Webinar

Kaitlin (00:00:05): Hey, everyone. Welcome to Beyond the Design System: Merging Data and Composable Experiences. We're going to give it a few minutes for people to come on in, and thank you for attending today.  
Kaitlin (00:00:33): This is a new time using this type of platform. I see just the three of us and who knows who's on the other side of that? So, if you are tuning in today from LinkedIn, welcome. We are so excited to chat with you today about composable experiences, about the future of CMSs, and about how technologies are coming together alongside the architecture and services around our solution providers. So, really happy for all who was able to make the time today. I know that we're here at the end of the quarter, it's been a busy few weeks, I'm sure, for a lot of you on the line and we're coming up on to this great holiday weekend. At least for those of us in the US; a few of our guests today are coming from Toronto and we just want to say thank you, first and foremost.  
Kaitlin (00:01:38): Few housekeeping items before we dive in. This session's going to be recorded, so keep an eye on your inbox and we'll follow up with the recording and other helpful resources. Please, please, please add your questions to the Q&A box, we'll be answering them at the end of the session. And then, of course, you will have the ability to get in touch with us after the event with a contact form that will be coming your way. You can also always reach out to us via Twitter, @contentful and then also write to us at kaitlyngreen@contentful.com or info@rangle.io.  
Kaitlin (00:02:22): So, today we are going to go through a lot of really exciting stuff. After introductions, we're going to just give you a brief overview on what is Contentful, what is Rangle, and then get right into the conversation. We're going throughout talking about composable experiences, we're going to touch on the evolution of CMSs, how they have come from all-in-one suite solutions through the headless notion and now to what we think of as a content platform. We're going to talk about design system evolution and what the future holds within micro frontends. We're going to talk about personalization, which is merging data, content, and design, tying everything together. And then taking a look at how those things come together with composable commerce; know a lot of the guests on line today are coming from the commerce industry and trying to look at how to serve their customers better, digitally, and with an agile E-commerce approach, we'll have touch on that. And then we're going to talk to you, too, about our DX launcher and our foundations workshops that both of our organizations provide to start opening the minds of these topics and how you can really utilize these notions and strategies to move forward within the content platform space.  
Kaitlin (00:03:43): Of course, we'll have time for questions as well at the end, so please add your questions to the chat throughout. So, without further ado, again, welcome. And we're so happy that you're taking the time today to listen to our conversation Beyond the Design System: Merging Data and Composable Experiences. I'm your moderator, Kaitlin Green. I'm Strategic Partnership Manager here at Contentful, leading our conversation today between Bertrand and Andrew based on my experience and background in technology, sales, and operations, digital transformation, the work I've done with the International SIs and full-service digital agencies over the past 10 years.  
Kaitlin (00:04:24): Joining us today from Rangle is Bertrand Karerangabo, Vice President of Digital Strategy. Bertrand has been with Rangle since its first year's business and leads Rangle's client advisory services, providing expert consulting on technology, strategy, and emerging tech. Bertrand and is joined by Andrew Kumar, Contentful's Director of Platform Strategy. He's a global leader of high performing and diverse digital teams; Andrew comes to us with 20 years in tech, marketing, commerce and content and has led nearly 50 digital products' applications and experiences, the builds leveraging Contentful in both customer and consulting roles. Andrew and Bertrand's current roles support teams tackling the most complex quality and scaling challenges, both from the platform and the services perspective. So, without further ado, Bertrand, I'm going to pass it to you to chat with us a little bit about who is Rangle and what do they do as a solution partner.  
Bertrand (00:05:25): Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Let's go to the next slide. So, this is Rangle at a glance. We're about 150 people across offices in North America and Europe. We've been in business for over eight years and I want to share a little bit about our worldview and I think it's going to sort of influence a lot of what we'll be discussing today. When we started Rangle, we saw a rapid explosion of digital products and services entering people's lives. And the consequence of that explosion in digital products was that more and more companies were competing on the basis of customer experience; customer experience itself wasn't a nice-to-have, it was a really a need-to-have.  
Bertrand (00:06:10): And so, Rangle exists to help companies compete in that setting because we think if companies actually deliver better user experiences, it's not just their businesses that do well, but society does well as well. And obviously, this landscape and the landscape that we're in today is highly competitive; industries are converging, the boundaries are blurring, and simply, traditional competitors are also reinventing themselves. So, Rangle's made up of product design and engineering talent that helps companies envision their future and start realizing it. And going to the next slide.  
Bertrand (00:06:50): So, we've worked with several companies and what we do with them is that we help them build products, transform existing one, but also scale their platform. The way we actually do it is we don't just come in and help build or improve those and leave, but we also help them use these initiatives to change the way that they compete, change the DNA of their companies. And so, that's the very core to how we think of ourselves as being different than other providers. Next slide. And in this case where Contentful comes in, obviously we'll be going to some of the details of this, but our partnership with Contentful is key to this. When we look at the market, we tried to partner with technology vendors, and best-of-breed suppliers to enable the future that we see occurring to enable our mutual clients to reach their goals and exceed the ambitions that they had set for themselves.  
