Ryan Breen - Why digital optimization is the new digital transformation

Ryan Breen: Sure. I mean, just first of all, I want to thank you so much for having me on the show. It's always a great opportunity to just talk about what we're seeing in e-commerce, where we're seeing businesses go in a journey that we've been on with a lot of our partners, with a lot of our customers for, it was a company 20 years now, but we've seen a lot of changes.

And right now I got to say is one of the most exciting times in e-commerce. It's just a lot of dynamism going on in the field. So it's, it's super exciting when somebody says, hey, come on a show, let's talk about it. Let's dig into it. So I really appreciate the time.

Tim Butara: Well, and I think that this explosion in e-commerce is a very important topic. I think it was one of the huge shifts that happened with COVID, right? Because of the move to remote work, because of lockdowns and people not being able to, you know, physically go to stores and physically purchase things. And then even after lockdowns ended and even after we kind of got back to normal here, in quotation marks, this dominance, I guess, or the value of e commerce was still maintained and people still weren't kind of prepared to give it up yet.

So definitely an important topic to cover here on our podcast. So we did start, basically we did launch the podcast just before, I think, the second wave of COVID hit, in autumn of 2020. So it was kind of like hand in hand, it was happening hand in hand with this boom and development in e-commerce. So yeah, very happy to have you here to discuss this, Ryan.

Ryan Breen: That's perfect timing. The second wave came in and you're like, oh, this is going to be a real thing. And we're going to be doing e commerce exclusively for another two years. Like makes sense to, to focus on that.

Tim Butara: Well, and just, just personally for me, it was also perfect timing because I actually made my first e commerce purchase just before the second lockdown started. I think it was literally like, I picked up the package and then the next day, another round of lockdown started and it was like, you know, okay, I mean, at least I get to kind of kind of reap the rewards of the e-commerce thing right now. So, yeah.

Ryan Breen: Yeah, this is the life I'm living, so I'm living it fully.

Tim Butara: So, Ryan, one of the things that we wanted to discuss today, and actually the first thing that we said that we'd discuss today is, why do e-commerce projects never truly come to an end?

Ryan Breen: Yeah, there is, I mean... As a software engineer by trade and by background, maybe I'd call myself a recovering software engineer. Now I'm a CTO, so I'm effectively just management overhead at this point. And the truth is no project ends. There's no done in any software project, but that is doubly true in e-commerce because, particularly with that increased dynamism, increased focus with everyone, even traditionally brick and mortar businesses over the last few years saying, no, our primary revenue driver going forward is going to be e-commerce.

Everybody's competing with everyone else, everybody is putting all their efforts, all of their focus in, how do we make the most of the traffic that we get coming in from Google? How do we make the most of folks who land on our homepage and want a differentiated experience where, based on the contours of my brand, maybe I don't just want to ram products down somebody's throat? Maybe I do need to tell an experiential story for someone.

And you still see, particularly with businesses that are during that sort of late digital transformation phase, maybe they're still trying to wrap their minds wholly around, we're an e-commerce business. You go to so many sites and you say, all right, I'm on a landing page where somebody has done something interesting.

And then two clicks in. I know I'm in template hell. I know it looks like every other Shopify site, every other Salesforce site, right? They aren't telling me anything about who they are. They could be Acme brand of some generic products and they're not really able to tell their story. So we see so many people really over the last couple of years saying, how do we stand out?

How do we keep innovating? How do we keep our products fresh? How do we keep the stories we tell about them dynamic, but then also how do we continue experimenting and optimizing? So really every day somebody needs to be testing a new business strategy. Maybe that's, I'm going to show people products where today maybe there's more price sensitivity. I need to be able to reflect that in the products I show people.

Or a big trend landed today and I need to get that in front of people. So your development, your organizational structure, the data you're making decisions on, all of that needs to be changing every day and you need to be figuring out how you're going to make use of that information.

And that's a really like, that's a daily treadmill of what you need to do as a business. And that's what optimization looks like every day. I should be doing something a little bit different than yesterday, which is just light years away from where we were, you know, I'm old, in the 90s, early 2000s, where it's like, I shipped my website, and it's just going to run like that for the next two years, and maybe I have some templates that I update from time to time. We're just in a different world right now, and if you aren't keeping up, then you're falling behind.

Tim Butara: And not only keeping up, like, it's not only changing constantly, but it's changing constantly, super, super fast. So, you need to be keeping up with this breakneck pace of, of progress and transformation. And I'm guessing that digital optimization would allow you to kind of maybe a more future oriented perspective. Basically you would... maybe, you know, if you took the digital optimization approach or kind of focused on this, you maybe need to invest more upfront, but then for these incremental constant catchings up, they would be smoother, or is it something like that?

