Guest post: Why Composable Components Are the Modern-Day Flint Hand Axe for Business Success

Around 1.6 million years ago, an epoch-shaping event occurred: a flint hand axe emerged as an unexpected mediator, resolving a dispute between two Homo Erectus individuals entangled in a romantic rivalry. This marked humanity's earliest employment of technology to navigate interpersonal interactions —a primitive counterpart to the contemporary "thumbs down" button, albeit more rudimentary in form.

Those were simpler times. Mainly because the flint hand-axe was the only piece of human technology around and would remain so for another hundred thousand years, followed by the invention of firecraft. The hand axe was, and still is, a good example of a great tool —a single-purpose, focused piece of functionality with acknowledged limitations and boundless potential.

As a CTO at a company that focuses on eCommerce implementations, I always try to entertain two perspectives when looking at technological changes - the impact it might have on our customers' business, both internal and external, and the impact it might have on the developer teams I'm working with. Does it bring value? When? Is it hard to implement? Should we commit? When?

This dance routine of system evaluation is not always part of a structured process, but neither is the release of new functionality, systems, and technology. Changes happen constantly, sometimes with incremental improvements, other times with a big bang, disrupting maybe more than one expected or anticipated (talking about you Chat GPT).

Being prepared for changes in whatever you build becomes more important than ever, and understanding that building great customer experiences is an ongoing process is crucial to success and not repeating the same process of platform overhaul that happens every five years.

Enter Composable - not a technology, system, or platform, but rather a way of building things based on the simple premise of exchangeability, openness, and purpose-built solutions. Working with a composable solution allows you to take what you need in order to build the platform you need for your audience. It also makes it possible to make choices based on a single system's capabilities and functionality rather than making compromises that can prove short-sighted over time.

Composable isn't something new. We have been doing it for years. What's new is the fact that a lot of vendors better understand how to leverage their products' core functionality, provide out-of-the-box data exchange, and better focus on what makes their product a great fit in a platform rather than trying to be the platform that solves all the cases.

If you are thinking about upgrading your platform or starting a new online business and are looking mainly at feature-complete systems that thick all the boxes in your requirement process, I challenge you: What would it mean for your business to build the solution you really want?

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