BigCommerce Employee Spotlight: Nathan Booker

Published in

BigCommerce Developer Blog

7 min readJan 30, 2019

Welcome to the BigCommerce Employee Spotlight. Each month, we’ll chat with an employee who works on the BigCommerce product. These are the folks behind the scenes who are crafting the BigCommerce developer experience, from SDKs and APIs to themes and documentation. Discover what they’re building, their tools of the trade, and learn about the technologies they’re passionate about.

This month we’re speaking to Nathan Booker, Product Manager, Platform and APIs at BigCommerce. We’ll learn about his journey, his work at BigCommerce, and what he’s excited to build.

Hi Nathan, Tell me about your path to BigCommerce.

It’s been meandering for sure! My career in tech actually started at quite a young age. I co-founded a web design business with a couple of high school friends when I was 15. We set up shop in an unused room of my friend’s dad’s business. He was a chemist who made custom chemicals for big companies like DuPont, so we were surrounded by all these explosive and carcinogenic substances while hacking on CSS2. We were competing on price with all the “real” local web design agencies since we didn’t have to pay rent and were high schoolers. I can’t say we were incredibly successful, but I was certainly making more money than friends working at fast food restaurants and such.

I think of this time in my life as less about early successes — but rather as having the opportunity to have a lot of early failures. I made a lot of early business mistakes that many people don’t get the benefit of until they’re in their mid-to-late 20s. It was incredibly educational.

Do you have a formal education or are you self taught?

I went to the University of Texas at Austin for Aerospace Engineering but ultimately didn’t finish. There were elements of “college wasn’t for me” and other elements of having already tasted the business world, so going back to school felt like a step backward.

I would consider myself mostly self-taught. I have a smattering of formal education in terms of business, engineering, and computer science — but I think most of it I’ve acquired organically by hacking on stuff and making mistakes.

How did you become a Product Manager at BigCommerce?

Towards the end of my time in college, I took a support job at BigCommerce and worked my way up through the support organization. I was offered the opportunity to become a Sales Engineer helping crack open the Australian market for our new (at the time) BigCommerce Enterprise product. Being a 24-year-old with an opportunity to relocate to Australia, I eagerly accepted.

While in Sydney, I had the opportunity to rub shoulders with many of our Product and Engineering team members there. Eventually, I set my sights on Product Management as a career choice. In my Sales Engineering role, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with our Partners and other developers and became extremely familiar with the BigCommerce API — both with its functionally and how it was received by our users. Product managers should always seek to be experts on the customers they represent, and my unique experience working with developers and partners made me well positioned to eventually lead our API strategy.

What do you work on? What’s your role now?

I work on our Product team, focusing on two areas of BigCommerce as a platform — our public APIs and the Storefront platform that we make available for merchandising products.

Tell us about a day in the life of a BigCommerce Product Manager.

Well, no one day is the same. Those are some of my favorite things about the job: the variety and that there’s never a dull moment. As a Product Manager, you get a chance to work with many different types of folks both within and outside of the organization.

On any given day, I might be:

Having conversations with our customers to understand their needs and pain points
Sometimes this means talking to a business owner, or the development staff within a business, or another operational employee within the business — sometimes these are all the same person!
Checking in with our technology partners who build apps on top of the BigCommerce platform to make sure we’re giving them the tools they need to build awesome stuff over and above what BigCommerce offers natively.
Working with engineering teams internally on new features and APIs we’re building
Collaborating with our marketing, sales, and partnership teams to make sure we’re getting the word out about new capabilities.
Refining our product roadmap with my fellow PMs to make sure we’re focused on the most important things, and constantly questioning those priorities as we get new information.

Are there any tools that you use in your role that have changed the way you work for the better or made you more productive?

Our use of Slack internally is a bit controversial (as I think it is at many companies), but I’ve loved it as a tool to collaborate with colleagues and partners in an asynchronous way and with less overhead and formality versus email.

Other tools in my toolkit include:

What’s interesting to you about your work at BigCommerce?

It’s a really interesting time in ecommerce, especially for those merchants that are growing out of “startup” phase and starting to scale but aren’t quite at the point where true enterprise solutions are relevant to them.

You see most of the industry moving to either of two things: “Walled garden” solutions that provide a complete package, but limited consumer choice (and usually some gotchas) or decoupled “do-it-yourself” solutions that are either open-source or are basically a pile of separate APIs you’re expected to string together yourself.

As BigCommerce, we try to provide a middle ground — a complete solution out-of-the-box, but with each component “optional” and modular so it can be replaced with something more relevant to a particular business.

This means that folks that use BigCommerce don’t have to worry about assembling their ecommerce solution from scratch and take on all that risk and operational expenditure. Or worry about managing their own infrastructure. It also means that merchants don’t have to sign up for a solution that locks them into a single vendor or a single ecosystem. They’ll get some of the confidence of an open source solution, the “as long as we have development resources, we can accomplish what we need” ethos — with less of the nightmare that comes after that when core components of the platform are too customized and become difficult to scale.

What are you most passionate about building at BigCommerce?

One of the most interesting opportunities for us has been the headless commerce trend. Merchants are constantly looking for more efficient marketing platforms and workflows. We’ve had to acknowledge that our out-of-the-box storefront templating engine — something we once thought of as a “core competency” — is now an area where consumers want choice. That’s the sort of thinking that drove the development of our WordPress plugin. It lets merchants tap into the rich ecosystem of WordPress when it comes to how they want to display content and products to customers, but backs it with a robust SaaS solution for the complex parts of commerce like payments, compliance, and backend integrations.

We plan to take this even further this year. We’ll offer even more choice in terms of the presentation layer for merchandising in the interest of making sure that, although we’re ultimately a SaaS solution, people don’t see that as something “closed” or “limited.” It’s a really fun problem to solve!

What’s been the hardest lesson to learn during your career so far?

Back in school, I used to be the kind of kid who wanted to have the right answer, always the person shooting my hand up first to try to answer a question or show off what I knew — that I was “right”. In a business environment, that’s not an ideal way to act. A big part of learning to be a leader in the company was learning that my own knowledge or abilities can only make so much of a difference on the actual end result of things.

Far more important, I’ve learned, is the ability to get a team moving in the right direction. I’ve learned a lot of humility, and that it doesn’t matter who has the idea as long as we as a group find our way to the right solution. I try to focus on helping my teams find the right answer together, instead of being the person who’s seen as having the bright idea. Leaders have to learn to maximize the power of a group, and that sometimes means checking one’s ego and investing in those around you. In the end, it’s really rewarding!

What’s the best career advice you’ve been given?

A general principle of the product management gospel is “falling in love with the problem,” or more verbosely “fall in the love with the problem, and not any particular solution.” You have to allow yourself to have options in terms of how you solve a problem for customers, and really focus all your efforts on understanding that problem from many different perspectives. As soon as you decide on a solution, it starts to change how you make decisions — and as a Product Manager, you have to keep trying to zoom out and make sure you’re really focused on the most important thing.

We want to shout out a big thank you to Nathan for sharing his story. Have a question for Nathan or want to learn more about BigCommerce? Reach out in the comments below or tweet us at @BigCommerceDevs.