Bertrand (00:08:09): Contentful itself to us, I think, fits in with this ecosystem that we see emerging in the market, and for all intents and purposes, we'll be going into some of those topics and I'll be asking Andrew to explain more of that as well. But certainly, again, Contentful here I think the point is that it's a key piece of this and we're really glad to be part of this webinar and maybe talk about why we think this future that we see, and Contentful, are a good fit. That's it for Rangle, I'll pass it back to you guys.  
Kaitlin (00:08:53): Sure thing. Thanks, Bertrand. Andrew, you want to chat us through the Contentful platform real quick?  
Andrew (00:08:59): Yeah. I'll give us a quick intro. So, for the audience members who may or may not know, we are Contentful. The quick intro here; I'm going to start off with an opportunity. So, this is from a Gartner report that 50% of large organizations will have failed to unify engagement channels. So, Bertrand talked a lot about customer experience, not all those customer experiences are unified or pleasant or fun or happy. You want to shift on to the next slide. So, this is the challenge that a lot of brands, a lot of organizations and a lot of customers are facing right now where they have fracture point solutions; the loyalty program, that'll be a different design, different tech stack, different operating model; landing page, global corporate website, product pages, commerce knowledge base.  
Andrew (00:09:44): They're all fractured point solutions that were built at a point in time and if they have different content, different design, different look and feel, it takes the end user away to figure out how to use it to find the information they're looking for. And the information might be contradictory, so if you're calling the call center, you get a certain set of information, you go in-store, it might be slightly different. You go online and you're like, "What?" It's just an unhappy experience for your customers. If you want to go to the next slide, please.  
Andrew (00:10:12): This is where we see Contentful and our reason for being here is this connected platforms. So, at least the content can stay consistent, customer-focused, no matter where the customer is and no matter how they're engaging with your brand. If you could go to the next slide, please. We have an example here in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, nationwide, of how TELUS a local telco, is powering over 40 different touchpoints across these areas, all powered by Contentful. So, really powerful way to keep everything customer-centric from day zero. If we go to the next slide, please.  
Andrew (00:10:49): So, there are some key opportunities that we're seeing. I call these the fundamentals or the foundations of digital. 75% of customers prefer to buy products in their native language, but not only their native language, localized to their region, localized to their context. So, if you're taking data and personalization and CDP, you might want to start with local localization and translations as introductory ways to personalize your experience for your customers. If you go to the next slide, please. The next opportunity here is around commerce, so E-commerce has really taken off. And we know that market is going to grow even more, but customers will also have more choice and they'll want fast experiences and to be able to find what they're looking for without hunting.  
Andrew (00:11:34): From a business perspective, the ability to integrate and assemble different types of technologies and capabilities is really important. Because right now, websites tend to be the main focus but mobile apps are seeing huge conversion. And then voice skills, chatbots, social media, even higher conversions depending on the channel, so you need that flexibility, you can't really put all your eggs into the website. So, another opportunity here to make sure that you have that cross-channel ability. And then the final one is around customer effort reduction; we're coming out of post-pandemic. It has not been easy for a lot of people and it's been quite a difficult year. So, no one's going to wait in line, queuing is not going to be a thing. Waiting online for a phone call, that's not going to be fun. So, to keep your customers happy and engaged and to keep your customers, self-serve and digital and online mobile experiences are going to be very key so that they can get that time back.  
Andrew (00:12:34): So, with these opportunities, these fundamentals, we have a lot of customers that will then take Contentful and partner with partners like Rangle to then build up and evolve these fundamentals around global marketing, agile E-commerce, and knowledge base. If you go to the next slide, please. So, Contentful as a content platform, in a nutshell. There's a bunch of different utilities and tooling in the platform that allow you to build and then federate that content, and then deliver anywhere, so across these different touchpoints different channels could have always a lot of integrations with cloud services. You can customize Contentful and make it flexible, wrap it around your business. And if you go to the next one, it's all secured and scaled on a cloud infrastructure. So, if you have a few hundred customers hitting your website in an hour to multiple billions of customers hitting your customer in hour, we're there to scale with you.  
Andrew (00:13:36): I want to highlight some apps; when we really think about the notion of a platform, the platform is your underlying foundations and then you aggregate the apps you need for your business. So, Compose app is a really good experience where you have a customer or a end user on your team that needs to build pages in a quick and seamless way, they pick this tool, the Compose app, to go get their job to be done. Have to go to the next one. If you're a project manager or campaign manager and you have content in many different areas of the business, all in one platform, and you want to schedule them in a coordinated way, you have the Launch app to facilitate that orchestration. So, you can publish together and unpublished together and manage your campaigns effectively. Go to the next slide please.  
Andrew (00:14:20): And we work a lot with partners and partner apps, so Contentful doesn't build all the apps, our partner ecosystem comes in. So, we have a partner called Stackbit that's building an engine and studio. Those are code names, I know our marketing team is going to tell me those are bad names and they're going to improve those. And we also have a partner in Toronto here called Contilla building a unified app so you can bring multiple data sets together to make nice payloads for your dev team. And we are going to talk about DX launched today at some point, right, Bertrand?  
