This blog was written by Andrea Miller
Today’s apparel industry looks much different than the industry 20 years ago. The advent of “fast fashion” retailers like H&M, Zara and Forever 21 has—forgive the buzzword—disrupted the product lifecycle of apparel. Lean manufacturing and lean supply chains are allowing retailers to produce more frequent, smaller batches of apparel, appealing to today’s “ADD society.” Stores like Neiman Marcus even encourage brands to batch their lines into 8-10 shipments to ensure that customers always have something new to look at in the store.
And it’s not just fashion—lead times for other industries are decreasing as a result of evolving consumer demand that no longer fits into product seasons.
If your product is changing this quickly, then shouldn’t the sites and apps that are selling your product change just as fast, if not faster? The evolving wants and needs of your consumer are unpredictable, and the only way to set yourself up for success is to accept change and handle it gracefully.
Agile development methodologies can be the answer. Agile is more mainstream than ever before—over 74% of companies have tried it. There are many flavors of agile, including scrum (favored here at Solstice), extreme programming, DSDM, Crystal, and Kanban, but agile at its core promotes “adaptive planning”—making a plan, and changing it as you learn more about what your customer wants.
But why does agile go hand-in-hand with commerce? While traditional, “waterfall” development methods are plan driven, agile is value driven—allowing you to focus on what your customer wants now (not what they wanted when you made the plan.) Change is built in to the methodology; product managers (called “Product Owners” in scrum) are encouraged to constantly re-evaluate previous choices and bring about the change that is necessary to stay in tune with today’s evolving consumer.
Many teams see change to requirements or priority as an unwelcome disruption to productivity. This attitude cannot be successful in today’s commerce landscape, because, as Heraclitus (may have) said, “the only constant is change.” Accepting change and making it as frictionless as possible is the only way to stay afloat. The future of commerce is unpredictable, and therefore you must prepare for the unknown.
Having a mobile site or app with easily updated content is tablestakes in today’s ecommerce market. Ecommerce today makes up only 5.9% of worldwide retail sales, and an even smaller proportion of sales in other industries. Buying products online is still a relatively new phenomenon, and it’s important to be able to change the structure, design, and features of your mobile presence quickly to respond to the evolving landscape of commerce. Some “known unknowns” about the future that may change your product roadmap include:
New Technology
- Emerging technologies like beacons, connected products, A/R, NFC and other payment technologies are here. The next technology your consumer wants may not be on your radar today, but you need to be ready to evaluate it and incorporate it into your backlog when it’s here
New Insights.
- Analytics about consumer behavior and preferences are commonplace and collected on most apps and websites. Insights gleaned from analytics should consistently drive change in design and functionality
- User research conducted with actual customers teaches us new insights about what users want in a mobile commerce presence. These insights should drive your priority.
New Distribution Methods
- Consumers are starting to expect same-day delivery, the option to buy online pick up in store, and other novel ways to get products quickly and conveniently.
- As distribution methods shift because of demand and technological advances, commerce sites and apps need to evolve to support them.
Being agile is a shift to a mindset in which change is truly accepted and encouraged—simply implementing agile processes is not enough. It can be difficult to accept that any decision made can and might need to be changed in the future. Initial comps may be scrapped; planned features with detailed acceptance criteria may never see the light of day. However, with agile, the features that do make it into consumers’ hands are the ones that will be used and valued. Agile methodologies shift your development dollars into the projects that will deliver the most customer value at the right time, and ensure that you can keep up with a constantly evolving market landscape.
