The Online CMO by Philip Hallenborg

What does an ecommerce site and a Boeing 747 have in common? Well, the bigger an aircraft gets, the greater number of controls and control complexities. The 747 cockpit layout below is a telling example.

Does it fly better than a basic single engine Piper? Not really. Bigger, faster, more passengers yes, but it doesn’t fly better. We all know of a number of “jumbo” sites with fantastic features. But the question remains whether they can be piloted, and whether they fly well?

Every pilot knows that you need your eyes pinned on the horizon to fly.  In doing so you will sense what is happening and even predict what will happen before it has happened. 

There are very few flight ”metrics” that are really instrumental to flying. And they have been there for ages: airspeed, attitude (gyro), altitude and heading.

Flying an airplane is in that sense similar to running an ecommerce site because the horizon of the competitive environment is there for anyone who dares look up from the dashboard. Similar to an airplane cockpit filled with instruments, controls and switches, an ecommerce site can produce a vast array of data outputs. But few of them are actually needed to pilot your site.

Interestingly, behaviour psychologist have found that a basic “T”-layout of the four key flight instruments is essential in order to provide the most important information (see below the “T” from a Piper cockpit).

So what is the basic “T” of ecommerce management? Well you need to know your traffic/lead generation rate, your rate of conversion, the revenue you generate and and the margin connected with that revenue. But more than anything, you need to forget about your instrumentation, lift your eyes and look at the horizon.