Bertrand (00:14:50): Yep.  
Andrew (00:14:51): All right. We got another app. I love it. This is the opportunity, this API-driven platform that's builder- centric, customer-centric. Competitive advantages, it just helps everyone move faster, it removes the need to do plumbing or chores or anything that you consider not high value for your business or for your customers. You shouldn't allocate a lot of effort to those types of activities, so when you're leveraging these API-driven platforms, you can reallocate your team and your talent and your humans to higher- value things for your customers. All right.  
Kaitlin (00:15:32): Okay. Thank you, guys.  
Andrew (00:15:36): Back to you, Kaitlin.  
Kaitlin (00:15:36): Yeah. Thanks, guys. So, let's jump in, appreciate the overview of both Rangle and Contentful. So, getting right into the questions here, let's start with the content platform evolution. Bertrand, I'm going to start with you, how do you feel that the CMS landscape has evolved in the past few years and where do you see it going?  
Bertrand (00:16:00): Yeah. That's probably one of the most interesting questions we've faced over the last decade. CMSs have been such an integral part of company's technology portfolio for so long, but they're probably the part that's the most misunderstood, in my view. Over the last five years, we've seen an interesting evolution and it's centered around three traits in our view; the one everybody's fairly familiar with is headless. Like Andrew said, IT and engineering departments have had to deal with more than just websites. Suddenly, they had to deal with all these other channels whether it be mobile or third-party E- commerce platforms or emerging chatbots. And suddenly you needed to be able to reach your customers across all these different channels.  
Bertrand (00:16:50): And so, the CMSs that actually were opinionated about which platform and which channels the content was delivered through started struggling to meet their client's needs. And therefore, the clients struggled to meet their customer's needs and so headless has been a big evolution over the last five years, honestly, driven by that need to reach customers in different channels. It's the one that's most talked about, but I think there are two others that are very interesting and very important in their own right.  
Bertrand (00:17:22): One of the most interesting thing when you look at a headless platform, they're not all the same. I think a second question that you may ask yourself is whether or not they allow you to structure content in a flexible way. The second evolution that's happened over the last five years is that the very definition, and I think we'll talk a lot about this, of what content is has also shifted and changed away from being just marketing copy in a CMS. And so, a evolution that's occurred for some of these headless CMSs that they've been very thoughtful about how they allow their consumers to model their universe and model the types of experiences they want to provide and deal with richer media. And that by itself has enabled not just the ability to reach customers in different channels, but to reach them with much more varied and much more powerful experiences; a topic that I'm sure we'll come back to in more detail later.  
Bertrand (00:18:21): And the third one for us, really, has been really seeing CMSs understand that they're part of an ecosystem. If we looked five years ago, and I think if we look even today at the market and certainly you look at Legacy CMSs, many of them are suites. The CMS itself is a part of a ecosystem, whether it's an implicit and explicit ecosystem, it's part of an ecosystem. The dominant approach that we saw in market for a long time had been these CMS vendors that just bundled more and more services within, let's take an example, search. So you have a lot of content, how do you provide a search experience for your consumers? And how do you track what they're consuming? And how do you offer them personalized version of that? The answer from legacy players has always been, "Well, we'll build that or we'll acquire it."  
Bertrand (00:19:21): The challenge, though, with these suites was that when they tackled search, when they tackled personalization, when they tackled analytics, tackled all these other things that are part of the content story, the quality dropped. It's very hard for a similar organization to have the requisite expertise and the requisite skill sets to provide really great search, great analytics, all in one. And so, the other thing that we've seen over the five years were just vendors realizing and CMS providers realizing this, and really thinking very deeply about how they connect with the world. How they connect with other tools so that if their clients are looking for a great search solution, it's really hard to maybe somebody to beat the type of intentionality and skill set that our Algolia has in-house. So, why not just use Algolia and connected it in? Same with analytics and the like, so workflows and really thinking about how you bring in the rest of the ecosystem has been one big evolution too as a thread. That's my answer. Andrew?  
Andrew (00:20:37): That is a good answer. So, I'm going to shift gears here a little bit though. So, we're talking about content platform and the evolution of content platform and Contentful, we're pretty keen on this notion of content platform. I think that's born out of the fact that CMSs and content management systems are not content management systems; everything that's come for the last two, three decades, up until probably about five years ago, they've been website builders. So, they've been labeled as a content management system but they're website builders and now some of those legacy and models platforms are like, "Okay. Well, there's mobile apps so we'll add on some sort of module for that." Or, "There's a AR/VR skill," or there's something else that's not a website and there's a significant amount of tech in those old CMSs because they're not true for CMS.  
Andrew (00:21:35): So, we're using the term content platform quite a bit, even shifting away from the whole notion of headless. Because I think headless has caught traction quite a bit, but it doesn't do justice to the underlying platforms. It doesn't do justice to the solutions that are coming out where they have these very robust... ourselves included, but I got to give credit to some of our competitors, too. Everyone's coming out with very robust developer tooling, very robust API's, not necessarily a Website Builder but an experience and it can go into a multi-experience type of solution. The other thing around this landscape evolution, it's shifting balance quite a bit. And the reason I say shifting balance is the old school CMSs were for content editors, content authors to inert content, have a WYSIWYG, highlight a block of text, make it bold, give it a yellow highlight, change the font to red. They have all this flexibility and freedom to drag and drop and do things, not necessarily the best for the end customer. The designer on the team is pulling their hair out like, "Why is this font not our font and red and highlighted yellow and bold?"  
