Sporting goods
SuiteCommerce to Shopify
I led Springfree's move from NetSuite SuiteCommerce to Shopify. Page speed improved 83%, conversion rose 46%, and the re-platformed stack carried a record 2020 holiday season.
+83%
Topic
Leadership
What I've learned leading as an operator, a director, and a technical architect, usually all three in the same week.
Work
Sporting goods
Dealer Hub
A Shopify Plus wholesale channel for Springfree's US dealer network. More than 20 dealers onboarded, 25 branded storefronts launched with zero critical defects, and the channel drives the majority of US revenue.
20+
Retail
European dealer migrations
Springfree's UK, France and Switzerland dealer storefronts moved off legacy Joomla and OpenCart onto multilingual, multi-domain Shopify. It proved the official Shopify Partner practice I built inside goba could deliver for clients.
3
Sporting goods
goba.life
goba.life is the multi-brand Shopify platform I own at goba, running across four markets with separate regional instances, NetSuite integration through Celigo, a Bloomreach CDP and AI-assisted customer care.
4
Writing
Agents propose, humans approve
Notes from partway through building a hybrid team, where agents draft Shopify work and humans decide what ships.
Library
book
The Phoenix Project
Most of how I run things traces back to this novel. Make work visible, shrink the batch, manage the constraint, and a surprising amount of a commerce operation starts to fix itself.
podcast
Lenny's Podcast
Long interviews with product and growth people about how they actually do the job.
book
The Unicorn Project
The same crisis retold from the developer's desk. It keeps me honest about flow and feedback, because the platform decisions I make as a director land on somebody's keyboard.
book
Accelerate
This is the evidence underneath the DevOps novels. When I argue for smaller releases and faster feedback, I'd rather point at Forsgren's research than at my own hunches.
podcast
Founders
One founder biography per episode; listen to enough of them and the patterns start repeating.
book
The Trusted Advisor
Thirteen years with one company taught me that trust builds slower than skill and matters more. This book gave me the words for earning it, which turns out to be most of the consulting job.
book
Inspired
Cagan makes the case for handing product teams a problem instead of a feature list. It changed how I write briefs and how I check whether discovery actually happened.
podcast
The Diary of a CEO
Sit-down interviews with founders, athletes and scientists about how they think and work.
book
Never Split the Difference
Negotiation shows up in this work constantly, in platform contracts, scope conversations, and vendor renewals. Voss made me a better listener before he made me a better negotiator.
book
Obviously Awesome
Dunford treats positioning as a decision you can test, instead of a tagline exercise. It's the most practical method I've found for saying what a thing is, who it's for, and why anyone should pick it.
podcast
Think Fast, Talk Smart
Short, practical episodes on speaking and communicating better, the kind of advice you can use in your next meeting.
People
The Phoenix Project was the first book that made my day job make sense, and Accelerate gave me evidence to back the instincts. Most of how I think about intake, flow, and release traces back to his work. When something in our operating model feels off, his books are where I look first.
April explains positioning better than anyone else I've read, and Obviously Awesome is the book I hand people when a good product isn't landing. Her framework turned positioning from a branding exercise into a decision you can test and revisit. She's based in Toronto too, so I'll admit to a little hometown bias.