Innovate or Stagnate

Join us in our latest podcast for an insightful conversation with Charlie Bell, a seasoned leader at Contentful. With almost two decades of experience in digital transformation, Charlie's journey from engineering to driving transformative projects and now in a key commercial role at Contentful offers a fresh and dynamic perspective on the evolving digital world.

We delve into the role of Contentful in digital transformation, exploring its evolution over the past decade and uncovering lesser-known aspects of the platform. Charlie shares his insights on the current challenges and exciting developments at Contentful, highlighting the intersection of technology and business strategy and the need to innovate or risk stagnating.

We explore the shifting dynamics of the digital landscape, from Contentful's origins primarily with developers to its increasing collaboration with marketers. Charlie reflects on his multifaceted career, drawing from experiences on both sides of the table to offer valuable insights into navigating digital transformation effectively.

One key focus of our discussion is on composable architectures and the importance of the MACH Alliance in digital transformation. Charlie sheds light on the concept of composable architectures, underscoring its significance in empowering organisations.  

Charlie shares anecdotes of organisations navigating challenges in selecting digital solutions and managing platform transitions, offering practical strategies for success.

Join us for valuable insights and practical advice on digital transformation success in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

We all hear a lot about digital transformation, but unless you've been there and done it, it's easy to feel that transformation is a significant challenge that might seem difficult to conquer. That is why we've launched the Good, bad and Ugly podcast series. Each episode, we talk to people who've been at the heart of transformation and we get under the skin not just of what they did and how they did it, but how it felt to be at the centre of it. Welcome to our podcast being a Digital Leader the good, the bad and the ugly of digital transformation.

Speaker 1: 0:40

My name is Wendy Stonefield and I am the Hub Executive for London for and Digital, and I'll be your host today, and I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by Charlie Bell, a Senior Director at Contentful.

Speaker 1: 0:54

We're delighted to have you with us, charlie. Thank you for joining us, and I'm really looking forward to hearing more about your journey and discussing the ever-changing digital landscape. And I know we're both veterans. We won't talk about the number of decades we've got between the two of us, but we're going to delve into the role, of course, that Contentful plays in the world we occupy and in digital transformation. We're going to touch on composable architectures, the Mac Alliance and, of course, it wouldn't be a podcast in 2024 if we didn't mention AI in some way, shape or form. So, really, we'll touch on and reference the role of AI and what you think the impact it's going to have in terms of shaping the future of content management as well the future of content management as well. So, without any further ado, I'm going to hand over to you to introduce yourself and just get us started by talking us through some of your journey.

Speaker 2: 1:53

Of course. Yeah, it's great to be here and thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to spend some time with our partners and talk about me, I suppose, and talk about us and what we do and whatever. So, as you say, I'm a senior director at Contentful and EMEA. I look after the solution engineering team, although my role encompasses a number of different functions. So we have marketing, obviously, we support the sales function. We also have our partner function, or the partner that we partner with, and then we have the business development people who are new into the business, who need a bit of coaching, a bit of guidance, and you know they lean on me for some of that.

Speaker 2: 2:34

That. I would say historical experience and the world of MarTech that they've come into. Some of the, some of the graduates that we have have come in straight from university and haven't necessarily been involved in IT. So it's an all-encompassing role which really suits me, because I think that my career, as you mentioned at the outset, I've had a bit of a varied career. I've worked for an agency, a WPP agency. I started life as a developer. I've worked for the world's biggest shipping company and I've also worked in the content management space, either as a developer, or as a customer, or as currently now selling the content management platforms, previously at Sitecore and now, as you say, been at Contentful for about 18 months. So it's going quite well, I would say.

Speaker 1: 3:27

So, like a huge amount of variation there in terms of the experience that you've had, what would you say are the most formative, defining parts of your career?

Speaker 2: 3:38

I've always looked for things that are interesting to me. So, and in a way I've never really had a career plan. I've always just seemingly fallen from one thing to the other, but actually I've always, in retrospect, I've always taken on roles that I've found interesting, and so the formative parts of my career. I think right at the outset I started life as a civil servant. I joined the Foreign Office when I was 18. And for me that was a growing up period very formative in terms of work environments and understanding work environments. I then went back to university after four years at the Foreign Office and then from there I went into IT and I joined Oracle.

Speaker 2: 4:25

But I didn't really feel that that gelled with me very well because I was always too interested in the new things that were coming along with the internet. And you know, the world of IT goes through these changes, I would say once every decade, maybe even less than that. And so the seismic changes that was around the time I was graduating in, about 1999, 1998. The big change was the internet, and so I just kind of followed that path and through that, developed, built websites. I built the world's first interactive voting app. It was on Tomorrow's World for a company that I worked with out in Goring as a developer who worked on that one so formative I think, has been for me around less so around. This is the type of tech that interests me, but it's always been about the solutions and the outcomes that I think have been interesting to me yeah and wow, haven't.

