From front to back: tech vice-president Dan Lake on Notonthehighstreet.com’s tech strategy

Front to back

“We’ve underinvested in the back end,” Lake says. “In the two years I’ve been here, we’ve gone through a lot of change and been purposeful. It’s about going back to what the company was about in the first place –shouting about and supporting small businesses in the UK.”

From a tech perspective, he says, it has been important to articulate NOTHS’s definition of customer is a “dual definition” – encompassing the end consumer, but also the small brands selling through the platform.

“It sounds obvious – and it is obvious internally – but it can get missed on how we decide what we’re going to focus on and invest into,” he says.

Lake’s senior leadership position reports directly to CEO Leanne Osbourne, and he has the responsibility of looking after tech products across the organisation. He acknowledges he joined NOTHS “primarily for the tech challenge”, identifying it as a reverse job to what he faced at Gymshark, where he was engineering director.

When Gymshark went through its exponential growth period, which resulted in its 2020 unicorn status as a £1bn-valued privately-owned business, it needed to internally build out tech to support its core Shopify foundations. At NOTHS, there’s a need to more comprehensively work with tech partners and stop relying on building everything in house.

“At NOTHS, we’re trying to end up in the same space but from the opposite end,” Lake says, adding that the business is looking to buy more tech rather than build it in house. “My view is we should only invest in or own things that are strategically important to us or we would have operational challenges without – we have too much stuff that falls into the commoditised bracket.”

In what might be welcome news for the retail technology ecosystem, NOTHS is now looking for products on the market – where there is commoditisation. Albeit, there is not a bottomless pit for investment.

Lake talks of the need for products within a retail organisation’s tech stack to contribute to strategic and operational performance. With so much built in house, NOTHS finds itself with components that are no longer contributing to either and are “holding us back” – it’s a typical retail legacy system tale of entanglement.

“Everything is owned and maintained, so my focus is on identifying what’s now been commoditised and what have other people done a better job of building – and we can then think about what we can chop away at. After all, we’re not a tier one tech company.”

Fundamental shift

NOTHS has already started its journey of modernisation under Lake’s stewardship. The marketplace has migrated promotional capabilities to a third-party engine platform – Talon One.

“Although pretty simplistic in approach compared to most businesses, it represents the first time we’ve gone out and bought a capability and integrated it in a composable MACH tech way,” Lake says.

“It’s a fundamental shift in thinking internally for the engineering and product teams. We deprecated and removed the old promo engine which – surprise, surprise – we had built. It did one thing and we had the age-old problem that you never come back to it – you go on to the next priority and it becomes a problem for people.”

This change will support in the running of campaigns, but is also set to be a capability utilised as NOTHS explores its options around building a loyalty proposition. “This takes a number of things the tech team shouldn’t need to be involved in off their plate, so we can focus in the investments we want to make,” Lake adds.

With e-commerce stack technology, “the most commoditised” area of retail tech, according to Lake, there’s lots of focus on what to bring in to the NOTHS business in this area: “We’re headless already, but some better decisions probably could have been made – you should own the user experience as it can contribute to strategic differentiation.

“What we hadn’t done in the move to headless was consider the service or integration layers just under that, so we built a load of microservices, some with thin veneers into the monolithic platform. We hadn’t thought about how to take off parts we shouldn’t really own which can be a distraction and they take time with maintenance on bugs.”

NOTHS is using Contentstack from a headless content management system point of view, but a stream of work currently well under way with Kin + Carta and Valtech is focused on better optimising the digital experience.

Lake says the NOTHS search and discovery process starts with its brand partners putting product data in – and this is an area where improvements are sought.

“For trade reasons, we focused on very outer edge of search and discovery and how results had ranked and reranked – and we’re using Google Vertex AI,” he adds. “Search went live last year and there have been marked improvements there. We’re doing tests on browse currently.

“We have circa 450,000 products on the platform, and surfacing the most relevant of those is a big challenge and we have built a load of tech that doesn’t really lean into surfacing the most relevant thing.”

That is being addressed using Google Vertex, and the work with Kin + Carta involves improving data quality and product information management processes so NOTHS can “augment the effects of the AI”.

In terms of AI strategy, a lot will depend on finding the most suitable partners. “A lot of the third-party companies we might buy into will be bringing AI to us because they are integrating it into their products – and that’s great,” Lake says.

“That’s the benefit you find yourself in as a D2C or online business. You can see the pressure on fellow CTOs working for SaaS businesses because there is a race to market – and there will be a number of misses, but we can benefit from that.”

Lake admits NOTHS was looking at how to use AI for search and discovery, “but then Google Vertex came along”. He predicts this type of situation will continue to happen for a while as the AI hype and focus continues.

“Once we have solved some problems and operational issues – and removed friction for partners and internally – we can think about how to utilise AI for something that is really interesting,” he says.

Lake describes his team as a “lean” 40-45 people covering tech and product, and says his leadership style follows a “teach-a-man-to-fish mentality”.

“It’s no good me steaming in and saying, ‘Cut that out, remove this, and go and buy this’, as it won’t build the sustainability in the approach we need,” he says, adding that the team is realising this new working method is aimed at making their lives easier as much as it is part of a method for driving the business forward.

The team covers IT infrastructure, cyber security, and support, with delivery managers, and an engineering team overseeing online, back and front-end, and mobile work across iOS and Android. There are members of the team focused on data analytics and data science, and those looking after platform infrastructure and product management.

“Good people get bought into the culture,” Lake adds.

It is their job to ensure the tech serves the five to six million customers NOTHS has in the UK, but under Lake’s leadership, they are also increasingly focused on making the lives of circa 5,000 marketplace sellers – some of which have started their journeys with Deliveroo this autumn – easier and more fruitful.