Ryan Breen: It has to be like that. It has to be like that. And that's the biggest obstacle we see with most sites is, and it's organizational as much as it is technological. Yeah, I think there is still this lingering assumption from the way sites used to be built and deployed that you create some templates, you create some fairly standard generic stuff. And then if marketing, if e-commerce, if somebody wants a tweak to that, and by tweak, I mean, anything other than put some new text in or change an image that's in a placeholder, anything beyond that is... that's a ticket to development. And somebody in development needs to write some hand coded HTML and CSS to make a change to the site.

So if everything is routing through your scarcest resource, which I mean, right now, there are just not a lot of developers. I mean, the labor market is crazy. And so the biggest challenge we see with folks right now, organizationally, is they want to move faster, faster, faster. Nobody we talked to, and I probably talked to like a hundred humans a week, nobody I talked to says, you know what? I have more developers than I had a year ago. And they're just sitting around waiting for stuff to do.

And so you have all these creative ideas, whether they're campaigns or designs, but more commonly, yeah, I want to test just differences in the products that I put in front of someone. I want to bring in this new third-party vendor for reviews and see what that does on my product pages. Now I got to wait a month and a half for that development project to be serviced by someone. And when I say, hey, can you go do that thing for me? I know that the opportunity cost there is 20 other things that I probably want to do.

And so we talked to people that are just daily making these debilitating choices where they say, well, we're in flight on this thing we thought was the best idea six weeks ago, and I know there's something I really need to do today. Instead, do you stop that project? Do you say, hey, what we really need to do to make this easy from now on is some replatform that's going to take us 18 months? And then when we get to the end of that replatform, we're going to say, oh, we still have the same set of problems because it's just a new tech stack.

And we see folks, and this seems like a strong word, but legitimately agonizing about the work decisions they have to make every day because they have that organizational constraint that's like, hey, once we ship the site, it's cool and you guys will have all the flexibility to make the business decisions and the new site content that's going to keep things fresh.

So what we like to see is folks are saying, hey, let's rethink that. Let's rethink that model, because to your point, it's not ship it once, and then we're good to go for some amount of time. It needs to be, hey, every day, we're going to ship a materially different version of a product detail page. And there are not a lot of businesses that can move that fast or that have the organizational structure that supports it.

So a lot of it is rethink, hey, where does the development work need to go? Development work needs to happen upfront, and that needs to give the rest of the business the context to say, hey, we can change every aspect of every part of our site, and we can do so in a way that we're going to get all the data we need to decide, yep, that's working. That's not working. Do something different informed by that. Yes. Tomorrow. There's no way to do that. If the thing you learn is, hey, somebody go hand code a thing. This is not possible within the limits of any development team, whether it's as staffed as it was a year ago. Certainly not today.

Where, you know, you mentioned the COVID boom in e-commerce, some of the folks we talk to right now. You know, there was a bit of a sugar rush from that boom, like everyone was sitting around, especially in the U.S., everyone's sitting around with stimulus checks, and I don't know what the social safety net story was with everywhere else in the world, but in the U.S., we hear from so many of our customers that, you know, we are still above where we were in our pre -COVID e-commerce revenue levels, but we're coming down. And so we don't know where the bottom is; is the bottom pre-COVID?

And so we're trying to figure out how we optimize with what we have, but it's just a very different environment. Cause you're constraining your budget and still feeling like, oh my god, I need to be doing more because somehow that other business is still doing more than we are, just takes that rethink of, man, how are we going to get changes to our site daily with the lean teams that we have?

Tim Butara: So with this in mind, why is digital optimization the new digital transformation and how does this apply specifically to e-commerce?

Ryan Breen: I think it, well... digital transformation to me and my literal reading of it and living it in sort of the history of our business, it is sort of that pre-cOVID moment and different people were on that arc of digital transformation, but a lot of our customers, historically, they're customers that were primarily brick and mortar. They were folks who had digital catalogs and were looking to become more e-commerce businesses for enterprises, for companies that have been around since pre 1995, call it, it takes decades to shift a business of that size to a model where you are digital first, you think of yourself as an e-commerce business that may happen to have a brick and mortar presence.

And what we're seeing probably pre 2018 was that, or pre 2020, call it, was that level of sophistication or understanding that for a lot of folks it was, hey, e-commerce is a growing part of our business, but it's not the focus of our business. Our CEO isn't someone we necessarily brought in because they're in a successful e-commerce executive, they're a retailer first who's learning how to do e-commerce.

