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Time is money. Kiboko gives you more of both.

There’s an old adage that “I know half my marketing budget is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” An entire marketing analytics industry is focused on that problem. There’s a similarly sinister but more overlooked issue affecting ecommerce retailers- at least half of developers’ bandwidth and managers’ attention is wasted. Worse, most companies can tell what was wasted only in hindsight.
Developer bandwidth and leadership attention are wasted on:
  • Projects that never make it to production due to intervening priorities.
  • Time spent switching between projects as priorities shift.
  • Projects that are completed too late to be of value.
  • Projects that make it to production, but don’t have the expected impact.
  • Projects that make it to production and have the expected impact, but still less impact than a different project that should have taken priority.
Most ecommerce leaders aren’t satisfied with the speed of enhancements and new features on their sites and know they could be growing faster. Wasted bandwidth and overlooked opportunity costs are key problems for these leaders to solve. To unlock full potential growth, we need to first go all the way upstream to strategy and ensure the business is solving the right problems. If an organization isn’t focused on the right opportunities, it doesn’t matter how good or fast its solutions are. Once the most critical problems or opportunities are clearly specified, we can go down one level to tactics- which efforts need to be taken to solve those problems and seize those opportunities? These are the projects that ecommerce leaders need to complete to fuel growth. Generating effective project ideas is easier within this paradigm, but we still need to choose which of those ideas to pursue. For each idea, there’s a series of increasingly difficult questions for prioritization:
  • Why this idea?
  • Is this the right time?
  • When will it add value?
  • Is the projected value right?
  • How long will it take to complete?
  • Which lead measure will be improved?
  • Does that align with our strategic objective?
  • Will this make it to production before being supplanted?
  • Is this the best use of our limited attention and development bandwidth?
The project backlog prioritization process at most companies, if it’s even organized enough to call it a process, is painful for everyone involved. The most common practices among ecommerce retailers include:
  • Large monthly or quarterly meetings that result in tail-chasing or over-reactions.
  • Last in, first out (LIFO) AKA shiny object syndrome, which comes with extremely high switching costs as priorities change constantly.
  • Purely deadline-driven, which focuses on the urgent over the important and eventually slides into the LIFO model as everyone attempts to game the system.
  • Skipped entirely, a wildly dangerous practice that all but guarantees no one knows what’s actually being worked on at any point, nor why.
  • Highest-Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO), the dictator approach that puts extreme burden on the leader and leaves everyone else in the dark.
None of the above solutions are the least bit ideal. At some point, many ecommerce leaders find that what’s being worked on isn’t even what was planned. The lack of a stable and efficient process for project prioritization is a primary cause of this issue. The problem is amplified by blockers that don’t get resolved, or even escalated in the first place, and the issue then cascades exponentially as new intervening priorities come up that throw the already unstable process out the window. It’s pure chaos. Regardless of which process failure ultimately occurs, the result is a financial plan that no longer makes sense and an executive team that can’t tell whether they’re on track to meet their budget. To make matters worse, the finance team knows they’re out of sync, the business staff can’t tell what they’re supposed to be focused on, and the developers feel simultaneously overworked and under-utilized because they keep working on things that never get launched before some new priority takes precedence. The dysfunction felt at the top is just the tip of the iceberg- if you think you’re in chaos, everyone below you has it worse.

A Novel Solution

Management attention is a scarce resource, which puts tremendous responsibility on the executive to direct their and everyone else’s focus to the most valuable projects. That’s only possible if they have an organizational process in place to also account for the opportunity costs of the projects they aren’t focusing on.

What can you do to ensure everyone is focused on the optimal set of projects, while freeing up your own attention to focus on bigger strategic issues?

You need to take control of your business.

Envision the solution as a simple 4-step cycle for ensuring your business is doing the right things at the right time:

Introducing the Kiboko Method for turning business problems and opportunities into strategies, breaking those down into tactics, and prioritizing those tactics for maximum speed and impact, all while keeping the entire organization informed and aligned. We provide a platform that reinforces this cycle and makes it so natural and easy to follow that the process quickly becomes habit.

