Leading an ecommerce team like a pro: principles from the Bundesliga

I played professional handball for 8 years in the German first division, the Bundesliga. Then sports journalist, then consultant, today an ecommerce founder and co-founder of Flowhouse. The path sounds chaotic. But elite sport taught me more about leading a team than any business book.

Today we run 3 brands with 2 people. That only works with clear principles. Here are six that come from sport and that you can apply to your ecommerce team right away.

Principle 1: measure performance, forget attendance

In sport the game counts, and the training before it does not show up in the table. Nobody asks how many hours you spent in the gym. Everybody asks how many goals you scored.

Many ecommerce teams measure the wrong thing. Attendance, tickets answered, hours in the office. Those are activities rather than results.

The principle for your team: define one or two numbers per role that really count. In support that is resolution rate and customer satisfaction, and the ticket count matters far less. In fulfilment it is the error rate, and hours worked tell you nothing. How to make such processes measurable in the first place is in our guide to process optimisation in ecommerce.

Principle 2: drill the set pieces until they are boring

In the Bundesliga you train the same set play hundreds of times. Not because it is hard. Because it has to run automatically under pressure.

In ecommerce your set pieces are the recurring processes: order processing, returns, standard enquiries. If your team reinvents every case, you lose time and make mistakes.

The principle for your team: write down every recurring process once, properly. A short document is enough. Then go one step further: whatever runs the same way a hundred times should no longer be done by a person. Our AI answers around 65 percent of support requests automatically. How that works is in the guide to customer service automation.

Principle 3: everyone knows their role, nobody plays all of them

In handball, no team wins where everybody chases the same ball. Everyone has a position. Everyone knows when it is their turn.

In small ecommerce teams everybody often does everything. It feels flexible. In truth it means nobody is responsible for anything. Mistakes have no owner.

The principle for your team: hand out processes instead of tasks. One person owns support, one owns fulfilment, one owns marketing. Owning means this person decides, measures and improves. With the three of us it is split exactly that way. That is why 3 brands work with 2 people in daily operations.

Principle 4: analyse defeats without looking for someone to blame

After every Bundesliga game there was video analysis. Also after wins. The question was never "whose fault was it". The question was "what do we do differently next time".

In ecommerce, launches flop, customers churn, orders go wrong. Teams that go looking for someone to blame learn nothing. From then on everybody hides their mistakes.

The principle for your team: run a short review after every larger mistake. 15 minutes, three questions: what happened? Why could it happen? Which rule or process prevents it in future? Often the answer is an automation, because machines do not make the same mistake twice. What manual errors really cost is written up in our article on the 10,000 euro mistake.

Principle 5: manage the load before somebody drops out

In professional sport the training load gets managed. Train at the limit permanently and you get injured. That is mathematics, and it has nothing to do with being soft.

Founders and small teams like to ignore this. Until somebody drops out. And in a team of 2 or 3 people, one person out means standstill, which goes well past a dent.

The principle for your team: look at where the hours go. Order processing at mate used to eat 4 hours a day. Today it is 15 minutes. Across all three brands automation saves us 33 to 46 hours per week. Those hours are the buffer that keeps the team healthy. Where to start is in the overview of ecommerce processes you can automate.

Principle 6: preparation beats improvisation

In sport you have a match plan. It rarely survives the first half. It is still valuable: whoever is prepared can adapt. Whoever improvises can only react.

In ecommerce that means Q4 comes every year. The returns wave after Christmas comes every year. Delivery delays come. None of that is a surprise.

The principle for your team: plan the predictable peaks before they arrive. Which requests come in during peak? Around 40 percent of all support requests on our side are WISMO questions, meaning "where is my order". You can automate those before peak, and never in the middle of it.

What does NOT carry over from sport

Not everything transfers. Three things I had to unlearn:

And a limit to the principles themselves: they do not replace good people. A cleanly led team with weak products still loses. Principles are the frame, and the content has to come from you.

On top of that: sports comparisons have an expiry date. A team is not a squad, a quarter is not a season, and nobody gets substituted in for you when you are tired. Take the principles, leave the metaphor.

Where to start this week

You do not have to introduce all six principles at once. Start like this:

1. Define one number per person that counts

2. Write down the one process that annoys you most

3. Check whether a machine can take it over

Whether step three pays off is something you can calculate in advance: the article on the cost of automation has the numbers.

Questions about the setup or your team structure? Get in touch. Or directly: damian@flowhouse.ai.