Right now, post COVID, and I think COVID was just an accelerant on that, that maybe jumped us forward, call it five years from where we would have been on that natural trajectory. When you say, no, we're at our heart a e-commerce business, we are at our heart a retailer that focuses on e-commerce, whether or not we have physical stores somewhere.

Now your focus is on, all right, we're building our business around that. Everything we need to do is about optimizing those e-commerce channels. Not about transformation, that already happened. We're there.

We're living in a world where everything is e-commerce. So the lion's share of our investments of a business, they need to be in figuring out how to do more with that. I'm getting 40 percent of my traffic from Google going directly to my product pages. What does that mean for me as a business knowing that I live in that world where I can't assume that, say, my home page of my website is like the front door of my store, and somebody walks in and I show them a nice path to a product that I want them to buy. No, I have to assume there are a bunch of people who, if it was a retail store, they're just magically appearing in front of one product, and how do I show them something interesting?

Digital transformation mindset. You're not going to get that this new model. You're going to say, well, I've got data. It says I need to tell a really different story if somebody lands from Google, then if they land on my homepage, because it may be a different shopper with a different persona.

It's just a different way of thinking about who your customers are, because they are fundamentally different customers. And they can go to the store next door a heck of a lot quicker than if they're walking into your retail store. So digital optimization, it's wrapping your head around the fact that it's not the same kind of shopper in a different place, different shopper showing up in different ways, needing a different experience every time.

Tim Butara: And how should companies get started, you know, with digital optimization? How can they get their foot in the door, so to speak?

Ryan Breen: Yeah, I think it's data, data, data, you know, you have to be collecting enough information and not, you know, not data in the way that we're all sort of feel icky about these days where it's like, oh, I'm tracking people across 50 different sites to figure out the right thing to show them data that's truly first-party, data that's about your site. How many people are landing on those product pages for the products that you put in front of them? You know, what's working and what's not, and learn about that daily. So starting point is analytics and really knowing how to use your analytics.

And that's a big part of your digital transformation mindset. Do you have a VP or above in your organization whose daily charter? Is to make sure they understand what people are doing on your site and what is working.

So that's one of the kind of organizational tells that you would look for. So are you guys all in on digital optimization because you understand the criticality of seeing that data, looking at that data, having sophisticated reports that tell you, for somebody landing in from Google, what are they doing? What's working, what's not?

Then you have to have the ability to do something against that data, to make a change to your site that's actually material. So one of the things we've seen a ton of, you see studies that say these kind of numbers all the time, like even folks who have A/B testing and they're working on experimentation and putting different content in front of folks daily to try and optimize so frequently, the changes are really skin deep on a site.

And the data shows that only like 1 in 8 A/B tests lead to a material change, and only less than 20 percent of the changes to the site are anything more than some text or colors of call to action. And there's a direct connection there. If all you can change is stuff that, and I think a lot of us know, even I, as a reader will say, I rarely read the copy on a site. If all you're changing is the text, you're not really going to change customer behavior. You're not showing them something that's different and it might actually change behavior or give you a better outcome on your site tomorrow.

So you need to be able to take that data and say, wow, we're really seeing something different in usage patterns. Or we tried something yesterday, and that was wildly successful. Let's go all in on that and dial up the amount of users we show that new experience. You got to have that data and you got to be able to do something with that data.

And that second bit, that is where we as a business come in is trying to help with that because if they do something with that data, is wait for developers to help you do that in six weeks - really, really hard to get some scientific information on what's working and what's not because a lot can change in six weeks. If you say, hey, we made a big change and six weeks passed and now we're in holiday season or now the economy changed and I'm comparing that versus that. Like, that's not data science, like that's, you're just grasping at straws then.

And so, you know, it's really that pack. Can I experiment? Can I learn? Can I make changes? And then can I do the whole thing tomorrow? Because that's the speed you need, before you can say, I'm actually doing digital optimization now.

Tim Butara: Well, so how can employees at e-commerce companies actually do this? So, how can they, how can they drive value and make these changes that respond to customer needs and customer habits in pretty much real time without an over reliance on the company's development capacities and the time consumption that this would kind of entail with it?

Ryan Breen: Yeah, I think it's, you have to think about flipping the entire model of getting content live on your site on its head. So right now the model is: business ideas, data comes in, creative ideas respond to that, or VP of e-commerce ideas, merchandising ideas respond to that, so I'm seeing a trend, people who come in from Google, they're more interested in related products, what I would really like to do is maybe try moving our related products carousel above the product information on a product detail page. If I see somebody come in from Google.

