The Experience Factory is a collaboration by Valtech and Contentstack. It is a series about how modern digital teams orchestrate consistent, adaptive, and connected customer experiences.
This first post starts with a simple truth: experience is the real flagship. Not the website. Not the app. Not the platform. The experience itself.
Most brands today ship great digital touchpoints but struggle to make them feel unified. You can have best-in-class design systems, modern CMS setups, and a strong composable architecture, and still end up with a fragmented customer experience.
Let's break down why that happens and what to do about it.
TL;DR
If customers feel inconsistency, your experience operations are fragmented. The fix isn't just new tech, it's orchestrating how teams, data, and content work together.
The why
Every brand wants to be fast and consistent. CMOs talk about agility and personalization. CIOs talk about governance and scalability. Everyone wants transformation, but they often start from the wrong place.
Transformation isn't a replatforming exercise. It's a workflow problem.
Alignment is the real barrier. The stack modernizes, but the organization doesn't. Marketing still runs in campaign mode. Engineering still runs in sprint mode. And the content teams sit somewhere in the middle, trying to bridge it all.
The how
The most important mindset shift is moving from projects to products.
Projects are temporary. They have a start, an end, and a handoff. Teams spin up, deliver, then dissolve. Products are continuous. They have ownership, iteration, and feedback loops. And that's exactly how your digital experience needs to operate.
When every site, campaign, or microsite runs like an isolated project, you end up reinventing governance, content models, and design patterns over and over again. That's why even well-funded teams struggle to scale.
To orchestrate experience effectively, build product-like delivery models for experience. That means:
- Dedicated cross-functional teams that own end-to-end customer journeys.
- Shared systems for design, content, and data.
- Continuous improvement loops instead of one-off launches.
Once you treat experiences as living products, not projects, everything changes. Coordination overhead drops. Content velocity increases. And the customer feels the consistency.
To support that, focus on the loop: intent → creation → activation → learning. When that loop runs inside stable, product-oriented teams, your experience delivery becomes scalable and adaptive.
The tools matter, composable DXPs, APIs, automation, but the real magic happens when teams connect their work around shared ownership and ongoing iteration.
Challenges
Omnichannel is still hard, even for digitally mature retailers. Not because of tech, but because of orchestration. Most are great at running multiple channels, but not at connecting them.
They treat CMSes like publishing tools instead of content services. They structure content for output, not reuse. They personalize within channels, not across them.
The maturity curve here is steep. Designing for reuse, building unified identity models, and connecting analytics are not quick wins. They require ownership, patience, and process.
I like to call it adaptive experience choreography. It sounds artsy, but it's deeply technical. Done right, an update in one place intelligently adapts everywhere else.
Concluding
Success in this model isn't faster publishing, it's consistency at scale. The best metric I've seen is content velocity: how fast a new idea moves from strategy to live experience, without breaking brand or tech guardrails.
To get there, start small. Pick one journey or campaign and rebuild it end-to-end with a composable mindset. Focus on structured content, preview, governance, and feedback loops.
Because in the end, the brands that win aren't the ones that ship the most features, they're the ones that orchestrate the best experiences.
Watch the first episode here:
Additional links:
Frequently asked questions
What are signs of fragmented experience operations?
Inconsistent customer experiences, duplicated content, siloed CMS setups, and high coordination overhead are key indicators.
Why do transformation efforts often fail?
Because they start with technology, not workflow. Alignment between marketing and engineering is usually missing.
How can teams move toward orchestration?
Shift from project-based execution to shared systems, unified data, and connected feedback loops.
