Have you ever tried designing a website from a template?
It can be challenging. First, there are so many options to scroll through (that all somehow look the same) your head will spin. When you do pick a template, you have to build it the way you want, meaning a lot of customization. When that doesn’t work — because inevitably, you always hit the end of what the template can offer — you have to puzzle your way through custom code.
That can become a tangled web very quickly.
Imagine that process for an established enterprise like Sephora or even a fast-growing start-up. Think about the manual process of integrating each tool needed for e-commerce or inventory management. You think you are “done” building, but wait — the market is evolving and you need to start selling on a new-ish platform like TikTok or BeReal.
A traditional legacy CMS environment is tricky: Change one thing and you risk the entire machine stalling.
The beauty of composable architecture is that your website can become whatever you want, whenever you need it — easily. Jurre van Ruth, digital strategy consultant at PostNL, came on our podcast, “People Changing Enterprises,” to discuss how the company took that concept to heart and made their composable DXP work for them.
But to make it work for your company like PostNL did, we need to level-set definitions and expectations. There’s a lot of confusion in the market about composable architectures — like what is a “composable DXP” in the first place — that I want to clear up.
What is a composable DXP?
I like how van Ruth said it in the podcast: “We see [composable] as an ecosystem of technologies that aim to create and offer a consistent digital experience for all our customer segments across all digital touchpoints.” I specifically love the word "ecosystem" he uses.
CMSWire describes a composable DXP as providing “integrated, consistent solutions that are modular and tailored to microservices and yet connect the gaps of digital experience. This is a unified and seamless approach that eliminates siloed user experiences and all-in-one solutions.”
To further flesh out that picture, I often describe composable architecture as a Lego tower: Each block is a tech tool and they each function together to make up one, larger tower, aka the customer’s digital experience.
However, unlike a sculpture — or legacy enterprise suites — you can more easily change the look and function of the entire tower by swapping out each block within.
For example, if your next marketing goal is to target potential consumers with more personalized advertising and content, those tools are easier to plug into a composable environment than traditional suites. Creative teams get to pursue the digital experience platform of their dreams, and there is much less frustration, less custom code and fewer heavy integration requirements for IT to handle on the back end.
Then where does headless — AKA a headless CMS like Contentstack — come in? It’s simply a cornerstone block in your Lego tower. For a marketing environment, the headless CMS acts as a foundation. Every tool — like e-commerce, automated translation, or SEO tools — can integrate into it to make content the central hub of your ecosystem.
Moving beyond one-size-fits-all
Every enterprise is different, which means that the capabilities they need will also be different. However, when it comes to traditional legacy martech systems, it tends to be one-size-fits-all.
The problem is that one size actually doesn’t fit all, and those environments are slow and difficult to change. It takes extreme customization via code, contacting multiple vendors for help, and a lot of inter-dependencies that aren’t always caught until something breaks.
One of the best benefits of composable is that integration is much easier and more natural with APIs inherent to a composable environment. Like clicking a Lego into place, that tool is now part of the environment. For PostNL, they invested in tools for headless content and digital experience analytics, which were easily plugged into their composable environment.
An e-commerce enterprise can integrate all the tools they require, whether it’s an online storefront platform, a product catalog with elements like descriptions or visual assets, or any personalization tools it might need. But, for example, a hospitality service will need a different set of tools, and they can have them inside a composable environment.
Enterprises are no longer satisfied with a one-size-fits-all approach. The beauty of composable architectures is that, in a market that changes like the wind, organizations’ digital experiences can also evolve just as easily.
You may find interesting
Learn how to drive business forward and build better customer experiences.
