Enterprise business agility is about reengineering your organization so it can adapt to change at speed. If you work in ecommerce, you’ll know this capability is a competitive necessity. When embedded effectively, true business agility helps teams in every part of the organization deliver better business outcomes.
In today’s ecommerce landscape, success relies as much on economies of speed as on economies of scale—so even the largest enterprise ecommerce businesses must develop effective strategies to improve their agility. This guide will take you through the key elements of the enterprise business agility journey, and how it helps unlock your organization’s full potential.
The origins of enterprise business agility
In recent years, conversations among business leaders have moved from “agile transformation” to “enterprise business agility.” Initially, businesses adopted an agile framework to improve efficiency and speed of IT delivery.
DevOps came along in 2007, looking to combine development and operations to improve the product/feature development life cycle. But as the market has evolved, the agile framework has been extended, from agile software delivery to agile transformation and beyond. Companies are now looking for an even more holistic strategy that encompasses the entire enterprise—hence enterprise business agility.
The internal challenges enterprise business agility may help solve range from slow time-to-market, to siloed or competing tech and business teams, to heavy dependencies and limited voice-of-customer intelligence.
Using enterprise business agility to overcome hierarchy challenges
Traditional organizational structures prioritize stability—but this can leave businesses vulnerable to disruption. As far back as 2017, Deloittewas warning that organizational hierarchies were not fit for our digitized, networked age. Their report says that a more appropriate design is one that “radically decentralizes authority in a formal and systematic way throughout the organization.”
To deliver business outcomes at speed, we must imagine a more agile structure in which all teams are organized not by function but around value streams. In essence, you take the cross-functional teams found in agile product development and extend it across all functions. By doing so, you make everyone more responsible for delivering value to customers and strategic outcomes to the business.
Business agility supports customer-centric innovation
A lack of agility can impact a business’s customer focus. A common issue with custom-built platforms illustrates this point well. Despite the promise of total control and flexibility, as your tech stack grows, so does the volume of work required to make sure everything runs smoothly. Adding just one new integration could mean weeks of writing and debugging code, racing to understand new APIs, and testing to ensure apps across your tech stack are communicating properly.
This is not the type of work most developers get excited about—and it doesn’t come cheap. Before moving away from their custom platform, Dollar Shave Club was spending 40% of their entire technology budget on platform maintenance. Their switch to Shopify was a strategic decision designed to improve business agility.
With that 40%, we thought to ourselves, what else could we unlock? What else could we do with that 40% instead of simply maintaining our platform? What else could we build? What else could we leverage? How could we drive more results in those primary KPIs?
Three reasons to increase enterprise business agility
Without business-wide agility, you risk losing out to a faster, more decisive competitor. Here are three critical reasons why investing in enterprise business agility is essential for commerce brands:
- Business users need more control. Disjointed systems cause frustration across teams like marketing, customer support, and fulfillment, who often rely on engineers for simple tasks. Agility empowers business users to manage their own workflows without technical intervention. For example, Shopify's app ecosystem enables users to implement new features, reducing bottlenecks and reliance on engineers.
- Custom builds drain developer time. Custom platforms often create maintenance and scalability challenges. Agile frameworks support quicker implementations. Companies migrating from custom platforms to Shopify, for instance, often reduce their operational costs significantly while gaining the flexibility of choosing between the full platform, going headless, or using Liquid (our open-source template language).
- World-class checkouts are hard to build (and we should know). Customers now expect seamless, frictionless checkout experiences. Agile ecommerce companies can quickly test and deploy new checkout solutions to improve conversion rates and the overall customer journey. For example, Shopify's APIs allow businesses to rapidly integrate a checkout that’s not only customizable, but is also the highest-converting in commerce.
Assessing your current enterprise business agility
Before investing, you need to assess your current level of enterprise business agility—but where do you start? For an ecommerce business, the following metrics are some some of the more useful proxies for overall agility:
Time-to-market
Metric: Measure how quickly new products, services, or features can be brought to market.
Why it matters: Faster time-to-market allows ecommerce businesses to respond to customer needs and emerging trends, staying competitive.
Customer feedback loop
Metric: Track how quickly the company gathers, processes, and implements customer feedback into product updates or service improvements.
Why it matters: A shorter feedback loop signals high adaptability and customer-centric innovation, which are core to agile businesses.
Employee engagement and empowerment
Metric: Monitor employee satisfaction and the degree of decision-making autonomy across teams.
Why it matters: Engaged employees who are empowered to make decisions contribute to faster innovation and cross-functional collaboration, key tenets of enterprise agility.
Operational efficiency
Metric: Measure how well resources like time, budget, and talent are used across projects, especially through metrics like throughput or cycle time in project delivery.
Why it matters: Efficient use of resources without compromising quality is a hallmark of an agile organization.
Revenue growth from innovation
Metric: Track the percentage of revenue generated from new products, services, or markets that didn’t exist before the past year or two.
Why it matters: This measurement shows whether agility is translating into business growth and expansion opportunities.
Pivot frequency and success
Metric: Measure how frequently the company changes course in response to market shifts and how successful those pivots are in meeting goals.
