Alessandro Desantis

With 9 out of 10 online shoppers stating that they want retailers to offer recommendations based on their interests, and
considering the vast amount of data and technology brands now have, there are few excuses not to have a personalization
strategy in place. eCommerce personalization is proven to increase conversion rates, customer retention, and lifetime
value, creating a virtuous cycle that can turn your visitors into loyal customers.

And yet, we often see brands struggle with rolling out an effective eCommerce personalization strategy: founders aren’t
sure how to segment their customers, evaluate the effectiveness of their personalization program, or what technologies
to adopt.

This article will demystify eCommerce personalization, providing you with a straightforward, data-informed approach for
designing, implementing, and validating your personalization program.

## What Is eCommerce Personalization?

Much confusion stems from the vagueness of the term “personalization.” If you Google it, you’ll find books, articles,
and SaaS products that all give it a different meaning: they talk about A/B testing, machine learning algorithms,
retargeting, user-generated content… It can be hard to understand where to start.

At its core, eCommerce personalization is the technique of using the information you have about your customers to
display content that is tailored to them. You can personalize across different dimensions (e.g., personalize by country,
browsing history, demographics), at different touchpoints (e.g., your website, your email campaigns, your ads), and with
different techniques (e.g., machine learning, user-generated content, human curation). No matter *how* you personalize,
the goal is to create a customer experience that feels unique.

## Designing Experiments with GTDT

When we coach founders that want to start experimenting with personalized eCommerce, we encourage them to think of
personalization as the means, not the end. Like all initiatives, personalized shopping experiences must be designed
thoughtfully and intentionally for maximum effectiveness. Adopting a tool or installing a plugin will only take you so
far if you don’t have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your personalization program.

Unfortunately, most resources offer an endless list of personalization examples from famous online retailers but no
indication of *why* or *how* those brands designed their personalization programs. This leaves operators scratching
their heads as they try to replicate the success of these brands. As a result, they tend to go for “blanket solutions”
that are easy to implement but ultimately leave the most exciting opportunities on the table.

Over time, we have developed a model that helps brands roll out thoughtful personalization experiments that get them
closer to their goals. **We call it GTDT, which stands for Goal, Technique, Dimension, and Touchpoint.** In the
following paragraphs, we will explain this process, providing you with all the tools you need to design your
personalization program.

### Goal

This might seem obvious, but surprisingly often, online stores will launch personalization capabilities to tick off a
checkbox with no clear goal in mind. Unfortunately, this not only means they will roll out an ineffective
personalization program, but it also means they will not be able to validate the effectiveness of their program: if you
don’t know what metric you’re optimizing for, you will not know what metric to look at.

The first step for any good personalization experiment is to understand what goal you’re aiming for—everything else
follows. Depending on your brand’s SKU catalog and business model, a personalization experiment for increasing your
average order value will likely look much different from an experiment to improve your add-to-cart or repeat purchase
rates.

If you’re unsure what goals you should be prioritizing, talk to your team and pick the one that feels most urgent right
now. Where are you falling behind compared to the industry benchmarks and your (or your board’s) expectations? What are
your customers telling you in your interviews? (You ***are*** doing customer interviews, right?) What are your plans for
the next 12-18 months?

Don’t make the mistake of falling into analysis paralysis: the beauty of running experiments is that you can quickly
pivot if you find that you’re optimizing for the wrong things. Make a data-informed decision, launch your experiment and
move on!

### Technique

With eCommerce personalization rising in popularity, several tools have emerged that promise to offer the definitive
solution to all your personalization problems. A/B testing tools, content management systems, eCommerce platforms, UGC
aggregators… almost every tool provides some level of personalization nowadays.

Unfortunately, without a clear personalization plan, it’s easy to get carried away by shiny object syndrome and try
every tool in hopes that it will solve all your problems. Do this enough times, and you’ll end up with a Frankenstein
monster of solutions that don’t integrate and annoy your customers with endless popups and broken UIs.

Before picking a tool or technology, decide **how** you want to personalize. You should do this, first and foremost, by
continuously referring back to your experiment goal and dimensions, but you should also lean on your brand’s strengths
and values. If you’re a fitness brand that’s all about community, you might want to leverage the power of user-generated
content, at least in *some* of your experiments. If you’re a luxury brand selling elevated essentials, perhaps you can
offer human-curated recommendations to your customers.

This last example brings us to the next point: don’t be afraid to do things that don’t scale, especially in the early
stages of your company. Many brands go from zero to a hundred by integrating deep learning models that are complex to
tweak and customize, and they don’t realize that they’re missing out on many lower-hanging opportunities. You’d be
surprised by how much you can accomplish with some basic customer segmentation and a human touch.

### Dimension

Once you know what you’re aiming for and how you want to get there, it should be easier to understand which dimensions
you want to personalize across. For example, you might want to personalize content based on geography, customer lifetime
value, previous purchases, demographics, or other factors.

It might help to group personalization dimensions into three big buckets:

- **Historical.** These are actions your customer has taken before. For instance, you might segment customers based on
  their AOV or purchase history.
- **Demographical.** These are traits that will always be true about your customer. For instance, you might segment
  customers based on geography, gender, or age.
- **Contextual.** These are actions your customer is taking now. For instance, you might segment customers based on
  their cart contents or session length.

When thinking about dimensions, don’t get limited by data availability: just because you don’t know your customers’ age,
it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it in a personalization experiment. Part of your personalization program should be
designing ways to collect or infer the information you need to carry out your experiments, which has the added benefit
of enriching your understanding of your customers over time.

You also don’t want to limit yourself to generic customer data: we find that the most successful personalization
programs use proprietary brand data to create win-win outcomes. If you sell pet food subscriptions, you might want to
curate your product catalog based on the customer’s pet type or age. If you sell sports equipment, you could send your
customers content specific to their favorite sports. Think about the different ways customers engage with your brand,
and try to design your experiments to optimize and improve those interactions.

### Touchpoint

With your goal, dimension and technique nailed down, it’s time to pick a personalization touchpoint. With this term,
we’re referring to the specific customer interaction you want to personalize. This will likely depend on your goal and
dimension: for example, if you want to increase AOV (goal) by looking at cart contents (dimension) to suggest upsells
(technique), you can only do this after the customer has added something to their cart or completed their purchase.

When deciding which touchpoint to personalize, we encourage brands to look beyond their product pages or on-site user
experience. Even with the average brand, there are so many ways your customers might interact with you and so many
opportunities to personalize those interactions. The most effective personalization programs are omnichannel and focus
on often-neglected interactions, such as transactional notifications, or create entirely new touchpoints, such as
sending customers a personalized card for their birthday.

Again, don’t get limited by your current touchpoints: if you want to send personalized email campaigns but are currently
not doing any email marketing, don’t be afraid to start now. If you think push notifications might resonate with your
customer base, why not give them a try?

The goal is to catch your customers when they need personalization even though they don’t know it, and leverage the
power of data to turn a mundane interaction into an intimate, personalized experience.

## Measuring Experiment Effectiveness

Designing and launching your experiment is only the first step. For an effective personalization program, you want to
validate the effectiveness of your experiment, double down on the ones that work, and kill the ones that don’t.

To do this, you must go into every experiment with a clear definition of success. This means answering the following
questions:

- What metric(s) do you expect the experiment to move, and in what ways?
- Are you already measuring the metrics you need? If not, how can you measure them? Do you need time to get a baseline
  for comparison?
- For how long will you let the experiment run after measuring the results?

### A/B Testing vs. Attribution Models

A special mention here goes to A/B testing: like with AI/ML, inexperienced founders often jump into A/B testing without
a clear understanding of the technique. While it’s tempting to run all personalization experiments as A/B tests,
sometimes this can be overkill or even detrimental: A/B tests require specific expertise, dedicated infrastructure, and
relatively high traffic volumes to reach statistical significance.

Typically, we only recommend A/B testing for large brands, running experiments where the results are highly uncertain,
and a clear control group can be established (e.g., customers that see the regular homepage vs. customers that see the
personalized homepage). In all other scenarios, a robust attribution model is a more reliable way to measure the
effectiveness of your experiment—even better when it’s paired with qualitative customer insights.

### Following Through on Experiment Validation

However you decide to validate your experiment, make sure it’s easy to roll back if needed and remember to look at the
data and take action accordingly! A recurring “experiment review” meeting with your team, where you review all
experiments that need to be validated and decide how to move forward, can do wonders to keep you accountable.

Finally, don’t be too rigid: if you expected a cross-selling experiment to drive $100K in revenue, but it only drove
$80K, it might still be worth keeping, depending on the effort you need to turn it into a permanent, first-class
capability. For some experiments, it might be helpful to establish different thresholds of success. Going back to our
example:

- Anything below $50K might be a clear failure.
- Anything between $50K and $100K might be up for discussion.
- Anything above $100K in incremental revenue might be a clear success.

Generally speaking, whenever you make decisions about your digital experience, you want to be data-informed, not
data-driven.

## Ready to Start Personalizing?

eCommerce personalization can create remarkable outcomes: when leveraged intentionally, personalization programs
increase revenue, customer loyalty, conversion rates, and lifetime value. It’s a tool that should be part of every
eCommerce store’s marketing strategy.

With the GDTD model, you have a streamlined process to design, launch and validate your personalization experiments.
It’s a high-impact tool that evolves with your brand as you scale, better understand your customers, and develop more
sophisticated ways to engage them.

If you have questions or need help with your brand’s personalization program,
[we’d love to hear from you.](https://nebulab.com/contact-us) Let’s start personalizing!

The GTDT Model for Intentional eCommerce Personalization

Stefano Sarioli

Your stakeholders are complaining that the app is slow. You work tirelessly to shave millisecond over millisecond off your server’s response time. Yet, at the end of the month, the stakeholders still complain about the suboptimal performance, to only later discover that they are using the application on a smartphone connection, inside a building with hundreds of other people using a smartphone, and while taking the elevator to move from one meeting room to the other.

This is just a story, but maybe you have experienced (or are experiencing) something similar in the real world and are looking for a more scientific approach to performance tuning. Perhaps you are here looking for an easy solution to improve your performance by just tweaking a single parameter in your configuration.

Unfortunately, most of the time, that’s simply not possible. All the overnight success stories you read about are the result of long experimentation, and they conveniently forget to mention all the failed attempts. Performance tuning is complex: it heavily depends on your application’s context, architecture, and [tech stack](https://nebulab.com/blog/ecommerce-tech-stack). To succeed, you must get your hands dirty and enter into a continuous measure/tune/verify cycle.

In this article, we will showcase a process for experimenting with the ideal performance setup for a [Solidus](https://solidus.io/)-based eCommerce application, as well as some interesting conclusions we’ve reached.

## Starting with Puma threads

When configuring a Puma-based Rails application, you can tune a lot of values to optimize its performance. Still, we can simplify our process by focusing on four major levers:

* The number of Puma workers

* The number of Puma threads

* The amount of CPU in your environment

* The amount of RAM in your environment

For now, let’s assume the amount of CPU and RAM and the number of Puma workers are constant, which is the most straightforward configuration you can have. We’ll talk about Puma workers and horizontal vs. vertical scaling in a separate article.

