Composable without Compromise w/ Matt Webb

a little bit all right let's read our live and we were in the middle of a discussion and so how about we finish that math but before we finish um tell us who you are uh hey uh I'm Matt Webb I'm the group head of digital for lab group um my background is in Enterprise uh Global platforms predominantly in the uh martek stack um I've done my time putting in monoliths around the world building teams around the world but I spend a lot of my team my time now educating c-suites and marketing teams and sort of mid management upwards on uh the art of the mac and composable so that's why I'm talking to you today all right and we already have somebody saying hi Ben what's up thank you for sending us a lovely um comment um so as we were just talking we just continued talking so anyways um this is the um composable without compromise stream where we basically interview people like Matt who are in the space understanding the thing and are also able to talk about it so it's not purely technical and so that's why we're here today and what I tend to do in these streams is we started off with a little bit of agency news to you know get the things flowing and Matt feel free to actually um comment on any of those that you find here so let's start with that once we're done we'll dive into the the main event basically so today in industry news we actually have a really cool thing where the Mac Alliance um came up with a Manifesto for gender equality um and they had a lovely event and I think it was in Spain right in Madrid yeah I think so yeah and a few of my colleagues were there and it was a really really cool event and with that they actually came up with this Manifesto and so I think it's important and Matt you just told me that you showed this to your daughter this is so cool can you say a bit more about that yeah I do I mean I'm quite passionate about this this is something that um I think when you look like me and you sound like me and you're the age of of me here I am um you don't you don't kind of be want to be part of the problem and I think there's a lot of people uh who are who are in our kind of camp that are part of the problem so um I was just kind of proud of this moment proud to be part of this organization and particularly you know the the work they're doing with gender equality in the Mac Alliance so it was just a really cool thing that it was one of those share over the dinner table I got an 11 year old who's just sort of thinking about you know life and what she wants to do and it was just a really cool thing to share yeah exactly I really really love this thing um so on to the next and so there's this new thing coming out that we call dxc right most people that watch this might know what DX p is Right which is a digital experience platform but a platform is not really what's solving the problems here at the moment in the Mac world because a platform kind of wants you to be all in one encompassing and then connecting the things together and where you have dxc is actually doing similar things but having these connections very Loosely coupled and allowing marketers to do a lot more easy things to make Pages or to do stuff with data and stuff and so I thought why not post a blog post here that kind of explains it in the eyes of how a marketer or content editor would be happy with that so Matt have you heard about this DXE thing yet uh I have and it's been a it's been an interesting term because there's a bit of controversy around using another set of acronyms oh yeah but but to be honest it feels like it I mean again we're going to talk about it now but it feels like it's a good time to start explaining this again I think there's been a lot of acronyms that have promised a lot in the past and I quite I quite like this I think this is going to work for a lot of people yeah I I agree I'm fully in that camp and because of that um oh before I go to that let's go to this one first because in the mecca lines there's a ton of different um companies in there from agencies that build projects but also from startups like where I work for example and all of these have jobs and even in the time of recession this thing is booming and so the mecca Lions actually created a page with the whole job board for all the members and I thought it would be worth actually sharing it like if you are looking for a job and this is a nice place to go because it teaches you who is in the alliance what they do but also what kind of jobs they're looking for and then lastly this is actually a little bit of a plug into this DXE thing again because where I work at uniform this is kind of what we serve right we're we're building a thing that actually does dxa and with that in mind to kind of help people understand what this thing is from both business side but also Tech I actually came up with a newsletter in which I will share like news and learning articles about dxa and I'm trying to Define what it is inside this newsletter because it's still so new and perhaps um once we go into the actual talk with Matt here today we will learn um all the basics right and then maybe where DXE fits to work the end let's let's see if we get there um Matt um but before we jump in we have one thing that we both kind of liked and um because Matt and I both come from agency and we dealt with a lot of really smart people both in agencies but also on the client side and or maybe even at Partners right and the talent density that we're dealing with that with people that move around that now go to like mid market and up Market places that are starting to build really cool things is the talent density is huge now it's amazing and so Matt what what is your opinion here I I again this is something that I I talk a lot about I was really lucky to be part of a sort of large wpp organization as a global CTO for that kind of organization and I would spend most of my time with c-suites and middle managers trying to explain to them what this amazing technology can do and it was always really hard because I wasn't really ever talking to my peers at that level I was talking to people who are either a little bit stuck in their ways if I'm honest or have just heard about so this Tech but didn't really understand it what we're seeing now and especially over the last five years is this huge shift where a lot of senior people and experienced people that come from the agency side have gone into vendors they've gone into clients conversations are a lot easier now I'll also say agencies can't get away with pulling the wool over their eyes of their clients anymore which is a great thing for our industry um I'm just seeing this kind of interesting shift it's there's a lot of honesty and in those conversations now it's exciting times yeah and I really like that um because these people are going to let's say either fenders or maybe even the clients that we used to deal with they are now doing their own homework they're learning a lot about what they might like or what they don't like so now when you are working at a fender and you you used to be able to just sell because of your name that's not really flying anymore you kind of just have to deal with people who did their homework and had the same job as you before perhaps yeah sure yeah come on oh