When I was asked to write a blog about performance and scalability, my initial reaction was, “Me?” Of all the members of the HCL Commerce Product Management team, I feel like the least likely to add much value to a discussion on these “technical” topics. Then, I remembered a quote I read, “Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.” Assignment accepted, and I knew exactly who to tap as a source…Brian Gillespie, Commerce industry veteran and our very own Product Management Leader. Here’s our conversation lightly edited and condensed: So, tell me how this idea for a blog came about. Today more than ever, the digital commerce channel is critical to total revenue for B2B, B2C and B2B2C organizations. With shopper and buyer traffic and order volumes increasing, page load times and a streamlined checkout process must exceed shopper and buyer expectations. Did you know that a page load delay of just one second reduces customer satisfaction by 16%? And a similar one second delay during the checkout process reduces conversions by 7%? Many of our clients have annual digital revenue of $1+ billion, so that 7% adds up quickly. Furthermore, organizations of all types must be able to adapt to the variability in traffic and order volumes, especially the upper ends of those variables, like during flash sales and holidays. Can you tie this back to HCL Commerce? Performance and scalability constitute the DNA of HCL Commerce. We have clients now on v9 who have reported a 30% reduction in page load time. At least in part, this is a result of HCL Commerce’s shift from a monolithic architecture to one comprised of business services, containers, and Kubernetes. With v9, we also introduced HCL Cache to serve content “on the edge,” or closer to the shoppers and...

For someone whose career started in business intelligence and analytics, there is no substitute for having accurate data and statistics to inform product prioritization and design decisions. This is why we launched and continue to leverage the HCL Commerce | Product Ideas Portal, which I wrote about in my previous post. An equally important program that we rely on to shape our product roadmap is the Sponsor User Program (SUP), a community of clients and partners, who we collaborate with more closely on new product capabilities and longer-term strategic initiatives. SUP organizations engage directly with HCL Commerce Architects, Designers, and Product Managers through a variety of research methods to share their industry expertise, business priorities, and product experiences. In turn, they are among the first to see early designs and prototypes and are invited to exclusive Webinars and events. Last year, select SUP organizations also participated in our first Beta Program through which they were given access to beta features and pre-release code. Just this week, we kicked off an exciting project with a few of our most important and industry-leading SUP clients to re-imagine the Search business user tools, and we are already planning for our next Beta Program that will coincide with our mid-year release. As Product Managers, we are always looking for patterns in what our users do, say, think, and feel, but the context that is needed to tell a more complete and powerful product story can come only from direct, personal engagement with them (even though it is all virtual these days). If you are interested in learning more about the Sponsor User Program, please reach out to your Product Specialist.        

In software product management, we are in the business of solving “market problems.” Market problems are evaluated along two dimensions: pervasiveness and willingness to pay. Through this series of blogs, we’ll share more details about how HCL Commerce play imporatnt role here.