That means we should just focus on the number of threads, which allows us to keep things simple and straightforward. In general, when tuning performance, we recommend tweaking one parameter at a time: touching multiple levers simultaneously will lead to inconclusive results, and you might end up making things worse.

## Works on my machine!

For this experiment, we have run all tests locally. This allows us to have full control over environment in which the load tests are running. It also gives the Rails server plenty of CPU and RAM, preventing those from becoming a bottleneck in our testing.

Another advantage of running the tests locally is the almost complete lack of DB latency. In the real world, DB latency might impact the ideal number of threads, since each DB request will block its originating thread for a little longer. However, you can fine-tune this parameter in production. In this case, we’re more interested in getting a ballpark number that we can start with.

## The setup

In this experiment, we will optimize a Solidus-based eCommerce application, running PostgreSQL and Redis for data storage and caching/background jobs.

We’re using [k6.io](http://k6.io/) for load-testing because the open-source version is free, easy to set up and use, and it’s scriptable.

As a first step, let’s bootstrap a simple Solidus store. We won’t go through the setup because the process is already covered in the [official Solidus documentation](https://guides.solidus.io/getting-started/installing-solidus#in-a-new-app). You can find all the code in the [GitHub repo for this post](https://github.com/nebulab/repo-for-globpost-are-you-leaving-free-performance-on-the-table-).

We wrote a k6 script that simulates a complete visit to the website and performs a guest checkout. Note that this approach has some limitations: for example, we’re not testing the authentication system. However, it’s a good approximation of what a typical user journey would look like on my store.

As recommended by k6, we’re not testing asset delivery: in production, assets will most likely be served by a CDN, so testing them in a local environment would just muddy my data. Right now, we’re only interested in optimizing the application server.

We’ve decided to load-test the system with 50 concurrent users, each completing a single journey in my application. We’ve run the script against our Solidus application ten times, progressively increasing the number of Puma threads from 1 to 10.

## The results

Here are some graphs showing our results:

![Requests per second](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/01b5ecdc96e1fa7859b614281aee8419c0ecfa39-600x371.svg?fit=clip)

![Request duration](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/82090ce65420951346613c6f146c18b5e94ffa49-600x371.svg?fit=clip)

![Elapsed time](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/88a998380731794a35b121d895e51122c54b74a0-600x371.svg?fit=clip)

Like most eCommerce applications, our Solidus store is a DB-heavy codebase, and it blocks each thread for a relatively long time. This is noticeable in our benchmark because the application is heavily underperforming with fewer than 4 threads.

It’s also interesting to note how the default Puma value of 5 threads is a good starting point for our application: anything beyond 5 threads is only giving us marginal gains. It also looks like performance is actually *decreasing* above 8 threads, which is probably due to the excessive thread context switching.

## Conclusions

k6 is a powerful tool with many applications: for instance, it could be used to enforce service-level objectives through automated performance tests.

When it comes to performance tuning, it’s always a good idea to put all decisions under the microscope. It was interesting to confirm that the default value of Puma workers is indeed a sane default. For a Solidus store, I would probably recommend bumping that number to 8 as a starting point to squeeze out each bit of performance.

However, the number of Puma threads is just the beginning. For instance, in a real-world performance tuning project, we should also:

* Calculate the amount of RAM I need to accommodate my ideal number of threads.

* Experiment with the number of Puma workers with 1 CPU.

* Experiment with the advantages of having a dedicated CPU versus a shared one.

* Compare different PaaS solutions to evaluate the pricing of our ideal setup.

* Experiment with horizontal and vertical scaling for our needs, creating to a well-defined scaling strategy.

As we’ve mentioned in the introduction to this article, there is no silver bullet for performance tuning: each project needs to account for the context, technical and business factors at play. However, by adopting a rigorous, scientific approach, you can tame the usual chaos of performance tuning, reaching your desired results with much less effort.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to expand on this topic. *Stay tuned*!



Are You Leaving Free Rails Performance on the Table?

As funding for headless commerce platforms reached a staggering [$1.6 billion](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/05/11/why-is-headless-commerce-getting-16-billion-in-funding/?sh=5322b28f513a) in 2021, these systems aren’t to be ignored. But how exactly do they compare to the so-called traditional “monolithic” eCommerce platforms, and when should you pick one over the other?

This guide will explore the headless commerce model, its benefits, how it differs from the all-in-one monolithic commerce system, and when it’s a good option for your brand.

## What is headless commerce and how does it work?

Headless commerce is an eCommerce architecture where the frontend layer, or presentation layer, is decoupled from the backend commerce functionality.

Before we continue, let’s review the key differences between the frontend and backend:

* **Frontend:** This is the user interface. Customers see and interact with the frontend, whether they’re accessing your eCommerce site, shopping app, digital kiosk or other shopping channels.

* **Backend:** The backend is the behind-the-scenes, technical side of an eCommerce store the customer doesn’t see. The backend includes the technologies and tools that run in the background to ensure customers can shop and [have smooth checkouts](/blog/one-page-checkout-with-spree).

In headless commerce, the frontend and backend systems communicate via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This approach allows you to update the frontend, the customer-facing part of your site, independently of the backend and even use different development frameworks. This separation of concerns offers several benefits which we’ll explore below.

Examples of headless eCommerce solutions are Commerce Layer, Swell, and Nacelle.


## 4 benefits of headless commerce

![Woman lying on a couch and using a laptop](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/96998b94bc1edf8908d27f5af24b1a34e88c56a8-1200x797.jpg?fit=clip)

Platforms that adopt a headless architecture offer several benefits compared to monolithic, or so-called traditional eCommerce platforms. Here are the top four advantages.

### 1. Omnichannel capabilities

In an omnichannel eCommerce experience, customers can start shopping on one channel or device and transition seamlessly to a different channel while the brand retains key information: common examples are a customer completing their purchase online, but selecting in-store pickup, or a customer buying something in-store and having the order show up their online order history.

Headless commerce makes it easy to serve the [74% of shoppers](https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/research/salesforce-state-of-the-connected-customer-4th-ed.pdf) who use multiple channels to shop: because the same backend system can serve multiple storefronts, you can easily adapt customer touchpoints and shopping experiences to serve your eCommerce website, your mobile app, social media pages, and even physical locations. All will be completely integrated and feel seamless for your customers to interact with.

### 2. Technical flexibility

By decoupling backend and frontend, headless platforms allow your development team to pick the frontend stack, including third-party providers, that they’re most productive with. A headless architecture allows you to adopt your favorite content management system (CMS) to create rich editorial experiences, or elevate your storefront through progressive web apps (PWAs). This enables you to create engaging digital experiences that don’t face the limitations of traditional monolithic frontends.

When done right, headless architectures even allow you to refactor or completely replace entire parts of your backend with little to no impact on your frontend experience(s), which allows you to move and experiment much more quickly.

### 3. Superior personalization

Most monolithic eCommerce platforms severely limit your ability to personalize the customer experience by forcing you to work with proprietary templating language and preventing you from accessing customer data. With [80% of customers](https://www.epsilon.com/us/about-us/pressroom/new-epsilon-research-indicates-80-of-consumers-are-more-likely-to-make-a-purchase-when-brands-offer-personalized-experiences) indicating they prefer brands that offer tailored experiences, eCommerce personalization is now table stakes for modern brands.

Headless platforms allow you to not only leverage basic eCommerce data, such as a customer’s profile and order history, but even augment it with brand-specific data points of your own. This allows you to create shopping experiences that feel built for your customer, boosting customer engagement, conversion rates and AOV.

### 4. Blazing fast performance

Storefronts that leverage a headless eCommerce platform can typically be deployed as static sites and put behind a global content delivery network (CDN) such as Cloudflare. In the hands of a capable development team, this can lead to incredible performance that would be hard to achieve with a monolithic platform.

A 2019 study by Portent has found that improving your loading speeds can boost your conversion rates [anywhere from 1.5X to 2.5X](https://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/research-site-speed-hurting-everyones-revenue.htm)! If your eCommerce site loads slowly, you are leaving lots of money on the table—literally.

## 3 drawbacks of going headless

![Four programmers working at same office's table](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/0afcfb4759febba635d79b5004c9a4cf4c8c2242-1200x800.jpg?fit=clip)

In some cases, a headless build can lead to an unnecessarily complex architecture that causes more problems than it solves. Evaluating which eCommerce platform to use for your business needs is a complex process that should take into account both short-term and long-term factors as well as your budget and internal capabilities.

Here are three drawbacks of headless eCommerce platforms.

### 1. Technical capabilities

Launching a headless storefront requires you to create an in-house engineering team or hire an eCommerce agency for the long term. Headless sites require more ongoing maintenance to keep the lights on: Dependencies need to be updated, infrastructure needs to be maintained, and the site needs to be continuously monitored for bugs and performance issues.

In our experience, this additional effort has its upsides: It forces brand operators to get into a continuous optimization mindset, where they’re constantly identifying and capitalizing on new technology and other opportunities that can improve the shopping experience. Monolithic platforms, on the other hand, encourage a less intentional set-and-forget approach, which is definitely easier to execute, but also worse positioned for long-term scalability.

### 2. Time-to-market (and cost!)

Headless builds are typically associated with slightly higher timelines than monolithic builds. Adopting a headless architecture requires a significant investment in an agency or an in-house development team that will build your storefront, and this process can take anywhere between 2 and 4 months, depending on the complexity of the build.

Conversely, launching a store on a monolithic platform can be a much faster process with more competitive pricing, if you’re willing to settle for a more standardized look and purchase experience. This can be an acceptable compromise for smaller mom-and-pop businesses, but certainly not for a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand with large long-term aspirations.

### 3. Integration effort

Headless eCommerce platforms are very flexible because you have full freedom to implement your storefront however you want. Unfortunately, this also means that many of the integrations and plugins that you can use out of the box with a monolithic platform will require a bit more work to be integrated in a headless architecture.

If you want to add reviews to your headless eCommerce website, for instance, you’ll need to work with your designers and engineers to figure out what the experience should look like, where to place the reviews, when to ask for them etc., and then implement and test the new functionality.

Ultimately, this extra effort is a good thing: A headless system asks you to be more disciplined and intentional in how you modify your storefront. This will force you to approach all initiatives with a critical eye rather than jumping from trend to trend, but it can be frustrating if you’re used to installing a plugin and forgetting about it.


## The verdict: headless or monolithic?

![Woman holding a credit card and using a phone](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/cb3e8d957a2c46acdf1eda32e9cecd9c5173bf13-1200x800.jpg?fit=clip)

The answer is: It depends on the use case. There’s no right or wrong answer.

While a headless commerce architecture has myriad benefits over monolithic architectures, it’s not ideal in all contexts. In certain scenarios, a headless commerce approach is the best way to build your vision and drive superior brand performance, while in others, you’re better off with a monolithic architecture that saves you time and money.

Headless commerce solutions might be right for:

1. **Brands that want to offer a consistent customer experience across channels:** Any brand that wants to deliver consistent customer experiences regardless of channels or devices should consider adopting this architecture.