my God on the on exactly that point on the agency side um it's it's actually really cool now to see those uh kind of clients want to build their own teams and it not be a threat so back in the day if you heard that your client was building a technical team or a ux team or an experience team it would be a threat whereas now it's like well they can build their bit of it and we can either do this the the kind of high value strategy stuff and the augmentation as well and it all fits together without a fight exactly because it's composable it's puzzle pieces you can actually kind of divide and conquer which probably fits really well in whatever Matt wants to talk about that was a it's a fun bridge that happened this is right this is why you're the professional at this stuff oh boy here we go all right so what do you want to talk about today man so I what I've done is I've brought a collection of the types of topics that I've I've mentioned on on this kind of chat now but the the the slightly softer side to selling and explaining composable technology um I'm a great believer in the mindset of of how you approach technology projects I was a believer in this even in the monolith days but I have to say it's far more important now in the in the composable sort of age um especially with um people as I say on the on the client side understanding this world it's really around how they run their team so I think what I want to do today is just take you through and I'd love you know I'd love it if you chip into him and just just kind of comment on these slides because this is a collection of slides we've used for a couple of events we've used them in front of clients and it's really to address this idea that you don't have to be a full-on techie to understand this stuff uh you don't have to have an old school I.T mentality and also run the kind of program management and also I want to kind of demystify the some of the scary elements that people think of when they think of posable so that's what it is it's a loose collection of slides to just to chat about um again if anything about it then they can afterwards nice all right um I like the fact that you're talking about the scary bits because it can be very daunting to say okay I have this huge stack it's very complex because I have a big business and it has some Legacy and some new stuff and now I have to do this other thing again because my boss has fomo right yeah you kind of like now what I might want to do this job for two years I'm gonna make my life hard or not like these are the conversations we're still having imagine that yeah exactly I think the other thing just to kind of point out and I haven't I've deliberately omitted some of the kind of really nerdy slides um but one of the things when we talk about when we talk to say cios and ctOS they're already running their teams in a way that can handle composable technology so they already probably have Micro Services teams and things like that yeah so there is a kind of a whole presentation to do around it's just the next evolution of micro uh microservices um but I think for this one um what I was going to do is just rattle you through I think you know you've already introduced me I was just going to say that obviously I have to declare my allegiances to the Mac Alliance so there we go the uh kind of group head of digital for lab group um I was on the tech Council actually with you Tim for the first two years of the Mac Alliance and I'm still an ambassador um at the Mac Alliance so if I sound like I drank all the Kool-Aid it's because of drank called the Kool-Aid well you did same for me yeah so yeah so let's just get into this so the the um sorry Tim I can hear my own voice back just sorry to just oh yeah let me just um put my screen down a bit my my audio better now yeah perfect thank you so um the the kind of interesting intersection of time now is we're at a place where and you just called it out because of the kind of dxc thing um we're at a place now where you can I won't use it but you could almost argue that the term best of breed is a viable conversation right so we don't use that because it's been so tarnished but we talk about the kind of Mac maturity so all the products that are there not necessarily all the ones that are in the Mac Alliance but you know they're all of that kind of world that exists to it to integrate and if you tie that to a composable mindset you build yourself this kind of opportunity to potentially never re-platform again so that's that's really what we're kind of talking about um Tim I know that you've kind of heard me talk about this a thousand times apologies but our flavor in life is to talk about flexibility as a strategy and that's three things feel free to steal this it's not necessarily allowed I think it's something that we preach to other people to hope that they adopt and that is having a technical platform or infrastructure or architecture that allows for any scale of change having the confidence to change so knowing that if you were to change something in that it's not going to break everything but then the focus of this kind of conversation which is having that kind of mindset and being organized as an organization to be flexible so knowing that your teams can handle the rapid pace of change the multi-vendors the ability to spin up different products and run Innovation projects alongside your kind of big big kind of main show so that's the that's the kind of three pillars that we adhere to um I think it's worth just for the people that have tuned in just to remind them that when we talk about Mac we're talking about quite a technical acronym so we're talking about Microsoft Services apis cloud and headless Tim and I can probably talk for you know a few centuries on that architecture it's just that you want to mean something else every week right yeah I guess the important thing is is that a lot of this technology has been around for a long time so if you look at microservices it's been around from the 70s apis have been around for a very long time cloud has been pretty much um a big part of our Lives since the mid-2000s and actually it goes back a lot further and headless again goes back about 10 years but you can you can trace its history right right back so this isn't something that everybody should go oh that's the next new thing it's just an acronym that describes a collection of technology so apologies for the tech nerdout but um I just thought it was worth mentioning so Timmy UK if I share the really ugly uh slide that explains the differences between Mac and monolith are you prepared for this almost because before you go there I have a question on flexibility because you were just sharing that whole thing about how flexibility is so important and do you actually have customers that want that flexibility because in my experience up until a few years ago because I'm no longer at an agency it was so hard to get anything done that thinking of flexibility is like Miles Ahead they just want to get the thing live like flexibility didn't really count as much even with the huge clients we both worked for because this is hard to do hashtag recently changed I I don't think it's recently changed I think it's been changing the two things I think are driving it number one and I'm