Mars x Valtech, on composable transformation, with Kyle Barz and Casper Rasmussen.

This episode of Martalks features Casper Rasmussen, global VP of Valtech and president of the MACH Alliance, and Kyle Barz, global head of technology for Mars. They discuss their collaboration, and how Valtech helped Mars to transform their ecommerce architecture and adopt a composable model.

Read more about this episode on the Rosenstein Group blog: https://bit.ly/4eIWPqA

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Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:06

Well, good day. Welcome to Mar Talks. You're about to spend some time with Kyle Bars, the global head of technology for Mars, our favorite candy brand on the planet, talking about e-commerce with me, Daryl Rosenstein, the moderator here at Mar Talks, where we discuss e-commerce technology and hopefully have the cooperation of the technology that we require in order to do so. We're also being joined by Caspar Aspesen, the uh global VP of Valtec and the president of the Mock Alliance, who's going to talk to us about their working with Mars through the adoption of Composable Commerce. So to start off, Kyle, can you tell us a little bit about how you managed to wangle your way into the leadership role at MMs?

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Yeah, sure. I'm first glad to be here. Um I started my journey with Mars back in uh June of 2000. So I've been with the organization for a little bit over 24 years. Um I had the opportunity to write the first e-commerce application at Mars. We have a small brand known as Ethel and Chocolates based in Las Vegas. Uh that's kind of a crown jewel of the Mars family, really based on um uh based around gourmet box chocolates. And like I said, they brought me in to write that first e-commerce application. It was kind of a very different back then. It was a one-man band, one-man shop to do both the all the UI and all the development, etc. Um, but proud to say that we got the site launched um by the end of that summer of the 2000 time frame. And from there, it really went on to do um a lot of iterating in the e-commerce space. Mars had this concept to launch other direct-to-consumer brands, take the learnings from them, see if they could scale. Some of them, um, some of them we took the learnings from and shut down, some of them we scaled up. One of the big ones that we scaled up was being able to actually personalize MMs. You could go pick your different colors, provide text, and eventually we launched the capability to also upload images, et cetera, to actually print on the candy itself. Uh, so I had the opportunity to be a part of that team that launched that whole product, including, of course, the whole e-commerce site experience that was around that. Um, went on from there to look after a lot of the back-end systems that also enabled our e-commerce and our retail stores. I took a little bit of a break from the e-commerce retail area and went to the traditional sales side of Mars, looking after a lot of our digital sales capabilities that enabled our global sales teams around the world. Um, and then about four or five years ago, kind of got the itch to come back and look after retail and e-commerce again. Um, and that was when we started on our journey to go down the composable commerce route in both our e-commerce platform as well as some of our back-end enterprise systems.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

Well, thank you for that intro. I I would mention, you know, I do remember the uh you could order your own labels on the MMs, and they didn't take any of my suggestions. No.

unknown 3:11

No.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

They were good. They were good. And uh, you know, the space limitation thing, I think that was bogus. That was bogus. Well, small, small candy, you can only print so much on that. Yeah, but you know, there's so much to be said when you're about to eat software. Really. So, Kyle, I I appreciate uh you joining us. Uh, but we're also we've also got uh Casper with us. Casper, uh, you know, what did you do to get yourself in this position? I mean, gosh, you you you actually had to be responsible for making sure when uh they pressed go, it was gonna work.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Indeed. Yes, that's the life of uh digital execution, isn't it? So thank you very much for having me. I'm basically similar to Kyle, born and raised in technology, specifically focused around verticals like retail, CPG, FMCG, but also industrial manufacturing. I've kind of spent a number of years in uh specifically B2C commerce, and I'm also fundamentally um focused around digital platforms and digital execution, so typically very much direct-to-consumer and growth orientation. Um, I'm also a technology evangelist. I want to offer the difference. I want to provide alternative pathways, and I want enterprises to avoid the uh hideous uh replatforming cycles that slowed down uh innovation. And that's also where Kyle and I we got to know one another specifically around the initiatives on MMs and across the snacking division at Mars.

SPEAKER_02 4:45

Well, Kyle, what got you guys uh what when did you first hear about Composer?

