Commerce Thinking is a team of six. Each of excellent at what we do, and each of the team worked inside fast-paced brands before moving into consulting and a portfolio of clients.
The last time we hired, Lauren joined as General Manager, after consulting for several brands and, before that, building her career inside Oh Polly. Before her, Amy joined us from a brand-side merchandising and planning career at Acne Studios, Burberry and others.
We’re selective about who we hire. Today we’re starting the search for our next recruit. The role matters to where we’re taking Commerce Thinking, and we have a clear idea of the person we need…
But we don’t have a job title.
Last week we sat down to finalise what this job actually is. Maxime, Lauren and me, on a call Granola was recording. Most of what follows is copied from it, because the conversation was really honest and we landed on a role that’s perfect for the right person looking to take the next step in their career.
So if you’re brand side, love being in the weeds of systems, data, ops, finance and merch, and want a new challenge then read on.
“We’re not looking for a traditional Sys Admin”
That was Maxime, about twenty minutes in, and it settled a big question.
The traditional version of this hire is a systems administrator with deep specific platform experience. Whether that’s ERP, PLM or something else. Historically businesses will hire an out-and-out expert in that system. Someone whose whole value is one platform isn’t a fit here, they must be able to work effectively across multiple systems at once. Their key value is seeing things across systems, and cross-functionally within a brand. They see how things relate to one another up and down stream.
So we are not hiring a single-system specialist. We are hiring someone who understands how a fashion & lifestyle business actually runs and can work out the systems part.
The best people for this often come from a different department
Maxime again, on where his team at Gymshark came from: “Half of my team at Gymshark ultimately came from the CS team.” Lauren said similar about hers at Oh Polly.
His reasoning: “They tend to understand the business. They tend to know Shopify already. They tend to know NetSuite already. They get how things should flow to/from warehouses and retail stores. They’re not the system experts, but they have a really good cross-functional understanding of the processes that run the business. They understand how data flows, at least on a high level.”
That is the profile. Someone who has been on the receiving end of bad data and has had to explain it to a customer knows something a systems specialist often doesn’t. Similarly, the likes of ops, merch and finance people inside of brands are connected to practically every stock linked transaction so have an in-the-bones understanding of if things are or aren’t working correctly.
We don’t train you from scratch
This was a key part of the call.
I asked whether, as a business, we are set up to develop entry-level people. Maxime’s answer: “developing someone in this role is just spending time with that person, which we don’t have a lot of.” Lauren had the numbers in front of her.
There are six of us. The people who hold the knowledge are the same people delivering the client work, and they do not have a spare day a week to run a training programme. Pretending otherwise would be unfair to whoever we hired.
The way I put it on the call: this is a finishing school, not an academy. If you are already good and stuck somewhere that cannot show you anything new, we’re the right next step in your career. If you need teaching from the ground up, we would be doing you a disservice and we would rather say that now.
The first three months are repetitive
Reconciliation. Imports and exports. Checking data has synced and resyncing it when it hasn’t. Validating a report someone has stopped trusting. An integration event that failed overnight.
That work exists underneath every client relationship we have, it is what our retainers are built on, and it currently lands on (very very capable) consultants. Whoever takes this job spends their first quarter doing all of it, across every client, until they know how each operation runs.
We could have written that more attractively. It would have been a waste of everyone’s time.
Then you get to decide how support should work
Here is the part I would take this job for.
We have never standardised support. Maxime’s version of success in twelve months was not having to be first line any more and becoming an escalation path instead, and the thing that gets us there is somebody deciding what support at Commerce Thinking should actually look like. The tooling, how requests arrive, what gets triaged and what gets escalated, how our systems talk to each other, and how much of that manual list above stops being manual at all.
We have a view. We do not have an answer, and we would rather hire the person who can formalise a plan AND deliver it with us.
What we still haven’t decided
The level. We have landed somewhere around the middle with room either side, and we will move for the right person in either direction.
The title. We have deliberately not put one on it. We think we’ll find the right one when we find the right person.
Why this might be a good move for you
Most people doing this work are doing it inside one brand. First person to get the Slack message when something hasn’t synced, first person they come to when a report returns a number nobody expected, first person they ask to set up a saved search. It is a real skill and it is almost invisible from inside one company.
You would do it across a portfolio of nine-figure brands instead of one, and you would see how each of them is nuanced. That is a massive draw for someone looking to develop their knowledge, experience and further their career inside fashion & lifestyle.
Lauren said it: you do not often get the chance to learn across a wide range of businesses like the roster we have.
The spec is here. If you read this far and thought about someone other than yourself, send it to them.
And email lauren@commercethinking.com if you want to talk about working with us.
What your interview panel could look like…