sorry to use the word and I thought I think the environmental factors I think covid uh really shook a lot of our industry up look at that massive Rising e-commerce that's currently plus selling yeah look at the way that people had to adapt they knew that any changing environmental circumstances and there are huge businesses that took advantages and there are huge businesses that went out of business because of environmental changes so I didn't get the world learned a lesson or the or the Markham and and Technology World learn a lesson um I think uh if I'm being really honest the second thing is is choice so this availability of all of the cool things you can do now um in our kind of event this week um one of the chaps that we had up on stage X kind of super dry and um ex-whip bread um he was a really he's a really smart Chap and he said that he said something really interesting about the kind of choice um and and one of the one of the factors there is this kind of importance of really sticking to what your core kpis are not your micro kpis so you've got a lot of people talking about the massive range of flexibility uh you've got the massive range of interoperability and then that brings up brings about a massive amount of choice so flexibility yes but but it comes with the caveat of don't focus on the minutia and I think that's a good thing yeah I'll have some opinions down the road but let's go to that fantastic slide I'm waiting for it it's it it's just that I've been beating up for this slide since I since you know really existed because as you can tell my uh my Google slides and PowerPoint skills are not are not uh that's a front-end developer I just don't like the spacings because why they're not the same right these kind of things is what you're going to get I changed them just before this uh so I guess the way that we describe this and this is where um if I'm talking to a non-technical audience it's really important to show this to explain uh the the sort of credibility behind how these things are fitted together but very quickly move on but just for the sake of argument on the left hand side um is really a kind of traditional stack so there's all different ways of showing this but really what we're talking about is the front of your stack is the desktop the mobile the app the tablet those types of things generally the rendering for how their their polish push that is controlled by the monolith that monolith could be any number number of well-known Global organizations that provide web publishing content so I can't kind of probably ought not to mention any names now but I think most of us know who the big kind of five are um they're how you usually handle the tagging the tracking they usually handle the code they usually have some sort of custom logic in there they usually handle the editing the workflow uh the content hierarchy they sometimes have this ability to plug in their own e-commerce and also their own data they then usually do integrate and whilst these Solutions have been brilliant and I you know I started kind of putting them in in 2002 right so we started to use these things a long time ago um and they've been brilliant the problem now is that everybody's looking at them saying well why would I why would I pick this one thing to do all of these disparate jobs in this whole world of different expectations and distant different customer needs um yeah historically what again you and I found this one working projects together is you find it very difficult to integrate with a lot of these these tools they say they integrate but they don't so what we say now is on the right hand side is what we would talk about a composable or a Mac stack so this is where and and very deliberately there are more front end end points on this slide because with more flexibility around the products that serve that front end we're able to add more things as and when they come about without them necessarily needing a huge platform update to say can you do me a PDF rendering front end or can you do me this version of a desktop or can you do me this version of an app endpoint what what the other important thing without going into all of the weeds of this is underneath how all these things are integrated is this this idea that you can go to different vendors to tie these things together right so if you really need a particular if you have a particular search and merch need or a particular Ecom need or a particular account management needs these are things that you can now go to a vendor that does this very particularly and we you know we've got examples of vendors that we love because they're so easy to set up we love some of the search vendors that are out there we love some of the content Management systems that are out there and we can now pick and again I'm going to use it probably for the second and last time this idea of best of breed I think just to kind of Nod to uniform for a second one of the advantages we've got with customers who are worried about how they all stitch together is we can use we can use platforms like Solutions like uniform that kind of tie them all together and then they feel a little bit more like it's less of a jump from the monolith to a set of disparate services so there is that halfway house but for the sake of the art the diagram it's about pick what's right for your business and piece it together and what's interesting here is and I've only recently learned this even though I've been working with this stuff for a long time is I'm a developer right I come at it from a production standpoint and to me what it tends to look like is I'm just going to build the best website for the end user no matter what that's always been my approach to it and all the Technologies you have how you organize your teams the whole thing and then recently I saw this very interesting live stream where people said hey we moved away from the monolith to this whole composable thing and I looked at the website it wasn't that good and I didn't get it and then what I realized through some cheeky questions that I asked um as as in is this the website you built and they're like really proudly said yes of course and what they learned is that the internal processes of it teams and Tech teams and agency Tech actually changed completely from where you have a monolith where people said like the boss would say I need a wish list this Christmas I know we don't have it yet but just build it for me and then you're like oh but it's already October that's never gonna happen right and they moved from that discussion which is always a fail for everybody to you want it this week or next right that's a very different discussion that you have on the client side or at the agency side because there's this extra magic here that you have flexibility of what you choose how you do it all the things and so even if you then still build a crappy thing on the front end you have completely changed the narrative and I think that's a pretty important part here as well that 100 it I think the other part to this is when you've got a particular problem on an existing solution and you wish that you'd um you wish that you didn't have to deal with and again just going back to the Legacy world yeah that's just how the workflow Works in this system or