2. **Brands that feel their current platform is too rigid and restrictive:** If you’ve ever felt your platform is limiting on the backend or frontend, it’s time to switch to a flexible headless setup.

3. **Brands that put personalization front and center:** If personalizing the shopping experience is critical for your brand’s strategy, then you should explore the capabilities that a headless build will unlock for your development team.

4. **Online stores that have slow-loading pages:** If sluggish pages have been a pain point for your eCommerce store, a headless architecture may be able to help by allowing you to leverage a more robust frontend ecosystem.

On the other hand, monolithic builds are a good solution for:

1. **Brands with limited technical know-how:** Headless commerce requires stronger technical capabilities which might not be everyone’s cup of tea. If you want to launch a commerce website without dealing with the underlying technicalities, headless is not for you.

2. **Brands with time-to-market or financial constraints:** If you’re on a tight timeline or a limited budget, a monolithic build will very often prove cheaper and quicker to launch than a headless counterpart.

3. **Brands that want ready-made functionality:** If you want to leverage ready-made features and integrations without thinking too deeply about how to integrate them in your shopping experience, a monolithic platform will give you more peace of mind.


## Need help picking the right platform?

![Entrepreneur using his phone and laptop](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/97e367e0de824649a05070d381052e44e0ca20e4-1200x801.jpg?fit=clip)

Headless architectures allow teams to move faster, address changing consumer needs, improve the user experience, and capitalize on omnichannel opportunities, but they’re not ideal for all brands.

Nebulab can help your new digital brand pick the right eCommerce platform for a greenfield build, or help your established brand design the right tech stack for its next growth spurt. We offer full-service consulting throughout all stages of your eCommerce project.

[Reach out](/contact-us) to see how we can help you create a vision for your eCommerce experience.

Headless Commerce: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Michela Frecchiami

**3D illustrations are a trend of web design in 2021:** reality and virtual reality are getting closer and closer. The combination of 3D shapes and effects in the 2D space is a great example of this trend in action. This is the right time to start learning something new, then!

At Nebulab, every employee has a bunch of hours to spend on personal projects, trying new tools, or studying to improve their skills and professionalism, so I decided to spend some hours of my [Investment Time](https://playbook.nebulab.com/personal-growth/investment-time/) developing a new skill that is useful for creating trendy illustrations and animations. I want to share my design process and what I’ve learned along the way.

## Spline 3D, nice to meet you!

I’ve always been fascinated by 3D design. Several years ago I tried Blender but I found it very complicated: the environment was very far from the applications that designers like me use, and since it wasn’t a must-to-have skill at that time, I gave up very soon.

This time I approached again to the three-dimensional design by using a brand new tool that makes 3D easier for a not-3D designer like me. This tool is [Spline](https://spline.design/): its interface is very similar to the majority of other design apps like **Figma**, for example. On the left side, there’s the layers panel while the tools used more frequently are on the top of the window. On the right side, you can find all the other options like Global Settings, Shape options, Camera Settings, etc.

## Initial phase: copy, try, repeat

When I start to develop a new skill, my approach is: learning the foundation, seeing how others do it, and playing with features and effects. Mostly, **having fun.**

Since Spline 3D was launched quite recently, you won’t find tons of tutorials on YouTube but there is a useful [documentation](https://docs.spline.design/) that gives you an overview of what (and how) you can do with Spline. Moreover, there’s a library where you can find illustrations and animations for playing with all the features.

![iPhone 12 3D mock-up, by Spline 3D](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/025512f4b8e8134e5685c24024004f3f5c314035-1680x1027.jpg?fit=clip)
*This is the original mock-up of the Spline library.*

![iPhone 12 3D mock-up, customized with the Nebulab website and brand color](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/35badac7709f3f9ec8613d94bbd9e1a112b21fcf-1680x1027.jpg?fit=clip)
*This is the customized version I did, starting with the mock-up above.*


### Camera operations

One of the first things I’ve learned is how to change views by using camera controls.

* **[Option / Alt] + drag** to rotate the screen (camera).

* **Press [Space] + drag** to move the camera around the canvas.

These controls allow you to simulate different views of your canvas and let you understand how three-dimensionality works.

### Materials

In Spline, there’re **7 types of Material** thus the Lighting layer: initially, I was wondering about having more options for creating awesome 3D color effects, but then I sooner understood that mixing just two or three material layers thus the Lighting one, lets you create a lot of combinations and you can easily find yourself spending two hours or more on it because you can’t decide which one you like most! That’s why I think is better to complete the illustration as the first thing, adding some animations eventually, and then focus on the colors and lights. The simplest three-dimensional effect is given by the **Lighting** layer (try to fill your object with a color and move the Lighting layer above).

![Spline 3D, lighting material](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/26e42163d282f174007aa0b35014236c9a350ca1-1680x896.jpg?fit=clip)

Adding a gradient by the **Gradient** layer seems a bit flat to me; a more precise method for adding gradient (or depth) to your objects is the **Depth** layer.

![Spline 3D, gradient vs depth material](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/4f53e9f9ce19327d998a4750da1fd08003197cd6-1680x997.jpg?fit=clip)
*Gradient material vs Depth.*

## Playing with Material for creating something cool

Another design trend in 2021 is **holographic and reflective elements.** You can create these two effects using the **Texture** material: import your holographic background (stock images or created using Photoshop), and edit the texture properties until the result satisfies you.

[![alt](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/b987486fc5ec4739982150c9e97e13d8-with-play.gif)](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/b987486fc5ec4739982150c9e97e13d8-00001.mp4)

*An example of how to use the Texture tool for creating the holographic effect.*

Use **Fresnel** for creating a reflective effect like this ring I did:

[![alt](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/360368ebe5fd40e8b46bab7bc5a2f322-with-play.gif)](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/360368ebe5fd40e8b46bab7bc5a2f322-00001.mp4)

For each Material layer, you can set the mode property and the layer opacity as you’d in Photoshop (normal, multiply, screen, overlay).

### Tricks that can save your time

* You can **copy/paste material** from an object to another. **(▲)**

* With the **Cloner** tool, it’s possible to clone an object and you can set the number of clones you want, the *Type* (how the clones are placed on the canvas - radial, linear, grid), and you can adjust the position, rotation, and scale them.

* With the **Visibility** mode, you can display the wireframe of a 3D object (and that might be a cool effect for your artwork!).

**(▲)** While I was writing this article, Spline has released the Alpha II version that introduces the web app and the **Material Assets** feature: now is possible to save Materials as assets on your project!

[![alt](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/f99dd970a5574e93a80cb4cfa5362576-with-play.gif)](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/f99dd970a5574e93a80cb4cfa5362576-00001.mp4)
*The new feature, Material Assets, works like Figma.*

## Starting from a blank canvas

After the discovery phase, I felt ready to start with something simple like an infinite rotation of the Nebulab logo as if it was an app icon. Spline 3D lets you **import SVG** files and after the Alpha II version was released, you can use the **Extrusion** tool to transform flat shapes into 3D objects.

![Spline 3D, extrusion](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/d36903c4141a571eaaefb59987465a70673f8418-1680x1291.png?fit=clip)

![Nebulab 3D logo](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/f23079e867385dba280f291061465ae64d65e9d1-3584x2240.jpg?fit=clip)

## Let’s move it!

Now that I have the Nebulab logo as a shiny bold blue cookie, I want to add a simple animation. I browsed on Dribbble looking for some inspiration and then I opted for a rotating animation with a final ease-out motion.

### Understanding States and Events

At the top of the right menu, you can find States and Events. Playing with animations with Spline is pretty simple (like everything else 😃) also because you can see the preview whenever you want, by clicking the Play button on the topbar tools.

![Spline 3D, the animation preview is always available](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/330dcd7d5bf7cd1ff5585d336e2be6a5d1e32fb0-906x198.png?fit=clip)

To make my first animation, I need two states:

* *Base State*, is the initial position or style of an object.

* *State 1*, which changes the previous state values.

You can change the position and/or the aspect of your object. In this example, I rotated the entire logo on its axis.

[![alt](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/ed27166d1b6d43ba8a1b1f7fc589c3f6-with-play.gif)](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/ed27166d1b6d43ba8a1b1f7fc589c3f6-00001.mp4)

Now, these two states need a trigger that you can add by the **Event** panel. (**Be sure to have selected Base State** and then add a new event). **Select the type of trigger for the event**:

* *Mouse up, down, hover*, that you can use to create a button and you can even link to an external URL.

* *Key up, down*, that is the same as the mouse types but it requires adding the key you want that triggers.

* *Start*, the animation will start by itself.

* *Look at*, this reply the cool effect of moving objects when the user pointer passes over the active area.

* *Follow*, the object is linked to your user pointer as a magnet.

I wanted my animation fired automatically, so I selected the *Start type*. I’ve previously grouped all the shapes that compose the logo, so I had one object to select for the event that I was creating. While the state to select, is *State 1*.

![Spline 3D, states and events](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/f094307692892d64a34817160faa61abc5ba65ae-1680x1050.png?fit=clip)

You can decide to repeat the animation infinitely, or just once. Then you can select the **Transition** type; if you know a bit of CSS these names should sound familiar to you: linear, ease-in, ease-out, ease-in-out, cubic (which is like the CSS *cubic-bezier*). I’ve played with these all but in the end, I opted for the Spring transition because I like damping effect on this kind of animation. About the Spring transition, you can play with its values since you won’t find the combination that satisfies you.

[![A video showing 3D animation configuration](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/4adb76bc402d4b558d099dae004a6a2f-with-play.gif)](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/4adb76bc402d4b558d099dae004a6a2f-00001.mp4)

And that’s it! You can apply different effects to every single object by adding *State 1* on it and then add the object to the main event by the ***“Add a new object to event”* button.**

[![A short video of the Nebulab logo 3D-animated](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/ba16d29395e2458aa393761f06939fef-with-play.gif")](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/ba16d29395e2458aa393761f06939fef-00001.mp4)
*This is the final animation*

## Don’t limit yourself

As I said before, what matters is having fun! Having the freedom to create whatever you like lets you experiment with a greater variety of features, and makes you more confident with the tool.

![3D artwork done with Spline 3D](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/eefd0a35280995051e73c67e691e681383f8a038-1680x1260.jpg?fit=clip)
*This is my first 3D artwork in which I played with materials, colors, and shapes.*

Even if it seemed simple (not a “WOW” illustration), I didn’t want to limit my experiments to what is trendy at the moment. I just wanted to create something for myself, as an artist draws to express their feelings. Ok, well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but what drove me when I designed that artwork was just creativity, nothing more. I’m pretty sure that looking at it in a month, I’ll say to myself something like *“How could I be so proud of that illustrationMouse up, down, hover,”* and then I’ll be back to revisit it, trying to push my boundaries a bit more.

