When the Arena Changes – Why We Can’t Keep Playing with Old Platforms

Part 2 of the series: “How to Win in the Next Arena of Digital Commerce”

In the first part of this series, we introduced the term “arena” as used by McKinsey in their report The Next Big Arenas of Competition: highly dynamic, intensely competitive fields where innovation and speed rewrite the rules of the game.

According to McKinsey, Digital Commerce is one such arena.

But many companies are struggling in this new reality—using platforms built for an entirely different world.

Platforms for the Old World

Whether it’s SAP Commerce, Salesforce, Magento, or another legacy system: these platforms were created at a time when markets were relatively stable. The goal was to digitize standardized processes—not to constantly reinvent them. The result:

• Rigid architectures where every change becomes a full-blown project
• High maintenance overhead, even for small optimizations
• Slow innovation cycles due to centralized control

These systems were built for efficiency—not for change.

The Arena Demands the Opposite

McKinsey describes arenas as markets defined by extreme competitive density, escalating investments and massive shifts in market share.

In eCommerce, this means new players can become market leaders in just a few years—if they can respond faster and more strategically.

According to McKinsey, by 2020, more than half of the dominant eCommerce companies had not held a significant market position in 2005.

To succeed in this arena, change must become routine. And that’s exactly where many commerce stacks fall short.

Headless isn’t the solution—if processes are buried in code

Many companies try to escape the legacy trap through Headless or Composable approaches.

The idea: modularize systems, increase flexibility, decouple frontend and backend.

But in practice, often only the monolith gets broken up—while the complexity remains:

• Processes are pushed into “Backend for Frontend” layers as custom code
• Every new use case requires manual integration and development
• Innovation efforts stall due to overwhelmed IT teams

In short: you may have new tools—but you’re still playing by the old rules.

New Arena, New Playing Field

What companies really need is a platform paradigm designed for the dynamics of the arena:

• Process-centricity instead of feature focus
• Orchestration instead of rigid logic
• Low-code instead of dependency on developer resources

Only then can companies continuously experiment, adapt, scale—and respond to change as it happens.

Looking Ahead to Part 3

In the next part, we’ll show how companies can put this new mindset into practice.

Because agility doesn’t come from technology alone—it starts with a new way of managing processes.

Part 3: “Arenas Require Agility—And Agility Starts with Process”