that's just how it's gonna I mean I pick on search quite a lot because you remember the days when it used to be two weeks just to set up an initial kind of solar search or oh yeah kind of leucine it was horrendous and yeah it was never right the first time it was always a kind of refactoring process which yeah it's very complicated yeah exactly and now we're in a world where you can just swap it out so for that for the search index the other day in five minutes 10 000 items everything index exactly how I want it's crazy yeah it's beautiful and it's and the thing is we sort of feel like we're um uh sort of either cheating a bit or not being truthful but I definitely think uh the more people who see this and see the benefits definitely question why they would go to the same vendor okay on on this again don't laugh this slide's been around for a long time so um this is the if you're if you're talking to an audience and if anybody's watching this and they just need a way of representing this to their teams this is the one we use so we talk about if your monolith is this huge RV that you've paid a lot of money for it's been running for quite a few years it still runs it works just fine it gets you up the mountain but it gets you to the campsite but no further it you it runs okay it's not very fast uh it really annoys you that it's only got four beds and you wish you had you wish you could change the engine and you can't right so it's that kind of analogy for the kind of big monolith whereas if we look at an analogy I'm sorry it's all car related It's My Life um if if um if we look at the kind of analogy we would use for a composable Max stack people say well isn't it just a load of pieces put together that you have to be a mechanic it's like no no no you don't have to be mechanic you now have to hit your tow bar you now have to do the kind of relevant Integrations but the main point is you get to the campsite you can set up a camp but then you can drive somewhere else you can experiment with somewhere else you want to go further up the mountain you can do it the next year you come back and you go you know what that wasn't right for me I need a much bigger trailer or I need road tires on my truck you these are the things that you can do with the composable stack I know it's a Cheesy analogy but it's it seems to be working and again if anybody's listening and has marketeers to talk to this is quite this this analogy does work for people who are going I just don't understand and to your point earlier Tim I don't understand why I can't get the flexibility why are you talking to me about a nine month program to build just another microsite you know why or I've just decided that I want to experiment pushing data out to our app and the IT team said no no that doesn't we can't do that we'll have to employ a different agency to do that with this way of thinking you you literally look at the vendors that will work with your existing composable stack you work with your it team to work out how you can integrate them and then you write a roadmap for that integration and test it usually and we'll come on to in a bit you can do proof of Concepts relatively quickly the thing though and this analogy still works pretty well the hump to get over to get this composable thing running is slightly higher though it's not like you buy an RV and you're and you're driving in five minutes exactly how strong is my engine can it actually pull this thing and what do I need on my roof maybe extra solar panels just to be safe so there's this little extra work that you have to get in and actually work through to get started and this is always kind of the the play you have between how cool and easy it is but to get started it is actually what you see in another in in next slides that it is actually easy to get started if somebody helps you yeah but the the mental investment is a little high but then once you're in it's awesome right and I I always try to also give that point here because I I agree I think one of the one of the problems that we've got in our industry now particularly and it surrounds actually the Mac Alliance is that um and we have this kind of conference a few couple of months ago which was the Mach 1 conference it's really interesting to see these huge organizations get up on stage and go this is so much better this is a such you know such flexible opportunity to innovate to do more things to get to New Markets however do not underestimate the Integrations or the cost it's not necessarily going to cost any less first time round and I think that's one of the things that people get a little bit kind of tripped up on however total cost of ownership is obviously a lot lower because you can do much more with it yeah and also things like your I your devops team is going to be a lot smaller for example if you use all these SAS systems something wrong goes wrong there you just point the finger and they'll have to fix it it's not your problem like we've had agencies we helped try to pitch to a customer with where the customer had like four agencies to just do one side and then plugging in uniform we could eliminate three agencies which kind of they of course obviously didn't like but that's that's the other side of the thing The Innovation is changing and people that try to remain very sticky with their customers by doing the thing they have been doing for 15 years yeah right I think I think you're doing everybody effect and it sounds awful but you're doing everybody a favor because you're forcing them into a more modern technology stack so they're doing that to the agencies and you're doing that to the clients the lovely thing is this customer really wants to and then you see these agencies scrambling to stay sticky and you're like come on that's not the best for your customer it's good for your wallet obviously but it's an interesting play to see um happening on on the last point on this slide is on that wallet point so so a few years ago um we we saw this kind of rise in consumption based pricing for a lot of the monoliths and everyone this is great this is going to work and it was horribly complicated and the biggest frustration people had is that the way that consumption-based pricing really works is if you start to see massive value with the additional costs and the uplifting traffic customer speed that type of thing but of course the monoliths struggle to do that so with composable all the line items are there you can see exactly what's performing you can see exactly where you're getting your return and investment and you don't mind paying a little bit more if you're getting a 50 uplift you don't mind paying five percent more on a 50 uplift so that's the other thing I think is working I'll shut up on the slide now so just just that's the kind of mentality of composability um but just really quickly uh coming away from the terms the terms that we use when we're being really techy so I think you and I you know we talk a lot about Mac um and we talk about the kind of technology that sits with underneath that one of the things that tends to happen to me on the agency side is clients will then say yeah but I've got this Legacy system that I really need to integrate with and we go yeah we will and unfortunately I think over the last few