![The Nebulab Solar System in a 3D version](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/6d1e6fabee08ed85aaa418b928d34822fae9785a-1680x1260.jpg?fit=clip)
*I’ve redesigned all the planets of the Nebulab website with Spline. In this illustration, I included them in the Solar System.*

![3D character done with Spline 3D](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/7519216a0df3a358ebba7d983ede50e569d51b7b-1680x1150.jpg?fit=clip)
*My first 3D character, a tribute for the running Olympic games.*

## How 3D design supports your workflow

Even if you’re not a 3D artist (and if you’re reading this article I suppose you aren’t) knowing how to create 3D objects or scenes can be very useful. You can create tailored mock-ups for a mobile app, for example, or adding some catchy objects that interact with the user pointer on your website.

![The Blog page hero with some 3D objects](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/abc58349dae18f451b8da3506d386b92cd952481-1680x1260.jpg?fit=clip)
*I’ve tried a white version of the Blog hero with some 3D objects that interact with the pointer.*
[See the sample in action.](https://www.loom.com/share/0192deb8d73b41fdb55ed361f0b1c3a8)

[![Final animation videoclip](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/0384abffdff0454c9b94eda02ccc272e-with-play.gif)](https://cdn.loom.com/sessions/thumbnails/0384abffdff0454c9b94eda02ccc272e-00001.mp4)
*You can even use this to show off a new website or mobile app, with a trendy minimalistic animation like this one.*

Surely, there’re tons of mock-ups you can download and use but having the flexibility to create your own is extremely better, even in terms of marketing.

I’m happy to have spent some hours of my *Investment Time* learning Spline 3D! Truthfully, I’m still experimenting with it, but what I have done so far has given me an incentive to continue learning this modern, trendy tool and to go deeper into the 3D world.

Experimenting with Spline for 3D Design

Andrea Vassallo

In this article, we are going to show how you can create a [NextJs](https://nextjs.org/) project with [Storybook](https://storybook.js.org/) and [TailwindCSS](https://tailwindcss.com/).

Before starting, I want to explain who are the actors and why it should be better adding them to our frontend application.

### NextJS

[NextJS](https://nextjs.org/) doesn’t need a lot of presentation. If you are here, you probably already know what NextJs is and why we should use it to build robust applications.

NextJs is a great [React](https://it.reactjs.org/) frontend framework, and it’s mainly used to build SEO-friendly applications since you can use three different types of rendering/pre-rendering methods:

* SSG (Static-site generation) the HTML is generated at build time and will be reused on each request,

* SSR (Server-side rendering) the HTML is generated on each request using a node server, so the response is SEO-friendly.

* CSR (Client-side rendering) the normale React behavior, the response is simply Javascript run by the client.

### TailwindCSS

Tailwind is one of the most powerful libraries to build your application style using HTML classes. [TailwindCSS](https://tailwindcss.com/) implements a ton of dynamic classes which apply different style rules to your application, and it is fully customizable using the configuration file!

Initially it will take time to understand which are the correct classes you need to use to build your interface, but one of the coolest thing in Tailwind is its super documentation.

By the way, the 2.0 version has recently been released with a lot of new features.

### Storybook

[Storybook](https://storybook.js.org/) is a great library that is mainly used to render our application components outside the NextJs environment. This means that you can check your components UI without making real queries or fetching data. You can also figure out how the application components change based on the passed props.

Storybook is more powerful when used with well-organized components, for example, using [Atomic Design(https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/).

**Example**

You will probably create your custom `Button` component in your project that will be rendered differently based on the passed props or the fetched data. With Storybook, you can check all the UI changes applying custom props from the Storybook panel or stubbing all your requests.

### TL;DR

Here you can find the fully configurated [project](https://github.com/nebulab/nextjs-storybook-tailwindcss)

## Let’s start!

For this article, I won’t split the application into components to be more direct. It would be best to do it in a real application to avoid using the `index.js` page directly.

The best practice is writing components splitting them by context using a great file structure:

* React documentation about components: [link](https://it.reactjs.org/docs/components-and-props.html#extracting-components)
* Atomic Design pattern about components structure: [link](https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/)

### Create the NextJS app

First of all, run this command to create your NextJs project:

```
npx create-next-app --use-npm nextjs-storybook-tailwindcss
```

and navigate inside the project directory with `cd nextjs-storybook-tailwindcss`.

### Run your application

```
npm run dev
```

### Refactor the default code

The `create-next-app` command creates the project with some unnecessary configuration since we’ll use **TailwindCSS** to build our style.

Replace the content in `pages/index.js` with:

```
const Home = ({ article, showImage }) => {
  if (!article) return "The article wasn't found!"

  const {author, company, image_url, content} = article

  const Image = showImage ? (<img className="w-24 h-24 rounded-full mx-auto md:flex md:self-center"
    src={image_url} alt="A beautiful cat" width="200" height="200" />) : ''

  return (
    <div className="w-96 mx-auto">
      <div className="h-screen flex items-center">
        <figure className="lg:flex bg-gray-200 rounded-xl p-8 lg:p-4">
          {Image}
          <div className="pt-6 lg:p-4 text-center lg:text-left space-y-4">
            <p className="text-lg font-semibold">{content}</p>
            <figcaption className="font-medium">
              <div className="text-blue-600">{author}</div>
              <div className="text-gray-500">{company}</div>
            </figcaption>
          </div>
        </figure>
      </div>
    </div>
  )
}

Home.defaultProps = {
  showImage: true
}

export const getServerSideProps = async () => {
  const response = await fetch('http://localhost:3000/api/article')
  const data = await response.json()

  if (!data) return { props: {}}

  return {
    props: {
      article: data
    }
  }
}

export default Home
```

Add your first API:

```
touch pages/api/article.js
```
```
const Article = (_, res) => {
  res.statusCode = 200
  res.json({
    id: 1,
    author: 'Andrea Vassallo',
    company: 'Nebulab',
    image_url: 'http://placekitten.com/200/200',
    content: 'The cat is a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal.'
  })
}

export default Article
```

Remove the CSS file: `styles/Home.module.css`:

```
rm styles/Home.module.css
```

![Nextjs without style result](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/cf125dfe5106852987ebfd778e133fe4566ef324-537x357.png?fit=clip)

![Man pointing thumb down](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/f804d6533a925773c96bc9055cd7aae96d76c578-640x480.gif?fit=clip)

The result is an ugly and boring HTML page.

**Let’s go applying our awesome style.**

### Install TailwindCSS

*Why the documentation isn’t enough in this case?*

Because NextJS came up with a bunch of pre-configured services like Babel and [PostCSS](https://postcss.org/) and we have to TailwindCSS with them.*

Reading the [TailwindCSS documentation](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation), you’ll see that we need three different libraries to complete the installation:

* tailwindcss

* postcss

* autoprefixer

We don’t need to install postcss and the autoprefixer libraries since they are already installed in NextJs.

Run these commands to install TailwindCSS:

```
npm install --save-dev tailwindcss
```

Unfortunately, we can’t use `npx tailwind init` to create the configuration file since it’ll check if you have installed the `autoprefixer` library.

Let’s create the configuration file adding the `tailwind.config.js` file:

```
touch tailwind.config.js
```

with the default configuration:

```
module.exports = {
  purge: [
    // This is not present inside the default configuration
    // but it's good to build your production application
    // Read more about this here: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation#building-your-css
    './pages/**/*.js',
  ],
  darkMode: false,
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  variants: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
}
```

### Configure PostCSS

To configure PostCSS we have to override the [NextJs default one](https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/customizing-postcss-config):

Install the dependencies:

```
npm install --save-dev postcss-flexbugs-fixes postcss-preset-env
```

Create the `postcss.config.js` file:

```
touch postcss.config.js
```

and fill it with the default configuration as well:

```
module.exports = {
  plugins: {
    'postcss-flexbugs-fixes': {},
    'postcss-preset-env': {
      autoprefixer: {
        flexbox: 'no-2009',
      },
      stage: 3,
      features: {
        'custom-properties': false,
      },
    },
  },
}
```

Add the `tailwindcss` plugin to the top of the plugin list:

```
module.exports = {
  plugins: {
    tailwindcss: {},
    ...
  },
}
```

### Include Tailwind in your CSS

Add these three lines of code to the top of this file: `styles/globals.css`:

```
@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;
```

### We made it

Check your application homepage; the result should be similar to this one:

![Tailwind result](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/8610b447fdcea90e798a8e33440326e498f8cbba-485x292.png?fit=clip)

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/ef653b4c8ced24daaf9d3b865d207d11b7b905bb-700x394.gif?fit=clip)

## State of mind

From here on, it’ll be a breeze building beautiful component with Tailwind, but we need to answer a couple of questions about testing:

1. How is this component rendered when the article data isn’t found?

2. How can we check all the component variants at any moment without changing the code?

[Storybook](https://storybook.js.org/) will help us to accomplish both.

### Install Storybook

The default `npx sb init` command that is used inside the official documentation installs libraries that we don’t need and adds a bunch of files that we don’t use.

For that reason, I usually prefer to use the `from scratch` configuration.

```
npm install --save-dev @storybook/addon-actions @storybook/addon-essentials @storybook/addon-links @storybook/react
```

Add the Storybook commands inside the `package.json` scripts:


```
"scripts": {
  "dev": "next dev",
  "build": "next build",
  "start": "next start",
  "storybook": "start-storybook -p 6006",
  "storybook:build": "build-storybook"
}
```

Copy this piece of code inside the `.storybook/main.js` file

```
module.exports = {
  "stories": [
    // Paths to the story files
    "../pages/*.stories.mdx",
    "../pages/*.stories.js",
  ],
  "addons": [
    "@storybook/addon-links",
    "@storybook/addon-essentials"
  ]
}
```

Copy this piece of code inside the `.storybook/preview.js` file

```
// Import the global style enabling tailwind classes
import '../styles/globals.css'

export const parameters = {
  actions: { argTypesRegex: "^on[A-Z].*" },
}
```

### Add a story

For each page or component that we want to tell using a `story`, we need to create a file called `component-name.stories.js`.

In this case, we want to create the `index.stories.js` inside the `pages` dir:

```
import Article from './index';

const articleMock = {
  id: 3,
  author: 'Dave Canterbury',
  company: 'Bushcraft 101',
  image_url: 'https://via.placeholder.com/200/200',
  content: 'David Michael Canterbury born September 19, 1963 is a survival expert'
}

const Story = (props) => <Article {...props} />

// Here we export a variant of the default template passing props
export const ArticleStory = Story.bind({})
ArticleStory.args = {
  article: articleMock,
};

// Here we export a variant of the default template passing props
export const EmptyArticleStory = Story.bind({})
EmptyArticleStory.args = {
  article: null,
};

// Here we export the default component that
// will be used by Storybook to show it inside the sidebar
export default {
  title: 'Article',
  component: Article,
  argTypes: {
    showImage: { control: 'boolean' },
  },
};
```

### Run the Storybook server

```
npm run storybook
```

![Storybook result with style](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/6b98a19deccff277aaa00d736aff13aa969a23ac-846x906.png?fit=clip)

At the time of writing there is a chance you might run into this [bug](https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/issues/12668). You can fix it with this [solution](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation#post-css-7-compatibility-build).