Andrew (00:22:50): And then the end customer's gouging their eyes out because they're like, "What am I looking at? Is this a Word doc?" So, it's not always the case, but that balance is starting to shift back where the designers are saying, "Let's do the design system. Let's enforce the design system." This is what makes customers happy, we've done the research we've done the testing. Let's keep things consistent because we want the customers to be able to find and navigate in a very fast, efficient and pleasant way. So, the design system has to be upheld and enforced and the developer is in the middle of stitching it; they get the design inputs from the designer, they encode it. They build the data model to be full of guardrails so you can only put in content that supports the design system. That has shifted the balance away from those content authors and made it a bit more of a holistic team effort where there's equal weighting where the designer, the developer, and the content author have that equal weighting on that end experience.  
Andrew (00:23:50): This is a challenge; it's a mindset shift and a challenge in ways of working, but I think ultimately, the organizations that have done this and continue to do this, they're the ones that are seeing their content have broader reach, their content be consumed more and hit those factors. Customers can find what they're looking for faster, they convert faster, they add to cart faster, they find support faster, they don't call the call center. So, if you do what's in the best interest of your customer, your business starts to see the results. But the team and that mindset shift, as much as we say content platform evolution, it's really we're evolving the underlying tools and technology to support the evolution of ways of working and the humans behind it.  
Kaitlin (00:24:37): I love that. It always does come down to the humans behind the platform at the end of the day. And I think we do see the more digitally-advanced organizations taking this approach, that is a platform-based approach versus just coming to either of our organizations and saying, "Hey. I need to replace my CMS. I need a new CMS." It's like, "Well, that's level one, let's get you to level five to really thinking about how a platform approach really changes the way that you are reaching your end customer." So let's move on to personalization and data; what role does personalization and data play in the new ecosystem, and what about content design? And Bertrand, I'm going to start with you again for this one as well.  
Bertrand (00:25:24): Absolutely. And I think, picking up on what Andrew said in a previous answer, the definition of what content is here, I think, has always been misunderstood and maybe poorly supported and then for misunderstood. What's happening here, I think, is that in order to provide these experiences, like we said before, your definition of what content and where that content comes from shifts when you lose, a term borrowed here from Andrew, the website builder constraint box and you're really thinking about the experience that you're orchestrating. And so, here, I think the key point is that if you have a content platform, what that allows you to do is to bring in that data from around your ecosystem, and be able to leverage that data therefore to provide different types of content and therefore different types of experiences to your users. And this goes very far because design itself and some of the front-end experiences that your users are actually touching, and we'll talk about again more about this, can actually be modeled as content and leverage that data and leverage that personalization to create those experiences. Andrew, you want to add anything onto that?  
Andrew (00:26:54): So, I love this notion of personalization and data. I'm going to start with personalization. So, to a certain degree, I feel like it's getting quite a bit of attention. Sometimes personalization is you know where the customer is and you know it's training, and so you do something fun and show them some content that's localized to their region or something. Sometimes you're translating it, I think that counts as personalization, you're making the experience more contextual and relevant. Sometimes you do have first-party data; I know with cookies and some of the trends there, there may not be as much access to third-party data on behalf of the sources, but if you have first-party data someone's authenticated, you know a lot about that person. The challenge isn't necessarily the getting the context and understanding who the customer is, the challenge I always find is you got to create content for all those variations. So, Bertrand, you're in Toronto, I'm in Oakville. Kaitlin, where are you located?  
Kaitlin (00:27:59): San Francisco.  
Andrew (00:27:59): Kaitlin's in San Francisco, we can all be looking at the same homepage but a truly personalized experience will be slightly different. Maybe not Bertrand and I because we're 20 kilometers away but Kaitlin definitely. So, how do you create the content and the practice around the content to then leverage personalization and data? And I think between our organizations, we have the platform and we have content creation and so that practice to do what's right and understand those insights is quite challenging. And on the design side, sometimes you don't necessarily have to design around personalization, you just need to be aware that some things will be personalized and add some robustness to existing design or robustness to existing design systems. And that's a fun type of quality challenge. I'll probably push back to you, Bertrand, on how you facilitate or get over that leap in the design world.  
Bertrand (00:29:01): Yeah. I think in the case of having all this data and providing different experiences through design, I think it forces you to think a bit differently. I think the old model was one-size-fits-all for everybody and so quality was one-size-fits-all and for everybody. I think the old methods still work. I think you just have to go ahead and use other models. One of the ones that we use a lot is that we use feature gating, for instance, to maintain quality of process experiences and canary releases. And this gives us that live data and that live feedback that therefore informs the experiences that they're seeing. So, we've broadened the view of quality to include whether or not it's achieving what we meant to achieve from a business perspective as well and from a user consumer perspective.  