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Yeah, so it was um it was sort of in the 2020 time frame where we had uh the confluence of several different um several different situations occurring within within Mars. One was around the MMs brand. Um, for the MMs.com site, we were kind of on this cadence of replatforming every two to four, three to five years or so. And it was once again at that time to go make a new platform choice and move forward with a new brand, a new e-commerce experience. Um the second pillar, the second driver for us to evaluate our solutions uh was really coming from the MMs brand itself. Historically, the MM's brand operated in a bunch of different silos, and there was really a strategic intent to make the brand operate more as an ecosystem and create consumer journeys that uh that really one supported the other. And the intent, the desire was really to put MMs.com at the heart of all of that to create an amazing consumer experience. The third uh kind of real driver that was going on uh was similar to what I described earlier, in that Mars had an ambition to do more within the direct-to-consumer space. And a lot of the direct-to-consumer brands that were starting were going and identifying their own D2C platform solutions, and they were investing into those platforms to create their own bespoke experiences. And we really thought internally there had to be a better way to uh to enable these different brands to go to market in a much faster way and really leverage the scale of Mars. And so it was really with the kind of with those three main drivers that we went and evaluated what were we going to do? Uh, what was the next platform that we were going to choose? And to be fair, we did start with the the kind of default of us uh default assumption that we would go pick another one of your traditional monolithic players that were out there at the time. And as we started to talk to some of our external um external experts, certainly as we started to talk to some of our internal technology leaders, they really uh once we described to them what our ambitions were, particularly around these consumer journeys, particularly around creating world-class customer experiences, they had this provocation to go explore the composable route. Um and that's where we started to engage some of the folks like Valtech with Casper to really bring more expertise, more outside in perspective to help us understand what the best path forward was. Uh, and that ultimately is what led us down the path to going towards composable.

SPEAKER_02 7:25

Well, I'm curious, were did you first speak with uh an external consulting firm, or did you directly uh request information from the vendor from Commerce Tools?

SPEAKER_01 7:43

No, we we first um like I said, at first our initial default assumption was to go down this path of one of our one of the traditional monolithic players. Um and through that journey, we engaged some of the more uh some of the deeper experts in the space, the like says you know, some of your traditional uh solution integration uh companies. And and they're the ones that really provoked what the best path forward was for us. And it like I said, it really came from the creating those great consumer experiences and creating the um uh the the platform that would allow us to continuously evolve versus having to do uh this constant replatforming every few years.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

Well, you uh when you say an expert, you know, this is this is kind of goes to the heart of of what I do on the daily is to find somebody you can actually trust uh that that that's going to uh uh take you to the promised land. What was it uh about Valtech that inspired your confidence?

SPEAKER_01 8:52

I think Valtech brought a lot of experience. And to be fair, at the at that time frame, there wasn't many partners out there that actually could speak to having practical experience and deploying what we were looking for. Um, not only was it experience in doing composable, but they also had experience doing it for other very well-known retail brands and doing it in brands that had similar ambitions to us and creating multi-channel experiences. So it wasn't just about the dot-com part of it, it was also about taking the platform, taking those capabilities and extending them into our own retail stores and potentially someday in the future, even extending those capabilities into third-party retailer stores to create that kind of seamless consumer experience across multiple touch points.

SPEAKER_02 9:41

I think that when you're when you're engaging someone on the outside, there there is certainly a presumption that they're gonna bring more to the table than you have uh in terms of knowledge of vendors, in terms of knowledge of other customer successes. What were your keys in terms of looking at customer uh success stories? Did you actually interview any customers of Commerce Tools because you end up ended up going with Commerce Tools before you selected them, or did you interview other customers of Valtec?

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Yeah, we actually wound up doing both, really. Uh in the in the choice of doing uh in the choice of picking Valtec, they provided us uh as a part of our RFP process, they provided us with reference customers that we were able to speak to and get a level of confidence and how Valtech interacted with them. Um and similar, as you know, in choosing to go the composable path, there are many solutions that we then need to go identify to make the whole ecosystem work. And we had the opportunity both with Commerce Tools as well as several other uh components that we ultimately selected, frequently spoke with existing customers to try to get a better understanding of the solutions from their existing customers.

