Simplifying complexity: Six lessons from our Ecommerce Expo panel

The hidden cost of growth

Inevitably, growth creates complexity. The challenge is knowing which complexity to keep, which to remove and how to make the rest easier to manage.

Growth brings more products, more customers, more pricing models, more channels and more markets. For a growing ecommerce business, these are usually signs of success. But growth can also create layers of technical, operational and organisational complexity that make the business slower to change, harder to operate and more difficult for customers to navigate.

So how do you simplify without taking away the things that make your business valuable?

That was the question we explored on stage at the Ecommerce Expo, where Dan Netherton from St Austell Brewery, Per from Struct PIM and our Chief Technology Officer, Matt Sutherland, joined true’s Mette Davis for a discussion on simplifying complexity across products, pricing and channels.

The panel brought their personal perspectives to the challenge, covering what they’ve experienced inside a complex commercial organisation, through product information management and across technology and transformation.

What became clear is that while there’s no single quick-fix solution, some clear lessons emerged.

1. Not all complexity is bad

The first step isn't actually to simplify everything. Some complexity exists for a good reason. Different customer groups may need different pricing, products may have genuinely different configurations, and markets and channels may require different information or experiences.

For St Austell Brewery, Dan indicated that there are many variables that can create complexity, including multiple customer groups, account-specific pricing and thousands of SKUs with different rules around who can buy them.

For him the question is not just “How do we reduce complexity?”, instead it’s more accurate to gauge which complexity creates value, and which doesn’t. Complexity that supports a genuine USP, customer requirement or commercial advantage may be worth keeping.

The problem comes when complexity creates duplicate work, inconsistent information, slow launches or fragile processes without delivering a corresponding benefit.

2. Before you simplify, ask whether you need it at all

One of the most practical ideas was to go one step further before trying to optimise a complicated process and to ask: “Do we need to do this at all?”

Businesses are often very good at improving existing processes, but if a process has accumulated over time without a clear purpose then making it 20 per cent more efficient isn't necessarily the best answer. Instead, sometimes the biggest improvement comes from removing the work entirely.

It's a useful principle for transformation more broadly. Before automating a process, adding another integration or introducing a new platform, understand why the process exists and what value it delivers. If the answer is unclear, that's probably the first problem to solve.

3. Complexity needs ownership

While much of the focus of complexity will typically fall on technology, that’s often not where complexity starts. It can come from unclear processes, fragmented responsibilities and different teams maintaining their own versions of information.

Per highlighted a common pattern across businesses: product information becomes difficult to manage when nobody has clear responsibility for deciding what ‘right’ looks like. That's when spreadsheets and workarounds begin to appear. Reaching that definition of "right" rarely happens in isolation. It requires the relevant teams and stakeholders to come together, align on priorities and agree how information should be managed across the business.

Clear ownership doesn't eliminate complexity, but it makes it possible to manage. Someone needs to be accountable for the quality and definition of key information, rather than leaving teams to create their own interpretations. Matt emphasised that this is why transformation programmes need to look beyond platforms, with data, processes and ownership strategically considered alongside the technology.

4. Technology should solve a defined problem rather than define the problem

It's easy to jump from a recognised pain point to a technology solution. Fragmented product data? We need a PIM. Slow website? We need a new commerce platform. Too many manual processes? We need automation. Sometimes those are the right answers but it’s important to remember that technology can't compensate for decisions that haven't been made.

A PIM, for example, can help businesses manage product information at scale and deliver different versions of that information across channels, markets and audiences, but it won't decide what a product actually is or what the underlying data model should look like. As Per's contribution made clear, moving bad data into a new system doesn't make it good data.

Matt shared that the technology and transformation challenge is often to understand the underlying problem first, then decide which technology can genuinely help solve it.

5. Start somewhere. You don't have to solve everything at once!

Complexity can be intimidating because everything appears connected. The knowledge that products affect pricing, which affects channels, which affects customer experience can be overwhelming. That can make it tempting to wait until there's a complete transformation roadmap before doing anything, but the panel highlighted the value of finding a practical starting point.

One suggestion was to pick a single product attribute - perhaps a price, description or specification - and trace it back to its source. Where does it come from? Who owns it? How many systems or people touch it? Where does someone have to intervene manually?

If a simple piece of product information turns out to require a complicated journey, you've found a useful place to start.

Dan's approach is similarly practical. He maps where complexity exists and asks whether it supports a USP, whether it crosses multiple teams, and whether it's primarily technical, operational or both.

The point isn't to fix everything immediately. It's to identify the friction that matters most and create momentum from there.

6. Simplification should create capacity for growth

Ultimately, simplification isn't about making a business less capable, it’s about making growth easier to manage.

Three clear benefits were identified as a result:

• Agility being able to react and move more quickly.

• Clarity understanding the business better and making decisions with greater confidence.

• Capacity freeing up time and resource for higher-value work.

For product teams, that might mean launching products without multiplying manual effort.

For commercial teams, it might mean supporting different customers and pricing models without creating increasingly fragile processes.

For technology teams, it might mean spending less time maintaining workarounds and more time enabling the next stage of growth. And for customers, the result should ultimately be a more consistent and useful experience.

So, where should businesses start?

There isn't a single technology answer to complexity, but these questions are a good point to kick off from:

• Does this complexity create customer or commercial value?

• If it doesn't, do we need it at all?

• If we do need it, who owns it and how is it managed?

• Do the right people agree on what good looks like?

• And what can we change now that will create value without waiting for the entire transformation to be complete?

Asking these questions puts you on the front foot in avoiding two common extremes: trying to simplify everything, or accepting complexity as an inevitable consequence of growth. The goal is somewhere in between. Keep the complexity that creates value, remove the complexity that doesn't. And build the data, processes, ownership and technology needed to manage what's left.

If you'd like to find out more about any of the topics raised in this blog, drop us a line here, and a team member will be in touch.