Master B2B’s Brian Beck and Sitecore’s Josh Kinzer shared a fireside chat with Peter Nowak, Software Engineering Manager at Brady Corporation, about managing the complexities involved with modernizing your digital experience.
In this new interview, you’ll get 8 tips for making this process a success:
- Start with shared vision and goals
- Focus on speed with agile approaches
- Empower IT to innovate, not maintain
- Make customer experience the North Star
- Balance innovation with stability
- Bridge the business-IT gap with governance
- Measure success with business-centric metrics
- Leverage AI and future-proof innovation
TRANSCRIPT:
Brian Beck: Welcome to the Master B2B Fireside Chat series. My name is Brian Beck. I’m the co-founder of Master B2B – we’re a thought leadership community of eCommerce executives across all different kinds of B2B industries. I’m excited today. We’ve got a great topic. We’re talking about demystifying the IT side of the digital and customer experience. We’ve got some great guests. My co-host today is Josh Kinzer, Global VP of Commerce at Sitecore. Josh has been in the industry for quite a long time, 20 plus years. Oracle, IBM, Salesforce, a number of other companies. Tell us a little bit about what Sitecore does. Josh, welcome.
Josh Kinzer: Thank you, Brian. I’m very happy to be here. I’m very happy to be here with Peter as well. Sitecore is a leading digital experience platform provider for hundreds of brands globally, brands that we would all recognize. We’re trusting the most visionary digital and content leaders and give them the power to build and deliver a very personalized digital experience. I specialize in a commerce piece of that experience.
Brian: We’re going to have a great conversation. We have a very special guest, Peter Nowak, Brady Corporation’s Software Engineering Manager. Peter, you’ve been there for four years. You were at PillarRX, Cenrare earlier. Almost 20 years of experience. Tell us a little bit about Brady Corp. What does Brady do?
Peter Nowak: I’m software engineering manager here at Brady. I run four teams here all dealing around these Sitecore eCommerce platforms. Each team specializes within their own little area or their own little feature. Three feature teams and then one DevOps team that really owns the infrastructure and deployment.
Brian: Our topic today is demystifying the IT side of the eCommerce experience and how to modernize it. This is such a great topic, guys, because there’s sort of been this quote-unquote tension between B2B marketing and eCommerce side of things, sort of the business side and the IT side. The two teams working together and who should own different things. From a business perspective, and a lot of our community are folks who are VPs of eCommerce and directors of eCommerce, they have a business aspect and a P&L and they’re driving the business requirements. But often what happens is they don’t understand necessarily the IT side of what’s happening and they need to. These teams need to work together. We’ve had debates about this in Master B2B over the course of our existence. It’s going to be really exciting to see and hear that perspective from you, Peter, and you as well, Josh. You described a little bit about your role. Tell us about Brady’s eCommerce experience, your evolution, and a little bit of the background of how you look at eCommerce.
Peter: eCommerce started here at Brady somewhere around 12, 14 years ago, where we really re-did our websites on the Sitecore platform here. And it’s certainly evolved over the years. We started off as being primarily really focused on just driving to that one customer. And we did that to try to take some additional sales, direct sales directly from our customers as opposed to going through other channels. And probably more recently, we’re starting to see a bigger focus around the business type buyer now coming to us. And starting to build out that platform, trying to get more towards B2B as opposed to just including B2C type customers. So that’s really where we’re evolving going forward, driving that customer experience for them.
Brian: And how have you worked with the business team in the past in terms of defining requirements, setting objectives? Tell us a little bit about how that works or how it’s even evolved over the time you’ve been working with Brady.
Peter: We have the business side and our product owner actually comes from the business and the marketing side. So we’ve got a fairly strong relationship with them over there. And it really starts with the business side taking a look and we create what we call a lean canvas on the business side where we basically just outline what that problem statement is. What are the benefits? What are the success metrics? We then take that lean canvas to a larger steering committee on the business side. We talk through what risks there might be where we think their value comes from once it gets prioritized by the business. We start to break apart that work and we’ve got multiple teams that are sometimes involved with this from the development team, the product owner. We’ve got a UX team that actually sits on the business side on the marketing side. And we look at that work, we figure out what’s our MVP? What can we get out quick fast and start to experiment on because that’s really the goal is how do we get stuff to that customer even faster. We look at the MVP then we really start breaking that work down even further to the point where the dev teams are really getting technical on some of that stuff. And then our goal – and it doesn’t always happen right, I mean this is software. It’s difficult. We’re not making widgets. We are building some software. So our goal is to try to get something out to that customer every couple of weeks ideally and that doesn’t always happen but that’s our end goal is to do it that way.
