Welcome to Retail Checks and Balances, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the bustling world of commerce and culinary delights to help you grow your business and win. Join us as we explore the fascinating stories, trends, and challenges that shape the retail and hospitality industry, from cozy corner cafes to sprawling shopping malls and everything in between. And now, here's your host, Kevin Spencer.

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Okay, we're back again with Retail Checks and Balances. Today, we have a very special guest, Natalija Pavic Marketing Director of Kibo Commerce. Welcome to the show.

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Hi, Kevin. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

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Oh, it's awesome to to have our second celebrity from your company being showcased on the podcast.

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And I feel very uncomfortable by you calling me maybe like an F list celebrity and as much as like my last LinkedIn post got 500 views, which I think is pretty awesome.

That's awesome. Come on. But, you know, let's jump in. Tell us a bit about yourself and, you know, how you got into where you are today.

Well, that's kind of funny. So I actually, I come from Salesforce. That's where I came from, to Kibo, from product marketing. But I actually grew up in like an artistic household. Both of my parents are painters and I decided to do physics because that was the obvious next step. Just kidding. And I've been in tech for about 17 years. So I've worked at Blackberry, Scission, IBM, Salesforce. Now I come to Kibo. And I always joke that I like to do everything. So I've been in sales, product, Q&A. I was a developer my first stint out of university. But I've also done go-to-market industry, and I also founded and hosted the commerce podcast at Salesforce, and I'm planning to launch a Kiba podcast here as well. So next up, janitor. That's what I got to do next. That's for sure.

Well, that's fabulous. That's a lot to give in in just a couple of sentences. But what you would say If you describe your expertise in your current field, how would you lay that down for us?

So it's funny because my job is actually to explain stuff. And so, you know, product marketing is really about breaking down technical concepts in a way that the market or others will understand. And not just in an explanatory way, like we're not talking about reading technical documentation, but in a way that communicates positioning and communicates with influence. And so I'm here to tell you what Kibo does, but also make you think that it's amazing, which it is. Okay. So that's not anything that's subjective. And also why it's amazing. And that could be anything from talking to customers. Because what's funny is, as you know, sometimes people in tech use a lot of acronyms and jargon. And that's useful. But then when we talk to clients, and we talk to businesses, and they live in their own world, and they use their own language, now we have to do a lot of market translation. So primarily, it's communicating to the market, but it's also translating for different markets what we could mean to them and what our value statements could mean to them. So That's broadly speaking. I do find this profession is becoming a little bit more technical. I think that might also be the nature of increasing complexity in tech necessitates more technical understanding, but it's also a good mix of creative and technical. So I get to use that Artistic side, you can see here, I have a few paintings behind me, but also that technical side, which is coming back from my degree. And I also have one patent and two patents pending in AI. And so I'm also considered... Well, that would make me an AI expert, but actually I always think of myself as a lifelong learner of AI. So yeah, so there you go. And that's what I'm supposed to be doing.

But remind us about the listeners about what's the core of Kibo right now.

Kibo is very interesting. Kibo is a commerce platform. Fundamentally, it has certain sort of collection of solutions, order management, commerce for B2C, for B2B, subscriptions, AI search. So those are all the components. Why I joined Kibo and what's fascinating about Kibo is we are composable and composable fully in the purest way that you can say composable. And there's several different advantages to that and several benefits. And let me define what that means because I think people will say, this is another market translation situation, right? I think for a long time, e-commerce vendors were all-in-one solutions. Some people who paint heroes and villains may say that the monolith, which is like, hey, here's a platform, here's a storefront you can build on our platform, your storefront. And what's challenging with that is that means that the vendor technically owns your storefront, which is weird, because that's your bread and butter, that's your business. And so we went into a direction of what we call headless, which I think is a terrible term, but it's all we have, which is basically the head, which is where people shop, abstracted from the platform, the cart, the checkout, the payments, et cetera. then headless was all the rage. But what's funny is that headless was the rage way before. If you're using any mobile app or kiosk or you're shopping in a vehicle, the infotainment system or through a voice assistant, those are all considered headless applications because they are not on the website proper. And in some places in the world, nobody cares about the website. They're shopping primarily through marketplaces. We know in China, it's all WeChat and Weibo. So then Headless was all the rage and Headless was really a way to say like, hey, let's use a CMS or let's use a content provider. Let's own our own front end. And then people took that further. They said, well, that's great, but what if I don't want to go with one vendor? Because there's huge proliferation. of e-commerce technologies, and I want to use the best of breed of everything. I want to use the best cart, the best checkout, the best promotions, the best loyalty. I don't want to pick one vendor and stick and pay for all that stuff. And so in came this concept of composable, meaning that some vendors can create what we call microservices, which are meaning standalone packages that are parts of the platform. So, you know, that's the breakdown of the whole concept of an all-in-one. And you take a look and you say, well, you know, we can sell, we can get this from, you know, we can get search from Algolia, we can get CMS from Amplian, and you start to sort of do your building blocks for your own implementation. Sorry, I just had to clear my throat.