years a lot of people have said yeah Mac can integrate and do everything at the top and then we'll try and integrate with your legacy system so that's slightly different to having a composable mentality which is I actually want to make the best use and and you know just shout out to uniform we've used you guys to integrate with Legacy systems to lift and shift away from that Legacy system over time that's more of a composable mentality than it is saying we're just gonna move to Mac and it's a safe path because it's not a big bang release which makes it very interesting yeah exactly so just it was just to kind of attach that terminology so when we when again this is gonna going to make a few people win so no but this is the cycle right I've actually put the dxp term in here right so again old slide and some other people have seen this before but every few years you know you look back over the last what 15 years every three years oh no my Tech's outdated oh look a shiny new CMS oh no it doesn't do what I thought it was going to do oh cool we've got this thing called dxp now let's have a look at that huge drop off huge disappointment cost you much too inflexible so then let's look at this new thing and people are a bit tired people are a bit fed up with doing this thing every three years so this is just I know I'm staying the obvious but it's just a kind of if you've got to put yourself in the shoes of the people who've paid a lot of money and then to your earlier points in this idea that if I'm joining a company for three years um and to help them migrate away do I want to be wearing this cycle to want to be well you want to be in the place where it just shifts away from it right so this is our this is our method cheesy slide actually for the did it for the University a while ago but um what we tend to do is we go right here's all the things that really annoy me about the platform and then we say and here's my wish list and then we used to go away and try and find one Platform One monolith and got as close as we could right it's like even saying it out loud now seems insane right I've done these Discovery faces like a three-month Discovery where you would just find another big one that Canada had the puzzle pieces slightly different it's kind of fun that I we actually made money on doing this well the thing is you know if I'm being honest agency life this is what it was like yeah I mean we started an agency in 2001 um and you know we became part of wpp and then we became part of another organization but it was the same mechanism until about five years ago I reckon I started working with I think it was contentful in 2017 on a project that was pretty early on yeah um so just again just getting away from that and just again keeping in keeping your head within the kind of mindset so what tends to happen and apologies to everybody who's hot on this term you get a group of people and they go yay we need a digital transformation and that's it's like a red rag to me because it's it's basically means a big consultancy can come and charge a load of money and go yay let's do digital transformation and I think I've seen that person so have I right so we just want to we just want to call out if you're going to do digital transformation that's fine prescribe what it is and what you're looking at if you're talking about total digital transformation you're not replacing PCS on people's desks their marketing campaigns their branding and all of their outbound you're not replacing that you're picking a particular window right so you'll probably have to hire a scrum trainer sorry I just had to put it in there there's there's a whole lot well this but I think it's just if somebody says to you right if we're going to move from monolith to Mac let's do a digital transformation we've there are other ways and this is kind of what this is right so you and I you know we've worked together on projects where we've taken a client from a monolith to a Mac one of the things we always say is try and make sure that your first test your first test of your foray into composable and Mac it includes some of your existing infrastructure don't run a test in isolation there's always adding features yeah so the the the aim of the exercise here is over time with no disruption to your services and I'm not saying this is easy this is like a magic wand Integrations are hard right so if you're integrating with your existing monolith it's even harder integrating even between things we know integrate well requires thought and effort but to move from one monolith to another requires even more for an effort and requires and just builds in a massive amount of risk so include part of your monolith include part of your program that will also take in the technology out of it force you to include team members from the existing team that you won't ostracize a team member because they only know about this particular monolith you can say right you're the data guy you're just the data guy you're the damn guy the CMS guy the content guy the editor the marketer you're including those people and I think it's a it's a weird huge thing it's very important yeah like what you see in these kind of systems that you're outlining here is that you're kind of reducing the monolith to a place where domain data lives and it just becomes a source people that are expert in dealing with that domain data they keep their job because they've been trained for five years on how to content edit something in the demo yeah whatever even if it's not used for that anymore they're still worthy to be in that whole family of people absolutely and you also give them the opportunity to learn about different ways of doing things it means that if they're then comparing one of the you know we all know this that when you compare a monolith CMS to a headless cmsa people some clients will go I don't understand the editing experience they can't see the editor the wysiwyg editor right I have not seen one customer who understood it I'm sorry but I've not seen one success story where they had the CMS where they really understood what they were doing without some sort of preview or help from a developer exactly so the the problem with moving straight from monolith to Mac without this bit in the Middle where this human kind of connection is you people are always going to be comparing apples or pets and they're going to get very frustrated and then they're going to go you know what screw it let's just go to this other monolith and let's go for what fits the easiest whereas if you take it the other way on and you take them on this journey they can start to see the advantages and understand the advantages of these different worlds we've we've got a client who's recommended to us again this Search opportunity because they've started they've started to understand this world they've realized the opportunities and they've even started looking up the technology themselves so these are not technical people this is great kind of examples of people understanding the art of the possible and and again I'm a techie right I've been a CTO for 20 years I I absolutely believe that it's about the hearts and minds of the people that are involved so again it's a Cheesy slide but it's a good way of explaining real life projects and again