--- title: "CDOBC Lesson 2: Intro to DXP - The DXP Dilemma" description: "Effective digital delivery demands collaboration between development, design and digital marketing. In this lesson we are going to cover things that get in the way of collaboration (e.g." date: "2022-02-18T16:24:57.000Z" url: "https://timbenniks.dev/videos/headless-creator/003-eybdyoihn1g" youtube_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EybDYOiHn1g" playlist: "headless-creator" image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EybDYOiHn1g/maxresdefault.jpg" tags: ["composable-architecture", "cms", "content-ops", "frontend", "devrel"] --- # CDOBC Lesson 2: Intro to DXP - The DXP Dilemma Effective digital delivery demands collaboration between development, design and digital marketing. In this lesson we are going to cover things that get in the way of collaboration (e.g. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EybDYOiHn1g ## Transcript [Music] well welcome welcome to the composable dxp with uniform boot camp course lesson number two intro to dxp the dxp dilemma today presented by tim bennex he's back he's the principal developer advocate at uniform if you want to learn more about him just watch the interview in the introduction section of this course on headlesscreator.com all right with that said tim welcome i'm going to let you take over and uh if anybody has questions i'll jump in and we'll go from there awesome thank you so much marcelo all right everybody happy friday as marcelo said um let's get kick this off so today this is boot camp lesson 2 and i want to be talking about the dilemma of the dxp and of course if you don't know what dxp is go back to lesson one so you get to learn all about it and so basically if we're talking about dxp um even if we have older systems or newer systems how you set them up and how your stakeholders work together can actually kind of limit um how smooth everything will run out and so um let's go to the slides and let's have a look so basically let's let's start with a statement right so act um effective digital delivery demands collaboration between development design and digital marketing and you might be thinking team yeah that's kind of captain obvious there right you kind of have to work together to be effective yes you do and you kind of often see that that doesn't really happen and that is generally the case because of how the architecture of your dxp has been set up even in the more modern composed architectures and that's the issue i want to talk about today so it get you get a bit more clarity on how these things work and how to avoid it right and so what i want to talk about is mainly stakeholders let's start with that because in a digital experience platform we're not only talking about the tools the headless cmss the front ends the things you connect together but you actually have lots of stakeholders that make this thing a success right so you have your product owners they are generally on the brand side they know exactly what the product is that that they make and they tend to prioritize things to do for the development team making sure they align with business values things like that that's a very important stakeholder i'm in the success of a digital experience platform then we have people like business analysts who are amazing at specking out user stories and user journeys and working with the product owner to actually make sure that these stories are mature enough so the developers get to work on them and then like we have a bunch of those right so also we have marketers and marketers make sure that the story is told the right story and that people can actually enjoy that story get connected to the brand and then maybe buy something and then with the developers that actually have to like tool it all together and after that you need to analyze your data and see if what you did was correct and if not you go back to the po and the whole cycle goes again and of course we have the the truth uh or how do you say the trusty content editors because without them that content is never there and you know what this is just a small group there's probably many more people that could fit in here and i wanted to talk about these because if these all work together really well effectively with the tech that you have chosen in your architecture you will have much more a much more easy way to have success in your digital delivery pipeline and so you also of course all these stakeholders have to work well with your cms but maybe also with personalization and they all have something to say about personalization but then in a different area right the developer might build it the product owner might know your personas or your intents the business analyst has to write it all out and so they all have something to say and they all need to be in these tools and then you have commerce you have search and that fits for all of those things and so what you'll see is that you have the stakeholders and the systems that have to work together and so basically the architecture that you set up when you get going will really be able to stall your digital pipeline and let's go back a little bit to what we used to have last week or two weeks ago about our monolith and our composed architectures because they both suffer from these issues right it's not only hey the old-school monolith will have these issues no like the composed architectures might have the same and maybe even worse um so let's talk about monolith and what is really hard when using these and generally they are pretty expensive licensing wise and they are not super flexible well they are flexible if you stay within the bounds of the monolith but if not it becomes pretty hard and by poor end user experience what i generally mean is the ability for front-end developers for example to do accessibility or performance or seo tuning things like that and the time to market could be quite slow if you go slightly off the path of the