Turning Knowledge into Action: Your 90-Day Ecommerce Growth Plan

"Knowledge without action is just trivia." This simple truth is a challenge to every ecommerce leader. It’s easy to consume ideas and nod along, but far harder to roll up your sleeves and execute. In Part IV of The Ecommerce Growth Playbook, we’re taking all that knowledge and putting it to work. Consider this a friendly shove forward. No more “someday” plans or endless strategizing – it’s time to act. Over the next 90 days, you’re going to move fast, learn by doing, and turn insights into real wins. By the end, you won’t just know more – you’ll have done more. Let’s get started.

The Three Core Levers Recap: Obsession, Engine, and Org

Before we dive into action, let’s quickly recap the three growth levers from earlier in the book – because everything we execute ties back to these fundamentals. Customer Obsession means putting your customer at the center of every decision. It’s about deeply understanding their needs and delivering experiences that delight. Scalable Engine refers to the systems and processes (technical and operational) that allow your business to grow smoothly. It’s the machinery under the hood – from your eCommerce platform to fulfillment – built for efficiency and high demand. Leadership & Organization is the human element: building the right team, culture, and habits to sustain growth. It’s about leaders who inspire action and organizations that are agile and accountable.

Each lever is powerful on its own, but real growth happens when you pull all three together and follow through. Big ideas are great, but execution is what drives growth. A customer-centric strategy or a robust platform means little if it’s not implemented effectively. As we move into the action plan, keep those levers in mind – every sprint we tackle will strengthen one (or more) of these areas. But most importantly, remember that even the best strategy is just trivia without taking action on it.

Phase 0: Establish Your Baseline Metrics

Before sprinting ahead, you need a starting line. Phase 0 is all about baselining four key metrics today so you can measure progress over the coming months. These four metrics give you a clear snapshot of where you are now:

• Conversion Rate (CR): This is the percentage of visitors who become customers. It’s the clearest indicator of how well your site turns interest into sales. Beyond just a vanity number, conversion rate reveals if you’re attracting the right audience and guiding them effectivelythegood.com. For instance, a low CR might hint that shoppers aren’t finding what they need or hitting friction along the journey. Baselining CR now lets you gauge the impact of any improvements aimed at removing friction or improving the user experience.

• Average Order Value (AOV): How much does a customer spend on average per order? AOV directly affects revenue – if you can encourage customers to add one more item or choose a higher-tier product, you grow sales without needing more traffic. Track AOV so you know if your upselling and cross-selling efforts are paying off. If you don’t track AOV, you won’t know if those tactics are workingthegood.com. An increasing AOV over time means you’re doing a better job maximizing each customer visit.

• Repeat Purchase Rate: This measures how often customers come back to buy again (often expressed as a percentage of customers who make a repeat purchase within a given period). Repeat business is pure gold for mid-market brands, especially in B2B. It indicates loyalty and satisfaction – the core of Customer Obsession. Remember, repeat customers are the lifeblood of ecommerce because it costs far less to retain a customer than acquire a new onethegood.com. By establishing your repeat purchase rate now, you set a benchmark to check later if your customer experience improvements and retention efforts are working.

• Deployment Frequency: This one might sound technical, but it’s critical – how often are you deploying updates to your eCommerce site? In other words, how frequently does your team release new features, fixes, or improvements? Deployment frequency is a proxy for your Scalable Engine agility. A higher frequency means you’re iterating quickly and responding to customer needs faster. In fact, deployment frequency directly influences your ability to deliver value to customers – more frequent releases create quicker feedback loops and more responsive adjustments to user needsnkdagility.com. Baseline it (e.g. deployments per week or month) now. If you’re only deploying once a month or quarter, we’ve got room to improve. Increasing this over time will indicate a faster, more innovative team.

Take a moment to jot down these four metrics as they stand today. This is your “before” picture. They will set the stage for all the progress we aim to achieve. Every improvement in the next 90 days should move one or more of these needles. Even small upticks will signal that knowledge is turning into action – and action into results.

30-Day Sprint 1: Remove One Customer Friction Hotspot

With your baseline in hand, the first 30-day sprint is about scoring an easy win on the Customer Obsession front. The challenge: identify and remove one major point of friction for your customers. Friction is anything that makes a potential customer’s life harder – confusing navigation, a cumbersome checkout, slow load times, lack of information, you name it. In B2B ecommerce, common culprits include clunky quote processes, login-required pricing, or complex checkout for bulk orders. For this sprint, pick one hotspot where customers are getting stuck or frustrated, and obliterate it.