Kaitlin (00:30:04): Awesome. I always think about whenever I traveled, just opening an app in a different city and getting that city's background because it knows I'm in a new location. It seems like a simple thing but it really does add to that overall experience and leaves a very pleasant feeling when you see that stuff come to life. And it's new, it's just in the past few years that we've started to see these changes alongside how we use or interact with our apps and with mobile and things like that, too.  
Kaitlin (00:30:42): So, switching now to design system evolution, I know we were talking about that just now but more focusing on the design systems and how's that tooling landscape evolved in the past two years. How do you see a seed that changing, too? Especially alongside how design, content, branding, omni-channel; these things are all so closely tied together or at least they are in the world we want to be living in. Maybe, Andrew, you start this one, how do you see design systems moving and shaking out in the next few years?  
Andrew (00:31:22): Okay. I'm going to start off by piggybacking on something Bertrand said around quality and process. You said something very key and what stood out to me it was you're describing a test and learn process. So, canary releases, you're testing on a small audience; that test and learn data back, that very customer-led research type of process, I think are key. And when we think about design systems, so a lot of organizations historically have invested in design systems to not only accelerate what the designers are doing. So, reallocating that effort for designers to focus on problem solving and less on like, "Do I make this button this size? How does this card look?" That's a lower level challenge that the higher level challenge is, "I have to build an experience to solve a problem for some customer's job to be done." So, that shift is really, really important and provides a really good business case for design systems.  
Andrew (00:32:20): What I've seen though is design systems very much are treated like an input. It's like when you pave roads and the economy improves because everyone moves faster; a design system is like that foundational investment, but it's hard to see the benefits because it's not a road; you have to wait until someone does something with the design system. And where I see it going is from being a pure component library or a library in your Figma file or InVision, that's the old path. The new path is getting much more closer to prototypes or micro frontends so that designed component is then codified and that codified component doesn't have lorem ipsum or dummy data anymore, it's actually just very quickly and rapidly piped with real content from your Contentful space.  
Andrew (00:33:11): Or you have a combination of content coming in from Contentful and then third-party data or your CDP or authenticated state, your customer API, then you have components that are live and living and testable. And these micro frontends, they can be transpiled, translated to web, mobile, responsive, any interface with a screen, or just you can scope the payload and now you have your response for a voice skill or a chat bot or a non-screen type of interface. I think that is where design systems, in the next two to five years, will land. And from my understanding, and Bertrand and I have debated this in the past, because I once said, "Oh. The world of design systems, who's buying this from you at Rangle?" And he said, "Well, call it a design system but they're actually asking us to these more advanced things." So, I feel like to a certain degree my hypothesis is being validated but I will pass to Bertrand because he's much closer to this type of evolution.  
Bertrand (00:34:20): Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, on that point, design systems are going from this static, in-time asset to this thing that's more dynamic and more alive and more fluid is exactly what's happening. The static nature where design system have sometimes lingered in some places and in some companies, I think that was a constraint that was forced on those design system by the silos in the organizations. Design and maybe front-end engineering would build this thing, but between it and production was maybe six more months. And so, it reflected the collaboration and the way that people worked, and I think we're seeing these silos come down. And part of the opportunity of that is that of course, companies build better products. But the way they're actually doing this is actually bringing these things closer together. Not just the static asset in Figma, but also making sure that the data it consumes and the capabilities are also part of this system that enables teams to build products for their customers that's more original. Yes, Andrew.  
Andrew (00:35:27): I have an ask; so you're describing this really good mature estate where the collaboration is tighter. Do you ever think there's a possibility where the language around microservices? So, I have a API response that provides me account information, and then I have some wrapper content around account information in Contentful. Do you ever see a state where the design system will then start to leverage that type of naming and terminology so then that Figma experience is about account and it accounts for the data availability that's coming? So, effectively my ask is how do we get designers to see the data so they are aware of what it looks like before they're designing it? So, kind of flipping it because traditionally you design first then you go code. But if you know what data you have, you can let the designer have an understanding of that and they can be much more empowered in that design.  
Bertrand (00:36:34): And we're seeing that and we're seeing actually very mature companies do that today. And that's been helped by two constraints moving away. The first one we discussed, the first constraint was the silos. It's not that designers didn't want to, it's just that they had no access to any of the data or any of the engineering, so they had to mock it. The second one is technology. I think that a few shifts in technology in the past two years have just made that a whole lot faster and easier to manage from a tooling perspective. GraphQL is a key piece here; for developers, GraphQL allowed them to forget about all the constraints of where the data is and what the location of the data is and just ask for the shape of it and what data they want. That same flexibility and that same mental model is actually the thing that's powering designer's ability to go ahead and be closer to the data and closer to providing something that's like you said, more live, more dynamic. So, technology was also a barrier for a very long time.  
Kaitlin (00:37:53): All good. We had a comment in the chat here saying it's a good point and also testing if the design is actually working with real content, because that can change over time or you could have the design group working in isolation of the content group and we want to move into workflows that don't really isolate those two groups and I think restructuring-  
Bertrand (00:38:16): And it's bidirectional. Content creators want to know how to best deliver the content within the experience, and they often also are surprised by the results because of these silos.  
