This guest post is part of Quantum Metric’s Continuous Product Design (CPD) Evangelist series. Thank you, Karl!

The Monday morning 8 am call we all know and…

How many of us have been here? A Monday morning 8 am call to discuss last week’s business results. They’re bad. Really bad.

The round robin starts with an overview of results and how every category is down year over year.

Customer service discusses last week’s ramp up of calls on site issues with no resolution.

The product team doesn’t have answers — but they’ll research and “circle back.”

Engineering acknowledges the Monday release didn’t go smoothly, but they backed it out on Wednesday, and patched it on Thursday.

QA will run through all p1 scenarios again first thing today to validate flows.

The consensus is that there are macro-economic issues, but everyone should research their areas and report back on a plan.

The torture of the weekly read out of siloed digital KPIs and priorities

Why do we torture ourselves with this weekly read out? We end up with a list of action items and research points that will no-doubt fix some issues but not the fundamentals?

Because that’s how we’ve been trained.

We work in teams. Each team has its own goals and KPIs. Each team has its own backlog, bugs, and priorities.

It doesn’t have to be that way

How should this scenario ideally play out?

Well, there shouldn’t be a need for a weekly lookback if teams are 100% aware of KPIs at any given moment.

That monthly release could have been a daily or weekly release with fewer touchpoints.

A single pane of glass view, with data transparency, identifies issues as soon as they occur. The bugs become less business-impacting.

QA automation gets releases out the door sooner. Even without, smaller releases with targeted changes reduce risk. Negative changes can quickly be identified, prioritized, and resolved.

Why do we argue about what caused last week’s sales dips and what to do about it?

First, it’s accountability. No one wants to accept blame for 100% of the problem — because it’s not 100% their fault.

Maybe accountability becomes easier if it can be quantified in dollars and cents with some level of certainty?

Perhaps that loyalty release escalated by a board member — shifting all dev resources in the process — is actually not as painful to the bottom line as a hidden bug in the checkout flow, that prevented 100s of customers from entering their credit card numbers.

Second, it’s prioritization. Is the CEO’s mandate to fix the loyalty bug more important than the checkout bug? If the CEO knew about the checkout bug, would more resources be made available to automate QA?

So many questions would be answered better if the issues, risks, and dependencies were known up front.

More tools, more data, more problems

I believe most companies have solved some of these quandaries by giving their teams tools to find problems and solve major issues. CSAT feedback, analytics tools, application performance monitoring (APM), real user monitoring (RUM), or even session replay. But these are siloed tools that require someone to gather teams in a room to let them know there’s an issue.

Development and Operations — or DevOps, potentially — works to find technical issues but might not always include the product team. Nor might they understand the impact of the issue in dollars and cents.

Customer satisfaction might hear about a bug and raise it up, but not know that the business impact is minimal.

In other words, there are many sources of truth. To the DevOps team, their truth is real and impacting. To the CEO, her truth is real and painful.

To use a car metaphor (I love F1 btw as it’s a great analogy to business): Everyone has a sensor and is adjusting the entire car to make that single sensor green. But this potentially impacts other areas that they hadn’t even considered.

We need a single pane of truth and a single set of priorities

Teams need to work from a single pane of truth. They need a single set of priorities that are driven by KPIs with the ability to learn, course-correct, and iterate with an acceptable level of risk and a safety net (in the way of alerting, quick reaction, and operational readiness).

This single pane of truth has to capture and output real-time behavioral and technical input. It needs to integrate with all the tools that are already in the team’s toolkit, and it needs to be able to scale with the business.

How we can (mostly) eliminate those torturous weekly readouts

This is a people, process, and technology solve.

First, our leaders have to change their mindset and not jump on the first problem that they hear about. But listen to the most important problems in order of dollars and cents impact. They may not be as shiny.

Second, we need to adopt a process of Continuous Product Design where the feedback loop is continuous across all teams. And all teams are aligned on where improvements should be made.

When we have a single pane of glass with a prioritization scheme we all agree on, teams can deep-dive, solve, and deliver faster.

