Terms of Trade · Edition 1: The PE deck
Headless
Definition
A commerce architecture in which the customer-facing front end is separated from the platform that holds the catalogue, pricing and checkout, the two connected by APIs. The promise is a front end that can change at the speed of trading without touching the systems beneath it.
Field note
Headless is not the ecommerce team running around on Black Friday week. It is a technology proposition that promised much, until retailers spoiled it with IT: the front end that was going to move at the speed of trading now needs a developer to change a banner, and the developer is on a different floor with a different backlog.
Board question
How many people, and how many days, does it take to change the homepage on a Tuesday?
Applied through
Should we replatform, and Operational Excellence in the Cat’s Whiskers, internally ready before externally funded.
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