Brian: I love how much you’re saying the word “customer.” Josh, from your perspective you’ve done so much of this work over your career. Tell us from your perspective – obviously you work with Peter and Brady but across the companies you’ve worked with what have you seen as some of the best practices? Are you seeing in terms of these collaboration between business and IT and some of the things Peter was alluding to steering committees and things – Is this what you see across your customers?
Josh: It is. It is and it’s such an exciting conversation to highlight thinking back two years ago as you considered where you wanted to go and why you were looking to partner with Sitecore Commerce and the order cloud solution in particular. The business process requirements…for the B2B world were going to be much more specific, much more challenging especially for the supplier management requirements…you would have some of the fulfillment requirements you would have that were quite more complex and different the B2C type of use cases. The payment types that you required, the contract management requirements – it’s much different than just a credit card payment. So there were some things that you were very thoughtful on and just what you describe there- it’s a very agile software framework approach you’re taking and you’re practicing. You’re not doing a crawl walk run in a project based with a big waterfall project. You’re creating the MVP to show value and get feedback. You really show the business, it’s not going into a black hole and saying in six months we’re going to come back with your solution whether you like it or not. We’re going to consider your business process and your sales process and some of those interactions that the B2B business is considering. They’re basing that based on what the market feedback is they’re trying to compete and grow the business. So it’s those best practices that I described and that’s what’s inspiring in the story and journey.
Brian: We’re getting to this concept or this notion of being nimble and agile and the business typically is really pushing for that. As you were working through these requirements and your steering committees – has Brady historically had kind of this competition between what the IT side needs and what the business side needs for their customers?
Peter: Yes it did and that’s really what drove us to really looking at our platforms and our architecture. We actually sat down with Sitecore about two years ago and we did a marketing developer vision session where we sat down and we just started throwing ideas on Post-It notes and throwing it up on the wall and starting to categorize some of this stuff we don’t really draw where we wanted to go with our ecommerce platform. And we took a lot of that and kind of looked at our current platform and went – I don’t know if we can do this with our current platform we got up we got to think of some other options. We took a lot of those requirements and started investigating different platforms out there that we could utilize and that’s really what settled us to going with Sitecore order cloud and their ecommerce platform. We had a couple of technical requirements that we were looking at. We don’t want to spend time on doing upgrades on maintaining the platforms. We want to deliver features and functionality – that that’s our bread and butter. It’s not our maintaining platforms and stuff like that. Going with Sitecore order cloud being a headless platform being flexible enough – that’s what drove some of that. Those were directly coming from a lot of those requirements from the business and coming out of that vision session that we had two years ago.
Brian: So Josh, what are some of the the best practices you see for IT and business working together?
Josh: There’s there’s a long list of things that we could we could draw on – I think conceptually – being nimble and agile and delivering quick time-to-value.There’s a set amount of revenue that the business is expecting and they’re looking to grow it and they’re looking to automate things and improve their costs through some automation. So how is it that commerce services can really play into a business process and existing business process to either remove some friction. And then they’re also asking okay we have actually some pretty decent systems how do we just digitize these and add a little more AI like some some Q&A that’s in the field that’s self service. We don’t have the chance to step back and do a a 24 month project upgrade and RFP process – they need to deliver something to compete today and deliver that to the board and deliver that to the market. The best leaders are using those terms and a lot of the times it is around that business process engineering and fitting into what the business process is.
Brian: You raised an interesting point talking about legacy systems. And we have this notion of technical debt- enlighten some of our business listeners and what some of those things are you have to deal with when the business has to you know to grow sales.
Peter: Technical debt is definitely a huge one – just like we’ve all gone out and gotten ourselves a mortgage for a house at some point we have to pay it back. That’s the same with technical debt r- at some point you’re going to have to pay it back. Otherwise your systems are going to get compromised and we certainly hit a lot of technical debt throughout our life cycle and our projects – it becomes a little bit of a balancing act on how do we start to pay that back. We’ve got some mechanisms in place to do that but on top of technical debt there’s certainly security concerns that we have to account for. We’ve got to make sure that we’re on top of that. Brady is unique – I think every team is responsible for security. I’ve got a separate team for dev ops that really owns it but at the end of the day all four teams are responsible for security. We’re trying to get to more of a micro service headless type architecture but at the end of the day we still have some platform stuff that we need to maintain and upgrade and if we let any of those stuff slide you start to run into security risk, so it’s a never ending cycle here that you have to stay on top of. And we manage that with the business by simply saying – here’s priorities and here’s your priorities and how do we intertwine those. We kind of have an unwritten rule of 20% of our time is going to be spent on tech debt, security, that kind of stuff to make sure that we we pay back that tech debt because otherwise the bank is going to call us.
