's activities and the opportunities offered by new technology can work well together. Unfortunately, the result is often new systems with minimal usage or frustrated and angry people who no longer feel competent in their roles.

To avoid this pitfall amidst change, it is necessary to actively renew the leadership culture of the e-commerce organisation. It is also important to consciously build new skills in teams, which have more multidisciplinary expertise and greater autonomy in decision-making.

What kind of skills should these teams have, and how should they be led? Based on our own experiences, we categorised these skills into three concise areas:

1. Managing Multidisciplinarity

The transition from monolithic technologies to Composable architectures has been driven by the speed of change in business requirements. The same pace of change applies to teams and their leadership.

Team responsiveness and broad expertise. Management practices and teams must adapt swiftly to evolving customer needs and business requirements. Teams should also be multidisciplinary to maintain responsiveness and possess the necessary expertise for independent decision-making.

Conscious and sustained change. Requirements summarised in a few words are considerably easier to articulate than to implement in practice. Genuine multidisciplinary thinking, and equal consideration of areas beyond one's own specialisation, demands highly conscious and sustained effort from individuals and teams.

A key aspect of leadership is the ability to lead the balance of perspectives and competencies in development work – from planning, technical development, data analytics, marketing, and e-commerce processes, to forming a cohesive whole driven by business objectives and customer experience.

A team leader therefore needs a holistic vision of e-commerce as a broad entity, and the ability to interpret business goals and customer understanding into concrete objectives for their team. 

2. Leading the Capacity for Collaboration

The transition from monolithic systems in e-commerce to modular architectures and compositions of various independent parts requires close collaboration between different teams, both within the company and with external partners.

Collaboration skills and open communication. In practice, this means team members and partners need strong communication skills and a willingness to collaborate. The team leader, in turn, must be able to lead multiple parallel teams towards common goals.

Individual experts need the ability to perceive their work as part of a broader network and identify which other experts their work most affects. 

The sum of its parts. Leading a team and partners requires a new level of openness in building collaboration between different entities: one must be ready and able to communicate expectations to different parts of the network and articulate how responsibilities and ownership should be shared across tasks.

Partners need to understand themselves as part of the client's network and view competitors as part of the same team; instead of sabotaging, the goal should be the success of everyone involved.

3. Leading Innovation Thinking and Psychological Safety

The shift from monolithic systems in e-commerce to composable commerce architectures offers faster development cycles and opportunities.

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

Rapid experimentation, innovation, and permission to fail. It is the responsibility of team leaders to build a culture and methods that encourage and aim for experimentation, “quick failures,” and innovation.

Psychological safety should be purposefully managed and teams encouraged to conduct continuous experiments (and consequently fail regularly) in an environment where team success has traditionally been measured quite straightforwardly by revenue growth, conversion rates, and for example, the size of the average order.

The rapid experiments enabled by quick development cycles allow the team to find significant improvements more swiftly.

Where to find someone capable of understanding and leading such a broad whole? 

Most likely, the organisation will cultivate such a leader through its own means. 

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

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Thank you for getting in touch. We will get back to you shortly.

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Best regards, The Crasman Team

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Would you like to hear more about enabling technological revolutions and the recipe for e-commerce success?

Contact us!

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