Tactical Checklist – Removing Friction:

1. Pinpoint the Pain Point: Dig into your data and feedback. Is there a page with high drop-off in your funnel? A recurring complaint in customer support tickets? Maybe your B2B clients often abandon carts at the shipping quote stage. Choose a friction point that impacts conversion (your baseline CR will thank you).

2. Experience It Yourself: Go through that experience as if you were the customer. Do a test order, simulate a typical buyer’s journey. Feel the frustration first-hand – this will clarify what needs fixing.

3. Quick Fix, Not Perfection: Brainstorm a solution you can implement in less than 30 days. This might be simplifying a form, adding a missing piece of info (like upfront shipping costs), or streamlining a step. Don’t over-engineer it. Aim for a minimum viable improvement that meaningfully reduces the pain.

4. Implement and Test: Make the change and let it run. Monitor the specific success metric for this fix – it could be cart abandonment rate, time on task, or directly the conversion rate for that step.

5. Measure the Win: Compare the before vs. after on that friction point. Did cart abandonment drop? Did support tickets about that issue go away? Even a small improvement is progress. Share the results with your team as proof that quick action yields real impact.

Success Metric: The beauty of this sprint is in its focus – one problem, one fix, one metric to monitor. For most, the success metric will tie to conversion. For example, if you fix a checkout issue, look at checkout conversion or abandonment rate. If you improve product info, maybe overall conversion rate or return rate is your metric. Define it up front. Your baseline conversion rate was X – after the fix, did X move up?

To illustrate the power of removing friction, let’s look at a real case. Barr Display, a US-based B2B retailer of store fixtures, discovered that their checkout process was a major source of friction (especially for large orders with complex shipping needs). Customers were dropping out due to slow, clunky checkout steps and uncertainty around freight shipping costs. In a swift project, Barr Display implemented a streamlined one-page checkout (using the Hyvä Checkout module on Adobe Commerce) to simplify the experience. The results were immediate: they cut their cart abandonment rate by 30% and even saw average order value jump by 20%, leading to a 16% increase in revenuehyva.io. In short, more shoppers made it through the checkout, and many bought a bit more than before – friction was replaced with momentum. Another mid-market merchant, SDS London (specializing in architectural hardware), tackled site speed and checkout simplicity in a similar sprint. After a rapid front-end revamp, their conversion rate leapt by 28% within just a few months, contributing to a 61% boost in revenuehyva.io. These aren’t theoretical ideals – they’re real-world proof that eliminating even a single bottleneck can unlock significant growth.

Your mission for Sprint 1 is to notch a win like that for your brand’s unique context. It might not be a 28% jump in conversions (and that’s okay!), but even a 5% lift means more customers and more sales. More importantly, it proves to your team that executing ideas beats talking about them. Pick your friction point, fix it, and celebrate the improvement. That energy will fuel the next sprints.

30-Day Sprint 2: Build Your Five-Number Scorecard Habit

With one win on the board, Sprint 2 shifts focus to making data-driven execution a weekly habit. We’re introducing the “Five-Number Scorecard” – a simple, focused dashboard of five key metrics you and your team will review every single week. Think of it as your company’s vital signs. The goal here is not analysis paralysis, but a quick, consistent heartbeat check on your business that drives action where it’s needed.

What is a Five-Number Scorecard? It’s literally five numbers that matter most for your growth, tracked and discussed weekly. These five should cover a mix of the core levers: likely a customer metric or two, a sales metric, a tech/operations metric, and perhaps a team or process metric. For many mid-market ecommerce teams (especially B2B), a great five-number scorecard might be: Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, Repeat Purchase Rate, New Customer Count, and Deployment Frequency. (Your exact five can vary – the key is they should collectively give you a pulse on customer behavior, revenue health, and execution speed). By keeping it to five, you force yourself to focus on what matters most. As the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) folks like to say, what gets measured gets done – and conversely, trying to measure everything means nothing gets done. Joshua’s rule: if no one has acted on a metric in 60 days, it’s just noise. We’re not about noise; we’re about clarity and action.