Brian: Josh, what are some best practices you can suggest to either the IT team or the business team in terms of understanding what the other side’s dealing with?
Josh: Peter said it so well – what I would add is that as you look forward you want to be able to think about a long-term strategy of deprecating that tech debt that you’re paying down, but you’re also replacing it with solutions that scale and take some of the elements in the world of SaaS and the world that we’ve all moving into and away from an on-premise solution, especially for commerce. Critical systems will always be on-premise and there’s no way away from that. But for some systems you want to move those workloads of security of truly composable commerce at the platform level. So Order Cloud is made up of 80 plus services but they’re all composable services – part of the platform. The experience that Brady extends into each of those business use cases that the business is looking for – they want to reimagine how digital commerce is going to extend into these B2B use cases and all these types of things for 15 or 20 years. In practice it’s difficult and it’s messy to do within in a complex, distributed manufacturing company. So that said, we’re much closer to that reality today – and the best practices to think about how do we invest in platforms that are composable, that can coexist, that can take on micro workloads now and then over time, as we’re paying that debt, we can actually move those those workloads off rigid legacy systems that are expensive and hard to maintain and have to be upgraded. How do we move on to a modern SaaS based, secure platform?
Brian: Technical that is dead, right? Maybe?
Peter: It also becomes minimized as we start to move those composable-type architectures. You can isolate your tech that way.
Brian: You’re trying to learn from the past to try to eliminate tech debt going forward and how that’ll help them with being more nimble.
Peter: The business is always wanting to move faster. We’re still trying to balance that quite a bit and we still have a rather large legacy system that we’re slowly migrating over to composable. It’s certainly been a slow process in a lot of cases. But in the same regard we just work with the business, and we explain to them where the challenges are, and we try to minimize our risk as much as we can. We went live with Order Cloud here last year and we did that in such a fashion that it really did not impact business one bit. And it took a while and there was a lot of technical debt that slowed us down because of it, but we just we work with the business we explain this to them. We walked through it we talked about what the benefits of going down these different avenues are, and what we’re going to see in the long run. We’re starting to slowly see some of those benefits today as we start to build new functionality and new features into the system. We’re able to move faster now because we’ve eliminated some of that technical debt.
Josh: One thing that I heard from some of your other leaders as well is this concept of optionality because we have to be prepared for what the options are going to be in the future.
Brian: My experience as a VP of eCommerce was exactly that – we wanted that flexibility. We didn’t have the same kind of option options folks like Peter and Brady have today which is really exciting I would have loved to have these types of options back then. At Brady, how is ownership divided up?
Peter: The marketing team really owns the vision, owns the roadmap of the product and we’ve got a product owner so it’s a single point of ownership. On the business side we’ve got all of our stakeholders and that could be other marketeers or it could be the sales team or it could be internal customer service customer support. We’ve got the delivery team and the delivery team primarily is made up of my development team, but then there’s also the UX team is sitting in there as well. The UX team is actually on the marketing side. We’ve got a software architect that also helps us with some of this stuff and helps drive where we should how does this work while making sure the teams are going in the right direction from an architectural standpoint. And then also kind of off on the side as well we’ve got the SEO team that really is another one of our customers for sure. We do a lot of work for that SEO team but then they’re the ones that are also driving a lot of that traffic to that site.
Brian: Josh, what are some of the best practices you’re seeing around how the teams are divided up?
Josh: So the way that Peter described their approach is really aligned with best practices.It’s this content supply chain. It should be driven and owned by those that have put into place governance and also the vision for our digital brand and the content we want to be in the field. The goal that Peter has shared is they want increase the velocity of approved content and personalize that content they’re making. I think that a lot of the things they’re describing allowed the practitioners to do what they do and own what they own in their tooling and in their business process. So I think what that requires is some downstream good communication. There’s a framework to follow. I think one thing that we want to avoid is asking marketing practitioners to suddenly learn a new system and learn a commerce system and learn some IP. They want to be creative and they want to really drive the content and live where the consumers are. So I think some some best practices there are to make the most the content strategy is to integrate that automatically into your downstream systems that need to consume it and put it in the hands of your practitioners so that on the IT side they can really just quickly deploy that across all the channels that you have here to go and deploy.