— Karl Goodhew

What can we do about those torturous weekly readouts of digital KPIs and priorities? was originally published in Quantum Metric on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thankfully, most of us already have the digital infrastructure to keep employees at home, teach kids via remote learning, and reduce our dependence on the large technology conferences that continue to be postponed or cancelled. Like so many other business leaders, I am relying on digital to keep our team, our business, and even my family together. We must remain nimble, we must address our daily challenges — and from that perspective, it’s business as usual. I am so grateful that our team is actively responding to the challenge — within less than a week, the Quantum Metric marketing team pivoted from a series of in-person technology conferences to a virtual trade-show booth. Yesterday, we had to shift from an all-hands meeting in Denver, and instead gathered the entire sales team for a critical training program via web conferencing — it went off surprisingly well! I fully expect these to be temporary changes. But, I have also been curious after seeing a comment like, “now we’ll find out which of those meetings could have been just an email,” on how we may more rapidly embrace digital under the current conditions.

Listening to the news, it is clear that every business is being disrupted and turning to digital as the (only) answer. I was curious to look into our data to see how the COVID-19 news has impacted the digital landscape so far.

At Quantum Metric, we have visibility into over 420 million online and mobile user sessions a month, so we investigated the aggregate data, from an anonymous perspective, for the past 13 months (that’s a total of 5.5 billion sessions) to quantify the impact on retailers. The results confirm what we already suspected: consumers have made a massive shift to digital!

Brick & Mortar Growth Rate Up 52%

We typically see a spike in ecommerce on February 14th, but a side-by-side comparison of brick and mortar e-tailers’ growth rate from last year held against this year shows a 52% increase.

We attribute the growth to lack of availability of local brick and mortar supplies (out-of-stock consumables and shipped from China inventory), and an overall desire to limit in-store exposure. It is worth noting that the growth rate spiked the week beginning February 17th and has declined by the week of March 2nd. It is possible that online inventories are beginning to run low, but more likely that consumers have already purchased what they need. Future weeks of analysis may see the growth rate index invert if consumers shift the timing of their purchases more than the amount of purchases overall.

Conversion Rate Up 8.8%

One of the most difficult e-tail metrics to move is conversion rate. This is defined as the total number of purchasing sessions divided into the total number of shopping sessions overall. Conversion rates during the month of February jumped by nearly 9% as shoppers demonstrated the same kind of buying urgency that we typically see during Cyber Monday.

Patterns among retailers who sell consumables like household cleaning supplies demonstrate much higher frequency of shopping with smaller average order values. The resulting impact to retailers will likely be higher shipping costs as more small boxes go out. Shipping companies will love this trend as they generally make more per individual box than they do on heavier boxes.

Regional Patterns Show Little Variation

We anticipated seeing different patterns of online shopping for consumers along the more heavily impacted West Coast. The analysis, however, when broken out by consumer location, actually showed a bigger spread in growth rate trends across the Mountain, Central and Eastern regions.

Post Valentine’s Day shopping typically declines as consumers have become skilled at shopping on “deal” days. This year, however, we saw upticks in growth rate in all regions. The West Coast didn’t peak as high or last as long as the rest of the country.

While that might seem strange, West Coast consumers have a history of buying more online than consumers in other regions. The higher overall purchasing averages in the West make it more difficult to increase the growth rate curve. The lack of regional differences lend credibility to the theory that much of the digital shopping surge is coming from national news coverage as opposed to specific local needs.

Assessment for Retailer Revenue

Investors may be wondering if these online shopping trends could be used to predict an unexpected and surprising upside among brick and mortar retailers. In store shopping still makes up the largest proportion of retailer revenue, but some of the stockpiling will certainly be incremental.

We believe, however, that the biggest upside of the COVID-19 shopping surge will be felt by retailers who have already built excellence into their digital products. Shopping trends are moving towards higher frequency, lower revenue shopping carts, so retailers are increasing their focus on building loyalty. Without a doubt, the digital retail experiences customers have been having these past few weeks, good or bad, will have a lasting impact on their ability to build much needed loyalty into their consumer-base.

Parting Thoughts

In parting, COVID-19 is still unfolding worldwide, and there are many unknowns ahead. One fact, the COVID-19 event is already impacting our personal lives, our businesses, how we connect with others, and will have a lasting effect on how we approach our global commerce. With regard to our digital engagement, I believe that once behaviors change, it’s unlikely for them to change unless some compelling reason. I, personally, have continued to increase my reliance more and more on digital for my personal, business, and family needs. I’m watching the entire world do the same as we face today’s world challenge with COVID-19.

COVID-19 Impact on Online Sales was originally published in Quantum Metric on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.