## That's all

Your project is ready to be built using a robust framework and beautiful style with an easy way to check component behavior in isolation!

I hope that you found this article helpful and easy to read.

Do you need the [Typescript](https://www.typescriptlang.org/) version? Let us know with a comment.

### Follow up story - use TailwindCSS and Storybook with SCSS

NextJS side this isn’t a problem, you need just to install the `scss` library using `npm`.

```
npm install sass
```

Rename the `styles/globals.css` to `styles/globals.scss` and fix the `_app.js` and `.storybook/preview.js` style imports.

and replace the TailwindCSS style import from this:

```
@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;
```

to this:

```
@import "tailwindcss/base";
@import "tailwindcss/components";
@import "tailwindcss/utilities";
```

**And Storybook?**

![Storybook SCSS error](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/59838f648762570d289c5201a0bf7848015ae22e-1042x410.png?fit=clip)

It seems that Storybook doesn’t recognize the SCSS syntax, and for this reason we need to extend the library [Webpack](https://webpack.js.org/) configuration adding the `sass loader`.

The Webpack loader is used starting from the end, and this means that the `sass-loader` should be added at the end of the loader list.

Here you can find the `.storybook/main.js` file with the correct configuration:

```
module.exports = {
  stories: [
    // Paths to the story files
    "../pages/*.stories.mdx",
    "../pages/*.stories.js",
  ],
  addons: ["@storybook/addon-links", "@storybook/addon-essentials"],
  webpackFinal: async (config) => {
    config.module.rules.push({
      test: /\.scss$/,
      use: [
        "style-loader",
        "css-loader",
        "postcss-loader",
        // Add the sass loader to process scss files
        "sass-loader",
      ],
    })

    return config
  },
};
```

Using Tailwind and Storybook with Next.js

Let’s consider two engineering managers, John and Jane. They have the same seniority, they both work on similar projects in similar conditions and their teams are both terribly smart.

John insists on personally reviewing and approving every change, no matter how small. This doesn’t just concern the codebase: if an engineer wants to try a new productivity tool with the team, they have to go through John. If the team wants to move an internal meeting to a time that better suits everyone, she has to go through John. Every little detail is scrutinized and torn apart to make sure John’s team don’t waste their time on “useless” initiatives.

Jane, on the other hand, is more comfortable with experimenting. She doesn’t require the team to ask her approval for everything, but she is there to support them when they want to try something new, and helps them validate initiatives by setting clear goals and metrics that make sense for them. Then, she takes successful experiments and acts as the team’s champion in the larger organization, implementing these initiatives at a higher level.

Which team do you think will be happier, more productive and more innovative — John’s or Jane’s?

## Bottleneck Managers Create Permission-Centric Organizations

John is the typical example of a **Bottleneck Manager**. We all know at least a few Bottleneck Managers: they hoard information and authority and require teammates to go to them for every little thing. Want to try a new tool? Ask your manager. Want to move a meeting? Ask your manager. Want to change the name of a Slack channel? Ask your manager.

Put enough Bottleneck Managers together and you have an alienating workplace where there’s a process for everything and no way to change that process, until one day you realize you’ve just been doing the same thing for the past five years and you’ve become irrelevant two years ago anyway, but no one has told you because they were too busy writing code. You have, to put it briefly, a **Permission-Centric Organization**.

Permission-Centric Organizations are the natural result of one or more of the following factors:

* **Lack of trust**: his goes both ways. Managers may not trust their teams to make sensible decisions, or teams may not trust their managers to make good use of the results of their decision-making. If a teammate wants to try a new technology but knows their manager will scoff at it, they may not even propose it, to avoid the uncomfortable feeling of rejection.

* **Lack of time**: managers want to make sure everyone on their team is using their time in an optimal way. In doing so, they may overly centralize the decision-making process, to the point where the team is not free to do anything but write code. In some companies, managers will allocate all of the engineers’ time to “busywork”, leaving no room for anything else.

* **High cost of error**: if you have a proven process and battle-tested tools in place, it’s scary to try something new. Sure, the new tool/methodology may improve your work by an order of magnitude, but what if it doesn’t work and you end up alienating your stakeholders? The more successful you get, the more this becomes a problem.

* **Lack of competency**: when team members are not competent enough to experiment in a safe, productive way, management may create constraints around experimentation and take the reins of the engineering process. This may also come from the team members themselves: if they are not (or don’t feel like they are) competent enough, they may avoid trying new ideas for fear of making a mistake.

These are all valid problems. If you’re running a successful company, you want to make sure innovators are competent, you want to trust them and you want them to trust you, you want to dedicate time to the things that really matter, and you want to eliminate or minimize any room for mistake.

However, there’s a way to have your cake and eat it too. You can have all of the above, without hindering your team’s ability to come up with new ideas and validate them. The way to do it is to stop being a Bottleneck Manager and start being a **Multiplier Manager**.

## Multiplier Managers Create Feedback-Centric Organizations

Unlike John, Jane is a Multiplier Manager. A Multiplier Manager supports their team, but also allows them to make their own decisions. They’re proactive in identifying opportunities, but let the team capitalize on opportunities in their own way. They create processes and boundaries for safe innovation and encourage the team to pursue their ideas. They are — by far — the best kind of manager you’ll ever work with.

Multiplier Managers are the bread and butter of **Feedback-Centric Organizations**. These are workplaces where you can — and are strongly encouraged to — run an initiative by your manager to get feedback on it, without first having to ask permission. They are workplaces where ideas move freely from one desk to the other, in continuous evolution.

Just like a Bottleneck Manager and a Permission-Centric Organization are identified by a particular set of dysfunctions, Multiplier Managers and Feedback-Centric organizations exhibit and promote most (preferably all) of the following virtuous traits.

### Provide context about the business

Lack of transparency about the business context and business goals of their organization is one of the most common reasons why people don’t feel like they’re empowered to change their surroundings — withholding information may save your team some time, but it also prevents them from providing their perspective and putting their own twist to what you’re doing.

Multiplier Managers make sure to share all relevant information with their team. Not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it and whom they’re doing it for; any decisions that are made, and why they’re being made; who’s responsible for what; any processes the team follows and the rationale behind them, and anything else that might be of interest to other people.

Once the amount of information is too much to be pushed to all teammates all the time, they start publishing it instead and give their teammates an easy, clear way to access it, so that they don’t risk wasting the team’s time with anything they don’t find interesting. This may take different forms: a shared Google Doc, an entire shared folder, a company playbook, meeting recordings or a bunch of those — whatever works for the company and how people communicate.

## Define what “good” innovation looks like

This is where bureaucracy and innovation meet: the best approach to innovating is by doing it within clear constraints and with a streamlined process. Constraints give your team members a way to frame their ideas in a way that makes sense for everyone, and process lets them validate and execute their ideas in a controlled way.

Here’s the stuff that Multiplier Managers are concerned with:

* What kind of innovation is good innovation? Is it okay to propose rewriting a perfectly working project in a new, shinier technology? Is it completely forbidden, or should it just be a time-boxed endeavor?

* How do we determine if an idea is successful? Do we need to set clear business metrics in advance, or do we use more qualitative metrics? Does it depend on the context?

* What’s the process for collecting feedback? Even more important, what’s the process for understanding whom to collect feedback from in the first place? What kind of feedback should be asked for at what points during the process?
Your mileage may vary, but the mere act of creating a process will be beneficial to your team and make it known that not only is it okay to experiment, it’s encouraged and codified.

### Use automation to create safeguards

If your organization is run by humans, someone is bound to screw up at some point. While Bottleneck Managers run from mistakes and pretend everything can be perfect all the time, Multiplier Managers embrace chaos and try to minimize the ways in which things could go wrong, the cost of things going wrong, or both.

Multiplier Managers use automation to their advantage: they know that systems are dumb and infallible while people are smart and fallible. This leads them to give their team ample freedom to innovate and move quickly *without* having to ask permission. At the same time, they create automated safeguards around the critical aspects of the company’s infrastructure to protect them from human error.

The most obvious example of this is creating a CI pipeline and setting up the proper telemetry to ensure developers can iterate on the codebase as quickly as they can think, *without* running the risk of breaking the app with a bad deployment. Removing the human element from the approval process is key to boosting speed and creativity in the organization.

### Promote technical excellence and innovation

As you create more room for experimenting and taking ownership, you should also make sure you’re promoting technical excellence at all levels of the organization. Having the right skillset empowers individual contributors to spot and seize opportunities for improvement, and it empowers managers to recognize and support innovators.

Before you start firing people, though, make sure those “code monkeys” on your team are not monsters of your creation. Even the most proactive engineer in the world will stop coming up with new ideas when there’s no room for execution. Consider each team member’s history and their aspirations and, most importantly, *talk* to them about the kind of change you want to create to see how they react: are they excited, worried or indifferent?

If you’re trying to revive a stagnating team, a useful icebreaker may be to allocate time for intentional brainstorming and innovation. Try to put aside 20% or 10% of each iteration for the team to try their craziest ideas, and see how that pans out. This will give you time to get aligned on what innovation means to you, and how you want to go about it.

However, remember that this is still not ideal: “thinking time” is still you giving your team permission. Instead, you want to get to a point where they come to you spontaneously with their ideas, without waiting for you to tell them it’s okay to think. If you can get there and maintain that momentum, you’ll have a real Feedback-Centric Organization.

The Feedback-Centric Organization

Alberto Vena

Everyone keeps telling us to be gentle when reviewing Pull Requests, and that’s the right thing to do, but are we nice with who reviews ours?

A Pull Request is a way to communicate with other individuals who are responsible for the project’s maintenance, so we should do a good job improving our Pull Requests code and documentation to make their work straightforward. It’s also in our best interest to do that since the easier the review is the faster we’ll get our code merged.

## Who reads our Pull Requests?

Creating a reasonable Pull Request is a matter of walking in the shoes of people that will open it later, who fall into the following categories:

* **Code Owners**: who are in charge of reviewing and merging the code.

* **Developers implementing new features**: who are changing previously merged code and need to understand why that code is there.

* **Developers fixing bugs**: who encounter a bug and need to go deep in the git history to understand where the regression has been introduced and why.

We should be respectful of each of them while creating a Pull Request since facilitating their work both in the present and in the future is what makes software development honest and practical. “Time is running out” kind of excuses here are not valid, every moment that we don’t spend improving Pull Requests that we leave in our project is a lot of time wasted for who will interact with them later.

> A Pull Request is created one time but evaluated multiple times.

Do the math!

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/61e451b8aa097487f4e8e20ab17f3ac713117f8c-560x240.gif?fit=clip)

## What reviewers dream to see

Let’s take a look together at what makes a Pull Request easy to review.

### Well organized code

Code is the soul of the Pull Request, but it won’t be my focus here. You can find a lot of resources about this on the Internet. I’ll only mention some general rules to apply code side:

* Make it small, try to break it into multiple Pull Requests.

* Write well-separated and well-documented commits, the why is the most important thing.

* Add tests, they’ll help reviewers understanding the context of the Pull Request.

* Take a look at the contribution guidelines usually at CONTRIBUTING.md; it may have important information.

