How Composable Commerce is Playing a Key Role in SiteOne’s Digital Transformation

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Adam (Moderator)

Now it's my pleasure to introduce our speakers. We have Kelly Goetsch, who's chief strategy officer at commercetools. He came to the company from Oracle where he led project management, product project management, excuse me, for their microservices initiatives as well as senior level product development and go to market responsibilities for Oracle Cloud products. He's also the co-founder and chairman of the MACH Alliance.

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Next, I'd like to introduce Scott Canney, senior director of product management at SiteOne. He's a digital strategy leader responsible for building and scaling digital teams in both B2B and B2C fortune 500 organizations, and he's participated in or overseen several Replatforming efforts using marketplace principles and vendors using a product led approach to drive impactful outcomes. And finally, we've got Thomas Mulreid, who is head of sales at Orium, where he brings a deep understanding of the both a composable and headless commerce ecosystem and the future it holds for major brand transformation projects.

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He's spent the past three years specifically focused on developing strategies for MACH architectures, and he's consulted and kicked off more than 25 MACH and composable commerce projects since 2021. We're going to start off with Kelly, who's going to be talking just a bit about MACH and composable commerce and their definitions for anybody who's not familiar with them.

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And, they'll also take us through some of the reasons why they're getting gaining so much traction in retail. So Kelly handing it off to you. You know happy to talk about MACH. My favorite subject. So MACH stands for microservices APIs cloud and headless and with commercetools came up with headless commerce. We invented that in 2013.

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And we also invented the term MACH. So, very near and dear to my heart. Having been at commercetools now for, for seven years. Let's discuss each one of these. So first, starting with microservices. Microservices are small vertical applications that are each deployed and managed by a single team. Historically, you'd have organizations that had different teams based on the technology that they used.

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So you'd have a database team, you'd have an infrastructure team, you'd have a frontend team, a backend team. But now with microservices, because of cloud, you can have a small team of five, six, seven, eight people and maybe that small team just does promotions for the whole company, or pricing or a shopping cart or whatever that vertical piece of functionality is.

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And what's key with microservices is that each team can release one of those microservices whenever they please. So if a team is doing the inventory microservice and they make a change, they should be able to release that whenever they want. So microservices really are good for accelerating development. And we have commercetools of course. Fully support that.

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The second is a for API. First. An API first means that we as vendors publish all of our data and functionality exclusively through REST APIs. So there's no calling our database, there's no anything. We're very firmly part of that API economy. And to work with data and functionality, you just call APIs. The C is for cloud.

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And cloud is multi-tenant SaaS. So that is think of it like, Gmail for example, or Google Workspace. You go log in, you create an account, and instantly you can access the functionality. And that's the same as multi-tenant SaaS, right? You can immediately start accessing the functionality. And that's in direct opposition to how everybody used to do it, where you'd have to call up your vendor and say, hey, I need a QA environment.

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And they'd say, well, how many servers do you want? And and then they'd say, how much storage do you want? And, and, and right. But with multi-tenancy, that just doesn't exist because as a vendor, we manage and scale everything at scale for our customers. And finally, the H is for headless. And what that refers to is a decoupling of the frontend from the backend.

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So the frontend can be deployed and managed independently of the backend, and it consumes data and functionality from those REST APIs. And then how this works with composable commerce. Gartner came up with that term about two years ago. It's really caught on. It's a fantastic business term, but composable commerce is the ability to, consume package to business capabilities.

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So basically chunks of functionality that roughly map back to an individual microservice. So as a business user, you can say, I'd like to get the checkout from this vendor, I'd like to get the PIM from that vendor link to get the service from another vendor. It's then being able to compose that rich experience, based on best of breed components, or you build those pieces yourself.

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Either way is just fine. I wish we didn't have so much jargon in our space. But unfortunately, unfortunately we do. So I'm hopeful that that, help explain some things. And before we, hand off, what would you say are some of the the high level benefits? You talked about them as you were as you were describing them, but what are what are the key benefits they offer to, to an organization, particularly a retail or, or, manufacturing organization.

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So the key is it's speed. And that's actually why we came up with the acronym. It was Mach speed. Got it. And historically applications just are so slow to deploy to production. So when I was doing I used to do ATG implementations, you know, a long time ago they were deploying to production once a month. You know, that was a pretty common release cadence.

