Keval Baxi has a favorite comparison for the moment before a website exists. Imagine a retailer opening a physical shop. Long before the doors swing open, somebody studies the neighborhood, the passing traffic, the likely customer, the floor plan and the route from entrance to till. Nobody sensible orders the shelving first and asks where it belongs later. On the web, however, perfectly serious companies do the equivalent every day. They buy a theme, begin the build and promise to learn after launch.
Baxi, the Chicago-based CEO and co-founder of digital consultancy Codal, thinks the order is backwards. His phrase for the missing work is uncomplicated: “blueprinting and researching.” The language is almost aggressively unglamorous. It also explains a career spent making digital products less dependent on fashion, instinct and late-night rescue.
He came to the problem from the wiring behind the walls. His early work included freelance development and network-engineering assignments, followed by BaxiTech, a consultancy focused on Microsoft and Cisco networks. While earning a degree in entrepreneurship and management at DePaul University, he helped start Codal. The satisfaction, he has said, came from discovering an inefficiency and finding a remedy. A company eventually formed around that instinct.
01 / The useful pauseA blueprint is a form of speed
The agency did not remain a general collection of technical hands. It moved from enterprise applications and mobile work toward the knottier end of ecommerce, where a handsome page is only the visible portion of a much larger animal. Inventory, payments, search, customer service, product data and marketing all tug at the same experience. One careless choice at the surface can create a queue of consequences underneath.
Baxi breaks that experience into three views. There is the customer trying to decide what to buy. There is the service representative dealing with the consequences of that decision. Then there are the less typical buyers a marketing team hopes to reach. The same website can feel clear to one and obstinate to another. Research is how the differences become visible before they harden into code.
“All of these questions and research we want to map out before we put code down.”Keval Baxi on the eComOne podcast
This is not a plea for endless workshops. Baxi favors modest experiments with a beginning, an end and something measurable in between. An audit might isolate search, the home page, a product-results page, a color choice or the sequence of steps in a purchase. The team changes one piece, watches what users do and decides what deserves to survive. A grand redesign makes an impressive unveiling. A small test makes an argument.
One example involved clothing sizes, a small box on a screen with an expensive life beyond it. The retailer let shoppers name a familiar brand and size, then translated that information into the equivalent size in its own range. Baxi said a large fashion seller using such a selector cut a return rate of roughly 28 to 29 percent by seven or eight percentage points. The interface spared customers a little arithmetic. The warehouse received fewer parcels coming back.
His cheapest research recommendation may be the most revealing. Open the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, type in a competitor’s address and watch its storefront change through time. Features that repeatedly disappear and return tell one story. Elements that remain while everything around them shifts tell another. Baxi adds an engineer’s warning: a competitor can make a poor decision, too. History supplies patterns, not proof.
02 / No ceremonial handoffDesigners meet the people who make it work
Many digital projects are organized as a polite relay race. Researchers hand findings to designers. Designers hand pictures to developers. Developers inherit a beautiful object that is slow, costly or impossible. Everyone was excellent in isolation. The product arrives carrying the seams.
Baxi says Codal combined design and development from the start and worked in short increments. Engineers comment on mockups before clients approve them. They ask what a heavy asset will do to load time and whether the planned interaction is feasible. Designers return after a page is built and examine what the translation did to their intent. The client sees a picture. The team is expected to see the system.
That systems view is why headless commerce became part of his public vocabulary. The expression sounds as if retail has wandered into a gothic tale, but Baxi’s explanation is practical. Separate the customer-facing shop from the machinery behind it, then connect the pieces through APIs. A merchant can change the search, filters or product pages without disassembling payments and inventory. A favored content-management system does not have to be abandoned merely because the commerce engine changes.
He has taken that argument into conversations with BigCommerce and Shopify, including sessions on complex storefronts and composable systems. Codal’s work for Garrett Popcorn received BigCommerce recognition in 2021, including an agency award and a UX design award for a headless direct-to-consumer site. The charming part of the project was popcorn. The difficult part was letting a customer customize a tin, add messages and wrapping, then send several items to several addresses in one order. Gifts are sentiment attached to logistics.
In 2023, Baxi and Codal colleague Ryan Bloms led a Shopify partner roundtable about automotive ecommerce. The assignment involved multiple brands, thousands of parts and fitment data that needed to be managed centrally. Here, the promise of a seamless shop depended on the distinctly unromantic question of whether a component would fit a car. Digital transformation is often advertised with clouds and arrows. Its real test may be a customer avoiding the wrong alternator.
03 / The organization behind the interfaceEmpathy with an operating manual
The same preference for feedback loops appears in Baxi’s management ideas. He has argued for several ways employees can speak, from formal systems and regular meetings to an open door. People do not all volunteer discomfort in the same setting. A channel only works if the person who needs it can bear to use it.
He also favors working beside employees while drawing a firm line between involvement and micromanagement. Managers should understand what people want to learn, explain policy changes and invite input. His summary is “a culture of empathy,” a phrase in danger of becoming office wallpaper unless it has procedures attached. Baxi’s version comes with mechanisms: feedback routes, check-ins, transparency and a conversation about growth.
“Working with people, not just managing them.”One of Baxi’s five practices for company culture
There is humor in the corporate record, fortunately. Asked what had changed as Codal grew, Baxi praised the different backgrounds and perspectives that improved the company across nearly every area. Then he exempted rec-league softball, where the team was still losing most of its games. This may be the most credible executive concession ever entered into a discussion of diversity: new perspectives can sharpen the work without repairing the infield.
The joke matters because it punctures the solemnity that gathers around scale. Codal now presents itself as a global enterprise consultancy, with operations spanning the United States, Britain, India and Canada. Baxi’s public appearances have carried him from Chicago to industry stages in New York and Toronto. Yet his useful ideas remain stubbornly close to the workbench. Look at the journey. Put designers and engineers together early. Ask a smaller question. Measure the answer. Tell people why a decision changed.
04 / What enduresThe discipline of better questions
Technology consulting is in the business of selling a future, and the temptation is to make that future sound frictionless. Baxi’s career suggests a less theatrical offer. Friction is information. A failed search, a confused shopper, an engineer objecting to a mockup and an employee choosing a quiet feedback channel all reveal where a system resists the people inside it.
His engineer’s instinct is to trace that resistance. His entrepreneur’s instinct is to decide which remedy can support a business. Neither works particularly well alone. Engineering without commercial judgment can perfect a feature nobody needs. Commerce without technical judgment can commission an attractive liability. Codal’s place between design, software and strategy is also Baxi’s own professional territory.
The current fashion is to describe every company as transformed by artificial intelligence, composable architecture or whatever phrase has just acquired a conference badge. Baxi certainly works in those technologies. His more durable contribution is older: the insistence that a product deserves observation before construction. Tools change. People still compare, hesitate, misunderstand, ask for help and abandon carts.
So the shop comparison returns. A good proprietor watches the doorway. A good designer notices where visitors pause. A good engineer makes sure the till works. A good executive lets each of them contradict the plan before the customer does. Looking before building is not hesitation. In Baxi’s hands, it is how the work begins moving in the right direction.