SPEAKER_02 11:09

Was there a proof of concept that uh you required from Commerce Tools?

SPEAKER_01 11:14

We did actually in multiple um in multiple ways, to be fair. So Commerce Tools was the first major component that we selected after going down the after the decision to go down the composable path. We selected Commerce Tools as the first component. Uh and actually that allowed us to do a couple things. One, we did work with Commerce Tools for them to take us through their tool. Now, what's what's interesting, of course, about Commerce Tools, and and particularly at the time, they didn't necessarily have a front end that made it very easy for them to show us the platform, right? It's a set of APIs. Um, and and from a business user's perspective, it's it's kind of hard to understand what that really means, right? Um so we then went down the path of picking, starting to make our selection around what is the UI technology that we want to use, what's our content management system that we want to use. And in doing that, we also had them work with commerce tools to develop prototypes, to develop proof of concept. What I'd say is even more interesting, and the part that I really love about um this era that we live in today is that we were actually able to do it ourselves as well. Um so even over you know, over a weekend, over a couple of weeks, both in the desire to learn and the desire to prove the possibilities to internal stakeholders, we were also able to develop our own POCs to learn and to show how it would work. So it wasn't just completely dependent upon third party. Um, we could stand these things up internally ourselves. So what what tools were you using? Um, in terms of the tools to do our own rapid prototyping, uh so the nice part specifically with Commerce tools is they did actually have starter kits that they had open sourced, and we were able to go pull down those starter kits and kind of you know reskin those things so that it made more sense to our internal stakeholders, uh, make it look more like our brand versus the starter kit brand. Uh, and again, really use that to show what's possible in a short amount of time and it made believers internally.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

So before you guys are even live on the platform, you're downloading their reskinning technology and putting out betas of what your site would look like with the new technology.

unknown 13:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Of course, very much very much internally focused. We weren't releasing these things to the consumers, but uh yeah, we were able to make uh an experience work from landing on a home page all the way to checking out and placing an order. Okay, did your head explode when you could do that?

SPEAKER_02 13:51

It's like, okay, this would have taken a month if I've been looking working with any other major enterprise scale platform on the planet?

SPEAKER_01 13:59

Yeah, first I would say a couple things. One, the access to being able to actually do that, right? To to being able to log into commerce tools and even just spinning up a free trial account. You don't traditionally see that with many players that are out there uh in the enterprise software space, anyways. With none. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

Unless you're looking at at maybe maybe ElasticPath or you know, uh potentially uh big commerce, but not not at the enterprise scale you're looking at. I mean, yeah was that like a mind-blowing experience for you? Was that a ha moment for you and the team that you might be onto something here?

SPEAKER_01 14:38

It certainly was. It is what helped us make the case that this was the right direction to go.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

Well, you know, good for you. You actually made it that far. Uh just because I I've spent 25 years placing enterprise software salespeople. Do you remember the name of the sales guy that actually worked with you at Commerce Tools?

SPEAKER_01 15:02

Good question. I'd have to go back and look. I don't remember off the top of the name.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

I'm sure he's looking and he's crushed, or she's listening to the crushed. I was like, yeah, but I just I wanted to bring that up. I had to know. I had to know. Do you remember the person? I was like, no, they but they were there. They had that, they were the ones with the big pieces of paper that you had to sign. They were they were there at one point. Of course. Well, uh let me let me just uh pivot here to Casper. All right, so here we are at the beginning of the process. They're they're already achieving some pretty spectacular functionality in demo in demoing their solution in the POC. At that point, what are you saying to your team?