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Amazon releases to production amazon.com more than once every second. If you can imagine that. So they're deploying really fast. And I'm a firm believer that innovation requires iteration. In many cases, it takes two, three or 4 or 5 iterations to perfect a feature. And if you're releasing to production once a month, you've got problems. And a good example, maybe it's an overused example, but when COVID hit, the fast moving organizations were very able to very easily able to pivot to buy online, pick up at the curbside.

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And that worked really well. And some organizations that had not made those investments, they just weren't able to. Or look at the recent Southwest Airlines meltdown. You know, they had all sorts of challenges. I mean, that was a very big event to the company, and that was because of too much legacy technical debt and an inability to release code to production.

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So there are real world consequences to this. And MACH is all about speed, right? Okay. Well, now I'd like to, switch things over to Thomas. And if you can talk about the role that, system integrators play and, specifically if you can talk about, how that might relate to the kind of digital transformation that Scott's company has been going through.

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Thanks, Adam. I'm happy to talk to you today. Hello to the entire audience. But, I'm with Orium, and Orium is specifically system integrator and consultancy based out of Canada. We mainly focus around the composable on headless ecommerce space, the retail space, the customer data and marketing space. But unlike many organizations where Orium focuses is specifically around these types of technologies that Kelly was speaking about.

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And that really gives us a blend of where we can support these transitions into what for many brands, is a new way of doing business. Those specific brands and for example, one of them is SiteOne, and Scott's going to do a much better job than I ever could of describing that in a few minutes.

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But where we can help brands like SiteOne is around specific areas around that transition of what is your current state today, what is the technologies that you're on currently, and how are you actually functioning on those on those technologies, and then transitioning into these new ways of building out architectures and that can be through things like accelerators to help you deliver faster and launch quickly with the right foundations in place.

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We also support a lot around digital roadmap. What is the right order events to actually start these transitions into new architectures? How do you set up the right Marc architecture without having overlap of your technologies, choosing the right vendors? And then the last one is really these playbooks of migration, things that can help you de-risk the strategy, things that can take the fear out of the transition, whether it's your people, whether it's your change management, or frankly, whether it's the features that are actually required to come across.

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Or it plays a specific role in understanding what the end state of composable commerce can look like. So that when we're bringing your business model to that end stage, we make sure we're not leaving nothing behind, and we make sure that we're planning ahead with the right expectations. Great. Thank you so much, Thomas. Well, now I'd like to bring Scott, Canney into the conversation.

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And, Scott, I'm very happy to be hearing from you and hearing about, your company's digital transformation. Maybe you could start with just talking a little bit about SiteOne, itself and what you guys do and what your structure is, and then, we can drill into some more specifics. Sounds good. Thanks, Adam. So, SiteOne, we're in what we call the green industry.

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We're a distributor of landscape supplies. Have five different lines of business, ranging from, typical irrigation. What you're familiar with chemicals for lawn all the way through hardscape to nursery. We're in a $25 billion market. And one of the most interesting things about the industry is that we make up 16% market share. It's incredibly fragmented, and we're four times the size of the next competitor.

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So ton of opportunity in the space. And, part of our strategy is acquisition. And that's going to be a key factor in what we talk about and how technology plays a role for. SiteOne. What we're looking at on this slide is just our history of acquisitions. You can see throughout the last several years, just year after year, averaging at least one acquisition a year, a month.

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And as recent as last year in 22, we were averaging more than one per month. So what we're beginning to see as we make these acquisitions of regional, players is that more and more of them have the ecommerce. And so with that comes complexities of having to manage multiple platforms, having to have multiple strategies. And so that's ultimately what we, started out on our journey, for a new platform.

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Okay. And, and so, you've mentioned the acquisition strategy and how important that is to, to the business. But overall, what we're, as you were thinking about this digital transformation, what were your what were your big challenges or what opportunities where you seeking to take better advantage of? I guess? Sure. First and foremost was our, Canada platform.

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We made an acquisition several years back with a company called Burn Co, that had a pretty big web presence. And so that kind of built the case around needing a platform there and a legacy, technology. Kelly mentioned earlier just the concept of monoliths, very slow to move. Hard to support, a little bit outdated. Not in the cloud.