Kaitlin (00:38:27): Right. And that experience is ruled by that design system, governed by how this content is appearing to the end user, so they really have to be talking to each other and the technologies working together seamlessly for that really lasting, positive digital experience for the end-user. What were you going to say, Andrew?  
Andrew (00:38:49): I always find it fun when you're designing something and you have lorem ipsum and everyone's like, "Oh. This looks great." And then I'm usually the person in the room that was like, "Throw in some German or some Russian or some Japanese. What does that do to your design?" The content and the language and just translating will break the design and that's how we add some robustness and have some fun on testing that the designs are capable of that flexibility. But that is a real-world case; a lot of our customers are global in nature, so they love 40-plus markets and translations to deal with so sometimes-  
Kaitlin (00:39:26): And they want their brand to have the same effect in different countries, in different languages, and it's so important, it's so critical to that brand reputation. Okay. Let's keep moving on here. Let's switch gears a bit to composable commerce, even though this is totally connected back to how design system, content, and data come together for specifically best-in-class commerce experiences. And before I invite Bertrand to start, I just want to remind everyone in the audience; if you have any questions, please throw them in the chat and we'll get to them at the end. We have a few minutes left here, about 15 more minutes, so please do ask away and we will answer those at the end. So with that, Bertrand, what do you think? Best-in-class commerce, all you.

Bertrand (00:40:20): There's just a few points to frame this answer; the growing reality for most digital commerce today is that the old monolithic silos of engagements are no longer enough. This traditional customer journey that people have in their mind of the simplicity of E-commerce is under significant stress by emerging requirements. So, it's no longer enough to have that E-commerce journey; now, it in most times extends way beyond what people consider at first glance poor sales support, other modalities of engagements. We've seen the healthcare sector have an E-commerce experience but also an experiential experience as well. So, commerce is getting much more complex and as a result of commerce being much more complex, you need a lot more tooling available to you and it's much more than just being consistent across channels, which is very important. We talked about design systems and they allow you to be consistent across channels.  
Bertrand (00:41:29): But you also have to integrate content and social narratives to drive engagement conversions. You have to unify your customer service, your inquiries, your customer and your product purchase experience within the experience as well. And so, as a result, you have these two consideration sets; one is, what tools and what technologies and what data do I need to support my experiences? And the answer in most cases is, "A lot." And then you have a second problem which is, "Okay. How do I make sure that to the user this all feels like one single thing, that it's one single experience?" And I think what we've seen with composable commerce, especially, is the use of design systems to maintain consistency across channels to solve that second issue. And then, the emergence of bringing in the influence of these data and these capabilities into the design system to create a full set up for cohesive experience and not just have these random silos. Andrew?  
Andrew (00:42:37): Okay. That is a good answer, I don't know if I have much more to add here. I'm going to think a little bit about the customer journey; so, typically, your standard commerce experience has a product listings page, PLP or product details page, and then a checkout and a cart, and that's pretty much it. Maybe you'll have an account type of functionality to see your orders, check tracking information. That's kind of the standard flow, and it's worked; it's worked for many years, it's been a pretty good playbook. I look at Casper or I look at Bang & Olufsen, and I look at what they're doing in their commerce experience; or even Ruggable, super-holistic. And then it's not a wonder to me why these organizations, why they're disrupting entire industries. They have a pretty clean and simple design system to help customers find what they're looking for fast and easy so they have a composable search capability, it's not the traditional product listings page. They have categories, they have buying guides, lookbooks, all these different ways to find product, to see how it looks, to see what it looks like in a room and they've taken the notion of that listing and you do a search and thousand results show up. They've really tailored it and made it a much more pleasant buying experience.  
Andrew (00:44:04): That requires a significant amount of content that's not product information, it's all sorts of other content and imagery and assets and photos and videos. Breaking that up into a composable chunk and then moving it across different channels is a challenge but I think, ultimately, a rewarding challenge. You have a clean design filled with the right data. We're not even talking about commerce yet, though. And then you start getting the product information and then you start getting into third party information or personalized, and then you can have some really advanced experience creation. And this is where I see a bit of opportunity in commerce and in the commerce market is that everyone has that expectation of what standard, but if everyone has that standard, everyone's competing. And you'll have standard cart start rates, you'll have standard conversion rates, standard basket sizes, and you'll probably flood your call center or support center with a ton of questions and a lot of need and dependence there.  
Andrew (00:45:09): So, where we evolve this and take this to the next level is by supplying a lot of that support, knowledge base, FAQ type of content in advance wrapped around or even embedded on that product details page. That is composition, you take your product specs, plus your knowledge base articles, plus your FAQ's and now you have something new; something that's more engaged, more enriched. You add in some lifestyle imagery, maybe a video, that is a much more pleasant experience that simultaneously takes you above those standards. You improve your cart start rates, you improve your basket size, you decrease your call center or support cases, because you're just putting a little bit more effort and thought into that experience in a composable manner. That's what I think of when I see this like, "How do we bring it all together for best-in-class?" because it's just moving past what you get out-of-the-box in that standard.  
