A properly defined senior role for a growing operation
5 min read
The business is growing. Five sites becoming sixteen is not a linear scaling exercise — it is a fundamental change in the complexity and scope of what we operate.
That growth requires two things to happen simultaneously and independently: a commercial operation that acquires customers, manages brand, and drives revenue across sixteen properties — and a technical operation that builds and maintains the infrastructure those sixteen properties run on, safely, with AI tools that require professional governance.
These are two different disciplines. Both are essential. Neither can serve the business properly while also doing the other one's job.
This document defines the commercial lane — what it is, what it owns, what it is accountable for, and why it is one of the most valuable roles in the business at this stage of growth.
SEO strategy across all sites, agency relationship, performance reporting, brief-setting for SEO-driven technical requirements.
Sixteen sites need sixteen SEO strategies. Managing the agency relationship, setting direction, reviewing performance, and holding the agency accountable to results is a substantial role on its own.
Paid ads strategy and budget, agency and platform relationships, performance targets, campaign direction.
Ad spend at scale requires commercial judgement, market understanding, and daily attention to performance across sixteen sites.
Brand standards, content direction, customer experience decisions, site tone and presentation, marketing campaigns.
What the sites look like, how they feel, what they say — this is the commercial layer that turns technical infrastructure into revenue.
Supplier and partner relationships, commercial negotiations, new business pipeline.
Commercial brief for every new site — the what and why, fully documented, before technical specification begins.
When a new site is proposed, the commercial case has to come first. What is the market? Who is the customer? What does success look like commercially?
WordPress content layer, CMS decisions, editorial direction — entirely and without sign-off needed from the technical lane.
The headless architecture the business is moving toward reflects a real and permanent separation between two layers of the operation.
The front end — what the customer sees, how they experience the brand, what content they encounter. This is the commercial layer. It belongs in this lane entirely.
The back end — the infrastructure, the Magento instances, the server, the AI-generated code, the security, the deployment. This is the technical layer.
In a headless architecture these two layers are literally decoupled in the code. They should be decoupled in how we work too — not because one is more important than the other, but because each one functions better when it isn't trying to do the other's job.
The handoff point is the brief. When the commercial lane needs something built, it produces a brief. The brief goes into the idea-to-build process. The technical lane specs it, costs it, and builds it. The commercial lane owns the outcome. The technical lane owns the implementation. Neither tells the other how to do its job.
These are not restrictions. They are the standards that make the commercial lane's work credible, measurable, and effective.
A senior commercial director with ownership of SEO, paid ads, brand, customer experience, commercial relationships, and new business development across a sixteen-site ecommerce operation is a significant hire in the market.
This is not a supporting role. It is the function that determines whether the business makes money from the infrastructure being built.
The technical lane can build the most sophisticated, secure, well-governed platform in the industry. Without the commercial lane performing at its best, it is infrastructure with no revenue attached to it.
Both lanes need to be properly resourced, properly recognised, and properly held accountable for their own results. That is what this document is for.