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So it's on-prem. So just all around, a lot of opportunity for us to get off of that. So that kind of kicked off of our, our journey. And as we went along, we decided to come up with a couple different pillars or tenets of the strategy. So in addition to Canada, what we want to do is make sure that we're thinking acquisitions, future acquisitions as well, and making sure we can fold them into the platform.

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One thing that's important for us at SiteOne is that some of our acquisitions we might fold into siteone.com or SiteOne dot K, but other ones, it might make sense for them to stand out on their own as their own brand. So that played into the strategy. And then finally business empowerment. Right now we're hindered by technology.

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So even the most simplest of changes, for example, of marketing, wants to make a change, whether it's promotion or, even content for the site. We have to go to dev, which isn't good. That slows us down. It pulls dev away from, other things that are critical to the business. So that was kind of the the business case.

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We, began around. Got it. I'm hearing that a lot about, trying to avoid needing to go to your, your developers for, for changes. And that certainly aligns with, what Kelly said about the need to act quickly and to iterate. So, yeah, that totally makes sense. You mentioned the obstacles of the monolithic stack where there other, elements of the technology, either for your company or the companies you were acquiring that might have gotten in the way of, reaching some of these goals or moving toward them.

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Sure. I mean, you can start with security. So each company we acquire feels like they're on a new platform. Some have never even heard of. And so just naturally needing to secure them all and make sure that, we're not not allowing any vulnerability to those different websites, but on top of that, also, let's say just total cost of ownership as well.

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So needing to manage multiple websites, needing different skill sets to manage those websites can be very costly. So consolidating down to a single architecture, while still having that flexibility of managing multiple sites, was a factor as well. Totally makes sense. I wouldn't even have thought of that. But yes, of course, security must be, a huge issue as well as, just the management of it.

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So it take me through, you know what, what the what the first phases of the digital transformation were and, maybe, what where you are now and, and where you're heading. Sure.

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So this slide highlights, two different things. I'll come back to the top later. But in terms of the phasing, we started off with the discovery process. We looked at a number of different vendors. We not only looked in the MACH space, but we did look at monoliths. Quickly eliminated them, thankfully. But, looked at DXP looked at, a few other things.

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We engaged Thomas and the Orium team, pretty early on as we started to identify that. Hey, let's move towards this technology. They were a great partner. We did a deep dive discovery session with them in person. We laid out all of the uniqueness of SiteOne business. They helped us kind of map out, a roadmap as well as a plan.

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Then we decided to kick off a proof of concept with them. This is a two month POC. Wildly successful. It allowed us to de-risk, taking the leap of faith into this technology. So we, used commercetools and implants. Our goal of ourselves put those together. We're able to, prove out some of the uniqueness of SiteOne.

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And then, in doing so, built the business case to then go full steam, into the actual migration of of Burnco, also known as siteone.com.

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So, so that was the. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. I'm sorry. And then the last part, that last space that's laid out, that's the acquisition and enhancements phase. So after we do Canada, we're not going to stop there. We plan to continue. So you can see in the top image now the current state, or all the disparate sites that we were talking about.

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So our future vision, we talked about headless earlier. We chop off the head, we have commercetools as well as Contentful. There's some other, backend, platforms supporting, multiple heads or frontend. So we allow and empower our acquisitions to maintain their brand or we co-brand we can have SiteOne.ca on it. We can have someone.com on it all on a common backend that connects to our ERP and other internal systems.

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So there's a couple of benefits with this. Number one is just the ability to, reduce that total cost of ownership. But then also a common example today is we release a feature in the US. Canadian counterparts wonder when they get that feature and we have to build it twice. We can now build it once and send it off anywhere we want to.

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Oh that's that's great. That's sound. That sounds like a great, structure for that, especially, as you say, for a company like yours. So that was, that was one of the reasons you started with Canada. That was, that was basically on just one, one system already. Is that correct? Correct. Yeah, it was twofold with Canada.

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One was they were on a legacy platform that we, desperately need to get off of. But then two, it allows us to de-risk this transformation. And we see this as the start of a transformation, not just with technology, but, organization organizing around products that I'll talk about later. But it, it provided us with those two benefits, de-risking give Canada the latest and greatest technology and then we ease into other acquisitions in other websites.