How a Composable DXP drives experimentation, innovation and digital transformation
Today's era of relentless technological evolution is challenging companies to break free from the cookie-cutter molds of monolithic solutions and embrace technologies that harmonize their digital strategy with unrivaled agility.To keep pace with customer needs, businesses are no longer playing it safe but instead embracing experimentation and innovation to forge ahead in the race of digital transformation.Enter composable DXPs. A composable digital experience platform (DXP) can be the game-changer your marketing and creative content teams have been waiting for. As businesses strive to provide customers with personalized digital experiences across all channels, the need for a robust, scalable and adaptable technology stack becomes paramount.In this article, we'll explore what a composable DXP is, how it can revolutionize your approach to content and digital experiences, and the benefits it offers your business.What is a Composable DXPA composable DXP is a modern approach to building digital experiences. With a composable architecture, businesses can create, manage and deliver digital experiences across various channels and platforms by leveraging a range of interoperable, modular tools. The fundamental components of a composable DXP are:Headless CMS: A content management system (CMS) that allows content creation, easy updating, and management separately from the front-end layer your customers see.Composable technology: Imagine being able to build your content strategy from a set of building blocks that can be easily configured and reconfigured to work best for you. Composable technology enables businesses to use modular and lightweight components to build tailored digital solutions quickly.Composable architecture: A flexible and adaptable framework that supports the rapid integration of business-critical applications and tools, empowering teams to build better customer experiences.How to leverage a DXP for better contentWith an expansive catalog of configurations, applications, and diverse components, a composable DXP empowers marketing and creative teams to experiment with various combinations to achieve the desired results. This capability helps foster innovation and allows teams to respond quickly to changing customer needs. Here are five ways a composable DXP can drive better content:Personalized digital experiences: Leverage customer data, behavior analysis, and customer journey mapping to deliver highly-personalized, relevant experiences across all your digital channels.Omnichannel: Enable seamless content delivery and interactions across every device and touchpoint you rely on to reach your customers.Experimentation: Empower your teams to innovate and experiment with different tools, solutions, and content strategies, all from a single environment.Collaboration: Streamline collaboration between departments, teams, and individuals by using a centralized platform that fosters efficient workflows and automates manual tasks, enabling your teams to create faster.Scalability: Leverage the scalability of the DXP to quickly adapt to market changes, drive growth, and maintain your competitive edge.Benefits of a Composable DXPBeyond producing better content and creating more space for innovation, a Composable DXP offers businesses the digital tools to create meaningful customer experiences. Companies that migrate away from their rigid technologies and uplevel their digital capabilities have a full toolbelt for swiftly responding to market demands, improving customer satisfaction, increasing operational efficiency and maintaining a competitive edge in the market. How, you might ask?1. Speed-to-marketComposable DXPs enable businesses to respond quickly to changing market dynamics, customer needs, and technology advancements. By adopting a composable architecture, you can minimize time spent on complex integrations and cumbersome traditional CMS systems. As a result, your teams can build and launch new digital experiences much faster.2. FlexibilityA composable DXP provides the foundation for a flexible tech stack that can continuously evolve and adapt, as your business evolves. Businesses can choose best-of-breed technologies that align with their unique requirements, allowing them to build, experiment, and adjust their strategies in real time.3. Cost-efficiencyGone are the days of being locked into vendor agreements and limiting technologies. Businesses can select the tools they need according to budget and requirements. This facilitates better resource allocation, helping organizations operate in a leaner, more efficient manner.4. Innovation and experimentationA composable DXP fosters a culture of innovation by empowering marketing and creative teams to experiment and iterate. This leads to accelerated digital transformation and triggers an innovation domino effect across the organization.Grow faster, scale better, experience more ROIA composable DXP can be a crucial driver of experimentation, innovation and digital transformation for businesses. By leveraging a headless CMS and composable architecture, businesses can unlock the true potential of their digital ecosystem, experience greater ROI from increased customer loyalty and, ultimately, stay ahead of the curve by delivering exceptional digital experiences that drive growth and success.About the authorMarina Rusinow is a Senior Manager of Solutions Marketing at Contentstack with over a decade of product marketing experience.Learn more about Marina
Building a scalable DXP - Part 1
