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HOW CORTEX HELPS ENSURE THE RELIABILITY OF BIGCOMMERCE’S GLOBAL SAAS PLATFORM




Content

Introduction
When spreadsheets won’t cut it anymore
Why BigCommerce chose Cortex
The importance of data model flexibility
Automation to ensure alignment while reducing noise
A look at BigCommerce’s customer-centric scorecards
Domain scorecards
Service scorecards
Measuring the impact of Cortex
Advice to new program owners
Executive alignment
The PoV roadshow
Easing into dev adoption


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Program Snapshot
Adoption

Number of users:
223

3 month adoption rate:
96%
Program

Number of Integrations:
11

Number of Scorecards:
10
Outcomes

Principal time saved per week:
30m

Domains achieving performance excellence:
100%
Use Cases

Standards enforcement, Incident response, Developer productivity
Scorecard Types

Onboarding, Quality, Security, Maturity, Observability, Migration, Performance,
Language-based best practices


INTRODUCTION

BigCommerce (Nasdaq: BIGC) is an Open SaaS composable ecommerce platform
enabling fast-growing and established B2C and B2B brands and retailers across
150 countries to build, innovate and grow their businesses online. From their
founding in 2009 through IPO in 2020, BigCommerce’s customer-first core value
has long been mirrored by an internal ethos of boundless growth for employees.
Encouraging innovation from all parts of the business has contributed heavily to
BigCommerce’s recent flurry of product, customer, and market wins.

But to preserve a system where every employee is empowered to innovate, every
employee must also adhere to standards designed to reduce subjectivity in
decision making and ensure interoperability between systems. This is the story
of how BigCommerce’s engineering team uses Cortex to drive best practice in
building the open and flexible platform experience BigCommerce customers need.


WHEN SPREADSHEETS WON’T CUT IT ANYMORE

Shaun McCormick is a Principal Engineer at BigCommerce responsible for driving
alignment between the Architecture and Platform disciplines in a model where
teams, rather than titles hold the most influence. Shaun explains, "We don't
have a top down technical decision-making structure at BigCommerce. That makes
us more agile, but also requires us to be rigorous about standards of quality
and measurement.”

Initially, just codifying standards wasn’t difficult. A simple spreadsheet could
do the trick, given the team’s existing organization by disciplines like
observability, security, and quality. But as the team surpassed 250 engineers,
questions like, “Is this service up to par?” became harder to answer. It was
clear the organization needed a common baseline of measurement void of
subjective interpretation.

“To provide enterprise grade quality, you have to get feelings out of the
system,” Shaun asserts. “That means you can’t think you’re performing well—you
can’t hope your service is moving fast—you have to measure, and constantly
integrate tons of data to do so accurately. The only way to do that at scale is
to be rigorous with standards and thoughtful with automation that eliminates
manual toil.”


WHY BIGCOMMERCE CHOSE CORTEX

Before BigCommerce found Cortex, they were looking to improve in four key areas
of engineering excellence:

 1. Continuous standards enforcement: Ensure every service is aligned with
    compliance definitions prior to and post-production.
 2. Strong post-incident playbooks: Once incidents are resolved, take necessary
    measures to ensure they aren’t repeated.
 3. Always-on DORA Metrics: Connect already strong observability data with more
    information on cycle time, deploy frequency, and change failure.
 4. Workflow optimization: Uncover bottlenecks that lead to disruption in
    team-wide metrics like PR cycle time.

Unsure which tools would address all four areas of interest, the team evaluated
several cloud-based vendors with different specialties. While multiple tools
could meet some requirements, BigCommerce identified two key characteristics
that set Cortex apart from the rest: Flexibility in data and scoring frameworks,
and automation that would ensure continuous alignment.


THE IMPORTANCE OF DATA MODEL FLEXIBILITY

Shaun elaborates on his need for a more flexible solution, “One of the primary
reasons we chose Cortex is because the platform assumes foundational data
modeling is highly personal to every organization. Other vendors were either
very opinionated about how to measure a SaaS engineering team—and rigid in their
architecture as a result—or just required an immense amount of rebuilding. We
wanted something that allowed us to codify our culture, our values, and our
business requirements—out of the box.”


AUTOMATION TO ENSURE ALIGNMENT WHILE REDUCING NOISE

Once the team was confident Cortex could act as a true system of record for
engineering, the next hurdle was to assess its ability to drive action against
initiatives. Shaun knew that when it comes to driving expectations, success has
nothing to do with where you sit in the organization. “You could be an executive
making a request via Slack, but 90% of people won't be able to act on that
before it scrolls away. You really need constant, targeted communication.”