### Meaningful title

It needs to clearly and exactly describe what has changed. For example:

![The preview of a wrong-formatter Pull-request title](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/2c23d7ca307eba19629a23417b8c92525c59f42f-1340x200.png?fit=clip)
🔴 Bad: This one is too generic and doesn’t provide any value.

![The preview of a well-formatter Pull-request title](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/e51f25dbd3166b9566efd0606c4f264866d63a64-1340x200.png?fit=clip)
✅ Good: This one is specific and explain what changed.

If you can only come up with a generic title, that’s probably a first signal that we could split the Pull Request into multiple ones.

A rule that I apply to determine if a title is good is to ask myself this:

> Could this title fit a CHANGELOG entry?

This soft-rule comes from my experience maintaining [Solidus](https://solidus.io/), the open-source project I mostly work on. On Solidus, before each release, we run a script that auto-generates entries for the CHANGELOG.md file using Pull Request’s titles. When they are self-explanatory, there’s much less manual work to do for maintainers.

### A description that really helps

Here’s the core of the Pull Request documentation. It’s quite common to assume that the Pull Request title and commits are enough for people to understand the context, but that’s not always true. For example, let’s consider this Pull Request title:

![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/2a55753537b7c1d02daf6a0746efd6d2e744bd47-1340x200.png?fit=clip)

I’m sure that when reading the Pull Request title today, with all the team focused on this specific change, everyone will immediately get what’s going on and **it could be tempting to leave the Pull Request’s description empty**. But what happens if you have to come back to this Pull Request in 1 year? Will you immediately remember how this switch has been done, and why?

Luckily, the “how” could still be read by commits description, even if it would be more time and energy-consuming to scan all the commits to get the sense of what’s happening. The real problem is that it’s tough to see the “why” of the change.

Let’s see what makes a good Pull Request description:

* It contains a **quick recap of the changes introduced**. It doesn’t have to be a lot of text, just something to quickly understand what changed without opening every single associated commit.

* It describes **why things changed**, try not to take for granted that the reader has a clear picture of the state of the system when the change happened. If the Pull Request comes from a change request done via an issues tracker, it could be handy to link that issue here.

* It describes the **steps to reproduce the changes introduced** with the Pull Request. It could be calling a method from a console, or make some interactions in a UI. It will drastically help reviewers to touch with hands the code they are seeing. It allows them to figure out any doubts that could arise in autonomy, without the need to ask for clarification and extra back and forth with the author.

* It includes **screenshots**: if the change has an impact on how the website looks or on any other visual part of the system, it’s a good idea to attach some screenshots. It will be super easy for those who look at the Pull Request to identify what changed and how.

With GitHub, you can guide the Pull Request author into providing all these things by using **Pull Request templates**. It’s a feature that allows to specify a template that will populate the Pull Request description for any new Pull Request. It’s just a matter of adding a markdown file into `.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md`. Here’s a collection of [ready-to-grab Pull Request templates](https://github.com/stevemao/github-issue-templates) and the [GitHub documentation page for Pull Request Templates](https://help.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/creating-a-pull-request-template-for-your-repository).

There’s also another hidden, not well-documented GitHub feature, that allows having multiple templates for Pull Requests. You can get them by just reflecting this filesystem structure:

```
.github/
  - PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md .       # The Default Template
  - PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE/extra.md   # Additional templates
```

When you create the Pull Request, you can use the infrastructure template by adding the `&template=extra.md` in the URL’s query params.

### The right reviewers

The policy about asking specific persons to review our code could change depending on the project. For this reason, GitHub offers a [Code Owners](https://help.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archiving-repositories/about-code-owners) functionality that allows us to specify rules that automatically trigger review-requests from the right people. Here’s an example of a CODEOWNERS file:

```
*                   @project/backend-team
/app/javascript/    @project/frontend-team
/docs/              @project/documentation-team
```

This will ask for a review to the `project/backend-team` for all changes in the project excluding those that are located in `app/javascript` and docs, which will ask for a review to their respective teams.

I suggest integrating the usage of this feature with a clear team policy on how much time and how often developers are expected to review others’ code.

## Preview App linked to each Pull Request

Reviewers’ work is way smoother when they can test what a Pull Request changes before merging, and it’s a good practice to have a preview environment, very similar to staging, generated for each Pull Request open.

If you are deploying on Heroku, you can just use their [Review Apps](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/github-integration-review-apps), whose setup is quite simple. It’s also possible to build something very similar by yourself: GitHub offers a Deployments API to create a Deployment section in the Pull Request page. By calling something like:

```
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Accept: application/vnd.github.ant-man-preview+json" \
"https://api.github.com/repos/nebulab/project/deployments/42/statuses?access_token=XXX" \
-d '{ "state": "success", "environment_url": "https://your-custom-url/", "environment": "preview"'
```

You’ll see the deployment link in your Pull Request.

![The deployment button in GitHub](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/bfe079861626b276e4e2cf4a47eb55f201bf93e7-1564x784.png?fit=clip)

At Nebulab, we use CircleCI and we’ve created a [CircleCI Orb](https://github.com/nebulab/circleci-orbs-feature-branch-preview) that allows us to have this functionality ready in minutes in all our projects by adding the following lines to the `.circleci/config.yml`:

```
version: 2.1

orbs:
  feature-branch: nebulab/feature-branch-preview

workflows:
  cool-workflow:
    jobs:
    - do-cool-things
    - run-specs
    - feature-branch/preview:
        domain: <domain-for-preview-apps>
        github_repo: <your-github-repository>
        github_token: <your-gh-auth-token>
        letsencrypt_email: <email-for-ssl-cert>
        server: <docker-server-to-run-containers>
        user: <docker-server-user>
```

### I bet you now want to be nice too!

After reading this post, you should! Being nice with reviewers gives you better and contextualized quality checks for your code, which should help you **grow as a developer**. It decreases **time-to-merge** for your code and will increases the **velocity to implement new features** that depend on existing ones. **Debugging is also faster** since you don’t have to read all the code to understand how and why a specific thing has been done. Helping reviewers means helping your team and your future self!

What Every Teammate Wants to See in Your Next Pull Request

During my career, I’ve had the honor of observing and being part of tens of engineering teams as a consultant, IC and manager.

Obviously, not all of these teams were equally effective at reaching their goals: some worked like perfect machines, others fell apart at every little problem, and most of them were somewhere in between these two extremes.

One would be tempted to explain these performance differences through a mere gap in technical skills — simply put, some people are more skilled than others and get more done, faster. The theory here is that the more highly-skilled engineers you hire, the better your team will perform.

This is certainly true, at least to an extent. However, if you talk to a seasoned manager, you’ll find that they’ve dealt with these two types of engineers at least once during their career:

* A junior engineer who absolutely crushed it not just from a technical perspective, but also in terms of the impact they had on the organization.

* A very senior and skilled engineer who never managed to accomplish anything meaningful, and ultimately moved on or had to be let go.

**Technical skill cannot always justify gaps in the performance of individuals or the teams they comprise**. There must be a more important underlying factor, one that justifies such dramatic differences in the impact people have on an organization, beyond their direct knowledge of the technologies and tools they work with. When present, this factor leads people to overcome their technical limitations in order to be effective at their job. When absent, it discourages them from pursuing meaningful results, no matter their skill.

Lately, I’ve come to realize the root factor may be **ownership**.

## An Intrinsic Trait with Extrinsic Results

Ownership is an intrinsic trait with extrinsic results: it’s born *inside* you, but most of the good things it leads to happen *outside* of you, in your interactions with others.

**Intrinsically, ownership is a sense of belonging and pride in one’s efforts that ultimately leads to the pursuit of excellence.** People who have ownership genuinely care about everything they do because they have the ability to see the value in it, even when it’s not obvious. Because of this love, they are willing to do the right thing.

**Extrinsically, ownership is the collection of traits that give managers peace of mind**: people who have ownership are dependable and consistent; they don’t wait for someone to assign work to them, but autonomously pick the thing that will have the most impact; they are in touch with the company’s mission; they work to the best of their abilities; they remove blockers from their way; they are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and fix something that’s broken, even when it’s not supposed to be their concern; they constantly re-evaluate and improve their way of working.

Most importantly, **ownership is contagious**, and it spreads very quickly: while technical skills take years or even decades to truly master, it only takes a few weeks of working in a team that consistently exhibits ownership for a new person to get up to speed on what’s expected of them. This is probably because we all have a natural sense of ownership and can recognize it and appreciate it in others when we see it.

## Ownership and Organization Design

In most mature organizations, there are at least three layers an individual is interacting with at any given time:

1. **The craft (the “how”).** When I am working, I am connected to the craft I am practicing to produce my work. An example is the relationship between an engineer and the code they write.

2. **The team (the “what”).** The code I write doesn’t exist in isolation (most likely), but is part of a larger endeavor my team is collectively working on. Together, we work on something bigger than ourselves.

3. **The company (the “why”).** Ideally, we don’t write code simply out of love for the code, but because we want to solve a problem we care about. Our company connects us all through its mission.

The three layers are also directly connected, and almost equivalent, to the three factors Daniel Pink identified in [Drive](https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates-ebook/dp/B004P1JDJO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1587991379&sr=8-1):

* Ownership towards **the craft** corresponds to **Mastery**.

* Ownership towards **the team** corresponds to **Autonomy**.

* Ownership towards **the company** corresponds to **Purpose**.

In some organizations, ownership is experienced at all three layers: people love their craft, trust their team, and believe in their company. This perfect alignment creates the ideal environment for individuals to do their best work, and such an organization is bound to have an impact.

In other cases, there is a disconnection between these three layers. It’s important to note that, while the layers are connected to each other, the different levels of ownership people feel towards them may be completely independent of one another. Here are some examples:

* An organization whose members are deeply connected to the company’s mission, but completely uninterested in their craft.

* An organization that hires superstar employees by offering extremely generous compensation packages. In this case, employees will own their craft, but most likely not feel connected to the company.

* A dysfunctional organization that happens to have one or two very good teams in it. Their members are bound to feel a strong sense of ownership towards their team, but a very weak one towards their company (in extreme cases, people may favor their team while antagonizing their company).

Another important aspect is that the ways to foster ownership in these three layers are completely different. While ownership should be practiced first and foremost by the CEO, ultimately **it’s up to the individuals who comprise the organization to find the best ways to implement ownership in their work.**

Because the ways to foster ownership towards the company is largely independent of the type of company, and has been written about extensively already, and fostering ownership towards the craft is not something managers should be concerned with, let’s instead focus on how to foster ownership towards one’s team, especially in the context of an engineering organization.

## Ownership and Cycle Time in Engineering Teams

In a team setting, the biggest obstacle to team members’ ownership comes in the form of bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are steps of the work process that require team members to wait for someone before they are able to move forward with their work. **By removing responsibility from the person who is producing the work, they discourage that person from “owning” the work all the way to its completion.**

In the average engineering team, bottlenecks come in many different shapes:

* Software engineers need to wait for a PM to define the next sprint and assign work to them before they can start working.

