Identify Jobs to Be Done
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how ecommerce features can impact your roadmap.
- List activities necessary for ecommerce success.
- Identify organizational gaps and key roles to hire.
One Task at a Time
When you create, uplevel, or extend your ecommerce offering, it’s important to take a step back and consider all the tasks and teams necessary for success. Whether you’re just starting out in your direct-to-consumer (DTC) journey or you have a mature organization with goals of launching new initiatives, the key roles and functions of ecommerce are the same.
It all starts with your goals and plan—including your technology roadmap and your product and marketing initiatives. Once your dev team launches the features and capabilities listed in your roadmap, your UX and design teams ensure ease of use for buyers. Marketing and merchandising strategies get customers to your site and help drive loyalty. Development operations ensure that the processes happening behind the scenes—like order management and fulfillment—are streamlined and as efficient as possible.
Let’s take a deeper look at how your roadmap drives key activities, roles, and your timeline.
Your Roadmap’s Impact on Key Commerce Activities
All ecommerce experiences need to be built before they can be enjoyed by customers. The first step is to identify which ecommerce features and functionalities will drive your business forward to help you meet your goals. Think: shopping cart design, streamlined checkout flow, and third-party integrations for things like ratings and reviews. Once you’ve identified which key features to prioritize, your development team can get started.
Your roadmap and timeline hinge on their skills, abilities, and bandwidth, so it’s important to know where you stand. Consider the new features your team will build and what kind of pace you expect sprints to be completed. Will you start with a minimum viable product (MVP) and optimize the site at a steady pace? Or will you take a more aggressive approach to innovate new use cases as fast as possible?
Once you’ve got these things figured out, it’s time to decide how to move forward. Depending on the pace of your roadmap and the headcount and skills of your dev team, most organizations take one of the following approaches to build an ecommerce site.
- Bring in partners, like systems integrators to help with the launch.
- Utilize your strong technical in-house team.
- Hire a new team if you don’t have one already.
After you decide on your development approach, focus on building out other teams that drive ecommerce success.
Key Roles Necessary for Ecommerce Success
Building the functionalities for ecommerce is just the beginning. To bring the vision to life, you need marketers who can drive traffic to your site, merchandisers to make products shine, and UX designers to advocate for shopper experience.
While it may be tempting to jump right into hiring for open roles, it’s best to be strategic. Before you post job ads, pause to consider the daily tasks carried out by each team. This approach removes discussions from the rigidity of job titles and the politics of hierarchy and helps you focus on how any given group or role fits into the ecommerce organization and its activities.
Marketing
Heavily trafficked digital storefronts and healthy conversion rates don’t just happen—they’re the result of a holistic marketing strategy. Reaching the goals you set for these KPIs includes everything from email campaigns to optimized product descriptions and compelling messaging. Consider these tasks before you determine who should be responsible for them—or whether you need to open new roles.
- Shopper acquisition
- Content management
- Campaign management
- Performance marketing
- CRM and customer data management
Merchandising
With their deep knowledge of industry-specific buyer personas, trends, and product details, digital merchandisers give your storefront more allure and help bolster sales. As you decide how to fill out your merchandising team, consider these activities to help determine whether you need to upskill, retrain, or hire.
- Product preparation
- Inventory planning and fulfillment
- Personalization
- Search and discoverability
UX Design
Eighty percent of consumers agree that the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services. With that said, UX and creative design are key to the success of your ecommerce initiatives. Consider these tasks to help guide your approach when deciding whether to hire, reskill, or outsource your UX endeavors.
- Shopper experience
- User research and testing
- User flow and wireframe creation
Development Operations
Your front-end operations team brings your digital storefront (or any changes to it) to life by way of JavaScript, HTML, React, and CSS. Consider the day-to-day tasks of your front-end team to get a feel for any gaps that may crop up as you implement your new ecommerce platform.
- Product strategy
- Technical requirements
- Feature build and development
- Operational support
- QA testing and automation
Identify Gaps and Decide How to Fill Them
As you consider the activities listed above, you can probably think of a few people on your team who already manage many of these tasks. You’re probably also noticing where gaps currently exist. For example, someone may already be in charge of product set up, onsite search, and sorting rules—but you may need someone new to devise personalization strategies.
Mapping each team’s activities gives you a better idea of where gaps exist in your current structure and where roles need to be filled or created. It may be helpful to create a visual tool for mapping out all the tasks to be done. As you identify activities and new responsibilities that don’t have an owner, decide whether to hire, reskill, or bring in a partner to get the jobs done.