SPEAKER_00 15:46

So specifically, we always advocate for POCs and testing things in reality, right? Getting out of the hypothetical slideware and let hit rubber hit the road. So we're totally aligned with how Carl went about his internal stakeholder management and stakeholder buy-in. But there is a difference in executing a reskin POC versus integrating and implementing e-commerce into the enterprise. And what we started to really focus on was the actual strategy for how, meaning, okay, we understand the digital reimagined strategy around the connected ecosystem and this new brand universe. We understand some of the scale expectations around the multi-brand, but how do we start to basically take title of that elephant? And we started to really focus on an incremental strategy for how to unlock value fast and also get work into production early. And we fundamentally ended up establishing a roadmap that looked at business growth and business value at the same time as we went through technology modernization. So we started a number of pathways around the specific personalization capability that Carl spoke about early on in his introduction, the design your own and personalization of Len tools for how to cloud modernize that. All the same time as we were building out a core commerce capability that looked to basically lift and shift some of the standard capabilities away from their incumbent through to us expanding that in and starting to execute on the new brand strategy and the new customer experience. So we found like a multi-mode operating model in how we started to basically raise the floor in doing a bunch of cloud modernization and move services and data services into the cloud for easy access, all the way through to us also realizing those customer experience expectations that the business was sitting with. So value delivery and incremental transformation was something that we really focused in order to basically find a way to break down the elephant. Yeah, that was a big elephant. It was.

SPEAKER_02 17:59

As you said, Kyle, you previously, it's it's like uh you were you're uh Mars was the technology version of Sybil with an uh with 13 different personalities. How many different platforms do existed throughout Mars?

SPEAKER_01 18:16

I I used to say uh uh effectively, if you can name the platform, it probably exists somewhere at Mars for sure. Um there there is uh untold number of different platforms.

SPEAKER_02 18:28

Blue martini hiding in there for for sure for the OTs out there in the audience. Yes, exactly. It was in there. Well, geez. That was my first blush with e-commerce, by the way. Back in 2000, with yeah, I put somebody at uh uh US Web CKS that was standing up blue martini for la Levi's. What a disaster.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

But you know, I did I had to ask. I um when I first started my career, we heavily used e-cometry, which was acquired by Blue Martini, so I certainly have some experience there. I love Rob Nybauer. Did you get to know Rob? I knew the name. I don't think I've ever met him.

SPEAKER_02 19:07

He was he was another guy that was on the other side of the table in the paper that you were signing. But anyway, yeah. So how so we're talking about dozens. Is that fair to say? Dozens of different uh platforms. All right, and and now you have one, correct?

SPEAKER_01 19:23

Well, at Mars, we still have multiple platforms to say the least. We are on a journey to try to consolidate. Um, but we have started first with MMs as the big platform, and now we've recently redid Atholim as well, uh, and then continuing to look to consolidate onto the global platform.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

Yeah, I mean, but essentially one of the major business benefits you were looking for is to get rid of all of these different individual silos, these individual instances of you know, Tom, Dick, and Harry commerce monolith, and you can have them all on commerce tools.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Yeah, on the yeah, on the whole, on the whole ecosystem, certainly made up of more than just commerce tools, but yeah, it's uh core components of it.

SPEAKER_02 20:06

What else, by the way, are uh is in your stack. What what did you choose for a CMS?

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Yeah, so the big components are Ampliance as the content management system. And then we have uh used GraphQL as kind of the federation layer to stitch all of the different services together. Um we're using AWS to do most of the hosting where we've built code or to deliver our um our our data federation environment is coming at AWS. Um and then we used uh Next.js to write the whole experience.

SPEAKER_02 20:38

Got it.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

But do you have an OMS vendor? We are currently on a journey to put in a new order management system. Okay. Uh we we didn't go down that route. We're looking at at Sterling as our OMS.

SPEAKER_03 20:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

And then um so right right now we effectively are using uh FAP as our order management system in addition to our ERP and today's operating model.

SPEAKER_02 21:07

Did you are you doing the same thing with a PIM?

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Today the PIM is coming out of Commerce Tools.

SPEAKER_02 21:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

All right. No, no third-party PIM. Adopt any other front-end technology. Um we have nothing. Like we we didn't use any um search at this point. We did evaluate different search technologies, uh, but haven't necessarily gone down the routes where we're continuing to use sort of Commerce Tools search functionality. Um we have some A-B testing that we've put in as a part of the front-end environment.

SPEAKER_02 21:45

Um so you're kind of you're you're you're in it. You're in it. You're aware, okay, I've got options here for content and for what I use for product information and what I use for digital assets. I can I've got you know this toolkit that that works just fine right now from commerce tools, but if I wanted to do something else my the APIs are open. It's gonna be easy to do that. It's gonna be very straightforward. You guys have have uh uh you you you you've broken the glass ceiling, as it were, here. I mean, a very popular term uh to do. So you'd say uh it's at this point since you've swapped out your the beating heart, the merchandising engine, uh and and the the OMS, you've you your transition to composable is about two-thirds? Is that fair to say?