Make It a Weekly Ritual: The power of the scorecard comes from consistent review. Set a weekly cadence – for example, every Monday morning or Friday afternoon, whichever fits your rhythm. In that meeting (or async check-in), review each of the five numbers against last week and against your baseline. Is one metric flashing red or spiking green? Great – that sparks a conversation: Why? What are we going to do about it? A scorecard isn’t just for monitoring; it’s for prompting decisions. As one ecommerce operator noted, scorecards are simple tools to track critical weekly metrics, flagging problems early and driving accountability across teams2xecommerce.com. Keep the tone blameless and curious – the scorecard is your early warning system and also your opportunity radar.

Pro tip: Don’t complicate this. A shared Google Sheet or a Slack message with the five numbers is plenty to start. In fact, many successful teams begin with manual tracking. The key is to actually look at it. Every. Single. Week. Over time, you’ll spot trends and can move from reactive to proactive. For example, if conversion rate dips for two weeks straight, you can dig in immediately (maybe something broke or a new friction emerged) instead of finding out a quarter later. If deployment frequency falls off, you’ll notice and can investigate what’s slowing the team down. On the flip side, if repeat purchase rate jumps after a new loyalty initiative, you can double down on what’s working. The scorecard builds a culture of data-aware decision making without drowning in reports. It’s the habit of paying attention.

Let’s look at a mid-market brand that embraced weekly scorecards. Imagine Acme B2B Supplies, doing $20M online annually, who implemented a five-number scorecard after struggling with siloed data. They chose metrics like weekly orders, average order value, site uptime (important for their buyers), customer tickets, and deployments. Every Wednesday in their case, department heads spent 15 minutes on the scorecard. Within a few months, the results were noticeable. In one instance, the scorecard flagged a sudden drop in repeat order rate – which led the team to discover a faulty re-order coupon code that wasn’t working, before it became a month-long problem. In another, they noticed a sales spike in a new category one week, which helped them react quickly to restock and capitalize on the demand. One ecommerce founder shared that this practice kept them from running out of inventory during an unexpected sales spike – without a weekly check, they might have missed the surge until it was too lateecomcrew.com. The weekly cadence turned data from a rearview mirror into a real-time steering wheel.

How to Make it Stick: To ingrain this habit, tie it into something you’re already doing. Have a standing leadership stand-up? Make the scorecard the first agenda item. Using Slack or Teams? Set up a bot or reminder that pings the five metrics every week. Encourage team members to chime in with a one-liner observation on each number. The first few weeks, it might feel forced, but soon it will become second nature – a part of your company’s operating rhythm. The payoff is huge: no more flying blind or reacting late. You’ll be catching issues and opportunities in near real-time. The five-number scorecard is your execution dashboard, keeping everyone focused and honest. After 30 days of this, you’ll wonder how you ran things before. And as a leader, you’ll start to feel that gratifying sense that the team is truly on top of the business – because you are measuring and discussing what matters on a regular basis.

30-Day Sprint 3: Ship a Composable POC or Tackle Tech Debt

By the time you hit Sprint 3, you’ve got some momentum – you fixed a customer pain point and established a weekly metrics habit. Now we’re going to push the Scalable Engine lever and a bit of the Leadership & Org lever by challenging your team to build for the future. In this 30-day sprint, you have a choice (or do both if you’re feeling ambitious!): ship one composable proof-of-concept or clean up one chunk of legacy technical debt. Both paths drive agility, innovation, and speed – key ingredients for scaling mid-market brands, especially in the B2B space where complexity often piles up over time.

Option 1: Composable Proof-of-Concept (POC). Composable commerce is all about flexibility – using modular components or services that can be swapped in and out. A POC is a bite-sized experiment to test a new technology or approach with minimal risk. Is there an area of your eCommerce experience that’s been lagging or a new tech you’ve been curious about? Maybe it’s a headless CMS for your blog, an AI-driven recommendation engine, or a lightweight mobile app for your sales reps. Pick one idea and build a small-scale prototype. The rules: it should be something you can design and launch in roughly 30 days, and it should operate independently of your core systems (so if it fails, nothing breaks). The business value of a POC is twofold: (1) Learning – you validate whether a new tool or approach can solve a problem or boost a metric without a massive investment, and (2) Innovation culture – you’re sending a message to your team (and maybe your customers) that you’re not standing still.