this is taken from one you and I worked on you know three years ago well and you know what I've actually had incredible success with this model that you just shown here where a customer was stuck with one of these monoliths for like 15 years and the deploy was 48 hours for like a CSS change or a copy change and it would always go wrong like mid mid release and they have to roll back and then this customer said yeah but we're gonna have to release every two weeks at least because then we have this he just wondered it we didn't know why but then we had this project where we decided you know what let's start small and just replace the front end at least so the rest says the same so the model that was here and we just created like a little layer that became an API made a front end but they didn't want to wait for a year for the whole thing to be a new front end so what we did is we actually redesigned the website and we implemented the new design in the new stuff and in the old stuff so the stakeholders would monthly every Sprint see new designs so oh fancy new website and then some pages would be incredibly fast another would be very slow and they wouldn't really realize what is happening but some pages were the whole new front end with the same design as the old one and in about a year and a half ish the full front end was there and then that back end could be attacked by adding something like algolia and culinary or I think they probably had some other damn system and slowly but surely it goes to the third pillar where the monolith is basically gone yeah and I don't understand I don't want to kind of do the kind of Shameless plug but one of the things that um we we do with you guys is when people feel that they're really stuck we can we can migrate just a few pages their men say so you look at a kind of let's say you look at a 600 page website and you go well actually only five percent of those pages are heavily hit so let's migrate those five pages through uniform we can hoover the rest through um yeah and although we won't recreate those pages and and I think if I'd have tried to explain that three years ago to people I think they would have got a little bit kind of sounds like it's gonna break right now the tech is there however I do want to address one point about these let's say headless cms's right where the editing experiences is actually different um it is really challenging for Content errors to actually deal with that so what is your experience there so it depends if you've taken them on the Journey of um a sort of content architecture piece so if they if they're seeing their existing site so it's a really big site if they're seeing that as we've got all of these pages uh then it's difficult whereas if you like this diagram that we have here if you're taking them partly on this journey they start to understand this idea of what a good content hierarchy can do for them how they can surface that content in different places and then they start to have conversations around well actually I'd really like to separate my content out in these kind of boxes buckets flows and then you say well what's the best editing experience to support that and then you look at some of the great content editors out there where you can say well actually do you really need a page view to do a um a slug on a page that's going to go out to a news article and to these other headlines so you generally you don't what you really want to do is understand where it might end up in which case you don't really want a page editor so for the clients that really want a pages so we use some pretty clever Tech to give them those kind of page renderings and you see it in preview mode there's quite a few CMS systems that do that um we thought that most of of the clients that I want to take advantage of a really good content hierarchy and that kind of dissemination of content in a really clever way they're not so worried we do however just sort of to complete that Circle we still have clients that they fund it's fundamentally about their content editors you know churning out content and and frankly we've even got a couple of clients who are using headless WordPress on because of exactly that reason oh that's the system they feel comfortable with right yeah that's the thing yeah yeah I mean I I wanted to shoot it down but when you see it's what it's being used for it's doing fine right it's not it's a basic content when you're not really worried about content hierarchy you just need the pages out I don't I don't like it because I'm a purist but um I get I get why people would want that um but I do think if you can take people on the Journey of what a good content hierarchy looks like if you've taken them through some training around how to think about their content as ever living and then being assembled in the future in different ways then the content editing experience becomes less of a problem all right good to know cool so um this always happens to us we Ramble On and oh yeah let's just go to the next slide and find the next round I just um it was it was actually just a kind of infer the point from before when I said look at the top of the composables that there are different things um one of the things that people um sort of get stuck on is well how many times they're going to switch out my search how many times I'm going to switch out my payment Gateway how many times I'm going to switch up my damn and and generally that's not what we're talking about we're talking about if you have a new market I'm a big fan of connected experience as you know I'm a big fan of physical and digital like retail sites where you've got to connect with the customer in store as well as online on their phone on their work laptop I love that kind of world I love the physicality of everything you see the rubbish behind me in terms of connected experience and iot so if you've got that world and we were talking to a retail client uh retail clients mainly mainly this week um so if they've got a new opportunity you with a client telling app or a point of sale system if you if you look at how you would have to integrate that with an old school monolith that'd be a pain um whereas if you look at it from a composable point of view you're literally talking about adding on something that's already probably a SAS platform usually when it's clientele or pass comes with its own Hardware usually has an API we can integrate with so you're talking about adding on something you're not necessarily talking about swapping out the fundamentals of course you can swap out the CMS if you need to but that's it's not a plug and play right it's it's more Plug and Play than it ever was but you can't just kind of magically swap it you actually can but this is not a uniform marketing tool here you can if you've done it with uniform you can actually think of it one step further where in your CMS you no longer compose pages but you just store your domain data there if you compose elsewhere you can map the data to whatever you're composing and then switching a CMS is actually easy but that's a very different mindset that we're working with but it's quite interesting I I think we we use this way of talking when we talk about flexibility for the actual Tech and the exactly is around customer