Scale is one of the most common and fundamental problems digital teams have to confront in order to grow their businesses. But more than just a key to unlocking growth, how a team thinks about scale can affect costs, ongoing resource capacity, feature roadmaps, and even an organization’s overall pace of innovation. In the universe of digital experience (DX), which spans all the way from the devices at the frontier of your audience’s senses all the way to the cloud and hardware that powers your company’s back-of-house operations, scale applies in some way to nearly every facet between these two ends. Understanding how the systems, people and processes that make up this end-to-end DX assembly line fit together and affect each other is key to unlocking that scale.This article aims to explain how to scale your digital experience platform (DXP). In it, we will discuss the meaning of scale, how to approach scale within your organization, and why it’s important. What exactly does it mean to scale?Simply put, scale is the relationship between the inputs and outputs of a given system. When people refer to scaling a business, they are typically talking about increasing outputs, like sales and revenue, while holding constant or decreasing inputs, like costs and materials. In an engineering-oriented team, scale often refers to hardware and software, such as the ability to flex or expand capacity to process more operations. If you work on a content or marketing team, scale usually refers to growing your audience, increasing engagement, and publishing more and better content. On the business and leadership teams, scale usually means increasing revenue.But these definitions of scale are oversimplified because they focus only on the outputs of these systems while ignoring the inputs. Or to put it another way, when we are talking only about increasing the outputs of a system, we’re talking about growth. When we talk about increasing outputs relative to the inputs, we are talking about scale.A “scalable” case studyConsider a digital agency as a hypothetical case study. The agency builds highly engaging promotional websites, and its revenue is directly tied to the number of websites it can implement for its customers. Let’s assume the agency is high touch and that each website takes a total of 1,000 hours to successfully design, build and launch. Let’s also assume that the agency employs 10 people, for a total of 20,000 available hours per year (ignoring PTO) and enough resources and the proper staffing configuration to successfully sell and deploy a maximum of 20 new sites per year.A blunt approach to scaling this business model would be to demand more than 20 sites out of the talent. In this approach, leadership sees the staff as the enemies of scale and demands more output from them in the form of working faster and staying late to meet aggressive goals. Indeed many companies attempt this strategy at the cost of talent attrition, sloppy work, constant training of new employees, missed deadlines and lost customers. Launching just two additional sites per year would require every employee to work an average of about one extra half-day every week of the year, leaving scant time for family as well as the occasional urgent customer support request.Another approach is hiring additional talent and slowly scaling up output while demand catches up to the newly increased capacity. Although this approach is common, it comes with the risk of increasing investment before increasing revenue, and when applied responsibly it can take some time to pay off. Leaders who choose this tactic will hire, say, two more staff with the aim of selling and launching about four additional sites per year. While this approach is intuitive, once the full cost of two FTEs, the opportunity costs of training them, and the revenue from four additional sites are factored into the balance sheet, it’s easy to see that this approach could be slow to take off and perhaps actually decrease the agency’s profit margin over time if it doesn’t go well.Now consider a third approach, where leadership recommends that each team looks for opportunities to repurpose generic work developed for other customers in order to reduce the number of hours required to implement new websites. Over the course of building the next few sites, the teams are able to develop reusable components of their work, for example, in the form of code and design libraries for commonly requested solutions, which in turn results in an average reduction of 200 hours across all website deliverables. This means that the agency can now produce 20 sites of the same or better quality in only 16,000 hours, which increases output capacity to 25 websites in the same original 20,000 available hours without adding staff or increasing costs.Scale smarter, not harderWhile each of these three examples are strategies for how an agency might approach scaling up output, the third example is a clear frontrunner because it has the highest impact on increasing output while at the same time holding inputs relatively constant. The third approach is also the only example out of the three that can lead to economies of scale. Economies of scale describe the state of a relationship between an input, such as cost per unit, and an output, say, the number of units produced, where the cost per unit actually goes down as you create more units. This relationship between inputs and outputs is what people typically mean when they say they want to scale something. It is not just that they want outputs to grow, but that they want outputs to grow and the cost of inputs to stay flat or decrease at the same time.Although this case study centers around an agency and looks at three simplified approaches to scaling the overall business outputs, it’s useful to shed light on the fundamental concepts of scale before unpacking the specifics of scaling a DXP. Here we’ve highlighted two essential tenets that will benefit digital leaders as they work to scale nearly any system: There are many ways to approach a problem of scale, some sustainable and some unsustainable. Scaling on the backs of employees, for instance, is not a sustainable approach. There is nothing wrong with hustling to achieve a goal, but hustle alone lacks the strategic thinking that unlocks scale, which leads us to our second tenet.Effective and durable scaling centers around creativity and is founded upon understanding — not brute force. But don’t be discouraged if you feel you or your team lacks creativity or your processes are too complex for anyone to understand. As we will see in the following articles, there are some tried and true methods for creating the conditions for creativity to emerge, and if you apply them with your teams you will have a higher likelihood of successfully achieving scale, no matter what it is you wish to scale.What’s next? Now that we’ve established a baseline understanding of scale, in Part 2 we will set the agency example aside and explore specifically what it means to scale a DXP. Stay tuned!About the authorDean Haddock is a Senior Product Manager at Contentstack who focuses on platform, hosting and data engineering.Learn more about Dean
Why MACH architecture matters
