5 Reasons to Launch an eCommerce Website as an Agile Project

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5 Reasons to Launch an eCommerce Website as an Agile Project

5 Reasons to Launch an eCommerce Website as an Agile Project

Agile has become a bit of a buzzword lately, jumping from software development to project management to marketing and other fields. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a somewhat chaotic situation where it is used for all purposes, often missing the point entirely.

Agile will denote the project management approach for this article’s purposes, which borrows from Agile software development. In other words, we will investigate why you may want to launch an e-commerce website by utilizing Agile project management.

Get a Working Version Online ASAP

One of Agile software development’s critical things is to create a working version of a piece of software as soon as possible. Of course, it can have a mere fraction of features and functionalities as a finished product, but it will get in front of actual users sooner. This way, you can see how people use it, what they want, what they don’t like, and how the application behaves in the real world.

This can also be beneficial for an eCommerce website for a straightforward reason – you will probably not get everything right the first time anyway, so why not make mistakes quicker?

Innumerable things can go wrong with an e-commerce website. From jumbled, unclear categories to checkouts that don’t work, from payment services to bad SEO optimization, from crashing pages to images that don’t load.

By putting your eCommerce store up as soon as possible, you will identify and resolve all of these issues before you waste time and money trying to make everything perfect on the first try.

Utilizing User Feedback

Closely related to the first reason Agile can work for e-commerce websites is another characteristic of this particular approach – collecting and acting upon user feedback.

Agile software development “introduced” close collaboration with customers and users (in our case, actual customers) as an alternative to volumes of requirements that plagued traditional software development and resulted in software that no one wanted to use.

Once you launch the early version of your eCommerce website (as suggested above), you should do everything in your power to learn how people use it, how they feel about it, and what they would like to see added in the future.

This should go beyond merely asking for testimonials from your customers. This should entail various forms, emails, polls, and anything else you can think of. Of course, there is a whole science to this, and you should research this more.

There is no better way to understand your e-commerce website than asking the people who use it what they think.

Inspection and Adaptation

Launching a successful e-commerce website is not a formulaic experience. There is no secret formula for getting everything right. There are too many factors that can influence the success of an e-commerce site.

This is what Agile does exceptionally well – it provides the frame of mind and the mechanisms that help you inspect your work and adapt when needed. One of the Agile Manifesto tenets is Responding to change over following a plan.

For one, Agile entails working in small iterations (or cycles), which produce valuable increments of the product (your e-commerce website, in our case). As a result, you get the chance to inspect everything you often do, identifying the mistakes and underperforming aspects of the website. Ultimately, this enables you to adapt quickly and continuously improve your e-commerce site.

Different Agile approaches have other mechanisms that help you inspect and adapt your work results and the way you and your teamwork itself. For example, Scrum (the most widely adopted Agile approach) has fixed sprints and various events that enable constant inspection and adaptation.

Making it sustainable and (somewhat) predictable

One of the most commonly misunderstood Agile goals is to make a particular product sustainable and humane. In simplest terms, this means establishing a certain cadence of work that does not require you to work 20-hour days to add another feature to your eCommerce website.

An Agile approach like Scrum recommends analyzing your performance across different Sprints and how to use it to predict how much you and your team will tackle in the future.

There are innumerable benefits to this beyond actually letting you enjoy life besides launching an e-commerce store. For one, it ensures that nothing is rushed and that all of the work is done meticulously and with an eye to future work. This dramatically reduces the need for do-overs and other unnecessary work that you can spend on making your eCommerce store even better.

It is critical to always inspect your predictions and only take them as guidelines. Agile is not about making plans for months in advance or trying to develop nifty little timeboxes that you can use indiscriminately.

Building a Strong Team

Agile software development has traditionally acknowledged that teams make software and revolves around supporting those teams. In Agile, teams are usually self-organized and own their product together instead of a group of individuals. They are also encouraged to be transparent about their work and share their knowledge.

This can be highly beneficial if you are not launching your e-commerce site alone.

If you wish to launch your e-commerce website as an Agile project, you will want to remember a few things about “managing” your team.

For one, you should never impose the Agile approach on your team. Instead, you should invite them, discuss and debate the possibility of working in such a fashion. If you find out they are willing and ready to do something like that, great.

In addition to this, you should never push work on them. Instead, agile teams pull the outcome from a Product Backlog (a sort of a to-do list) according to the priority agreed upon by the entire team.

It would be best to allow them to decide how to do what is best for the product (i.e., the website). You are working with adults who know their stuff and probably know the best way to add value to the e-commerce website.

Of course, you will still want to keep the team synchronized by promoting communication and actively trying to keep the to-and-fro going. Good communication is at the very core of Agile, and your Agile project is no different. You might also want to use Agile teams’ tools when working with a distributed team.

The ultimate result will be a happy, motivated team that owns its work, which continues to improve over time.

Closing Word

It is essential to point out that taking an Agile approach to launch your eCommerce website is not a magic wand that will dispel any problems you may encounter. However, it has certain advantages over a phased approach, and if applied intelligently, it can help you launch a successful eCommerce site.


AUTHOR: Jug Babic is a marketer at VivifyScrum, a company that developed an agile project management tool of the same name.

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