An interview with MKM’s Head of Digital, Craig McLaren, exploring why they decided to migrate to BigCommerce and go headless, building out their own internal engineering team.
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Tl;dr
- What selection process did MKM go through and how they ended up selecting BigCommerce
- Why headless was right for the business and the complexity this added to the project
- The impact Bloomreach DXP has had on the ability to merchandise and personalise
- Advice for other ecommerce teams on handling project management for large site migrations
MKM is the UK’s leading independent builder’s merchant, with branches across England, Scotland & Wales. Founded in 1995, they have branches across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom from Redruth to Elgin Norwich and Llandudno. Ecommerce is an important part of the business, selling to trade customers and connecting online customers with local branches via free Click & Collect.
We’re joined by Head of Digital, Craig McLaren, who talks us through MKM’s ecommerce evolution story, migrating to a new headless stack built on BigCommerce and Bloomreach DXP. Craig is an experienced technology and digital commerce leader with specialist knowledge and skills in composable commerce replatforming and devops team building from scratch. He shares insights into the technology decisions MKM made, the positive impact on the business and how, and why, they’ve built out their own internal engineering team.
Discussion notes
- You recently replatformed to BC – what were you migrating away from and what were your overall goals for the project?
- Can you first talk us through your selection process and how you ended up choosing BC? What else did you consider?
- Why was headless needed, and what challenges do ecommerce teams need to look out for with a headless approach, as some people still push that it doesn’t add any complexity but that’s just not true.
- What impact has Bloomreach’s DXP had on your team’s ability to merchandise and personalise etc? Any big learnings around this area?
- Sales pipelines and customer quotes are important in B2B, so how do you handle CRM, what systems and how are they connected?
- What were some of the biggest challenges from a technical standpoint with the project?
- I know your background is Programme Management, what tips do you have for others managing large change projects like this? Broadening a bit – think this is still a good one
- If you could start the project again, what would you have done differently?
- As you said, you’ve built out an internal engineering team. Hybrid setups bring additional challenges around release discipline, how are you splitting responsibilities e.g. who owns integrations, is your team FE only? And who in the internal team has technical ownership of the release cycle?
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