default accelerator that these systems give you and you really need specific fender um specialists to be able to actually build out these systems right you cannot just hire anyone and say hey go into this ecosystem that's been existing for 20 years and just deal with it so all those things um it's just it's a challenge for getting to work together right and they generally do not have a super good omni-channel delivery strategy because they might not have headless or they might have a little bit of headless and then it's it's not really an easy way to get that going um and then because of the way that these systems tend to be set up they won't be taking advantage of all the new modern development tools that you have and because of this you see quite often that the monolithic suite stays there as kind of a cms and then the front it is a separated thing and they built like an api layer in between like what if you didn't have to do that then it was already in place that would be much much nicer right and so they won't be able to take advantage of the ever changing nature of the composed world that we live in and of course it's single origin and that is pretty hard to scale because just imagine scaling mysql servers right those kind of things that that's just hard and this single origin kind of needs to is the brain of everything and so if there's lots of people calling that it will create a cue and so those are kind of the disadvantages in your architecture of monolithic suites that give you problems later on when you have to work together to get the best thing for every stakeholder in that dxp but when you go to this new fancy composed way of working you have um different problems but with the same kind of outcome right imagine you're thinking okay we're going to do a green field project and we have all these different parts and we have to put them together there's lots of choices to make right you have to think about okay i have some commerce i need a cms i need some marketing stuff for emailings i need crm i need personalization i need them and then you look at the field of what you can choose from and it's insane there's too many of all of those and they all kind of need to fit together and you know that that's a challenge and if you don't choose the right ones you'll have problems later on and integration is actually really complex between these and so how do you orchestrate them that's quite hard because think about let's say okay i'll have and have the cms but i need digital asset management as well and in ecommerce well there's many ways you can go about this but the way that we tend to see is that people use ahead the cms use an integration feature into the headless cms to push in the headless commerce and also using integration to push in the headless dam system but what happens if you need to change the cms or something somehow doesn't work you've created a really tight coupling in these systems and scaling them individually and then which api sli is is most important and it gets pretty hard right and so that's hard to do complexity in integration and orchestration and then what you see is that most of the time these new modern um composed systems are quite um developer focused i.t is very happy with them because it's all you know we speak data to each other that works but then if you are a stakeholder that does not speak in data but needs a drag and drop interface or something like that or what you see is what you get like thing it basically just doesn't work and we quite often hear the thing where a website is finished and a month after marketing wants to do a campaign and on that campaign they need a couple of products they need data from a global data set for legal and they need local data with images from a shoot and they need some personalization because maybe like women choose more than men so you need to do something with that well what then often happens is like okay we have all these headless systems all the things are there how do i now get one page on there that's new that didn't exist well you're gonna have to call the developer and say can you query all these things for me put them on a page and that's the work then right but quite often the developer says i don't have time i'm already working on other features version 1.1 of the site um didn't we build you a flexible system well no you didn't because for the developers it's super flexible they're very happy but all the other stakeholders cannot really work in it and that's quite challenging right and so that stalls your digital pipeline and you didn't even know that you you you did that because you were so happy it was all composed and real quick it almost feels tim uh real quick it almost feels like um by doing all that in integrating into the the the cms itself so it almost feels like it's a it's a monolith of multiple vendors almost right like yep it's tightly coupled now exactly and the funny thing is when you make a monolith of all these different vendors it actually becomes more complicated than when you had an official monolith because they all have different slas they have different contracts they have different support systems and the one thing i personally enjoyed a lot working with monoliths if it's broken i point the finger one plc yeah right they fix it in this case who do you point the finger to the agency that helped you integrate them all maybe the system itself maybe the the web hooks in between are not correct i don't know serverless functions somewhere so creating something that's tightly coupled like that it gets hard to orchestrate but it's also hard um organizationally right yep makes sense yeah and so based on what all these things is like okay we now every although all the technology is maturing all the stakeholders are maturing and we now know okay let's go compost and then you ask an agency or you look internally and you make some decisions generally not based on the value that you need but on the system that you