That's fine.

And, you know, I took a look at the Kibo product, and there's a lot of people that say they have composable, but they don't. There's some vendors that have long chains of APIs, and so they say they're composable, but then you need 50 of the microservices to work, and then now they're not microservices anymore. And then there's a lot of vendors that are not really into it. And I think that we're moving from a place where composable was like a techie thing. It was like, oh, this would be so cool if I could do whatever I wanted with the instance. And we're moving into this is now a business imperative. You know, we know that there's a lot of, in the market, there's a lot of uncertainty. There's tariffs, there's changing regulation. There's also price consciousness. There's demands for TCO. And we are sort of going, we're losing the era of the Big Bang digital transformation. Those are not in vogue anymore. Nobody's like, yeah, I want to spend millions of dollars and overhaul everything all the time. Nobody wants that. Exactly. What people are looking for is what I call incremental innovation. And innovation is still in demand more than ever because there are companies out there, Sheen and Timo, that are giving everyone just an example, giving everyone a run for their money and innovating at a pace that we have never seen before. And we know post pandemic, that we've had a huge shift from in-store to e-commerce that is sort of going to stay where it is. It went from like 10% benchmarking, 10% of revenue to like 17% permanently, which is like a doubling of e-commerce adoption. And so people are looking to improve things on their site, but not do big bang digital transformations. And I fully believe that Kibo is really well positioned to solve those problems for customers. And so I was like, oh, wow, you guys actually made something that everybody should have and that everybody could benefit from in this environment, in this new era. And so I was very excited by the mission to join Kibo.

And you said, you talked about that excitement. What, what's currently your, what current project or what, what is differentiating Kibo now to, to push forward and what, what has you that, what, what, what's channeling that energy and excitement?

Well, you've spoken to Ram and I think anybody who speaks to Ram is just inspired. He's a very humble CEO. Yes. And that's, I love that style of leadership and that sort of like service oriented leadership. And that sort of permeates in the whole company. Just amazing people to work with. A lot of people that I've worked with in the past, it's a small industry and sort of, you know, when you're in it for long enough, you get to know the players and who you want to work with. We're investing a ton in AI. I cannot say exactly what we're investing in or what we're doing. Obviously, I can't speak to the roadmap. But I would say, A, we recently were mentioned as leaders in the Forrester OMS wave. And what was great about that is the reason we were placed in the leader quadrant was a mix of like hardcore functionality, almost like really good road mapping plus usability. And this kind of mix of like, some people have a lot of functionality, but then the usability is not there. You can never unlock that functionality. So what's the point of even having it unless the threshold is so high. So the barrier to using those features was low. And I'm just thoroughly impressed with the product team, the pace of innovation at which they work with such a small team. So that's sort of what I would describe Kibo as, a series of experts, a set of experts that do their job really well and are very highly efficient. for me to come in and say like, wait a minute, people don't know. People don't know how awesome you guys are. And I get to be the one to go out there and tell that story is very exciting. So it kind of, it has a bit of a mission aspect to it. That's awesome. And Um, you know, I like to, I don't think of myself as a careerist, you know, I think of myself as a generalist and, um, more of a thinker and a storyteller. But sometimes you get in situations where you have that feeling that you're in something special, you know, and you I've had that maybe like four times in my career. where I was like kind of almost watching myself being like, when I get out of this, I'm going to miss this period, or I'm going to miss this person, or I'm going to miss this project because it will have been. And that's sort of like the feeling that I'm getting here. And I'm excited to talk to our customers and talk to prospective customers about considering us.

Well, fantastic. And I think you're highlighting the challenges and lessons that you're learning along the way and how is, you know, my question is, is how are you going to position that in the future to make sure that you stay number one?

Um, well, I think number one is a little bit, um, number one is almost, almost like the goal that you're chasing. I think that I prefer to think of it as collaborative. I think that there's enough space, um, in this area for a lot of different vendors and solutions because customers need choice. Um, and so I think it's also like about that partnership aspect, like who are we partnering with? Um, and you know, making sure you're partnering with people. that might have some of the functionality that you have, but then letting the customer choose. And so I think of it more of as a collaborative approach in solving customer problems because we're in an interesting era and it feels like e-commerce is at a transformation period. the e-commerce that emerges from here on out will be fundamentally different than the e-commerce that we had before. And that's all really because we're moving from this era of... It started with a single site and that was e-commerce, the 2001 era. We moved to this idea of Omnichannel, which was like, well, okay, hang on. I expect to shop from the brand. I don't think of the site and the store as two different things. It's the same brand. So I expect to return things in store, buy things online while I'm at the store, just like blending. And what's interesting about Omnichannel, if I could just pause here for a moment, is that it feels like people are still on that journey. Like there's tons of brands, they're not executing on that. And the reason is because of the difficulty in integrations between in-store tech stacks and online tech stacks. And those are like two separate categories and they often don't talk to each other. So there's still a ton of room for improvement within the Omnichannel game in and of itself. But while people are improving Omnichannel, the consumer has moved on. The consumer is like, I wanna shop from anywhere. I wanna shop from an inspo pic. I wanna shop from my TV. I wanna talk to my car and tell it to buy me Starbucks before I get there, right? The consumer expectations have already moved on to shop from anywhere. And in this transition, I do believe that solutions may be proliferating. And this is where I think composability is really key because the more API performance you are, the better you are connecting, the better you are collaborating, the more you can fit in with other solutions, the easier it is for retailers and brands to create that commerce anywhere reality that consumers are expecting.

And you hit a nice point there. I mean, one of the things that I've seen because, you know, we do retail transformation for even on websites and stuff is that The customers or the stores, they don't have enough variety on their website compared to what they have in the store. So for me, sometimes I go online and I lose interest because I'm not seeing that variety. But if I go to the store, there's so much variety there and what they have. So I don't know if you can answer a question. Do you think that's inventory or just a failed marketing approach or what is it?

That's an excellent question. I won't say what it is, but actually my second patent is for this problem because there's a technical solution here. The challenge is that we started with creating content systems and e-commerce systems separately, historically. We created CMS, content management. We know all the players in that space. And then we created e-commerce and don't know why we never merged the two. And so you have then these like third party sort of like PIMS, you have PIMS and we have some, you know, PIM light functionality that allow you to publish to marketplaces, et cetera. But then the actual work of product, keeping the descriptions up-to-date, knowing what the color apple actually means and how it relates. I actually, I didn't look it up. I don't even know if it's yellow or green, but that's an example of the product work is actually very complex and product discovery is very complex. And the benefit, you spoke to what you have in store, Is that a glance? You can see everything. And you can be almost like guided in the process of discovery. The challenge is if you're a searcher, fundamentally on a mission, you might not find that thing you're looking for if you're looking for something specific. So there's two different modes of shopping, hunting versus gathering, if I could call it hunting and gathering. I don't know. I'll think about a better term later. Probably after this podcast, I'll be like, oh my God, I thought of this content. But the problem is content and product is separate, and it doesn't live in the same place, doesn't function in the same place. It needs different systems. But it actually needs to come together. And there's something called a digital twin. Have you heard of this concept?

No, I haven't.

So a digital twin, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is actually, this was from my conversations. I was like talking to some people at Unity and they're the makers of the gaming platform. They're actually selling it now to corporations to build models. And a digital twin is a version of a product that exists virtually, that is literally a twin. And so I think some of it is based on NFC technology or Web3 technology, or could be, so that it's tokenized and unique. But it's not just like the product information, it's like the product itself. And so you could say, let's say you're developing a car, you could track that life cycle from development, design to sales and ROI, and use that information to develop and design a new car. And so you know exactly what's going on with the product. So what's happening is we need three-dimensional, what I would call three-dimensional abstract systems for e-commerce. I know this is like a heady concept, but we can't look at it in a flat way anymore. Because the way that we look at it is like, here's my content, boom, boom. Here's my copy, publish. Oops, where am I supposed to be publishing it? I don't know. Is it up to date? I don't know. Does it match the product? What's on the product page? And so there's a need for something that's bringing the two together. And I think NFCs, Web3s, and digital twins are like a solution, possibly part of the solution for that problem. But the world's gonna look very different as we start to get into, for example, e-commerce, right? So is this design or handbag authentic? Is this single item, how am I supposed to merchandise items of which I only have one of? And how do I get product images created for unique items? So that's an example that's adding complexity, especially as we consider sustainability. How do I quickly create new items based off old items that are evolutions of old items, but keep that history or understand the relationship between this product so that I can accurately track sales so that I know what I should be building and producing next. And then disposal, what happens to that item afterwards? How do I treat that item for efficiency cost? But also sustainability. Again, I think that's going to be bigger and bigger moving forward just because we kind of won't have a choice. We'll have to think about that. So these are all very complex. complex problems to solve. And we're now, we actually don't have the tech, I think, to solve it. And it's going to be a bit of an arms race to develop a new world. I'll give you an example. One solution to the product discovery challenge is more visual engagement. So that could be like, say, using visual search, taking a photo, being like, this look is great. How do I put that together? At the moment of inspiration, that could be like on a TikTok or an Insta or whatever. Another way would be like a metaverse solution. Like I created a virtual version of the store online. And so I can shop online the way that I shop in store. And for the like metaverse immersive experience problem, what we have now is disparate experiences, no unified singular experience. And so we need like a shared metaverse protocol or shared metaverse, whatever you want to call it, mainframe layer. And so there's also more need for collaboration. And also, I will say the third part of this problem is data. Data connectivity, orchestration, data generation, integration. So I don't know what the solution is. I don't think anybody has figured it out yet. And it will be very interesting to see what the future of content commerce customer information looks like. And I think we're swinging, you know, we spent a long time thinking about the customer 360 and thinking about the personalized view of the customer. But I think we're going to shift a little bit to considering more the view of the product, how the product is displayed, how it looks, how it functions. And so we're almost moving back to product centricity, which is kind of interesting. I don't know. I could go on. What's your next question?

That's good. You know, some people just buy something based on the brand. They don't really investigate the product. But, you know, I think that's kind of cool that we're going back to that, as you said. You know, when I listen to you, I hear a wealth of knowledge and experience of what you do. And, you know, tell me about what routines have contributed to your success.

I wish I could say that I wake up at 4 a.m. Unfortunately, my mornings are like a train wreck usually. I know some people are like, I wake up before him, I get everything done by six. No. I'm not a morning person anymore, anyway. No, I'm not even conscientious, if you could call it that. But I would say two actual habits, because I was like, you know, obviously preparing for this interview and I thought about this question, I was like, I don't know what, I might have to come up with something. But there was actually two things that I thought of that do help. I'm an avid reader. I'm a huge podcast listener and huge audio book listener. And sometimes, you know, people ping me and they're like, Oh, I want to get your like your list, your list of books and you know, that you read. And unfortunately it's not actually, it's like maybe 10% business books. Most of the other stuff is like economic books, parenting books, you know, ecology, anthropology, sociology books. I'm really big into connecting different ideas and ideas in different knowledge areas. I don't think that learning about the arts is throwaway, et cetera. And I think that there's an element of knowing or learning about different things expands your creativity. And the other routine that I have is like, I talk to a lot of people. One of my favorite things to do is learn from experts. And so sometimes I'll just ping somebody and be like, Hey, you're really smart at X. I have some questions. Could you help me out? Or if I think about somebody, I'll send them a text message. I kind of like garden my social network very actively. And it has nothing to do with... It's not something that's conscious. I'm actually just like super nosy and curious. So I'm just like... What are you up to? Like, I haven't heard from you in a while and I want to know now. I'm just so curious. And so it's really talking to people. A lot of the ideas that I share with you are not ideas that I thought about in silo in my basement where I work, right? It's ideas that I heard from other people who are acting, functioning, working with clients in different problems and different challenges. And so I always like to stay in touch with different people in the industry. So those are two things that actually help help me. And unfortunately, we'll never find out if I'll benefit from a 4 a.m. morning routine because that's not going to happen. I'm more of a late night person.

That's what it is. I don't know how people do that. I mean, now it's like, especially when you have kids, I mean, you want to value that sleep, right? I mean, my son wakes me up at seven o'clock and says, let's go. Sometimes I go. Sometimes I cannot, but, you know, after having a late night, so, you know, that's really good. But outside of work, what are some of your hobbies and interests that you haven't expressed to us already?

Um, art and design. I'm huge, um, uh, art collector and, um, I just did a renovation, big renovation in my house and, um, very particular about, um, design and aesthetics. Um, I, I love to say health. I wish it could be healthier, uh, big foodie. Um, so I love to eat and survive by eating. It's good. It's, it's a good thing to have. Right. Um, so those are sort of my big, uh, broad strokes, but yeah.

And million dollar question, do you maintain a work-life balance?

Oh, that's a very good question. I remember like Ram's, how Ram answered this, which is like, no.

I was like. Exactly.

That's why I asked it like that. I think, I think I do. I think it's, I think I have a pretty good balance. I like to use the phrase like ruthless prioritization. Right. And so I try to leave work behind after nine to five, you know, with some exceptions. Yeah. And I like to be sort of plugged in home. I know when you have small kids, it's kind of, I feel like a little bit easier because you have this feeling of like, if I don't pay attention now, I'm going to miss it. I'm sure when they get older, I don't know, maybe I'll be more neglectful. I don't know. Or they want to get you. Exactly. I was going to say they're going to ignore me and then I'm going to be like, huh, I haven't seen them in like days. I wonder what's going on. And then I'm going to text them. I'd like to know what's going on with you right now. But, um. So yeah, I think I do. I think I do have a pretty good look. I think for me, work isn't everything. Work is really a sum of like interesting challenges and interesting problems to solve, but definitely not identity driven in that manner. So I work on things because I choose to work on them. Right. So, yeah.

So that brings me to another good question. How do you measure success in your work?

You know what's funny? As a former seller, I used to carry a quota for like six years. And I think as sellers are very clear on how success is measured, did you meet your quota, right? Outside of that, there's a really good book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And it's a little bit of a philosophy book, but in it, they say that quality is actually intuitively easy to see and measure. And it does not require a yardstick. And that's actually goes for like a seller too. Like there were times when you were up and down in your territory and there were times when you were down, but that doesn't mean that you're like, you know, not worthy. there's other things you could be doing. And so for me, it's really a barometer of like, am I happy with the work? And not so much how is, you know, maybe Ram should be listening to this. Like how happy is Ram with the work? I don't know. And so sometimes that makes me really bad at receiving feedback because when people give me negative feedback, I literally think it's okay. I've said worse to myself. I don't, you don't need to say anything. I can tell you what all the issues I have with the work are. Um, or like if somebody gives me a compliment, I'll be like, yeah, I know it's okay. So I'm really bad at receiving feedback, but it's my own personal yardstick. And can I, where can I improve? Right. So I think, um, I don't know who said this, but I'll always better never best. If you're like the best at something, or if you consider yourself an expert at something. Then it's over. You're better off being a lifelong learner and you're better off incrementally improving in areas.

