Program snapshot
BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform serving B2C and B2B brands in more than 150 countries. Since its founding in 2009, the company has maintained a customer-first mindset and a culture where every employee is encouraged to innovate.
In e-commerce, customers expect every click to work and every transaction to succeed. Keeping software always ready is critical. BigCommerce’s engineering team ensures this readiness by maintaining clear standards, consistent measurement, and automation across all services.
1. Moving away from manual tracking that couldn’t keep pace
At BigCommerce, innovation has always been part of the culture. The engineering team operates without a top-down technical decision-making structure, giving teams autonomy to move quickly. But with that autonomy comes the need for consistent standards to keep software production-ready.
When the team was smaller, Principal Engineer Shaun McCormick could track readiness with spreadsheets, grouping standards by areas like observability, security, and quality. As the team passed 250 engineers, that system broke down.
Answering simple questions like “Is this service ready for production?” or “Who owns this service?” became slow and often subjective. Tracking ownership and dependencies meant combing through multiple tools, asking around, and piecing together information manually.
“You can’t hope a service is performing well. You have to measure it with consistent, automated checks. The only way to do that at scale is to remove manual work and standardize the process,” Shaun says.
The lack of a single, reliable source for service ownership and readiness slowed decision-making and made it harder to ensure BigCommerce’s platform was always ready for its merchants.
From spreadsheets to always-on ownership
The first priority was to create a single system of record for services. Cortex's catalog allowed BigCommerce to map ownership, dependencies, and on-call contacts automatically, pulling data from across the engineering stack.
Now, if an incident happens or a change is planned, the right people can be found immediately. The team no longer wastes time tracking down who’s responsible or how a service connects to others.
“With Cortex, we know exactly who owns what, how it’s performing, and what it’s connected to. That alone has saved us countless hours every week,” Shaun says.
This clarity not only speeds up incident resolution but also gives teams the confidence that every service has an accountable owner responsible for keeping it ready.
Automated readiness
With ownership defined, BigCommerce needed a way to keep services aligned with standards over time. Cortex’s Scorecards continuously monitors service data and flags changes that put readiness at risk.
Instead of relying on broadcast messages or email reminders, Cortex delivers targeted notifications to the people who can take action.
“You could be an executive making a request in Slack, but 90% of people won’t see it before it scrolls away,” Shaun says. “Cortex ensures the right person gets the right information at the right time.”
This keeps services compliant with quality, security, and performance standards without creating noise that disrupts developer focus.
A look at BigCommerce's Scorecards
Cortex Scorecards give BigCommerce a measurable way to track readiness and prioritize improvements. The team uses two main types:
Domain scorecards focus on customer-impact areas such as quality, security, and incident management, with a priority on fast resolution times. BigCommerce also tracks and prioritizes post-incident “follow-ups” to ensure problems do not recur.
“Our customers know no system is perfect. What keeps them with us is knowing that if something happens, we fix it fast. Scorecards help us make that promise real,” Shaun says.
Service scorecards track operational maturity, observability, and performance. They help identify inefficiencies, enforce standards across services, and make it easier for engineers to move between teams without friction.
“Service-level scorecards help us answer what’s slowing us down and where we can be more efficient,” Shaun says.
BigCommerce’s approach is customer-centric: if an issue affects merchants’ ability to transact or communicate with their customers, it becomes a priority in the scorecards.
The impact: always ready for customers
With Cortex, BigCommerce has moved from manual, reactive processes to an automated, proactive readiness model:
Ownership and dependencies are always up-to-date, reducing incident response times
Standards are continuously enforced through automation, without adding manual checks
Scorecards provide a shared, measurable view of readiness, keeping teams aligned on priorities
“Cortex lets us focus on building and improving rather than chasing down information. It keeps us ready for customers every single day,” Shaun says.
For BigCommerce, “always ready” is a commitment to customers. Cortex enables this by providing continuous measurement, automated alignment, and a shared standard for readiness across the engineering organization.
For more information on how Cortex can help you drive alignment to standards of engineering excellence, visit our website, or take a tour today.