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Okay, great. And are you are you already starting to see some of these benefits or. These are these, in process where where are you in terms of the the sort of, beginning the ROI for, for this whole thing, which I imagine is going to be spread out over, well, not too many months, but spread out somewhat.

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Exactly. No, we, I mean, our only measurable thing to date has been the successful POC, which which we do tie value to, we're preparing in the coming weeks to go live with our, MVP or a minimum viable product, first phase that will test and we'll ease into it. We're going into season in Canada. And so we want to be extra cautious.

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We want to make sure everything looks good. But we're excited already with the products we're going live with. We have a better checkout experience, a lot more seamless. We have better search without here and just overall page improvements, both with speed SEO optimization and so on. Right. And, just just one more question. I know you guys, you have multiple, as you say, multiple audiences, but you're, you're both business to business and business to consumer.

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Has this been, has this architecture you're already in and moving towards? Is that helpful in terms of getting the advantages of, of having one system, but also being able to serve these two very different, customer groups? Absolutely. And we even have different segments within the B2B side too. So we have extremely large customers, that have unique wants and needs, that this technology can help meet.

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And at the same time, we have smaller pros, that are very similar to consumers, that can meet their needs as well. And so if we look at Canada right now, we, the Burnco side today is heavily targeted towards consumers. We're going to be able to replicate what we have there. And then, dial it up even further, going after the B2B market.

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Right. So the smaller B2B customers might be somebody who owns a landscaping business in a particular area or something or, or maybe, you know, a couple of different businesses, but not not an enormous company. Exactly. So you could in B2B, you could range from just like, call it like one truck, operation to a national company that has operations in multiple states or provinces.

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Okay, great. All right. Well, let's let's bring in the, Kelly and, Thomas as well. And, first of all, thank you so much. Scott, great present, part of the presentation. And we will excuse me. We will be getting back to some more about tonight one. But, let's bring these guys in.

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Kelly,

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Someone decided to use commercetools versus, developing their own bespoke, homemade solution. And, not just building out the IT network themselves. Can you tell me why in a, in a situation like this, composable represents a, a viable or maybe even the preferred type of solution? We've had commerce platforms on the market now for basically 30 years.

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And this is not rocket science. You know, there are actual people building rockets. And this is right. This is not that level of complexity. We've had shopping carts, promotion engines, pricing like it's all pretty straightforward. And because we've had these on the market for so long, we as vendors largely compete based on delivery model, based on cost, based on partnerships, you know, are fortunate to have Orium is a great partner.

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You know we that's how we compete right where we don't competitors are we you know we support the specific type of currency because I mean generally speaking we all have roughly the same features, right? It's not a feature and function fight. So I would argue that commerce is a commodity in the same way that load balancing is a commodity, right?

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You used to have to get these really expensive load balancers from F5 and net scaler and other vendors. Very expensive to deploy, hard to maintain. We used to have the same thing with commerce. Now we have multi-tenant SaaS mark based commerce vendors, of which commercetools is the leading. And it makes much more sense to pay a nominal fee to use our shopping cart, which is the best in the market, then build something and then have to maintain that, you know, no developer, the developers are expensive.

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No developer ever wants to get out of bed and fix a big queue of tickets around pricing errors in the shopping cart, right? For the same reason you don't feel like load balancer from scratch. So by the boring commoditized stuff from us as a vendor, build the differentiation. Build the frontend. Okay, Thomas, any thoughts on this, and how it might relate to, for instance, total cost of ownership, TCO?

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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the big things that Kelly mentioned earlier that I think it all comes back to is speed. That's the name where MACH came from. That's the thing that we're all driving towards. I think moving as quickly as possible as you can for what you need to achieve in your business definitely helps with the hard times like COVID and when you need to pivot quickly, but frankly, it just helps in the day to day.

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Your team want to be able to do things quickly and test things quickly, and having an experiment driven approach is really important to the success in the B2B and B2C, or frankly, just any digital experience that you're trying to drive. So, specifically where it comes back to for a lot of the work that we do is the business cases are often built around how painful it is for the day to day business.

