“We’ll deliver that in six months to a year.”
When your business has an urgent need for a new technical capability, those aren’t the words you want to hear. Retail moves fast, often operating within thin margins. When a new business opportunity crops up, the last thing you want is to be blocked by the absence of a technical capability.
But it can be difficult for CTOs and technical teams to anticipate what comes next when the bulk of their day-to-day work is caught up in serving their businesses’ current needs. And the last thing a technical leader wants is to make a technology decision that backs the business into a corner down the road.
At Shopify, we believe that good business strategy is empowered by technology choices made years ago. Our job is to see around technology corners—to get out ahead of the needs of Shopify businesses so that when the world of commerce shifts and a new business strategy arises, they’ve already got all of the technological tools they need to hop right on it.
Seeing around corners: Personalization
Nowhere is the need to stay ahead of the curve more evident than in the shifting world of customer personalization. The effectiveness of third-party cookies is dwindling—and the retailers who thrive in the next era will have to rebuild their ecommerce presences on the strength of their first-party data to make shopping more personal than ever before.
In our new report, Seeing around corners: Personalization, Shopify’s director of product Alex Danco says:
