My journey at took me across various sectors, engaging with merchants managing extensive IT domains, often spanning multiple countries. These enterprises carried substantial technical debt, making a shared language an invaluable tool to fast-track discussions and move swiftly through a meaningful Discovery phase.
Merchants increasingly came to our door, enticed by the promise of agility. The urgency to respond swiftly and stay ahead of the competition, always a driving force for change, was supercharged by the race online during the pandemic. Existing systems, once robust, struggled under the weight of a growing backlog of feature requests, new channel surfaces and the changes imposed by the mega-platforms and new standards. Navigating this context and the involvement of known and unknown stakeholders played a pivotal role in most engagements.
I often turned to the Cynefin framework—a navigational guide through uncertainty. Created by Dave J Snowden and his time at IBM, this framework helped individuals and organizations navigate complex situations. Divided into five domains—clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder—each requiring a distinct decision-making approach. It emphasises the importance of context and adaptability, adhering to natural science and rebutting the illusion of a one-size-fits-all solution. Diverse viewpoints and collective intelligence emerge as essential ingredients for programme execution.
My adaptation of the Cynefin framework to Shopify Consulting
Within this framework, the Complex domain is usually the focal point for Solution Architects—where patterns and expertise converged to uncover the way forward. This was our sweet spot, we focused on understanding enough of the puzzle to identify the appropriate toolset. For us, this translated into features, discussions, and technical approaches that guided our merchants toward the most appropriate solutions all the while uncovering gaps and the need for conversation vs. a checklist or 120 page RFP document!Gathering sufficient context to orchestrate such transitions is complex and was often outside of the scope of what Shopify alone could manage, we leveraged partners who could also carry this context, the best experiences were based on the ability of the partnering teams to hold context loosely and listen deeply.
Managing for resilience means building networked capability before you need it not when you need it. That means techniques like social network stimulation which, over two years can connect everyone in an organisation within three degrees of separation based on some form of usable trust. (It's short-sighted not to build capability in advance of need - by the time you need it, it's too late!)
―Dave Snowden on Resilience
Zooming out, ecommerce landscape has undergone a transformation, rapid growth, and also technological consolidation. I noticed that the CTO mindset often went beyond agility alone; innovation, quick market entry, transparency on product sourcing and sustainability, feature depth, and resilience have took up more and more of the conversation. Resilience, in particular, while never described as a requirement, is interwoven with the very fabric of systems, back-office operations, and human resources along with global supply-chain management. My opinion is that resilience in technical organisations is undervalued and any change programme needs to create space for idle work which in the end is what enables change to be absorbed without the business losing critical structural foundations. So we would delve into the organisational and cultural aspects of the programme, this provided rich context to help the client make appropriate choices.
In retrospect, enterprises used to focus on bolstering their back-office operations, with finance and ERP processes at the forefront. Interestingly, on more than a few occasions the IT function was frequently led by the CFO, resulting in a complex web of processes. This complexity, while essential at the time of implementation, often led to sluggishness as it was embedded in slow moving complicated systems with multiple point to point connections and hardwired dependencies (SoA).
“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”
―Oliver Wendell Holmes
We would try to seek simplicity and ask questions that help business logic migrate from backend systems to the responsive frontlines or other logical systems. Systems architecture necessitates a phase shift, and here there is confusion and inertia in most projects. However, if we could get through this, I saw a pattern where Services shed their black boxes, and were channelled into the ecommerce engine, Shopify was evolving very fast and had rewritten deep logic to facilitate this. The challenge now became the art of communicating and pursuing Simplification, creating a flexible system ready to adapt. Discounts and Marketing Campaigns found their place in the Ecommerce realm (usually in the form of best of breed open platforms via extendable data models), while the ERP retained its core function—orchestrating pre and post-sale processes.
To embrace resilience, we must create space—unleashing engineering talent without disbanding the team and sensing for how innovation empowered by modern platforms feels and can indeed transform the relationship between traditional IT and Business functions. The back-office transforms, becoming a pillar of ecommerce strength, aligning to drive digital value.