engagement so how can people predict what their next level because if you're a if you're a B2B site then chances are you're not going to have much innovation in the in-store experience right you're not going to have you might have a few outlets and things like that whereas if you're a huge retailer you you don't know what the next device is going to come along and do you don't know what the next point of sale system you don't know whether your foray into install augmented reality is going to be a success or a failure but if you want to try it you know we've got you know those um huge Hollow blades and we've got clients who are using those how can we make those part of the system so they're not just Standalone I hate I hate innovation in a silo as you as you've heard me about a lot of us but but now you can do it as part of your system without breaking your core platform so that's all this is all this slide really says but like there's actually an example I could give that makes this quite tangible where we used to work for a Cosmetics company and what they wanted to do during Corona is still try on lipstick for example in-store or hair coloration but not go to a teller or ask somebody in the shop and so they integrated like a little Google Lens thing yeah that would scan a product and then Google would know about the product because we implemented a little microservice for Google to scrape and then it would actually know the product and would open a little app that we made that talks to our own database with all the Bim stuff all the products and then actually shows you a makeup tutorial and you can try it on live with the camera and then buy it there and then don't go to the to the lady behind the counter but then just leave yeah and that was like a project and the hardest thing was to figure out Google's way of giving metadata to a product page so it understands what you're scanning that's like a month last if I didn't have a whole team it would have been three days that's exactly it and I love it because it just became part of the ecosystem it's not a silo thing at all no completely no and again it just it's just to try and make the point that if you think your business doesn't need to innovate over the next few years then you know maybe maybe Mac isn't isn't right for you right it's not right for everybody um so the the only thing just to kind of mention when you're trying these tests and trials is whether you're doing a huge monolith to Mac migration you're doing step by step or you're doing that kind of innovation like project on the side one of the advantages that we're seeing because you can spin up in the cloud because it's SAS because you can use apis is the gap between your proof of concept and your MVP is much smaller this is super nerdy I'm well aware that I sound like a Management Consultant when I talk about this stuff but I it used to be the other way on so people would get their ux and their prototype so you go your Discovery you do your ux and your prototyping which is generally Lo-Fi clickables and then your proof of concept was really just to say will the text sort of work right so you take your main data fields your main API connection you plug it all together that that would be then a huge gap to get it to production ready so that you could go to MVP what we're seeing now is it's sort of on its head because the second you can connect to a search or you can connect to a CMS or you can present data in a particular format or use a particular tool that's it that's the way that it works so although it's not a complete flat line between POC and MVP there is definitely not the step that there was five years ago it's quite as I like I've seen pocs being at like 70 percent maybe of an MVP it's quite close yeah um and I think that the it also helps us with the terminology because people used to kind of argue about you know what's a prototype what's a POC what's an MVP but now you can say yeah but my POC is going to be all of the functions are going to be indexing everything or returning everything I'm gonna have most of your assets in the dam and I'm gonna also do it all in the cloud so you won't you don't even have to give me a credit card detail at this point it's all going to cost you pennies just to test it so that's the kind of world we live in um if my boss is watching she's going to go don't don't don't hold them to that say these things but yeah there you go I guess 10 minutes left yeah I mean again the the only other things were really just headline facts so just going back to that point around choice just to hammer it home if anybody's seen this this is was the kind of martech 1000 or I think it was a side of his mask like 500 there it's like martek three thousand four thousand five thousand that's the mountek nine thousand eight hundred right so you absolutely businesses have the choice in all the and I mean it's so small you can't even read it on these slides right so there are enough vendors out there um and my argument for anybody that says oh it's too much Choice let me go back to a monolith is would you go to one vendor to build you two entirely different products you know that I've used the Lamborghini here but because it's another car analogy but it would be insane if you went to a building Merchant to build you the the kind of pieces for your house and build you an engine block it would be insane right so yeah and you end your sound system like at the same time like Main makes no sense and and I think as soon as you start using the kind of human angle it it sort of works for people um the the other one I was just going to hit on and again it's a bit of a wordy slide but when we talk about no more need to re-platform just to hit home this idea that if you then pick those vendors that are built to integrate you know that you've got the flexibility and you can customize you know that you've not got this single point of failure and that's one of the things that's you know I've had sleepless nights in projects all over the world where I'm just worried about a certain monolith falling over or I can't get the developers I can't get this particular skill set so that's a big big thing for me the one that seems to resonate with most people just from uh just speaking from somebody who's sort of trying to explain it is this idea that you have no downtime due to updates you're always on the latest version this is a real mental shift and I think one of the problems is people like you and me we over techify it to start yes and I think we need to go no no no no just go back to your last five five years look at how much downtime you've had due to updates how much cost and how much external agency cost now we're in a world where you're always on the latest version so that's the that's just a one to kind of I don't know hit hit home I think for us um last just sort of wrap up these kind of these they're basically just five bullet points really so these are the ones that we use quite a lot so I just steal stuff from the Mac Alliance I'm allowed to there you go we've still got that they they kind of run these incredible surveys um and in 2020 it was like 20 of people were suggesting they should move to composable 20 of these kind of tech leadership of these five fans 5 000 or plus employees and then