SPEAKER_01 22:40

Yeah, I mean certain certainly depends upon how broad you want to look at it uh in terms of the spectrum from an e-commerce standpoint, from a digital exp you know, digital experience the consumer interacts with, um, that has all gone towards the composable architecture with the composable partners in place. We have since in the last 12 months or so pivoted and now we're looking internally as well. So whereas historically we'd run one monolithic solution to drive all of the business, we're also looking at how we can decompose the business and and try to adopt the same principles and similar architecture with more of a you know uh put putting associate experience at the heart of it instead of consumer experience, but uh uh allowing us to really um look at where we want to truly drive more value, perhaps where we want to move at a faster pace in terms of our internal capabilities. We're looking at how we architect around that concept. Um, and have started on that journey with probably about halfway through.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

Got it. But from a speed and a flexibility perspective, you guys must feel like you're in a much better place now.

SPEAKER_01 23:55

Certainly, yeah. We we've moved from what was historically every month, every couple of months to quarterly releases, and down to today we run about two to three-week release cycles to move things into production. Uh, so we're in a drastically different spot than we were historically. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

75% faster, if not more. And you guys uh so let's talk about your team. I mean, obviously, you had to go from a uh whatever legacy coding environment to uh a modern environment, you know, your developers are now working with React slash and JDOT, and you know, I don't even know if you had agile development or or scrum methodology beforehand, but you had to make that move. You had Valtech in the trenches with you. What uh what role did Valtech uh play in taking your team to the next level and using the new tools? And then when they left, having them in a position where they own the microservices.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

Yeah, so that that has certainly been quite the change journey by itself. Um, as I mentioned when I first started at Mars, I was a one-man shop. So we we had we had evolved a little bit since then, but not much. We did have what I would like to, what I historically would have called good project managers at Mars, and we heavily depended upon third parties to do the actual hands-on keyboard uh technical development uh and architecture type work on our behalf. With this move towards composable, one of the important parts of that migration uh is was certainly the organizational evolution as well. In order to really take advantage of the capabilities, we knew we needed to bring more of that technical quotient with technical capabilities into our own team. And so while when we started on the project, on the program to deliver composable commerce, to deliver MMs.com, Valtech absolutely took the lead with uh with the architecture designs, with the hands-on keyboard developers, etc. And then over time, we have started to increase our engineering team and start to build that muscle internally with recruiting architects, with recruiting engineers, with recruit, recruiting uh you know UI design uh team members to upskill ourselves in order to really be able to maximize the potential of the platform. And that's been about a journey over the last year and a half to two years or so. Valtech helped us quite a lot in um you know, helping to scope out what those roles actually were, what the job descriptions were, and sometimes even participating in the interviewing process to assess the skill sets of the candidates. And now we're starting to see the evolution where Mars is able to take on more of the responsibility. So we we have our own feature team internally, we have our own architects internally, and they're taking more of the accountability, more of the responsibility for the ongoing management of the platform. And the role of Valtech starts to shrink, right? That they're still there to play a strategic role in helping us guide the platform. Um, but the the actual day-to-day development is starting to shrink a little bit, and our internal team is taking on more of that responsibility.

SPEAKER_02 27:14

I mean, it's gotta make you happy to have more capability, to have more control over your own destiny, which which come which composable architecture does. Composable architecture lets you gives you a great deal more control over you not just your user experience and your digital experience, but how you how you actually build things from an architectural perspective. And that oddly enough is new to a lot of folks in your chair. Uh and uh I'm I'm I'm thrilled, you know, one of the reasons Valtech is is here is because they do such a great job of enabling teams. And from a recruiter's perspective, developers especially, if you're not uh using cutting edge technologies that are fun to work with, they will not stick around. And composable has given CPG brands and retailers a great set of exciting technologies that the developers really enjoy working with that both allows you to recruit higher level professionals than you prior would have. I mean, the the uh let's face it, you are uh a wonderfully odd duck, Kyle. You've stuck around, you've hung in there. Indeed. You must have a sweet tooth. Indeed. You know, you you must have a sweet tooth. And and uh they must have an incredible dental there at Mars for you to stick around that long, but it it also because you had a long-term vision. So I mean tell me, how how happy are you to be in this position with this team?