Why it matters: An agile ecommerce business can quickly change strategies based on real-time data, ensuring they stay ahead of competitors.
Technical agility
Metric: Assess the speed and ease with which technical infrastructure can be scaled or changed, including platform flexibility and integration capability.
Why it matters: Ecommerce businesses rely heavily on tech infrastructure, and agility in this area means faster adaptability to new tools, apps, or systems.
Customer experience
Metric: Use metrics like net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores to gauge how well agility efforts are translating into improved customer experiences.
Why it matters: The ultimate goal of enterprise agility is to serve customers better, faster, and more effectively.
By examining these measurements, an ecommerce business can gain a comprehensive view of how well it is adapting to changes and maintaining a competitive edge. As demonstrated by Dollar Shave Club, focusing too much engineering time on maintenance tasks takes IT resources away from innovation. An agility assessment helped Dollar Shave Club refocus their resources.
Outcome-focused agility across all teams
Teams often left out of agility conversations—such as finance and HR—need to embrace agile processes to create a unified, nimble organization. For example, when finance departments adopt agile thinking, they can pivot quickly in response to market changes, adjusting budgets more fluidly based on evolving priorities rather than being locked into rigid annual plans.
Similarly, in human resources, agile practices could mean streamlining recruitment processes, and shifting the focus from predefined roles to the cross-functional skills required by dynamic business needs. Typically, ops, finance, legal, audit and sales/marketing are all teams that need to be brought into the agile fold.
Lean portfolio management
Lean portfolio management (LPM) is critical to enterprise agility because it allocates resources based on ongoing outcome evaluations, not fixed budgets or rigid plans. This dynamic approach lets businesses shift focus to high-return initiatives. For instance, a company might divert resources midquarter to develop a feature that meets an emerging customer need, boosting satisfaction and competitiveness.
LPM also reduces waste by letting teams “pull” uncompleted tasks aligned with their capacity and skills, promoting sustainable delivery and improving morale. This focus on business value enhances innovation.
Continuous improvement is built on business agility
Business agility is a journey, not a destination. To sustain momentum, organizations need to foster a culture of continuous improvement. This ensures that businesses stay adaptable and responsive to market demands over time.
What Shopify lets us do is spin up all these different experiences to rapidly test, iterate, and drive additional performance as far as acquisition is concerned.
The race to achieve business agility
The race to achieve business agility in ecommerce is a competitive scramble for adaptability, speed, and innovation. With rapid shifts in consumer behavior, technological advancements, and market dynamics, businesses need to continuously adjust their operations to stay ahead.
Ecommerce businesses that embrace enterprise business agility are better positioned to respond quickly to market opportunities, launch new features or products, and deliver superior customer experiences. And with more than 4,500 experienced engineers working on platform improvements around the clock, Shopify is able to help ecommerce brands build precisely the kind of adaptable, customer-focused businesses that are able to evolve quickly in the face of market demands.
Enterprise business agility FAQ
What is enterprise business agility?
Enterprise business agility (EBA) is the ability of an organization to adapt to change, learn, and pivot, deliver at speed, and thrive in a competitive market. EBA requires a holistic and integrated strategy for transformation, focusing on business outcomes and value realization. It involves creating a culture of continuous learning, innovation, and improvement, enabling organizations to stay ahead in the market.
What are the benefits of business agility?
Agile businesses are equipped to capitalize on short-term opportunities, allowing them to act as first movers in the market. They can quickly adapt by learning from mistakes or setbacks and pivoting without being locked into rigid plans. This helps them to respond proactively and stay competitive, or even surpass competitors.
What are the four components of business agility?
The four core components of business agility revolve around these key areas:
- Leadership and strategy: This involves having flexible leadership that can make quick, informed decisions, adjusting strategies based on real-time market feedback. Leaders foster a culture that encourages experimentation, continuous learning, and rapid adaptation.
- Process: Focuses on the ability to quickly pivot business processes to meet changing demands. Lean and agile practices help organizations streamline operations, reduce waste, and accelerate delivery without sacrificing quality.
- People: Emphasizes building cross-functional, empowered teams that are capable of making decentralized decisions. Employees are encouraged to continuously develop their skills and take ownership of their work, enhancing overall organizational flexibility.
- Technology and Tools: Organizations need adaptive technology and platforms that can scale quickly, integrate easily, and support rapid changes. This includes the ability to update and deploy new features, automate processes, and leverage data to make informed decisions swiftly.
What are the best enterprise agility frameworks?
Here are the top 4 enterprise agility frameworks:
- Portfolio Kanban A holistic method that improves agility by applying visualization principles, limiting work in progress, and managing flow on a system level.
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) A set of Lean portfolio management and Agile project management practices used to scale agility at the enterprise level.
- Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) Applies regular Scrum to multiple teams. The approach promotes less prescriptive roles, events, management, and organizational structures than Scrum.
- Scrum@Scale (SaS) The Scrum framework applied to multiple teams and in complex environments. SaS promotes tight collaboration and coordination between Scrum teams.