* Software engineers need to wait for a QA engineer to test their work before their work is approved for deployment.

* Software engineers need to wait for a release manager to follow a very long and complicated checklist before their work gets deployed.

Every single bottleneck reduces the ownership individual team members feel towards their team: QA engineers find bugs in the features they test, but these bugs are never fixed and the work lingers in a limbo forever; engineers sit on their hands all day because they don’t know what they’re supposed to work on next. This results in a very tangible increase in cycle time.

Unfortunately, **engineering teams often don’t know a better way to do things**. In fact, many of them will argue that the bottlenecks are necessary: we need the engineers to have their priorities clear before they work, because the priorities change too quickly. We need to do manual QA on our system, because our system is too complex to rely on automated tests alone. We need to handle deployments with care, because the cost of a mistake is too high.

I would agree with all of these objections: there are products where the priorities would change dramatically from one day to the next, there are enterprise systems that are too complex for automated tests to catch all the permutations of interactions and edge cases that would cause a bug, and there are applications where the cost of a bad deployment can be computed by multiplying the minutes of downtime by a factor of one thousand or more.

And yet, I would never ever advise such teams to strip their engineers of their responsibility and ownership to protect the business — not because I think the sacrifice isn’t worth it, but because there is a better way. One that empowers teams and makes them more productive, resulting in more value for the organization and a better use of the engineering budget.

## A Practical Framework for Fostering Ownership

There are three activities paramount to building ownership in your team:

* **Communicate:** by communicating constantly with your team, you create alignment on the business priorities and expectations. Frequent and consistent communication gives your team the information they need to make decisions autonomously.

* **Streamline:** by streamlining processes, you empower everyone to follow them and make sure their work gets done. Note that streamlining doesn’t necessarily mean automating: while automating a process is the ultimate way to streamline it, proper documentation can also do wonders.

* **Trust:** ultimately, you need to trust your team to do the right thing. Most teams lack ownership because their managers don’t think their members can do the best interest of the organization without micromanagement. In the long-term, this lack of trust is a recipe for failure.

These three activities will take different shapes depending on the size and conformation of your team, but your end goal should always be to establish a framework for ownership and collaboration within the team. Everyone on your team should know not only what ownership means, but also how to exhibit it in their day-to-day work.

For example, here are some of the practices I have adopted over the years to foster ownership in the engineering teams I led:

* **Enforce direct communication:** when you’re a team lead, people have a tendency to go to you when they have a question, effectively turning you into a bottleneck and reducing their contact surface with the business. The next time someone approaches you with a question you can’t answer, encourage them to seek the answer by themselves. This may seem like you’re forfeiting responsibility, but what you’re actually doing is removing a bottleneck in the communication process.

* **Take “done” to the extreme:** most engineering teams don’t even have a definition of “done”, yet alone an extreme one. It should be clear that a feature is only finished once it’s been successfully deployed to production and used without problems by your users. Until then, the developer’s first priority should be to keep the feature moving through the development pipeline so that it gets done  — *actually* done.

* Turn **bottlenecks into leverage:** bottlenecks often come in the forms of individuals or teams who are responsible for keeping another team’s work moving forward. I’ve already made a couple of examples when I spoke about QA engineers and release managers. This kind of repetitive work alienates people and doesn’t add any value to your team — in fact, it slows them down. Instead, find ways to turn bottlenecks into leverage: the job of a QA engineer, for instance, should be to document QA processes and build tooling to automate them as much as possible. QA on individual features should be done by the engineer in charge of that feature.

* **Make ownership visual:** having a highly visual representation of the state of work can be extremely helpful in creating ownership. Most development teams work with Kanban boards, which are great for this sort of exercise: make sure your Kanban board actually has columns for every single step of your development process (e.g. don’t conflate code reviews with QA) and make it clear that it’s an engineer’s responsibility to keep things moving through that board at all costs. Also, make sure people give priority to things on the right (i.e. closer to get done) over things on the left. Having strict rules in place helps fight our tendency to start something new when we feel blocked on in-progress tasks.

* **Delegate decision-making:** nothing empowers people such as… their manager empowering them. Delegate decision-making as much as possible, even and especially when it feels a little uncomfortable. This doesn’t mean you should leave people to themselves: always be there for your engineers to talk a problem through, but give them the last word if possible. When someone has autonomy, they will honor that autonomy by exhibiting ownership.

As I said, your mileage may vary, but a good starting point is to try these practices in your team, keeping what works and adjusting what doesn’t. People will start taking ownership in ways that surprise you, identifying bottlenecks and creating original solutions to keep the process moving.

## Ownership Is a Gateway to Velocity

You have probably heard the term “velocity” before. A lot of articles talk about velocity and the difference between velocity and speed: while speed is just about how quickly you’re moving, velocity is also about *where you’re going*.

Many teams move crazy fast, but they often lack a clear direction. As a result, they do work that is not truly meaningful for the business, or they have to redo their work over and over again because of defects, incomplete implementations or missed requirements.

Once you and your team start exhibiting ownership, you will realize how connected ownership and velocity truly are: teams that own their work are teams that move both quickly and in the right direction. This connection exists for two reasons:

* **Ownership is first and foremost about doing the right thing.** Low-ownership environments discourage engineers from thinking about the business value behind their work, but high-ownership teams carefully consider each initiative and its impact from all possible angles. People will start doing things that really move the needle.

* **No one wants to own a half-done task.** Teams that don’t own their work often do the quickest thing that will allow them to cross an item off their list, whereas teams that exhibit high levels of ownership know that the work doesn’t stop when it’s in production: quick and dirty solutions mean more maintenance work down the line and less time for high-impact initiatives.

As you can see, creating a high-ownership environment is not just the best thing you can do for your team members, but it’s also the best thing you can do for your business: it will increase the volume, quality and business impact of the work produced by your engineering team.

For a lot of managers, it can feel scary to give away control so radically, once you have seen the results, you’ll never want to go back.

The Transformative Nature of Ownership in Engineering Orgs

One of the most important decisions you will make when launching your digital brand is which eCommerce platform you build your store with. Typically, there are three categories to choose from:

* **SaaS platforms** are online software solutions that handle all the complexity of building and running a store. In exchange for a recurring license fee, these tools provide a storefront your customers can access as well as a backend to to manage your store. They are by far the quickest and easiest solution to get started. Popular examples in this category are [Shopify](https://www.shopify.com/) and [BigCommerce](https://www.bigcommerce.com/).

* **Open-source platforms** are ready-made software packages that provide similar functionality to what you could get with a SaaS platform. Because they are open-source, these platforms can be customized, although many of them are not built for that. Furthermore, you have to host them in your own infrastructure. Popular examples are [WooCommerce](http://woocommerce.com/) and [Prestashop](https://www.prestashop.com/).

* **Open-source frameworks** are software solutions that provide the basic functionality you need to build your store. They vary in functionality and underlying technology, but most of them are built to create extremely custom experiences and provide a very high degree of flexibility, at the cost of a steeper learning curve and a larger upfront investment. Popular examples are [Solidus](https://solidus.io/) and [Saleor](https://saleor.io/).
The main difference between SaaS platforms and open-source platforms is the pricing model: SaaS platforms require paying a recurring license fees, while most open-source platforms are free. In terms of functionality, however, they are pretty similar, so we will instead focus on the differences between SaaS platforms and open-source frameworks.

## Cost of ownership

SaaS platforms have two main pricing models: you either pay a fixed fee every month/year, or a percentage of your store’s sales volume. This results in a pricing model that scales with your store, but **it also means you are paying money just to keep your store online instead of investing in its continuous evolution.**

Most open-source frameworks, on the other hand, are entirely free to use, but you need to hire a development team that will build, launch and maintain your store. While this model requires a larger upfront investment, **it’s also a better fit for those entrepreneurs who are serious about investing in the technology that powers their business.**

If you can afford a larger upfront investment and you expect your brand to scale seriously, going with an open-source framework will reduce your total cost of ownership while creating more opportunities than you could get with an off-the-shelf solution.

## Customization possibilities

SaaS platforms offer a great starting experience with no customization work needed. This is really helpful for people who are just getting their feet wet in the eCommerce industry: **if you don’t know how to create a good UX and just want to start selling, a SaaS solution will help you.** This kind of simplicity doesn’t come for free, though: **SaaS platforms are not always easy to customize, and in certain cases you are stuck with the default experience they provide.**

Going with an open-source framework means you’ll have to figure out more stuff by yourself, but **it also affords you the flexibility to customize each and every aspect of your store however you see fit,** allowing you to truly innovate the buying experience rather than being one more droplet in a sea of digital brands.

The most prominent online brands became memorable not just because of their products, but because of the experience they created around all brand interactions. **If eCommerce is an important channel for you, you need to start seeing yourself as an experience company,** and treat technology as a first-class citizen.

## Data ownership

**SaaS platforms, unfortunately, act by their very nature as middlemen between you and your customers.** Because you are not hosting your infrastructure when you adopt a SaaS solution, you lose direct access to a lot of potentially useful information. These platforms try to make up for the lack of data ownership by providing out-of-the-box reporting tools, but they often fall short of brand expectations.

**With an open-source framework, you will always have complete access to all the data generated by your store.** This data can be used in any way you see fit: you can either customize your platform to generate advanced reports internally, or connect an external business intelligence tool that will help you take full advantage of all the information at your disposal.

Being a digital brands allows you to use data to your advantage: by accessing information that is not always available to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, you can make smarter decisions, which reduces your costs and helps you stay competitive. The paradox here is that **data ownership is even more important for smaller brands, which don’t have access to economies of scale and can afford fewer mistakes.**

## Time to market

Because most SaaS solutions provide all the tools you need to start an online business out of the box, it will always be quicker to get your brand started with a SaaS platform than with an open-source framework, at least for a basic store. **If you’re in a hurry to get started and cannot afford to wait, you should definitely look into SaaS.**

With that said, one aspect to keep in consideration is the velocity of your team when evolving your store in response to market conditions. **In the hands of a skilled engineering team, an eCommerce framework will be not only quicker to adapt, but because it’s built to be customized, it will also allow you to make optimizations that stand the test of time.** SaaS platforms, on the other hand, often require ugly hacks that cost you more time in ongoing maintenance than for their initial development.

For most brands, time to market for the initial launch is not a relevant factor. On the other hand, time to market in capitalizing new opportunities and evolving your eCommerce experience can make or break a digital brand.

## So… which one is it?

As you have seen, there are different factors to take into consideration when choosing the best eCommerce platform for your needs. Most of them boil down to two key aspects: experience and vision.

**If you are only getting started in eCommerce, or think of your brand mainly as a product company, you should probably consider SaaS options.** They will make selling online a no-brainer, at the cost of technical limitations and a higher total cost of ownership.

**If you are an eCommerce veteran, or consider customer experience to be paramount in building your brand, you should instead going with an open-source framework**, making a larger upfront investment in order to have a flexible platform that will allow you to deliver a completely custom experience.

What Can Open Source Do for eCommerce?

As an eCommerce consulting firm, we know the value behind a custom store implementation: **not going
with a SaaS solution affords you maximum flexibility and endless innovation opportunities** —
there's nothing a good development team can't do.