you know last year it hit 79 it's it's this is crazy right so you know you think you're being people are doing this all around you if you're a tech leader why would you not look at this world and look at the look at the amount of people that um again go back to the job roles look at the kind of the the talent that we were talking about to start with a lot of this is it's not just the tech that's driving that it's the this kind of human need um just a slide on again stealing from the the kind of um Mac alliance's day um I took a few shots I've got a few of ours in there as well but they this idea that this is the world's biggest companies and the mid and smaller end it's not just the big boys it's not the guys who've actually done a huge digital transformation so this is really the mid Market that are starting to do it now I I have to say I think they're more interesting I I genuinely think that the mid Market is a super interesting space right now because they've kind of they know how the advantage they can take it's not like the big guys who are just looking for those margins and the survival of the next five years the mid Market can really eat the lunch of the big guys um however what I think is interesting here is the mid Market will do it at a certain scale but not at the crazy skill right if Amazon starts to do these things for their website up they probably are but whatever other company um they will start to notice the extra scale also brings more interconnectability between these tools yeah and they have to worry about the fact that they might be creating a Mac monolith right if you interconnect too deeply yeah how can you then switch something out again so there is a balance to be found at scale and so maybe it's a good thing that mid Market is trying these things out yeah figuring out hey maybe this was too much this is one integration too deep or my CMS now has 16 integration fields to all these types but then I need another CMS I'm going to do 16 Integrations again yeah I have a speculative um completely speculative theory about this which is the mid markets can't employ thousands of teams thousands of team members to handle Integrations yeah so there has to be Innovative Innovative right yeah and if you think about um the the Mac monolith uh problem you look at whether I better not say the names but you look at where that's happened and it's because they've hired hundreds and hundreds of developers to handle Integrations which means they formed their own inflexible processes exactly and it's an in-house problem so I think the mid-market is the really interesting space because they also know that they also know enough that they can Chuck out their agencies if they don't deliver which means you you get a comparison of how different people integrate these different vendors and these different pieces of software and it means that your internal team has to be super smart and know when they're being you know when something's not working um and I think you can't hide behind the old way which is oh it's just not working you can see exactly where it's not working now I love that it's completely open and yeah Matthias from file deck is actually sending us a lovely message here thank you Matt nice to see you man the back monolith I've got one one last thing just to shout out a lot of this data just again it's it's partly a plug as well um the the Mac Alliance we've mentioned quite a lot they've got a lot of This research that I've mentioned today there's a great report out the 2022 report out the reason I use this and I wrap up with this is it's got a lot of um uh information in there that's really digestible for everybody in kind of marketing you know cios ctOS but also the kind of the people on the ground who are just going to be using this stuff so that's my little plug for the Mac Alliance because I use a lot of their information I think a lot of us who are ambassadors do um but a lot of the way that I'm talking today around the human aspect of it comes from this kind of data as well yeah that's a really interesting one yeah thanks man this was um I love doing this slides where you normally do this in 20 minutes and then I just interrupt you to make it an hour and then we come up with fun stuff at I think that's great it's good fun yeah so other than um plugging a little bit of the Mac Alliance there's something you wanted to share maybe where you work or what you want to have people check out yes I suppose my only my only um suggestion would be that when we've talked a lot today about the different Technologies and we've talked about the approach towards those Technologies the reason I shifted years a little bit um was to kind of focus really on the intersection of customer experience uh Behavioral Science thinking about different ways of approaching your customers as I mentioned um a really great guy mentioned on stage this idea that don't focus on micro kpis so for me it's this we've got this kind of cool five companies within lab group and we're able to tackle all of those so we're able to tackle kind of your conversion rate optimization we're able to tackle Behavioral Science were able to tackle the corporate comms and ESG sort of comms were able to tackle really cool creative and connection to you know just to shout out to a previous client we were able to kind of hit you know thousands of 16 to 24 year olds to get data out of them about what they really wanted from their Ecom experience and then underpin it all with tech so it's that's the and I'm going to use the word and you can kill me for it later but that's the kind of authentic approach to understanding customers that I was kind of after and I think I'm sort of seeing in the mid-markets and up markets as well yeah I really enjoy the fact that the tech is out there right now to do those things for real yeah just like suddenly personalization is a thing you can just do because you have the tools and we've we've done something with you guys as well I mean we we took a Behavioral Science kind of demo oh yeah I remember that that's like a few months back right yeah it was a brilliant exit we used that exercise quite a lot to explain to people that you can portray the same content but understanding the behavior of a user profiling that user based on their behavior and then rendering the page differently not necessarily even the content but just the way that you're presenting that page exactly like the images bigger or smaller things like exactly yeah so that Tech's out there but it's just a case of not just getting wrapped up in the tech says the techie yeah exactly same here but you know what since that time Tech has changed again because now we are rendering these personalization things on the CDN Edge dynamically yeah so you don't even need the JavaScript and so that's a whole other story so let's not get there and not now we'll have a beer once and I'll show you some some extra fun stuff anyways um thank you so much and also thanks people for watching if you wanted to talk a little bit more about uniform you can go to Discord by that link or just go to that QR code so what is the URL for for lab Matt oh lab.credit UK easiest easy all right anyways uh thank you so much Matt and um yeah see you in the next stream cheers see you later buddy bye