Andrew (00:46:02): Now, Bertrand, you touched on the legacy systems can't be pulled apart and then recomposed to do what's best for the customer and that is unfortunate and that is a challenge. I do see a lot of legacy systems now say, "We have GraphQL. We have this, we have this." I'm always a little bit leery because then I go do a scope on there payload response time, and it's like, "You're headless and you have GraphQL but it's a 900-millisecond response time. No one's waiting a second for your API, that is not reasonable. But kudos to you, legacy team, for building that capability." That's the kind of thing, I think, really shift gears; you cannot have that type of slow performance when someone's talking to Google Home or Amazon Alexa, they're going to say, "Sorry we're waiting for brand name," because the voice skill is sitting there waiting for their API response. That is not reasonable, so I think there's a opportunity here to not only have these best-in-class composable experiences but to make sure that they're super- fast, highly performant and pleasant.  
Kaitlin (00:47:17): It got me thinking, so many buyers these days, they want to hear about the products that they're buying. They want to know the story, they want to know about the founder, they want to know where it's sourced, where it's coming from. And I think that might have shifted a bit from, of course, there's the convenience factor of being able to order things quickly online, but I do believe there's a huge upsell when customers feel connected to the products and services that they're buying. And that is completely accomplished with the seamless digital experience, the ability to learn about what you're consuming. Because all of that's content, all of that is the information gathered or the information that the customer's looking into before they hit buy. And that's so important these days for younger generations for that overall experience in making a purchase. Oh. Yeah. Let's take this quick question here, "How do you approach building a content model that allows for dynamic content and localization based on UTMs?" And thank you, whoever submitted that.  
Andrew (00:48:36): Would you like me to go first, or Bertrand, do you want to have a kick at the can?  
Bertrand (00:48:40): Go first and I'll jump on it.  
Andrew (00:48:44): Okay. So, this is a really good question, and thank you for asking. Unfortunately, our panel just says LinkedIn User, so anonymous user thank you for that question. So, those UTM and those parameters you get in, so as a consuming application website I have the ability in my code to read those UTMs. So, the first part is doing a bit of a mapping or a bit of a standardization on what the UTMs are, and then treating those like tags in Contentful. And then what you can do is create a banner block or a section of a web page or experience or screen. And in that section, you can just call it a grouping, and then have that grouping have a lot of linked or nested references. So, you may have a homepage banner as a grouping, and it may contain sub-items for 20, 30 different sub-items, each of those side items would then be tagged with one of those UTMs.  
Andrew (00:49:44): So, as the UTM comes in as part of the payload query, you then go, "Her, Contentful API, give me the banner that matches this UTM parameter. And if there's no match, then just give me the default banner." And that can be all facilitated using the API, so if there is customized content available for that parameter, you can show that in under 50 milliseconds. If that custom content doesn't exist, then you can just show the default or we call that a fallback. Similarly, there's another capability around localization, so each piece of content in a space you can configure your locales. So you can have different entries for different locales or different translations, all configured so it'll create additional fields. So, you can have your EN-BC content separate from your EN-Ontario content separate from your English-San Francisco content.  
Andrew (00:50:39): And again, once you have all that content structured and stored and configured, your front-end applications and then call the API and say, "Okay. This person is Kaitlin. Based on her GeoIP we know she's in San Francisco." Ask Contentful, "Do we have any content for San Francisco or California region?" "Yes." Okay. Contentful responds with that specific or personalized or localized piece of content, that's nested in that group. So it can get complex, so I suggest having a bit of a labeling or naming things exercise to make sure that the UTM parameters and your tags in Contentful are in sync so your team can make those requests seamlessly. But ultimately, that is a very quick, fast and efficient way to facilitate that type of dynamic content engagement or dynamic experience assembly.  
Bertrand (00:51:39): Yeah. That's absolutely right. And I want to just highlight that bit, it's a mapping exercise there. The fact that it's coming from a UTM almost doesn't matter, it's what it means, it's a semantic version of what that information coming from the UTM is and passing that along to the CMS to provide the proper mapping or provide the fallback. It can get complex but I think the mapping itself helps a lot in making sure that you have the desired outcome. So, map your content and your localization based on traits or tax.  
Andrew (00:52:20): All right.  
Kaitlin (00:52:20): Awesome. Whoever asked that question, I hope that answered it for you. I think the last thing we're going to chat about today is the DX launcher. What is it, how will that help our mutual customers get to market faster and with high quality? Andrew, you want to start with that one? Or you want to jump in, Bertrand?  
Andrew (00:52:48): So, I don't know much about the DX launcher. I also would love to know what it is and how it helps our customers get to market faster with high quality.  
Bertrand (00:52:56): Absolutely. So, the DX launcher is essentially an output of the work that we've been doing over the past two, three years, including with you guys and our mutual clients. We've talked during this webinar about modularity, this composable nature of technology and content and data and user experience and design systems. This was called coupling, we talked about the flexibility that that provides and the agility that that provides. But there could be a cost. And this is where the DX launcher comes in. And moving away from these, what we found when we work with our clients is that when they were moving away from the legacy space, there're specific capabilities that we were building for them over and over and over again.  
