BL&T No. 198: Shopify Editions, Sales, & Culture

Borrowed

"As Dick Brown puts it, “The culture of a company is the behavior of its leaders. Leaders get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate. You change the culture of a company by changing the behavior of its leaders. You measure the change in culture by measuring the change in the personal behavior of its leaders and the performance of the business.”

From "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done" by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, Charles Burck [Book]

Learned & Thought

I’m in Toronto this week for Shopify’s editions.dev event with Barrel CTO Wes. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the 150+ product updates in Shopify’s bi-annual release, Summer Edition '24, you can review them here.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been helping brands launch on Shopify since 2009. A lot has changed in the last 15 years. It's no longer enough for brands to invest in their website alone—they need to meet their customers where they are to succeed.

As an agency, we’ve evolved from focusing solely on a client’s website to examining the entire customer journey, seeking opportunities to enhance how customers shop and experience the brand across touchpoints. Many of our clients are CPG brands, making this approach even more relevant. These days we're working on building B2B storefronts, designing Amazon content, creating personalized email/SMS flows, and implementing POS.

Shopify has continually evolved with merchants' changing needs and customers' buying patterns. They’re not afraid to embrace partnerships like Amazon’s Buy with Prime while investing the same energy in POS and B2B that got their core e-commerce offering to where it is today.

The Summer ’24 Edition is aptly titled ‘Unified’ and, as usual, it’s a lot to digest. The addition of a “Top 10” summary this year is a great starting point. Among my favorite updates are tailored Markets experiences across B2B and retail, store credit availability, split shipping in checkout, and seamless store pickup between POS and DTC.

I'm eager to dive into the Summer Edition '24 with our team over the next few days and uncover new opportunities to enhance our clients' commerce experiences.

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Other things on my mind this week:

Sales: I’ve been leading sales at Barrel for over a year now—despite my involvement in the process for a decade, I’ve learned so much since taking it on. While I know there’s value in my involvement, I’m questioning how early I need to get involved in every opportunity. I’m grateful to the many team members who take the lead in digging into a client’s requirements and work with me in developing strategic proposals. However, while I’m traveling this week, I’m experimenting with having a couple of team members take the initial call with a prospect. I believe this will be a good step in identifying a longer-term, productive path forward and allow me to create more space for developing deals alongside leading other company initiatives. In some ways, I’m reminded of my transition from a designer to a manager years ago and how it felt to slowly take steps away from the work.

Company Culture: Last week, I reviewed some feedback from our People Ops Manager, Allison, based on her monthly one-on-ones with our team. Just before this, I had shared with Allison how I'd been feeling that aspects of our company culture – how we work (process), how we work together (collaboration), and how we feel while doing both (camaraderie) – could be worth revisiting to better reflect our evolution and ambitions as an agency. In reviewing the feedback, it’s clear my gut feeling is on the right track. I have some ideas on where everything from weekly rituals to team collaboration to employee benefits can go but first things first, I'll be meeting with each team member to gather feedback and get a more holistic view. From there, I look forward to taking steps over the next several months toward renewing our company culture and what it means to be a part of Barrel.