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And how can you build that opportunity to do better, faster. And I think that really comes back down to both the clear total cost of ownership savings, but also the hidden ones, and the clear ones really do come back to where you're not spending a lot of money, like what Kelly mentioned, around building your own cars or building your own load balancers and having to spend a lot of resources on it.

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But frankly, just how fast you can spin out features, launch new things for your brand that can incrementally improve the revenue that you're able to capture. And I think that's really important because, it really is a case where brands can't afford to lag these days in their growth. There's a lot of competition online. No, space is really a niche space where there's no competition anymore online.

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There's always someone against you. And if you can move quickly, the reward is pretty big in terms of how you can take market share. And I think, you know, Scott talked about how there's a big gap between themselves and their next competitor, and that's important that they can keep that going for the years to come. And, you know, obviously keep on growing with that growth rate as well.

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I don't know, Scott, if you've got anything else, that you'd add on top of that. Yeah. Two things. Number one, I couldn't have said it any better than, Kelly there. I always I've worked for a couple of billion dollar, websites in my, previous life, and I was always amazed when you were spending all of this engineer's time and all this money on just building a cart.

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Like Kelly said, it's a commodity. And so that was a lot of the attraction and going towards this technology as well. This technology technologies almost modeled after Amazon, and what they've done and what a lot of the leading ecommerce companies are doing today in-house. But now it's brought to the masses. And, that's what SiteOne wanted to go after.

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We want to use our engineers when we think build for Aspi, we want to build what's unique to our business, and then we want to buy everything else. So that that was a really great point by Kelly. And then to the TCO part, I do think there's a lot of, intangibles, I guess we, we did a three year projection as part of the business case, and we were able to show how we brought costs down, but what we didn't articulate there, and I think this technology, brings to the table is just, lowering tech to, speed is invaluable.

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And it's hard to quantify that. But when we can release more features to the customer, adapt more quickly and no longer have to do nightly releases once or twice a month, but instead of intraday, there's a lot of value in that that can't always be quantified. So definitely looking forward to, to, to bringing that to the organization.

00:26;01;18 - 00:26;17;05

I love that phrase tech that that's not that's somewhat new to me, but what a what a great concept. I think everybody can, can immediately get the, the basics of what that means. It's got I want to just keep you on for one more minute before we, before we move on to questions from the audience.

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We have gotten a couple, but, you've, said the reasons why you've done, a partnership strategy you mentioned. In addition, excuse me, in addition to the companies represented here, I'll go there. And I think some other, I believe one other company. Tell me a little bit about the day to day of, keeping everybody on track, you know, doing, doing the meetings, making sure everyone's, you know, to use the cliche, everyone's on the same page singing from the same choir book, whatever.

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But, what what were some of the techniques you used to do that or make that, work better? Sure. It is a lot having multiple vendors going from 1 to 4, in our case. But it's totally worth it. And that's where a partner like Orium comes in, because they have these pre-established relationships, they know who to pull in and when.

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And then that, coupled with product managers organized around the different functionality that each vendor brings, allows us to kind of introduce it at scale. I think, where we need to connect the dots is architecture. So it's incredibly important to have a strong architect that's able to sit next to Orium, connect those dots and then, product management, product design as well.

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So we have a very strong trio, lead Patrick Fabian, who do a great job just connecting all of these dots, working with Orium and, making sure that we're hitting, sprint after sprint. Terrific. All right. Well, as a as I mentioned, we have been getting some questions in from the audience, and I'm going to relay them to you guys, the speakers.

00:27;47;04 - 00:28;14;00

If we don't get to your specific question that you're putting and there's still time, we will, we will pass them along and, they can respond offline, outside the webinar itself. So I my first question would, or not my first question, excuse me, the question that came in, what's the best way to sell this to your upper management and who or which departments are most important to get buy in for, something like this?

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I mean, we're talking about some some pretty major things here. This could be either you, Scott, or maybe Thomas or Kelly. Have some thoughts on this as well. Sure, I can start. I think it's a couple different groups that you need to sell it to. Three. In our case, I would argue that the most important is going to be the team that's involved in it.

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More so, I think everyone actually jumps to the CEO, the CFO, CIO, which are equally important. But we needed to make sure that the team was ready and that they were excited and that we all believe in this vision of going towards it. So that was first and foremost. And Orium did a great job coming in, pulling that team together and then teaching those who who needed to know, just about the benefits of this technology.