Bertrand (00:53:50): In many cases, when we talk about E-commerce or business operators, whether that be marketing, merchandising, content creators who are starting to see their ability to do their jobs bottlenecked by IT suddenly because the technical landscape was more complex to reach these channels. They didn't have controls. In many cases, they didn't even have an admin panel to do their work. And I think you guys have seen the same thing. I think, Andrew talked about Compose and Launch, I think it's called. So, for us we saw three things come up; we saw page layout management be a big thing that they wanted to do. They had loss the WYSIWYG and drag and drop of their web builders. But now they not only had to do page and experience management across just a web page, but also the mobile side and these other touchpoints.  
Bertrand (00:54:46): So the customer journey management and governance were also these things that they were left to solve by themselves. And then being able to preview these things in the context in which they wanted to deploy them. So, the DX launcher is a set of tooling around Contentful that that takes an opinionated approach based on the experience of some of our biggest mutual customers on how to solve some of these challenges; how to manage and build customer journeys and put into governance and drive some of the control that these businesses need once the code of these experiences, once the design systems built, actually driving the car as it were. Does that answer your question, Andrew?  
Andrew (00:55:33): I'm excited to get a demo of this. Or see some. All right. Should we go on Kaitlin? Oh. We have one minute left. Can I drive?  
Kaitlin (00:55:45): Yeah. Go ahead.  
Andrew (00:55:46): So, before I jump into this, so Omar asked a question around hand off to the development what you design inside the design system. Given that there's limited time and challenges. I always employed and continue to employ this practice called a story kickoff. So, I pull everyone into the same room, or not physically, I guess online now in Zoom, because writing up documentation annotations states, helping the developers understand what's design and what to do next it can be challenging if you have to write a lot of docs and they have to read a lot of docs. And I know sometimes teams are geographically separated. But having a 15, 20, 30-minute working session of rapid Q&A and having these story kickoffs I find a very more agile, lighter effort, lighter-touch way to help do that handoff.  
Andrew (00:56:41): I know, ultimately, you want to do these more frequently and more often. And then, as you do story kickoffs on a regular basis, you're no longer doing a handoff, you've then just joined your dev team and brought them into the design process and brought your design team into the dev process. Because you're constantly working together in a bit of an interlocked fashion, and then work separately and then working together and working separately. And the term handoff kind of goes away because you're now connected. So that would be my approach; it helps you with speed, but then also has that long-term, connection-building, cross pollination of skill sets. So, you get that right culture in practice. Bertrand, anything to top up before I...  
Bertrand (00:57:29): Yeah. I agree with everything you said. I would like to cheat on that question. And maybe I think this is what you were getting at, I think one of the best ways, if you have limited time and you have a design system, and you're wondering how to hand it off; the best thing to do is to not and bring the developers in to the ending of that work. It'll save you a lot more time than anything else, technology or otherwise, that we could give you.  
Andrew (00:57:55): Yep. And we have Alan in the chat who's an expert, and I think there's a bit of a time delay so I just see his responses coming in. So, definitely, chat with Alan White on the chat about this. To close up, we want to talk about the foundations workshop. So, it's a new kind of approach, a new type of practice that we do in tandem with our partners like Rangle where we will work with our customers and do a bit of a roadmap alignment. So, we'll understand business strategy, digital strategy, what are the KPIs and start to align and understand what does that roadmap look like? And then do a little bit of an assessment, lightweight again, of customer journeys, understand those priorities and use cases.  
Andrew (00:58:37): So, I keep coming back to the foundation so like, "Is your marketing experience, your commerce experiences, and knowledge base and care experiences, are they good?" That's usually a really good starting point to just get a lot of ROI and a lot of benefit by just making the fundamentals better, and then piecing that all together in a bit of a digital roadmap. The next two layers are really the fun part; What technologies do you need? What capabilities do you need? What kind of content do you need that's future ready? And then we can figure out what that Contentful configuration looks like for your organization. And then, talent, human enablers; talent, structure, ways of working. Do you need services, do you need training? Do you need a partner like Rangle to come in and pair or support or implement on your behalf?  
Andrew (00:59:22): So, we do all this in a pretty rapid fashion. Sometimes we allocate up to two days to do this type of workshop but I've done it in 90 minutes for some customers as well, so we can work around constraints or limitations. If you want to go next slide, please. We can skip this, the two days or the workshops and the structure. Please reach out to us and we can give more information. And Kaitlin, I'll pass the ball back to you for conclusions.  
Kaitlin (00:59:58): Everyone, thank you so much for attending, for asking some questions. Bertrand and Andrew, it's always a pleasure to chat with you guys. I think this is a lot of really good information, too. If you want, we're going to be sending the session out for those who signed up and want to listen to this again. Feel free to share it amongst your colleagues if this talks about any topics that you're thinking about within your organization or taking a look at and trying to figure out the best path forward. You can always reach out to myself, kaitlingreen@contentful.com; you can reach out to Rangle, info@rangle.io as well. And we will see you soon. Thank you so much for being here. And Andrew and Bertrand, thank you again for your time.