SPEAKER_01 29:07

Yeah, so I can talk to a few things. Certainly, from a personal standpoint, one of the parts that I've enjoyed the most in working at Mars over the last you know two and a half decades is the diversity of challenges. Every single day there's something new to learn, something new uh to make an impact with. Uh, and the pace at which we can make an impact is incredible. Sometimes, sometimes better, sometimes better, sometimes worse, to be fair. Um, but you can always make an impact and always learning something new, which I completely love. Um, one of the challenges in terms of building this composable architecture, one of my worries, in fact, was how are we going to recruit the engineering talent that we need in order to successfully operate the platform? A lot of times your top talent doesn't necessarily think of Mars as the place to go. Um, so we we did have to get intentional about telling our story in order to retract talent into Mars, is often why I would do sessions like this, tell others what we're doing, and actually had people hear about what exciting things we are doing here and got people interested to come join us as an organization. And certainly now, once they have joined, the the the one of the most common feedbacks that I hear is the opportunity and exposure to more of the modern technology that they get to work with. Um we're far from perfect, right? We're still evolving for sure in terms of building our muscle around running a good engineering practice, running a good architecture practice, how we measure ourselves and how we continuously improve. Um, but the team gets to be along for that journey, and that's the part that I frequently hear the most that they love.

SPEAKER_02 30:43

I mean, being able to evaluate uh in evaluate new technologies from uh an API-led cloud native perspective, it it's so it must feel so liberating for you.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

It is for sure. Certainly one of the historical challenges that we had was the performance and the scalability. Um I would frequently spend my my Thanksgivings and Black Fridays on the phone on the crisis calls on how are we going to manage the situation, uh the situation du jour. Um now that we have had um some of our big peaks under our belt on the new architecture, these aren't things that we have to worry about anymore, right? This is kind of the these are now table stakes, the bread and butter where the platform automatically scales and deals with the just deals with the traffic without us having to get involved is fantastic, helps us all sleep better at night, uh, which which is important. Good quality of life.

SPEAKER_02 31:38

I you know, and and I think sleep uh for someone that's that's on such a high sugar diet would be doubly important. I mean, really critical for you.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Indeed, sleep is important, yes.

SPEAKER_02 31:53

You can only eat so many MMs before it's like, wow, I'm just I crash. You know, after about a pound, after about a pound, I really I I just have to take a nap. That's that's usually where I'm well, you know, I I guess the the uh the big question I have for you now is um for uh speaking to other CTOs of global organizations that have uh dozens of instances of e-commerce platforms out there uh that are looking to composable, what what kind of advice would you give you uh in considering a move to composable?

SPEAKER_01 32:36

I would say a couple of key areas. One, the journey isn't necessarily super easy. Uh and so when we started, we had to make sure that we had very strong sponsorship, very strong support so that when the first challenge comes to bear, that we're not immediately switching directions. Um we certainly had our fair share of challenges, we had our fair share of um, you know, it took us a little bit longer than what we had originally anticipated. Uh, we had the situations where we couldn't necessarily get a commercial contract in place, etc. And it took good, strong sponsorship in order to help us navigate through those through those difficult times. Um the other part, and we just spoke to this a little bit, is really focusing on the culture shift. We went from what was highly a project-led to now being a product-led organization. That is such an important change in how you make sure that you maximize the potential of the investment that you're making into the architecture. Um, we had to start educating internally, start building stakeholders' understanding of what it really meant to ship to shift from what was historically a highly uh waterfall methodology with very clear deliverables on certain dates to what is now more of an agile methodology with product backlogs and more of a roadmap approach instead of a waterfall approach. Um I think the the other part, the last part I'd probably touch on, is around the concept of strangulation. And while we we started with it a little bit, I would, you know, given the opportunity to redo it, I would even push harder on that. And if you're not familiar with what strangulation is, is really moving different parts of your application, moving different parts of your ecosystem over to the composable approach versus doing it big bang or doing it all at once. Um and and like I said, we we did start on that. We did move towards a you know um a different content distribution network. We did take parts of our critical experience and shifted those over to composable, but I think we could have even done a better job at shifting parts of it more uh in more iterations versus doing such big chunks like we did. Um that that story, those values, um, the business results that you get from doing that early on also helped to build confidence with your stakeholders and set yourself up for even more success.