He continues, “Cortex really stood out because not only can we define
initiatives with data from across our stack, we can trust that data is
automatically assessed for changes. It’s really helped us normalize a culture of
ownership without resorting to constant emails.”


A LOOK AT BIGCOMMERCE’S CUSTOMER-CENTRIC SCORECARDS

Cortex has helped BigCommerce bring standards of quality to life for their team.
But when it came to determining exactly which quality metrics the team would
prioritize, BigCommerce took a very customer-centric approach. “We prioritize
Scorecards and rules focused on customers. If it’s a problem for our
merchants—something stopping them from handling a routine transaction, or
communicating with their customers, it’s a problem for us.”


DOMAIN SCORECARDS

BigCommerce categorizes scorecards in two major groups. Those focused on mission
critical customer support (quality, security, and incident management) fall into
the “Domain” grouping. These scorecards demonstrate a conscious decision to
focus on certain metrics, and not others. In practice, that means that while the
team tracks the number of incidents, they weigh “time to resolve,” higher. Shaun
explains, “Our customers know that no SaaS service is perfect—but they choose
us, and stay with us, because they know issues are resolved quickly. And our
Scorecards reflect that prioritization.”



BigCommerce tracks "follow ups," which are action items created during incidents
or in retrospectives that the teams have identified as priority.

Action items are prioritized post-incident to ensure they don't happen again.
This is reflected in their Incident scorecards.


SERVICE SCORECARDS

BigCommerce also has a “second tier” of Scorecards that are more inward looking.
These were built to continuously raise the bar for operational maturity,
observability, and performance. Shaun adds, “The Service-level scorecards are
how we drive incremental improvement. They help us answer, “What’s slowing us
down?” and “Where can we be more efficient?” These second tier scorecards are
also huge drivers of interoperability between systems. Keeping services built to
standards decreases friction in their service-oriented architectures, and lowers
on-ramp costs when engineers move their development work streams between
services.




MEASURING THE IMPACT OF CORTEX

BigCommerce’s first use case for Cortex revolved around persistent visibility
into service quality and ownership. This need was most apparent in the frequent
questions Shaun heard regarding software ownership and dependencies.

"Just understanding who owned what, or where we were at on any given initiative,
was a pretty tedious exercise. With Cortex, we save tons of time each week just
having automated discovery of ownership and dependencies in services. Just
knowing who’s on call and what is all connected to a service has also helped us
more quickly resolve incidents and lower development time.”

Importantly, the team wanted to ensure that learnings from incidents would be
programmatically captured to prevent similar situations in future. Shaun
continues, “Scorecards and follow-up actions have been invaluable for helping us
add more rigor to the time after an incident. Because the reality is that anyone
can help fix an issue, but it’s more important to do the hard work to ensure it
doesn’t happen again. Cortex has been by far our best tool for maintaining this
level of accountability."

But programmatizing this work has been equally beneficial for the developers
themselves. With self-serve templates used to build according to new best
practice, and targeted notifications, developers can stay in the flow. “We know
if an engineer gets pulled out of what they're doing, it takes them 30 minutes
to re-engage. Cortex lets us reduce noise and keep our team focused on the
highest priority work,” said Shaun.


ADVICE TO NEW PROGRAM OWNERS

For those looking at Internal Developer Portals, Shaun has three key tips:


EXECUTIVE ALIGNMENT

While BigCommerce doesn’t have a top-down framework, executive tool fatigue was
still top of mind for Shaun. “I really wanted our leaders across the
organization to understand this wasn’t just another tool—it would be in service
of getting more value out of existing tools, which would in turn improve our
output, and customer satisfaction.”


THE POV ROADSHOW

As part of their Proof of Value, BigCommerce and Cortex teamed up to build a
Terraform provider to auto-populate their catalog in minutes, effectively
onboarding the team’s projects into the portal. This made it easy for Shaun to
really bring the value to life. “I talked to our Engineering leaders, and
honestly, it wasn't hard to sell. To have something that could codify and
auto-assess alignment to standards WE created - rather than some other company -
was a slam dunk.”


EASING INTO DEV ADOPTION

Shaun didn’t want Cortex to feel like a sudden shift in developer workflow,
especially as the team was already working hard to meet existing standards. The
flexibility in the portal lets engineering teams onboard in a way that makes
sense for their unique culture. “We actually kept notifications off for the
first month, so we could slowly introduce the concept, and folks could
organically venture in when searching for information. This helped us position
it as an asset first, rather than an ask.”

For more information on how Cortex can help you drive alignment to standards of
engineering excellence, visit our website, or take a tour today.

Shaun McCormick - Principal Software Engineer

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