Brian: Tell us about the results you see. You’ve obviously been talking a lot about the implementation and the things you’ve done. What kind of results have you seen?
Peter: We really only measure the revenue on a year-to-year basis and we look at it even from a monthly basis but you know over the past couple of years since I’ve been here we’ve certainly increased revenue especially to the US site almost 15 to 20% year-over-year. So you know we’re doing something right that’s for sure. And I think a lot of that is giving the business the ability to drive the content like Josh mentioned earlier. It’s being able to be flexible and to deliver in a timely manner what the customer needs.
Brian: Josh from your perspective, when you think about the kinds of metrics companies are seeing when they put up a more flexible system, what are you seeing?
Josh: I’m actually part of a panel at a B2B conference next week and I think the B2B market in general is asking for metrics that are very similar to direct consumer. The average value of a customer, the lifetime value of a customer. And taking the themes around personalization as they provide self service – they expect the value of a customer to go up and the costs of acquiring and retaining that customer to go down overall. Those types of metrics are what the B2B market is asking for and expecting and they want the ability to build a view of that data more specific than annually. They want to be able to see that on an quarterly basis, on a monthly basis, in real time. We’re allowing you to have more of that analytics data on your customers and respond well – getting more granular is key. So I think those are some some things to consider around how do we get access to the order history and all the different components of a customer and incorporate that into a personalization theme around that B2B customer the same way we would around a retail customer or a lifetime like a typical customer relationship management three sixty degree of your customer. It starts with – can you capture the customer order data? Can you capture their preferences? Can you deliver in the channels that they want? Can you provide self service? These are the basics and then you start to measure them.
Brian: Peter, you have a chance to talk to the business users here – Tell them what you’re dealing with when it comes to KPIs.
Peter: Yeah we certainly look at some of those metrics as well. Uptime is a big one for us. We’re constantly looking at that one so that is one that I report out on a monthly basis to the business. The other ones – we take a look at Google core vitals quite heavily. But going back once again to – what’s that customer experience? Are we improving on those? What can we do to improve upon those? And then page speed performance – we still look at all of that stuff but it’s it like I said at the end of the day that all drives revenues. we really hang our hat on whether we are increasing revenue. We do look at other security type metrics as well. We’ve got different tools in place to monitor that and make sure that we’re improving on those. A lot of those are used internally within the engineering teams – it’s sometimes still a little too technical for the business.
Brian: I’m hearing a lot of communication, which is great and it seems like that’s a key to your your success here. So Peter as we look at going forward. The you know the beacon on world class experience is always moving out . How do you think about making sure your tech stack is really ready for where things are going and maintains that flexibility you built.
Peter: I think that goes back to the composable architecture that we’ve kind of always talked about . We’re trying to achieve that best in class and we’re always going to be experimenting. We’re always going to be trying new things. That architecture really gives us that flexibility to kind of strive for that best in class in a lot of those areas.
Josh: What things do you see as a future growth metric and method for you growing your catalog. Any thoughts on extending it to include maybe third party products and services to compliment the Brady catalog that you’re not offering today?
Peter: Historically we haven’t done a lot of third party sales on our website. The only one that I can think of is Code Corporation with handheld scanners. A few years ago we actually acquired them as you know just outright. They had a need that we were looking to fulfill. But that’s really the only one that I can think of. We’ve got a whole bunch of different brands. If I was going to look way out in the future it would probably be that one buying experience for all those brands. That’s way out there – those are you know pipe dreams at this point. But that’s where I see if we’re going to expand and add different catalogs that’s probably where I would see us going before we start offering third party.
Josh: And that’s a that’s a great description on best practice. Can you invest in a solution platform that takes care of your security and all of your scale and also allows for you to take on these other B2B channels and catalogs and catalog complexity and price and schedules and all those types of things in concert with the same platform providing the simple direct use cases.
Brian: You’ve had a successful collaboration here and what’s one thing that your business partners have done well that have helped you to achieve success. What are they doing that helped you get there?
Peter: I would say you know just being open and transparent with us just as we are with them being open and transparent. A lot of times with IT in the business we lose the what and the why – what we’re trying to accomplish and why. And I think one thing that the business does really well is explain that. Which helps get buying them for my dev teams. They understand the purpose of what they’re trying to build. So I think that is one thing that I would say is certainly driving success is making sure that we understand the what and why because then we’re all marching towards that same goal and that same outcome.