For example, one B2B brand’s tech team built a quick POC of an online customization tool for their products. Instead of fully integrating it, they whipped up a standalone microsite that pulled product data via APIs and let a handful of key clients test configuring products online. In weeks, they learned that clients loved the feature – which justified the effort to fully integrate it next. Or consider a POC in the performance arena: after hearing about how headless storefronts could improve speed, a mid-market retailer spun up a headless PWA prototype for just their homepage and a product page. It wasn’t perfect, but it loaded in a blink and impressed internal stakeholders enough to plan a broader rollout. The key here is speed. Done is better than perfect in a POC. Ship it, get feedback, and you’ll have actionable insight (maybe even a competitive edge) that you wouldn’t have if you stayed in planning mode. Many companies talk about being innovative – you’ll actually practice it.

Option 2: Tackle a Chunk of Tech Debt. If you’re not feeling the pull of a new feature, perhaps your bigger need is shoring up the foundation. Technical debt is like the junk closet of your platform – old code, clunky plugins, workarounds that “temporarily” fixed a crisis two years ago but never got cleaned up. Every eCommerce site has some, and B2B platforms often have a lot (think of all those custom pricing rules, legacy ERP integrations, etc.). In 30 days, you can’t rewrite your whole system, but you can target one ugly corner and tidy it up. Maybe it’s refactoring a slow database query, updating your site theme to use a modern framework, or simplifying a tangled integration. The business case for tech debt cleanup is performance and agility. When you reduce debt, your site runs faster and your developers deploy easier. Customers get a snappier experience, and your team gains future velocity. As an example, a brand that migrated from Magento’s old Luma theme to the newer Hyvä theme essentially paid down a massive chunk of front-end tech debt – the result was a 330% increase in page speed (5 seconds down to ~1.5s load times) and a 68% boost in revenue after launchmageplaza.com. That’s right, cleaning up tech debt in the front-end directly translated to more sales, because users love a fast site. Similarly, our team at Creatuity recently helped a client implement zero-downtime deployments (reworking their devops processes – definitely a tech debt move). That eliminated 1.5 hours of site outages on every release, which instantly meant more uptime for customers and reclaimed revenue that was previously lost during those down times. In other words, tech improvements are not “back-office” chores – they have real ROI. As one client put it after we sped up their site and checkout, “It’s like we removed the roadblocks and our customers just started buying more, faster.”

Executing Sprint 3: Choose your adventure – POC, tech debt, or a mix of both. Define the scope narrowly: one POC feature or one tech debt target. Rally a small cross-functional tiger team if needed. If it’s a POC, make sure you define what success looks like (e.g. a working demo for internal stakeholders, or a live beta for a subset of customers, along with feedback collected). If it’s tech debt, identify how you’ll measure improvement – site speed metrics, deployment time, bug counts, etc. Then go heads-down and build/refactor for a few weeks. Don’t let it drag on beyond 30 days. This sprint is as much about proving you can execute quickly on the engineering side as it is about the specific outcome. At the end of the month, you should have something tangible to show – either a new capability in hand or a faster, more stable site. That’s a win-win: your Scalable Engine gets a boost, and your team flexes its execution muscle.

Measuring the Impact: The 90-Day Checkpoint

Time to pause and see how far you’ve come. Remember those Phase 0 baseline metrics (CR, AOV, Repeat Rate, Deployment Frequency)? Pull them out and compare to where you stand now, roughly 90 days later. Did your conversion rate nudge upward after removing that friction hotspot? Has average order value climbed thanks to the improvements and perhaps the insights from your scorecard? What about repeat purchase rate – any uptick from better customer experience and engagement? And are you deploying more frequently than before?

Don’t worry if not every metric is a hockey stick – the goal is directionally up and to the right. In our experience with clients, a focused 90-day execution cycle can drive meaningful gains. It’s not unusual to see conversion rates increase by 10-20% and repeat purchase rates by a few percentage points when customer friction is reduced and engagement efforts increase. Revenue often moves even more – one brand saw a ~15% revenue lift quarter-over-quarter after systematically improving their site speed and checkout (mirroring cases like Barr Display’s +16% revenue uptickhyva.io). Some improvements can be dramatic: as mentioned, streamlining checkout and performance contributed to conversion jumps of 20–30% in certain caseshyva.io. Your mileage will vary, but the point is to see positive movement. Even a 5% gain in conversion or a 0.1 increase in repeat rate is worth celebrating – it means more customers, more sales, and proof that your actions had impact. Importantly, you should also gauge qualitative impacts: smoother operations, fewer firefights, a more confident team. Those are harder to graph, but you’ll know it when you feel it.