FOCUS- Identify the most important issue limiting your growth

Kiboko provides an intuitive means of diagnosing performance quickly and accurately.

There are ultimately only three ways for an ecommerce retailer to grow sales:

  1. Attract more traffic to the site
  2. Engage shoppers to make more purchases
  3. Expand the size of those purchases

Using our proprietary analytics dashboards, it’s clear that any activity you could undertake to grow sales will do so via influencing one of the three objectives above. The Kiboko platform is built with this in mind to reinforce strategic rigor and clarity of thought.

Kiboko then takes those three ways of growing sales as their own objectives and answers how to improve each of them with a choice between two primary levers:

  1. How do I attract more traffic to the site (increase Visits)?
    1. Get more visitors
    2. Get visitors to come more often
  2. How do I engage visitors to turn more of those visits into purchases (increase Close Rate)?
    1. Turn more visits into carts
    2. Turn more carts into purchases
  3. How do I expand the size of those purchases (increase Average Order Value)?
    1. Increase the number of items per purchase
    2. Increase the price per item

Thus, via those same three paths to grow sales, we now have six distinct areas of opportunity from which to choose where to focus. Kiboko’s platform naturally draws attention to the most critical of those six within seconds.

This layer of detail highlights where the tactical opportunities lie in service of the strategic initiatives in a way any user can follow. Chess grandmasters don’t just see individual pieces, spaces, and moves; they see positions, patterns, and sets of potential moves. This enables them to envision more steps ahead than casual players without even needing to devote additional mental bandwidth to the effort. Kiboko’s analytics dashboards are designed to provide that same benefit to its users by naturally drawing them into the same thinking patterns as experts in the field.

IDEATE- Brainstorm ideas that will impact that issue

 

After directing both strategic- and tactical-level focus to where it’s most needed, Kiboko goes a step further.

For each of the primary levers noted above, Kiboko shows the performance of lower-level lead indicators that can be directly acted on to move that lever, influence the strategic objective, and ultimately grow sales.

Beyond drawing attention to the right problem, Kiboko suggests a variety of solutions to jumpstart the brainstorming process.

Users are then free to formally recommend projects for consideration. Kiboko guides users through a brief set of simple questions to ensure any proposed projects are understood and include the relevant information to be properly evaluated.

 

RANK- Prioritize those ideas for the largest, fastest, and most certain impact along with strategic fit

 

For each project proposed by users, Kiboko assigns a dynamic prioritization score.

Kiboko utilizes a proprietary algorithm to score each project on a scale of 0-100, taking into account:

Expected impact to sales (both in size and timing)

  • Incremental costs unique to the project (subscriptions, tools, etc.)
  • Developer effort
  • Strategic fit (along multiple dimensions)
  • Impact relative to all other projects proposed or in progress

 

EXECUTE- Complete the optimal projects with confidence, stability, and organization-wide clarity

 

Kiboko directly addresses the issues driving wasted developer bandwidth and leadership attention. With much clearer understanding of which projects are worth what (and when), leaders can operate with the confidence to see them through. Avoid the many types of waste that stem from the natural chaos of project prioritization and explicitly account for opportunity costs. With our proprietary algorithms, priorities are still nimble enough to respond to changing conditions.

With Kiboko, you can have your feet on solid ground when pursuing projects without being caught flat-footed when the market moves.

The ancillary benefit to leaders and business users is to be able to directly point to where their efforts and decisions have had real impact. Regardless of what the broader market is doing, you can confidently claim wins when it’s clear that you took action aimed at a particular lead measure, improved that lead measure, and as a result, grew sales.

Focus your attention and efforts where they’re most needed.

Ideate solutions to narrowly-defined issues, starting with a generated list of suggestions.

Rank those solutions based on a holistic set of factors, including strategic fit and opportunity costs.

Execute the right things at the right time, without second-guessing, and with the ability to claim your wins.