When I ran eCom for a P&G brand in the UK, I had a spreadsheet.

Fifteen rows. Each one was something I knew we should test or fix. Free shipping threshold (hadn't been touched in a year). Product page layout (our bounce rate was high). Pricing on our hero SKU (I was pretty sure we were underpriced). Bundle opportunities (customers kept buying shampoo and conditioner in separate orders). Email segmentation. Welcome flow. Promo calendar optimization. The list went on.

I was sure that spreadsheet had GBP 100K-300K in annual revenue sitting in it. Maybe more. The data was right there.

I tested two things that year.

It wasn't because I didn't know what to do. I had the data. I'd read the research. I'd even built the business cases. My manager trusted me and would have approved most of them.

The problem was Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday morning, I'd come in and there'd be an urgent email from our agency about a campaign that launched wrong. Then a pricing discrepancy. Then a meeting about Q3 planning. Then the designer needed help with the email calendar. Then someone from finance had a question about last month's numbers.

By 3pm, my "optimization roadmap" was still sitting in the same tab it was in at 9am. Untouched.

And that was a good day. On a bad day, there was a product issue, or a platform issue, or a customer escalation that ate the entire week.

I used to feel guilty about this. Like I was failing.

Then I left CPG and went to Google, and spent six years on the other side. I worked with many eCom teams. And I realized something that made me feel both better and worse:

Everyone has the spreadsheet. Almost nobody gets to it.

The brand doing $5M with three people? They know their shipping threshold is wrong. They're too busy managing inventory and running Instagram ads.

The brand doing $30M with a team of fifteen? They know they should test pricing. They're too busy with the holiday launch and the agency review and the new product drop.

The brand doing $100M with a full analytics team? They know there's $500K in promo optimization sitting on the table. But the analytics team is backlogged three months and the eCom director has 47 stakeholder meetings this quarter.

The size of the team changes. The spreadsheet doesn't go away.

I want to be precise about what I mean by "bandwidth gap" because I think it's misunderstood.

It's not a knowledge gap. eCom operators are smart. They read the research. They go to conferences. They know what best practices look like.

It's not a tools gap. There are more eCom tools than anyone knows what to do with. Most brands have 15-20 apps installed on Shopify.

It's not even a prioritization gap. Most operators can rank their optimization opportunities correctly. They know what would have the biggest impact.

It's a capacity gap. The difference between knowing what to do and having the time to do it. The things that matter most (testing, optimizing, iterating) get crowded out by the things that are most urgent (campaigns, fires, meetings, launches).

And the cruel part? The urgent stuff is visible. Your boss sees the campaign go live. Nobody sees the pricing test you didn't run.

Why this matters to me personally

When I left Google in early 2025 to start Revenue Agent, people asked me what problem I was solving. I kept trying to articulate it in terms of features and data and AI.

But the real answer was simpler: I wanted to solve the spreadsheet.

The thing I couldn't get to at P&G. The thing I watched hundreds of brands not get to at Google. The optimization work that everyone knows matters but nobody has time for.

I'm not pretending Revenue Agent solves everything. But the core idea, that an agent can scan your store, find the opportunities, quantify them, and act on them, came directly from staring at that 15-row spreadsheet and knowing I'd only get to two.

If you run an eCom store, you probably have your own version of that spreadsheet. Maybe it's in a doc, maybe it's in your head, maybe it's on a whiteboard that's been there so long it's become wallpaper.

My question isn't "what's on your list?" You already know what's on it.

My question is: how many of those things did you actually get to this quarter?