Agreed. And I guess that turns into what legacy you want to leave behind.

Oh, I love that question. Okay. I love that question because this is actually how I went from sales to product marketing. I was a solution engineer, so I was the technical qualifier on client projects, which means that clients trusted me with being like, is this seller saying the truth about the product? And I'd be like, actually. So I went from that and I said to them, I said, what are the things that I love to do? And am I doing them? Am I getting that from my job right now? And what is the next job where I'm going to be able to do the things that I love to do? So that's one exercise I did, and I encourage everybody to do this exercise. Write down the 10 things you'd love to do and evaluate whether or not you're getting that from your current role. But then the next question I ask myself is, if I died. what would I want on my tombstone? It's a bit of a dark question. What is the legacy that I want? And I think for a while I had that like, everybody goes through like that young naive phase where they're like, I wanna be CEO. I wanna rule. But then I closed my eyes and I read that tombstone, I visualized it and I read it and it said, it didn't say at all what I thought it would say. It said, And I was like, oh, great, I'm screwed. Futurist and inventor. And it completely changed my trajectory, my career trajectory, because I really value, you know, thinkers and thought leaders. And I realized that that's what I wanted to do. And so that's how I moved into go-to-market and product marketing. I was able to step into that like, okay, now I own thought leadership. Now I own messaging. Now I own market communications. And it also led me down the path of trying to generate patents because I was like, oh, if I don't do that, then how could I be an inventor? And so it was very nice when going through the filing process, the lawyers would call me an inventor. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. like officially an inventor if they say so. So yeah, that's priorities. Do you need to rule the world or do you need to understand your place in it and carve out a niche for yourself where you get to work on things that drive you? Because once you align Once you align things that drive you with things that you're interested in and with things that are good at, um, then that's the like. Magic Venn diagram. There's actually, um, a court for, um, a concept for this called Ikigai is Japanese. And so you have these three things, things that I like things I'm good at, um, things that make money so you can survive and you want to find that thing in the center. Um, and that's different for everybody, uh, for sure.

Beautiful. Is there anything else you want to share before I jump into my rapid fire questions?

Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't know the rapid fire questions. Wait, I thought this is what this whole half an hour was. Oops. Just to say like, hey, the Kibo Commerce Innovations Podcast is going to be launched in June. I'll be hosting it along with my co-host, Ty Sweet, which we call the voice of Kibo because he built the entire trading curriculum for Kibo. So if you go to Kibo Academy, you will hear Ty and hopefully you will hear Ty on the podcast. So follow me on LinkedIn, which I'm sure will be in the show notes to watch that launch. I will be interviewing thinkers and innovators in their space, talking about OMS, commerce, supply chain, retail trends, everything really related to our industry. So that's it. And now, what are we getting into?

Easy stuff.

Soda or juice?

Soda.

Swimming pool or beach?

Beach.

Fiction or non-fiction?

Non-fiction.

Favorite book?

Dictionary of the Khazars. Movie? Oh, movie. That's a hard one. I mean, I was going to say Godfather. I feel like, but I feel like that's such a, it's got to be the Godfather. I mean, everybody's going to say like, that's so dumb and cliche, but what can I say? It's the Godfather. Yeah.

Mine's Scarface, so.

Yeah.

Well, you know what? But then you can think about it from our perspective. There is like a right answer. That's what it is. Right.

So it's yours. I mean, you got to own it. I don't care what anybody else thinks. And favorite song?

Oh, I don't have one. That's a that's a tough one. I just listen to so much different types of music. I will tell you my daughter's favorite song is Skidamarink. It's a Canadian nursery rhyme. And if you listen to it, you will get teary. So just beware. It's very emotional. But there you go. I'll tell you my daughter's favorite song.

Fantastic. Well, thank you very much, Natalia. This has been great. It's been fun. I look forward to following you on your podcast for sure. I mean, I love to listen to podcasts as well. I love to see, I mean, I follow you guys on LinkedIn already, so I see what all the changes that are coming. So I really appreciate you spending time with us today.

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Bye. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts, so we'll get updates as new episodes become available. And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Until next time, friends.