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Next is your stakeholder group. We talked about business empowerment earlier. So, sharing with them how it's worth the wait. And don't just try to run out and build on legacy right now, but let's make the investment and will empower you later. So no longer waiting for dev for everything. And then finally C-suite. You have your CEO most important, but, in my case, CIO.

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Selling him, making sure he's bought in on this technology and then actually the CFO that we're going to get a return on investment in the near future. Not sure. Thomas, any thoughts on this? So this is a challenge. Lots of, lots of tech people face, every day. But, I'd love to hear your thoughts on, getting by and what kinds of arguments or, proof points do you bring to this, to these managers?

00:29;43;29 - 00:30;04;07

Yeah, I think I think Scott framed it really well around the day to day people. One of the things that I do see in the space is that technology teams consider this a technology project, and that's where it can quickly get dismissed, because it's all about the APIs and the 500 buzzwords that we all use in this space.

00:30;04;07 - 00:30;26;15

But I think really where it has to come back to is who is the team that's going to build on this every single day, who you know, clocks in on the day and their job is that much easier, that much more fun, and getting their buy in early so that they can see the opportunity is really important. And then the second thing is just making sure that there's, transparent communication around what you're trying to achieve.

00:30;27;01 - 00:30;50;20

It's not really a game of hidden motives or hidden agendas. A technology team often wants the exact same thing as a business team. It's just they're conflicting because they want different things at different times. It's really just around the perspective of how can we help tell the story to the business buyer or the business team how their life is going to be better once we achieve this, you know, new architecture, a new approach.

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And then really, I mean, for for me personally and especially in this economy, it's around risk and it's around cost. Making sure that you can show really clearly to your, to your buyers, onto the executive team that you're helping to reduce risk or you're taking considerate strategies in terms of how you're approaching your project is really important for me.

00:31;12;07 - 00:31;37;17

So I think, you know, Scott mentioned the POC that we were able to build out within two months. It's not really just buying one technology and saying this is going to work in, you know, six months from now and we're going to launch a good website. It's about bringing a few of them together, identifying what are the key areas of your business model that are unique to your business, and then showcasing quickly with value so that people can say, wow, if we can do this in two months, we can achieve a lot in six months.

00:31;38;01 - 00:32;09;28

I think that's really the goal around, you know, getting everybody in the room, making sure everybody feels comfortable and then ultimately answering the questions with the right care detail so that people are ready to jump off and kick it together. Some great points. And I and I love this idea that, it's not necessarily a conflict that I can imagine it might even be, a language issue or, or, you know, just the terminology that people use, the business people use one kind of terminology or the things that are important to them, it uses another, etc..

00:32;10;05 - 00:32;32;15

It's as I think you mentioned the word translate, and I think that's super important. We did get a question in and this is kind of related to this. How do I know if my organization is ready? Because this does sound like it's complicated. I would assume that's the kind of, you know, prep work that that you'd be doing, as part of maybe NLP or even before that happens.

00:32;32;15 - 00:32;54;17

But, what are some of the things you'd need to have within your organization to be able to start with, this type of transformation? Any thoughts on that? Scott or Kelly or Thomas? I'd throw that to all you guys. I should mention the Mac Alliance is soon coming out with a MACH maturity assessment tool. Oh, cool.

00:32;54;19 - 00:33;14;15

You can answer a questionnaire and it will tell you if you're ready. But what it's looking for, things like, are you had this already? You know, how many, you know, do you do DevOps today? You know, where, do you do cloud today and to what extent? And you know, what level of use of cloud you use just for hosting?

00:33;14;15 - 00:33;33;26

Or do you do real multi-tenant SaaS stuff on it? You know, and I think it's just those basic things. Can you work with APIs? Can you work with events? Or if you just historically outsourced everything to an SI and then chosen an ISV that does everything in a box for you? So, you know, lots of those types of things.

00:33;33;29 - 00:33;58;29

Sure. Okay. Thomas, what what are your thoughts on, test, testing or understanding your organization's readiness? I think another another way to look at this is around what pain is your business in today. What are the things that are really hard to do? That's probably where you should start improving things. And then I think to Kelly's point, you know, how advanced are you or how mature are you in your current state?