Feels like a wacky idea. But we've had customers say that because they say, hey, if I had the flexibility, I just know the traffic pattern of somebody coming in from search. It's unlikely they hit the exact product they want. So I'm going to show them that at the top of the page. You wouldn't do that for a normal shopper.

But how do we get from the point where I have that idea to that's something that I could test easily enough that I'll waste trying that crazy strategy in case it doesn't work. If that's something where it's going to take you six weeks to do it, you would never do it because it sounds like a nutty idea and you would need a ton of data to lead you in that direction for starters.

But if you said instead of bottlenecking on developers as the very last step of going live with a strategy like that, and you say, hey, developers, what you need to do is give us the flexibility to take all the information from our product catalog, our personalization, the information we bring in just by our knowledge of mining our Google Analytics reports and our ability to change the experiences we put on pages.

Give us the context in which we VP of e commerce marketing, creative and developers could say, you know what, I'm going to throw out a completely different layout of every product page on my site. And I'm going to serve it up to 5 percent of traffic that comes in from Google. I'm going to do that sort of outlier type testing where I say, hey, did I get a strong signal from that over the day or week that I want to run that to get some statistically significant data? And if I do now, I dial up the traffic and now that's the thing that I'm optimizing against.

So the developers are still involved, but whereas right now it is - every project, every iteration on the site now requires developers to do things. Instead it is - developers, give us the context that the rest of the business can run those sort of experiments day after day after day. So, I don't have sort of computer science terms, it's taking that really scarce bottlenecked resource and moving it so that you can get that leverage out of it. So you say developers do one thing. That allows the business to do a thousand things rather than developers having to manually do those thousand things.

That's the as much organizational shift. And yeah, we have a technology solution that helps out with that, but you have to buy into, no, my developers are wasting their time if all they're doing is laying out HTML and CSS to get somebody's new idea to the site.

Tim Butara: Yeah. I'm guessing you need some kind of system that allows non-developers to make changes in a kind of no-code way, and then the developers can focus maybe on optimizing that system and support the non-developer, more business users to kind of, you know, realize their strategies and the the mission vision that they set out for themselves.

Ryan Breen: Yep. Yeah, that's exactly the way we look at it. I will say I try not to self identify as a no-code platform because there's definitely code there. But where do you put it? You put it ahead of time. You put it at the start of that content creation and that site creation process.

And the easiest kind of mental model that I think of... so, our platform, the core of it is something that It feels a lot like any other developer handoff tool that you would use. So if you've seen a Figma, if you've used a Figma or Sketch or Adobe XD, you know that you're creating and designing, not just like Photoshop back in the day, where you're doing a layout, but you're designing overlays and dynamic elements, and you're designing all these things to tell a developer what to build.

So they are pure developer handoff tools. This is just the inverse of that model, where instead of handing it off to a developer, you hit a button and it goes live to your site. Instead, the developers hand off to you everything you need to not do rapid prototyping, but actually create the applications, true e-commerce applications that you're going to run on your site.

So developers are still involved. They're just not sitting there every day saying, oh God, I just got another Figma doc from marketing. I got to figure out how to turn this into, and I have this conversation with developers all the time where it's, no, this is not in any way competitive to your work because you can't sit there and tell me your favorite part of the day is waking up and figuring out a bunch of CSS you have to write.

That is just not, to your point, the sort of optimization of the business, not go find five different vendors that can really help uplift the site, not keep your backend up and running because any e commerce business we talk to that's been around for more than three years. They're like, yeah, our site's terrible. We're sitting on top of just a really bad tech stack because it's 15 years old. And so we're stuck trying to operate these things while servicing these needs from development. So, or from, from design and e commerce.

So developers, do your work up front, hand that over to creative. Now they're not breathing down your neck every day to get things done. Now you can focus on why you became a developer in the first place, which is how can we add differentiating business value to the site?

Tim Butara: And the last thing that I really wanted to talk about with you today, Ryan, is, we spoke initially about this move from, you know, experiences and projects that were kind of considered done and with no kind of avenues for further future optimization to now this new stage where we have this continuous optimization, continuous tweaking, continuous acceptance of customer feedback and, you know, data we get from customers using platforms and using products to make the experience better for them.

So I believe we called this digital experiences that are continually engaging. And can we talk a little bit more about this, about these digital experiences that are continually engaging and what are the key strategies, the key steps for ensuring that digital experiences are continually engaging?