SPEAKER_02 35:05

Well, when I think about, you know, you uh that key sponsorship, I mean, that's you. You were you were responsible for communicating to all of these stakeholders. Here are the here is the long-term vision, here's where we want to go. So essentially you're the one who's gonna champion this, hustle this through the various stages. So what you what you appreciate now, obviously, is that we could have gone even faster. It would have been even easier. We could have done it sooner had we just pulled out our pulled the plug on our merch engine. Pulled the plug. I mean, it it just it it worked. The water looked great. I should have just jumped in, is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Yeah, that's uh to an extent that is accurate. The other part is there are now many, many more resources than what we had when we started our journey back in 2020, right? You have the likes of the mock alliance, which helped to bring all of the industry partners to the table and really think through kind of what some pre-composed solutions would actually look like to help you drive value even faster. Like I said, when we when we started on this journey, we were more on our own, right? We were we uh had to stumble a few times in order to figure out our way through the journey. Um that we're we're very glad that we did. We're definitely seeing the business value from, um, but I think it, to your point, is even easier today than it was four or five years ago.

SPEAKER_02 36:38

Well, I think Casper would agree that you know uh the mock alliance has done a wonderful job, but just composable, the composable ecosystem developing. I mean, Valtec has been one of the marquee partners globally for all of the composable vendors, particularly the ones that have joined the mock alliance. And I've been nothing but impressed with everyone that I've interacted with there. So I think you picked a great partner. Uh I think you might have got lucky. Just there's an opportunity, you know, maybe, maybe a little lucky. But uh, Casper, any any uh any closing thoughts from you? I'm sorry we've had you on so much.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

No, I've really honestly enjoyed to observe as much as anything. So thank you very much for speaking through the story, Kyle. Um I just want to get back into the cultural component because composability is more than a technology problem. And there is a big digital execution and cultural component in that that retailers often underestimate. And I think one of our unique edges, yes, yes, we understand the tech, we know how to deliver, run programs, like all of the foundations, but there needs to be the right spirit in the engagement you do with clients. And we, for instance, Empower don't overpower our clients. We look to enable, meaning this notion of internalizing and in-housing and building up maturing capability was known to us and we encourage it every day. So that is not something we see as being negative nor conflicting with our own interests. That's something that we support and really push through in the daily work with the client. And I think that mindset, that spirit is super important to make sure that you ultimately enable client success in all of it. Because without it, you're just ending up creating another channel of dependency that we're not interested in, and Mars for sure is not interested in. So focus on some of those cultural components and don't underestimate them in a composable journey like this.

SPEAKER_02 38:39

Making an organization move from legacy architecture to composable architecture is it's one of empowerment, it's one of discovery, it's one of cultural transition. But I think you know, the the joyful part of it is that you've got business leaders that now know that they can come to you with ideas for where to take the business, and that you now have development teams that can say, yes, we can do that. We can do it. Well, Kyle, with that, uh thank you again for joining us for for dealing with the numerous technical hurdles that this audience is not gonna have to deal with uh to record this. And and Casper, thank you for for uh making me get up early. I just want to really uh express my appreciation for that.

SPEAKER_00 39:39

Uh welcome. An early start is a good start, no?

SPEAKER_02 39:43

You know, I've I'm gonna just change my life around. I'm I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go composable.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

There you go. All right.

SPEAKER_02 39:51

Very good. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00 39:53

Yeah, thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_02 39:54

All right. Well, we're we're gonna, you know, uh milkshakes are gonna be on me at Shop Talk, fellas.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 40:01

Looking forward to it. Thanks for listening to Mar Talks. Please leave a review and a rating on your platform of choice. We're available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast platforms. To find out more about how the Rosenstein Group can help you find the right leaders for your client development teams in Martech and e commerce, please visit our website, Rosenstein Group.com.