Why your digital transformation should start with a modular DXP

From monolith platforms to modular architecture, commerce brands are looking for the best way to interact with their customers via digital channels. The traditional option has been to sign on to a monolith solution provider. With their everything-out-of-the-box options, they provide a lot of ease, but some brands find their finite suite of offerings too limiting. The other option, and one that’s gaining ground of late, is to go with best-in-class modular or headless solutions. The challenge here is finding the best solutions for the specific needs of the brand, which can be difficult with an ever-expanding ecosystem of vendors on the market. 

What modern brands are now finding is that a “best-for-us” approach—one that puts business goals and strategy ahead of technical decisions, in order to solve for nuanced and specific unmet needs—is the perfect direction.

To learn more about how organizations are making the switch to a modular DXP, read more here.

Best for me, not best in class

Given the complexity of vendors in the landscape today, brands must start their journey from a business problem or customer demand perspective first. In the earlier days of digital commerce, there were only a couple of monolithic vendors to choose from and they provided everything. A brand could pick an ecosystem and work within its limitations. 

Now that microservices and integrations allow for almost any experience to be built, brands need to identify what’s pushing them (e.g., cost savings or other business priorities) or pulling them (e.g., market or customer demands) before they start selecting their curated suite of best-for-us technologies. 

A tool might seem rudimentary for one brand’s experience, but it could be ideal for another brand. And while some brands may only need a simple implementation to achieve their goals, others might require hundreds of moving parts and systems to create their desired outcomes. Often, these choices are not even correlated to the complexity of a front-end experience— instead, it’s about navigating a brand’s unique needs and demands vis à vis their current capabilities and limitations.

Consider starting with the experience and scale

It can be difficult for brands to know where to start when considering the move to a modular technology stack. Even if they’ve identified the right business problems to solve, brands can struggle with selecting the right vendor, and with understanding the differences introducing each vendor could have on their ecosystem. 

Fortunately, many best-in-class, modular technologies work well with existing monoliths, so a brand can introduce pieces of a new architecture without fully replacing their existing system. This is especially true when brands start with the experience layer, since many content management systems can run in parallel with monoliths, which can ease the transformation process. In fact, this is a great way for brands to start paying down the technical debt they may have encountered with a monolithic architecture. 

Starting with the services that drive experiences affords a brand more runway during their transition, and solves immediate pain points that many marketers are experiencing— things like channel access, consolidated authoring tools, and flexible content models. It also sets the brand up for scale, as additional services can now be integrated directly with the new experience layer as older systems begin to sunset.

Where the experience layer can really help

Monolithic tech stacks often have rigid content structures centered around product descriptions. Brands run into problems when they want to centre their products in a story, as opposed to just listing features, when their current technology doesn’t support the necessary content structure. With a modular DXP, and specifically a headless CMS, content structures can be defined however brands want them to be, supporting marketing and merchandising teams with the flexibility they need. 

When content teams bypass the CMS provided data-entry tools with things like desktop publishing applications, that’s a pretty good indication that the current tools aren’t meeting their needs. Not only is this a waste of tooling costs, because teams that stop using provided tools are definitely not getting the most out of the software, but in the long run this can become an operational roadblock. Workarounds can damage existing implementations of tools like SEO, or become less accessible for users, and versioning and data management can become a nightmare when the tool intended for the job is being ignored because it is too rigid to use effectively.

When writing across channels, rather than editing one source of content across channels, a headless CMS allows for centralized authorship, and uses their API to control how content is displayed across channels. This means teams can think more specifically about the channel, rather than adapting one channel content for another time and time again.

Iteration is the only strategy

In the past, brands could make a single commerce investment and rely on it for years. That’s simply no longer the case. Instead of making big plans and spending months—or even years—building out a commerce implementation, brands need to identify their minimum needs up front. By implementing single pieces of their desired experience, building and iterating as they go, they’ll decrease time to market and allow for feedback loops and rapid testing in-market with real customers. And with the help of a good partner to de-risk the tests at the outset, brands can spend more time building the right solution for themselves, and less time cleaning up messes.