Have you been hearing about MACH lately? It’s currently one of the biggest buzzwords out there — and for good reason. The acronym has spread like wildfire throughout the digital world. Endorsed by analysts and IT experts; frowned upon by not-quite-as-tech-savvy business folks; initially belittled, now heavily embraced by the monoliths who are trying to MACH-wash their offerings and avoid extinction. But what exactly is MACH architecture? How does it compare to monolithic platforms? And where does composable fit into all of this? If you’ve been wondering lately, keep reading. You’re about to get the inside scoop. What is MACH architecture?MACH stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. Let’s look at each individual term. Microservices: Microservices bring together loosely coupled, independently deployable small components or "services" to compose a more integrated application. They are exposed via well-defined APIs as the communication method between frontends and backends. They deliver faster responses, are more reliable, and can be deployed more frequently. API-first: Through APIs, best-of-breed components can be combined into a custom application built for specific business needs. Cloud-native: Being cloud-native in MACH architecture means leveraging cloud-based infrastructure and services, resulting in significant cost advantages by avoiding the high costs of maintaining on-premises infrastructure, such as hosting, site acceleration, security and uptime. Headless: Headless describes the decoupling of the front end from the back end. The front end can be anything customer-facing, from a web shop to social media to mobile apps. The backend is the layer where all the systems, processes and tools run to handle operations, including product information management, checkout and more.Headless vs composable vs MACHHeadless is all about decoupling the front end and the back end so they can operate independently and achieve higher flexibility and agility. Nowadays, you see many legacy platforms claiming to be headless when really all they offer is a few APIs. Don’t be fooled. If a monolithic, non-microservices-based architecture is lurking behind the scenes, you won’t be able to unlock the freedom that a true MACH architecture has to offer.Composable is yet another term that is being thrown around, many times used interchangeably with MACH. They are not the same though. Composable is a modular development approach and enables brands to “compose” unique customer experiences by plugging best-of-breed building blocks like cart, checkout and payments into their technology stack. Those components, though, are not required to be MACH-compliant.Assembling a composable architecture using MACH-compliant building blocks is the only way to truly embrace the power of composable technology. Essentially, composable takes a step beyond headless. It breaks down the entire platform into individual components that can be independently plugged in, customized and even replaced. That allows companies to integrate curated best-of-breed components to tailor their technology stack and, consequently, the customer experience. What are the benefits of MACH technology?MACH-based architecture provides the technical backbone to make businesses future-fit. It creates an environment in which every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable and can be continuously improved through agile development to meet the ever-evolving business requirements.When combined, the technologies that provide the foundation of MACH architecture provide remarkable advantages:Flexibility: Decoupling of frontend and backend allows for more agile development and deployment.Scalability: Auto-scaling ensures seamless handling of traffic peaks with zero downtime. No more Black Friday outages!Speed: Allows for faster iteration and testing, and the cloud provides instant provisioning and deployment of resources.Lower costs: Reduces the need for costly and frequent investments in hardware, software and infrastructure.Resilience: Reduces the risk of application downtime; has built-in redundancy and failover mechanisms.If you want to go further, faster, a MACH architecture will get you there.MACH architecture vs. monolithsThe time of the monolithic giants — think the likes of SAP, Oracle and Salesforce — is coming to an end. No monolithic platform can deliver the same speed, functionality and performance that a MACH architecture can deliver. What may seem like a blessing when you sign on with a monolith (you only buy once, with one contract and one point of contact) quickly becomes a curse if you want anything but the standard procedure. Thinking about an innovative, unique customer experience? You’ll need to beg the monolith to create it for you, and chances are slim they will unless you’re the biggest customer in their portfolio. With a MACH architecture, you are in the driver’s seat. You’ve got a brilliant idea for a thrilling new customer experience? Plug and play the best-of-breed solutions and watch your business thrive. With a monolith? Wait until the trend has passed to even get a response to your request. Is your business ready for MACH?Now that I’ve gotten you curious about the whole MACH thing, how do you know if MACH is right for your business? Start with an assessment of your current systems, processes and goals. Then, check the statements below. If you agree with any or all of them, it is time to make a move. Your current system is holding you back because it is too inflexible and slow to move at the speed necessary to keep up with shifting customer expectations and industry trends.You're looking to decrease TCO and increase ROI as you are currently paying for resources you don't need.You want to improve customer experiences, but you are struggling to provide cohesive and personalized omnichannel experiences.You want to stay ahead of the competition by staying agile and responsive to market demands, but you're finding you can't keep up with your competitors.The bottom lineIn today’s uncertain market conditions, the only constant is change. Moving to a MACH architecture will not only make your business more agile and adaptable, it also reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) often associated with outdated pricing and licensing models employed by the monoliths.A modern tech stack is key to making your business future fit. Make the move from monolith to MACH. Tailor your tech stack to your individual business needs and create that unique customer experience that will put you ahead of your competition — time and again.About the authorJasmin Guthmann is the Head of Corporate Communication at Contentstack and Vice President of the MACH Alliance.Learn more about Jasmin