Ryan Breen: I think the core there is you have to know who your users are, and that's going to change daily, but you're always trying to match up and it's gonna be different for every brand we talked to - what is your brand identity? And if somebody lands on a certain part of your site. Are they more interested in experiential content?

So we talked to a lot of folks who say, yeah, I spend a ton of effort, not just for SEO reasons, but I spend a ton of effort focusing on longform written content, blogs, really different stories that I want to tell folks because maybe I have a lot of, not to like group people by generation a little too much, but maybe a Gen Z shopper that's the core of my audience, maybe they want a very different story than somebody who maybe is more Gen X like me and is more of a transactional shopper where I land somewhere and I probably want to buy a thing and maybe you want to sell me five things instead of one and I'm a sucker and I'm going to buy them.

So know your audience. And knowing your audience isn't just like a one time persona map of, hey, we set out our sort of brand division and we're going to appeal to Gen Z folks. That's going to change daily and you're going to see, hey, for some reason, I don't even know what TikTok is, but we're trending on TikTok, and we have a lot of folks who are coming in from that channel. Maybe we need to tell them a different story today because we're going to have maybe a week of really bursty interest in our site.

And we see from that audience and we know from our historical data, maybe they want more long form content. Maybe they want to tell us us to tell them about our, our social goals and our responsibility. Maybe that needs to be a part of the pages you land people on.

But we also talk to folks, and these are sort of the more interesting conversations we have sometimes. You know, we'll talk to e-commerce creatives and marketers who've done really different testing on their site, where they set one really different form of content versus another and a lot of times they're stunned by what their shoppers like versus what they think they would like.

So we'll talk to folks who say, you know, we designed this gorgeous landing page, which told this really experiential story. And then we had this horrendously ugly one that was 20 products. And the 20 products one wildly outperformed the pretty one.

And it's interesting because they're like, I didn't want to do the one that was 20 products. I would have rather done the pretty one because it's a better UX, but that's the signal you're getting from your audience because for whatever reason in that moment in that day. That's what was working for folks, and that's going to change day after day, and that's going to be different for brand after brand.

And so you have to have that data, and you have to be looking at it daily, and you have to say, man, how are we going to respond to this better, and then how are we going to learn from that so that tomorrow we're building on something that was better than the day before, and we keep doing that over and over and over again.

Tim Butara: It's really cool, I think you also highlighted kind of a pitfall that we can fall into really easily when designing user experiences, right? You said that it's a better UX, I would rather design the pretty one because it's a better UX, but your data clearly shows that it's, that the other one was the better UX, you know.

So, you know, that reminded me of like the memes where, like, you know, I think it was the difference between user interface design and user experience design, and it was like a mug that was shaped like a wolf or something. It was like, oh yeah, super cool. But then when you drink from it, like the ear of the wolf pokes you in the eye or something like that.

Ryan Breen: And it's funny, cause we talked to these marketers and they're almost like aghast. They're like, people, why are you buying from this page that I think is objectively uglier and worse? And it's like, yeah, your shopper is different than you. They may have less discernment.

Or you may find that your shoppers, you are giving too much of that beat you over the head. We're trying to sell you a price, or maybe we're throwing 50 different payment options at you and you're turning folks off because they're like, no, we I'm here to learn a little bit about what I could do with those products, how I could employ them. And maybe if you tell me the right story about them, maybe I learn something and now I realize for that gardening project, I am going to need to buy five things.

But if I showed up at your site and you hit me with five things, I'd be like, get out of here. I just bought my first hoe. Like, I don't know how to garden yet. And it's going to be different, but it is really interesting because to your point, you really have to challenge our own cognitive biases as to what we think, like that's going to work for everyone because it works for me.

Tim Butara: Well, Ryan, this was such an awesome discussion. I really, really enjoyed having you as our guest today and discussing this with you. Before we wrap up our conversation, if listeners would like to reach out to you, maybe learn more about you and Fastr Frontend, where would you point them to?

Ryan Breen: Yeah, this, this is also going to probably label my generation. It's not going to be TikTok, but - LinkedIn. I'm always on LinkedIn. That may sound super old and boring and corporate but that's where I am. And I think that's a great venue for folks to chat about where brands are, where they're going. So, happy to talk to anyone who wants to reach out there.

Tim Butara: Awesome. Well, Ryan, thanks again. It was great to have you, as I said, and have an awesome day.

Ryan Breen: Thank you so much, Tim. Thank you so much for having us on.

Tim Butara: Well, to our listeners, that's all for this episode. Have a great day, everyone, and stay safe.

Outro:
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