Document these changes. Share the “before and after” with your team and stakeholders. This is the feedback loop of execution – learning what worked and how it moved the needle. If something didn’t improve as expected, that’s a lesson too. Maybe your scorecard metrics need tweaking, or the friction you tackled wasn’t the biggest one after all. That’s fine. Adjust and keep going. The gains you see now are not the end; they’re the baseline for the next cycle of growth. But for now, take a moment to appreciate that you made real, measurable progress in a short time by focusing on action. That’s a big deal.

Culture Hacks to Build Momentum and Keep the Energy Up

Execution isn’t just about tasks and metrics – it’s about people. As a leader, one of your jobs is to keep your team motivated and fired up through these sprints. Here are a few tactical culture hacks to maintain momentum and make this work fun (yes, fun!):

• Friday Wins Demo: End the week on a high note. Set up a casual Friday afternoon demo meeting (even 15 minutes). Anyone who made progress on a sprint project can share a quick demo or result. Did someone remove that friction point? Have them show the “before and after” of the checkout. Did your dev team get that POC running? Let them screen-share the prototype. Keep it informal, applaud, cheer, let folks ask questions. The point is to celebrate execution. This ritual creates a mini-deadline each week (encouraging people to wrap something up to show) and reinforces a culture of sharing progress. It feels good to get recognition, and it spreads knowledge across the team.

• Blameless Post-Mortems: Not every experiment will go perfectly – and that’s okay. Perhaps Sprint 3’s POC didn’t move the metric as hoped, or a deployment in Sprint 2 caused a brief issue. Instead of blame, institute quick post-mortems focused on learning. For example, if a change didn’t yield the expected conversion lift, discuss why and capture that insight for next time. If an outage happened, explore the root cause and how to prevent it, without finger-pointing. When teams know that failures won’t be met with drama, they’re more willing to take calculated risks and speak up about problems. That speeds up innovation and fixes. A culture that says “Okay, that didn’t work – what did we learn?” will out-execute one that’s hiding mistakes.

• “Wins” Channel on Slack (or Teams): Create a dedicated channel (like #wins or #celebrations) where anyone in the company can share a victory related to these initiatives. It could be a screenshot of a positive customer feedback after a change, a graph showing a metric uptick, or a shout-out to a teammate who cranked out a feature. Encourage everyone to post at least one win a week, no matter how small. This builds positivity and reinforces the idea that progress is happening daily. It’s incredibly motivating to see a steady stream of wins roll in – it turns abstract metrics into human stories and reminds the whole org why this work matters. Pro tip: As the leader, model the behavior. Drop in your own wins or, better yet, amplify others’. “@DevTeam deployed the new search module in 2 hours with zero downtime – kudos!” Simple gestures like that can make someone’s day and keep the energy high.

Little culture hacks like these create an environment where execution thrives. They cost almost nothing but yield a sense of camaraderie and purpose. The team that demos together, learns together, and celebrates together stays together – and slays goals together. You’ll find that these practices not only sustain momentum through your 90-day plan but become habits that carry on well beyond it, forming the backbone of an action-oriented culture.

Looking Ahead: Connect with Joshua and Next Steps

Ninety days from now, you’ve transformed “trivia” into tangible results. But this is just the beginning of your growth journey. Keep pulling those levers, keep running fast feedback sprints, and never let knowledge sit idle again. I’d love to hear about your progress or help with any roadblocks you hit along the way. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn (I’m at joshuawarren) and share what you’ve achieved or ask any questions – I’m always up for geeking out about ecommerce growth wins and challenges.

Also, stay tuned for the launch of my book, The Ecommerce Growth Playbook: A Field Guide for Scaling Mid-Market Brands, coming this August. It’s packed with more strategies, case studies, and practical tips just like these to keep you moving forward. If you found value in this sprint-focused approach, the book will give you an entire field guide to leveling up your ecommerce operation.

Remember, ideas are only as good as the action they inspire. You have the knowledge, you have the plan – now keep the momentum going. The next growth milestone for your brand is just an execution sprint away. Let’s make it happen!