There’s a pattern that Eduardo Frias, Field CTO Enterprise at Shopify, sees repeatedly across the hundreds of brands he works with. A retailer invests heavily in a new commerce and fulfillment stack. The implementation goes reasonably well. The integrations hold. The data is cleaner than it was before. And then, six months later, the promised outcomes aren’t materializing.
The platform isn’t the problem. The organization is.
“If you’re singing out of two different songbooks, it’s not going to work,” Frias said plainly. “There’s a change management component that comes with realizing the vision of unified commerce.”
E-commerce teams and store operations teams that work independently — with different metrics, different definitions of success, and different ideas about what “good” looks like — will undermine even the best technology stack. Not intentionally. Just structurally.
Why the org problem is harder than the tech problem
Technology problems are, in most cases, solvable with money and time. You can buy a better platform. You can hire better engineers. You can invest in a more capable integration layer. The problem has a known solution space.
Organizational problems are different. They involve people with different incentives, different reporting structures, different historical definitions of their own success. An e-commerce team measured on online conversion rate and a store operations team measured on in-store comp sales are, by design, optimizing for different things — even when they’re nominally working toward the same customer outcome.
Unified commerce requires those two teams to operate as one. That’s not a technology decision. It’s a leadership decision. And it’s one that most technology implementations skip, because it’s harder to put in a project plan than a platform migration.
The Psycho Bunny approach: customer experience as alignment tool
Todd Dean, Strategic Lead of Technology and Transformation at Psycho Bunny, has developed a specific method for solving the alignment problem — and it doesn’t start with technology.
It starts with customer experience design.
The approach: map how customers actually move across channels — not how the organization wants them to move, not how the systems were designed to handle them, but how they actually behave. Where do they start? Where do they switch channels? Where does the experience break down from their perspective?
When that mapping becomes the center of the conversation, something happens to the internal debates. “It helps clear the air,” Dean said. “And that bleeds into the technology roadmap and the data structure.”
The organizational disputes about which team owns what, which metrics matter, which system gets priority — they don’t disappear, but they become easier to resolve when everyone is oriented toward the same customer reality rather than their own internal definitions of success.
Dean’s sequencing recommendation was direct: do the CX work before you select the systems. Not after. “Without being overly repetitive — if for anything, doing CX before selecting systems or defining roadmaps, what we found is that it really aligns the organization.”
What ‘doing the CX work’ actually means
This isn’t a research project that runs for six months and produces a PowerPoint. It’s a structured process that surfaces how customers actually experience your brand across channels — and uses that reality to make organizational decisions concrete.
In practice, it includes mapping customer journeys by channel — not aspirational journeys, but observed ones. It includes identifying where friction exists from the customer’s perspective — where the experience breaks, where expectations aren’t met, where a channel handoff fails. And it includes translating those findings into organizational and technology implications: which teams need to collaborate differently, which metrics need to change, which systems need to talk to each other in ways they currently don’t.
The value of this process isn’t just the output. It’s that it creates a shared language and a shared frame of reference. When e-commerce and store operations are both looking at the same customer journey data, the abstract argument about whose priorities matter more becomes a concrete conversation about what the customer actually needs.
The metric problem nobody wants to talk about
Frias was direct about the structural issue that makes alignment hard: siloed metrics. When e-commerce is measured on online revenue, and stores are measured on in-store comp, ship-from-store — which is a win for the customer and a win for the brand — looks like a loss for the store (inventory leaves the floor) and a win for e-commerce (the order is fulfilled). Neither team has an incentive to make it work well.
Unified commerce requires unified accountability. That means shared metrics that reflect customer outcomes rather than channel-specific performance. It’s a governance change, not a technology change — and it has to come from leadership, not from a platform implementation.
The brands that have solved this describe the other side as a fundamentally different operating mode. Fewer internal conflicts. Faster decisions. A customer experience that’s coherent because the organization behind it is coherent.
The technology, it turns out, is the easier part.
Eduardo Frias (Shopify), Todd Dean (Psycho Bunny), and the Evereve team go deeper on aligning teams, metrics, and systems for unified commerce.