00:33;58;29 - 00:34;25;11

Can Austin size how big is a bite you take off? Scott obviously talked about bringing on multiple technologies to do multiple things at one time, and that takes you know, frankly, a high level of maturity in organizations so that they can go into their acquisition strategy and their multi-channel model. But, to be honest, you know, sometimes it might be a case where you've got an ecommerce platform and your business users can't change content on their homepage.

00:34;25;18 - 00:34;43;22

So maybe you just need to figure that solution out and bring in one specific Mach technology that lets you manage the content on your home page in two different languages. Without going to the development team. So really just identifying the pain and then saying, how much of this are we willing to bite off and what level of support do we need?

00:34;44;08 - 00:35;09;01

I could bias this to say a good partner will help you be successful, but, I say that this can also be done on your own. We've seen a number of organizations, you know, ask us for opinions or perspective, but then go and do it themselves. And that's totally fine. I think it really comes down to what your team dynamic looks like today, what the specific thing or outcome you're trying to drive is, and then how big of a bite do you want to take off in the first phase?

00:35;09;03 - 00:35;28;16

Scott, what are your thoughts on this, on this overall topic? Yeah, I think, both these guys nailed it. But just like Thomas was saying, it's it's how big of a bite you want. And we happen to be doing the entire platform, and breaking it apart. But I've also seen successful organizations, kind of take the Strangler approach where you pull out one at a time.

00:35;28;27 - 00:35;48;07

The microservices that Kelly was talking about. So whether it's a CMS to search another part of the site, that's also possible to it. It makes the timeline a lot longer, but it risks a lot. Gotcha. All right. I think we have time for one more, question from the audience. So, I believe it was you.

00:35;48;07 - 00:36;19;07

Scott talked about organizing around the technology, as as opposed to, being organized around just a project. What what are you seeing as as, how is that benefiting SiteOne? Or how do you see it benefiting SiteOne in the future? Yeah. Earlier Kelly was talking about organizing around these microservices and, Kelly business, from a business standpoint, we, we call them basically products.

00:36;19;07 - 00:36;40;10

We look at it as a product. So a product, it could be search, it could be cart checkout, could be promo. And by organizing product managers around these, including product designer and engineering, they can focus in and really be subject matter experts. And we're using this call it, technology to to help drive our transformation.

00:36;40;13 - 00:36;59;15

So not only are we going to Replatform, but we're going to, transform to a product led organization each release that's going to be faster and faster. Now we're going to be focused on outcomes, not just delivering shiny features on the site, but actually what are the business benefits or customer benefits that this technology solves. And so we're thrilled for that.

00:36;59;17 - 00:37;24;05

That's great. So that that, that kind of addresses, another term that's gained a lot of currency recently, which is future proofing. It. Thomas, you have some thoughts on on this as well? Yeah. I think one of the things that I think is really interesting about what Scott mentioned is, not being dependent on the whole organization to build one thing.

00:37;24;21 - 00:37;47;22

If you can build out by products such as checkout, such as search, you don't have to wait for someone else. You know, you could make five enhancements to your checkout experience in that microservice in that capability, maybe enhance the frontend of your checkout experience. But you don't have to go back through the entire platform and architecture and test everything from end to end.

00:37;47;24 - 00:38;21;00

It really is a case where a lot of the time, the one, you know, movement of a button or the one extra feature could make you an extra 5% of conversion rate on your checkout, but you don't have to go retest everything in order to launch it. So I think that product driven model also allows you to keep moving fast on multiple roadmaps at the same time as your overall digital roadmap, which is a really interesting dynamic because you can, you know, almost have teams with different goals achieving similar outcomes, and the checkout team might want to make it faster.

00:38;21;05 - 00:38;51;18

The search team might want to make the search experience longer because they want more discovery. But ultimately our results in more revenue that's going through, you know, through the architecture that you've built out. Yeah, it's a great point. There's so many different elements of the customer journey that, you know, each each acquire their own thing, but they all need, also need to work together, obviously to lead people to hopefully to the transaction or at the very least, you know, further down the funnel, you know, some great, some great responses and some great insights from all of you guys.

00:38;51;18 - 00:39;07;19

Thank you so much, Kelly. Thank you Scott. Thank you Thomas. And thanks to all the attendees for joining.