For digital brands, this can be powerful: **when your platform doesn't limit you, you can implement
whatever you have in mind,** and create even stronger bonds with your customers.

However, there are also downsides:

* Having a solid development workflow is good for new features and invasive modifications, but it
  becomes a bottleneck when you only need to change an email template, or the arrangement of
  elements on a page. Relying on developers for these tasks can slow you down.
* **Your developers' time is important and, most likely, expensive.** Having them make trivial
  adjustments to your content or campaigns may not be the best use of their expertise. Instead, you
  should do whatever you can to free them up for more important work.

Luckily, a lot of tools have emerged over the last years that allow you to make changes to almost
every customer-facing aspect of your store without necessarily involving your developers. These are
SaaS tools that only have to be integrated with your store once, and then provide you with an admin
panel you can access and use autonomously.

There are a lot of options for different categories, and over the years we've used many of them for
our customers. Here's a round-up of the best one in each category, along with a few alternatives
you may also want to try!

## 1. Manage your content yourself

Content management is one of those areas where self-serve tools have been available for a long time,
but are not always used (the right way). Headless CMS solutions are all the rage now, and the
philosophy behind them is fairly simple.

Unlike a traditional CMS, that allows editors to enter whatever they want in the page, with the risk
of creating un-optimized or even broken layouts, **headless CMSs require your developers to specify
the possible structure of the content upfront.** Content editors can then manage the content through
the headless CMS. Finally, this content is pulled by your store and displayed to your customers when
they visit the corresponding page(s).

While they may seem limiting to someone accustomed to old-style content management tools, **headless
CMSs are extremely powerful if used the right way**, and they can be just as flexible, if not more,
than traditional solutions, while sparing your developers a lot of tedious work.

### The best headless CMS: Prismic

[VIDEO](https://drive.google.com/file/d/181Oppz0QeRmrr11ShCrQ4DXC4jwpTNQT/view?usp=share_link)

Out of all the headless CMSs we have tried, [Prismic](https://prismic.io) definitely comes out on
top. **It's an extremely modern tool with a powerful API and development toolkits for the most
popular languages, and it can be easily integrated in any application.**

Its pricing is also [very competitive](https://prismic.io/pricing), with a free basic plan and
attractive options for organizations of all shapes and sizes.

There are a couple of alternatives also worth considering:

* [Alchemy CMS](https://alchemy-cms.com/about) is an open-source, self-hosted headless CMS for Ruby
  on Rails applications. It's a good option if you don't want to pay a third-party to host your
  content, but may be more complex for your development team to configure and maintain, especially
  if they don't have experience with Ruby.
* [Contentful](https://www.contentful.com) is Prismic's main competitor. While it's a solid option
  trusted by large companies such as Spotify, Lyft and Twilio, we have found it to be less reliable
  than Prismic, and a bit behind the curve when it comes to its technical capabilities. The pricing
  is also [much steeper](https://www.contentful.com/pricing) than Prismic's, going from $39/mo to
  $879/mo.

## 2. Build 360-degree marketing campaigns

**For digital brands, creating a loyal customer-base that identifies with your values and mission is
a matter of life or death**, and how, when and where you communicate with your users is key to
creating a successful and engaged community of brand _aficionados_.

Unfortunately, very often these touchpoints are hardcoded by developers into the application, which
means every experiment and every change need to go through the development team before customers can
benefit from them. **This can be especially critical for time-sensitive marketing campaigns,** where
getting the timing right can mean the difference between a customer and a lost sale.

Luckily, there are a few tools out there that can help you take back control. The integration flow
is usually straightforward: you ask your developers to send customer information to the marketing
automation service, which you then use to communicate with customers autonomously.

### The best marketing tool: Klaviyo

![The Klaviyo email marketing UI.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/34c56d7e6b8d6bda3f2dfaf44a6668137211eab0-1395x762.png?fit=clip)

A relatively recent product, [Klaviyo](https://www.klaviyo.com/) won our hearts when we first used
it, thanks to its flexibility and ease of customization for the end-user.

It allows you to run email, SMS and social media marketing campaigns all from the same interface
and leveraging the same dataset, and (obviously) supports A/B testing of your campaigns so that you
can test small changes and tweak your campaigns accordingly.

But where Klaviyo really shines is in its event-based architecture: by integrating with your store,
**Klaviyo knows when your customers take certain actions and allows you to build complex automated
campaigns** such as abandoned cart flows, all without having to involve your devs!

The most prominent alternative to Klaviyo is [Mailchimp](https://mailchimp.com), a giant in this
industry. While it provides many of Klaviyo's features, Mailchimp lacks SMS marketing capabilities
and has other features, such as landing pages and postcards, that may not be needed by the average
brand.

## 3. A/B test to your heart's desire

A/B testing can be a complex feat to pull off properly. Not only do you have to implement the
testing logic, but you also need a solid framework in place to validate the results of your
experiments and ensure you're not jumping to conclusions.

From a technical standpoint, implementing experiments is not fun either: each experiment needs to
be implemented manually, and failed experiments often linger unused in your codebase because no one
has time to remove them. **Over time, this accumulation of failed experiments can create huge
amounts of technical debt and slow down development.**

The complexity behind running a reliable A/B test often puts off companies who'd like to start with
the technique. When done right though, **A/B testing can be a powerful tool to optimize your
conversion rates and get a better sense of your customers' taste**, and there are a few tools you
can use to make this process a breeze.

### The best A/B testing tool: Optimizely

![The Optimizely A/B testing UI.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/1c7ac7dc278e63f43c8fd68b6f1cf66dd6f6101b-1849x1278.png?fit=clip)

[Optimizely](https://www.optimizely.com/) is an all-in-one platform for A/B testing all aspects of
your website, trusted by the most prominent startups and enterprises. A full-stack implementation
consists of two components:

* A frontend plugin that allows you to **run customer-facing A/B tests without involving your
  development team**, e.g. testing two versions of your landing page.
* A backend integration that allows your development team to implement A/B tests for more complex
  aspects, such as testing different promotions or shipping options.

You can manage experiments directly from Optimizely's UI, **which will also determine the winner
with its proprietary algorithms** — no Excel spreadsheet needed.

A popular alternative to Optimizely is [LaunchDarkly](https://launchdarkly.com), although you should
know LaunchDarkly is more focused on feature flags and does not provide a visual editor that allows
you to run customer-facing experiments without asking your developers.

## 4. Up your data collection game

Data is the stepping stone in the journey from online store to digitally-native vertical brand. As
Andy Dunn, one of Bonobos' co-founders and
[the man who coined the term _DNVB_](https://medium.com/@dunn/digitally-native-vertical-brands-b26a26f2cf83),
says:

> Deeper data on the consumer drives enables the DNVB to stay closer to the customer than its brick
> and mortar driven peers, and the ownership of the brand end-to-end fuels more affinity for a
> vertical commerce brand than even the best e-commerce experiences.
Being able to do more with your data unlocks new possibilities for your business. In turn, **your
ability to analyze data in a meaningful way is a function of how much data you collect and where.**

Traditionally, adding a new analytics service to your toolbelt has been very dependent on
development work. Developers would have to write a custom integration for the new service and then
test it to make sure data was being collected consistently and reliably. This could result in slow
integration times and lost opportunities.

But in the last few years, a new category tools was born that promise to solve this problem once
and for all. This new breed of services acts as a gateway between your application and all of your
tracking and analytics tools. They provides a unified programming interface that **drastically
simplifies the integration work for your development team,** as they only have to integrate with one
service and not ten. Store owners can then manage all of their tracking integrations from the
gateway's control panel. Adding new services is as simple as clicking a button — no dev needed!

### The best data platform: Segment

![The Segment data collection UI.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/0f94ab549ae2c13cf121a0c26936e899aa9f079d-1121x519.svg?fit=clip)

[Segment](https://segment.com) touts itself as a customer data platform (CDP). In other words, they
provide a centralized data collection service and give you the tools you need to manage and act on
your data.

Trusted by tens of startups and large organizations, Segment lives up to its promise of dramatically
simplifying data collection: **developers only have to integrate Segment in your application once.**
You can then enable and test new tracking and analytics services in a blink of an eye, freeing up
your engineering team's time for other initiatives.

In our experience, **Segment is incredibly reliable and provides an amazing user experience.** It
reduces development spend and implementation time.

A popular alternative is [Google Tag Manager](https://tagmanager.google.com/), which allows you to
manage all of your tracking snippets from one interface. However, GTM is much more limited than
Segment, because it simply acts as a central repository for different tracking codes, and doesn't
know anything about the data you are collecting. On the upside, it's free, so it may be a good
starting point if you just want to dip your toes in this water, or if you don't need a full-fledged
data collection platform.

## 5. ...and access new business insights!

Now that customer data is flowing in the right direction(s), it's time to use it to make informed
decisions about your business. In order to do that, many stores develop their internal reporting
tools, which take a lot of time away from core business priorities, or turn to Excel spreadsheets,
which often fall short of business requirements.

Instead, **companies that use data to drive important decisions, such as digitally-native vertical
brands, can and should rely on battle-tested Business Intelligence (BI) platforms.** These are tools
that plug directly into your data sources and can generate reports about all aspects of your
company's operations and sales.

Using a BI platform instead of in-house solutions allows you to access richer insights into your
data and let your developers focusing on core business capabilities rather than internal software.

### The best BI platform: Looker

![The Looker business intelligence UI.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/kqgmf0g2/production/ad302d86b3f6a04f0641560e3f0bcdc04966649d-942x571.png?fit=clip)

There's no shortage of BI platforms, as these tools have always been used by companies of all sizes
to better understand the market and drive strategic decisions. Among all the options,
[Looker](https://looker.com) stands apart for its modern take on business intelligence.

By combining BI, data visualization and reporting capabilities, **Looker allows you to create very
flexible experiences:** for instance, you can embed data visualizations directly in your store's
dashboard, or send a sales report every month to your key decision-makers, so that everyone's always
in the loop and can make the right decisions.

**Looker allows you to access the data you need, wherever you need it,** making sure that reports
are being put to good use rather than just sitting there and gathering dust.

[Tableau](https://www.tableau.com) is also worth looking into, although it takes a more traditional
approach to business intelligence, centralizing all your data and reports under the same roof.

## Flexibility + automation FTW

Most of these tools have plugins to integrate with the most popular SaaS eCommerce platforms.
Unfortunately, **these plugins often offer a shallow integration** that doesn't cover all customer
touchpoints or doesn't capture all the data you could leverage.

In some cases, the fault lies on the plugin developer for not doing a good job. In others, it's due
to the sandboxed nature of SaaS solutions, that don't expose all the hooks and information the
services need to show their full potential.

**By adopting a flexible, open-source eCommerce framework such as [Solidus](https://solidus.io), you
are getting the best of both worlds:** on one hand, you can create deep integrations that let you
leverage all the features of these awesome services; on the other, you are not limited by your
platform, and can implement all those features that make your brand stand apart from its
competitors.

The Nebulab