Introducing Big Ideas: A New Make it Big Video Series

BigCommerce’s Make it Big thought leadership program delivers ecommerce insights across many mediums. You can listen to the Make it Big Podcast, attend the Make it Big Conference, and celebrate our exemplary customers through the Make it Big Awards and Make it Big Success Stories. 

Now, Make it Big brings you a quarterly video series about the ecommerce leaders shaping our industry and the many learnings they’ve collected over their illustrious careers.

Introducing Big Ideas, where ecommerce executives share candid and sometimes controversial ideas.

The first episode of “Big Ideas” features Brilliance Business Solutions President and CEO, Lori McDonald, on the topic of innovation in ecommerce without regrets.  

How can you approach projects and stay ahead of the curve without second-guessing your choices and arriving at outcomes that will please your customers? Here is a brief excerpt from McDonald’s keynote presentation:

Ecommerce Innovation Without Regrets

Lori McDonald: “So, it still happens. Folks call me up and they say, ‘What I want really isn’t that hard. All I want is a website that works like Amazon.’ What makes it worse is that they don’t realize how ridiculous this request is. 

“And you may have been in a project like this. Your team decides that you want to replatform and you start about the process of gathering up the requirements for your project, and folks start to dream. You think of all the things that you haven’t had that you want, and all of those things start to go on the list and the scope of what you want grows bigger and bigger. And eventually, when you get that set of requirements for your project, the list sounds something like this.

“‘We will have the best site search out there. The site will load in under two seconds. We will have complete product data on all of our products. It will have the best digital experience in our industry. It will be leveraging experimentation and personalization.’ And look, none of those are bad things. Actually, they’re all really great things to have on your wishlist, but you shouldn’t attempt to do it all at once.

“When you have a larger scope, the challenge is that it takes more time for you to get it live and to create value and to learn from it.

“And when a project takes more time, when you have that larger scope, the other thing that happens, there’s a much higher likelihood that you’re going to get more opinions of what should be a part of the project and a much greater likelihood that you’re going to experience regret because there’ll be less clarity over what the project was actually intended to accomplish.

“The smaller the scope, the faster you can get something live, and learn from it, and create value for your customer. So, you want to ask yourself what is the minimum that you can accept in terms of getting this release live? You know, you’re not going to stop there. It’s just your starting point, and then you’re going to continually be improving and iterating on that first release.”

This transcript excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.