Speaker 1: 5:28

We lived through some fascinating and seismic changes in terms of consumer behavior and the impact that tech has had um in in the world. Um, but interesting, you know. As you were talking about. Having started your life in public sector, you know your change has been quite significant. Also, being client side with a large shipping business working for different providers in the space, what is the bit that has really kept you on the tech side?

Speaker 2: 6:03

has really kept you in.

Speaker 2: 6:04

On the tech side, I think I've always been aware of the fact that tech needs people who can understand tech but talk in a non-techie way, and that's always been.

Speaker 2: 6:15

I think the thing that I've always had is that ability to be sympathetic to people who need to use tech in their, in their everyday lives but don't necessarily understand it.

Speaker 2: 6:28

And I don't mean that in a patronizing way.

Speaker 2: 6:30

I mean that in in you know, developers.

Speaker 2: 6:34

As a developer, as a former developer, we can be very consumed by the technical part of it, the challenging part of it, and but that's not for everyone, and so for me, it was always about bridging that gap between the users and the builders, and so that's what kept me in tech, because I've always found a space and found a position in that role, and the fact that I'm still around, I think, is evidence that it's needed, and and and now more so than than ever.

Speaker 2: 7:09

I mean the pace of acceleration of technology, and you guys are on the front line of building these solutions, but the pace of acceleration. It really needs people who can help people understand what tech brings to the table in a in a way that that gives them some sense of ownership, some sense of value, some sense of uh, of being able to define what that is for them yeah, yeah, I love that because I I think there's a big role to play in terms of translation and facilitation between those different aspects that need to come together to actually ultimately have the impact within a client organization.

Speaker 1: 7:51

Thank you for sharing that. I'm really keen to hear a little bit more about Contentful. It's been part of the content management landscape for a decade now. Just before starting talking about how we're sharing a 10th anniversary year between and Digital, it being our 10th year as well, so we know it's a big milestone in an organisational history. I'm interested in a little bit more about Contentful and also your reasons for specifically joining Contentful.

Speaker 2: 8:22

Yeah, so we are a content management platform, if you like. We manage the content that exists within businesses. As you say, it's 10 years old, founded in Berlin by Sasha and Paolo, who are the two founders who met at a tech networking event like a speed dating type thing and ended up coming up with a solution Sasha, who came up with a solution, that that the content management platforms at the time were not really omni-channel in the way that they claim to be, and I'll qualify that in a bit in a minute. But what they ended up doing was building a platform that really looked at content as a combination of the content that exists within a business and it doesn't all exist in one place, and that's been the old style content management. The original content management platforms were very much a linear system where you put all your content in and pages dropped out the other side. They recognised that there was a need for a platform that connected the sources of content around a business and exposed it out into a way and effectively between the two of them invented the headless content management space. That was about 10 years ago Now, when I was at Sitecore.

Speaker 2: 9:39

I was there for six years and I got wind of this company out of Berlin and we would see them start to pop up in opportunities that we were bidding for, and I was thinking that's interesting.

Speaker 2: 9:57

At the time it felt like and it probably was, I think they would probably admit there was it was just a bunch of guys in Berlin with this little idea, but they just kept coming back. And what was interesting for me? I think you could easily say one of us is in the wrong room. I was more interested in the fact that they'd got into the room at all, and they were very they're very focused on the development community. They were very focused on their, their platform as doing this one thing well, and, and so we started to see them more and more, and so I started to pay more attention, and then I realised that the problems that they were solving for were the problems that most businesses are facing nowadays, and so I started a little bit of early exploratory work. I downloaded the platform, I had a go with it, because it's free to download. You can actually download and get started, and I thought this is interesting.

Speaker 1: 11:09

I had to dust off my developer skills for a little bit I was going to say you call from your engineering background.

Speaker 2: 11:15

Exactly. And then I just started a conversation with them and said, look, I'm kind of interested, and they said, yeah, come on board, We'd love you to join us and bring your experience of the world and content management and partnerships and how they were going. And they are going through a. You know we I say we now because I'm there, but we're going through this very transformative phase in the face of the company. It's 10 years old but we're really on the, the trajectory, the upward trajectory of of the problems that companies are facing now with their content strategy.

Speaker 1: 11:53

we absolutely solve for so it's a great place to be yeah, and interesting, I suppose, to be back in um you know 10 years you established but you've still in the domain can feel like a startup as well.

Speaker 2: 12:09

Yes, there is that very much that startup feel, there's that entrepreneurial feel, and I noticed that the moment I walked through the door is that young upstart thing and I know the company's 10 years old, but I think it was Jeff Bezos who said it took us 10 years to become an overnight success. Bezos who said it took us 10 years to become an overnight success, and um, and I think that's very much the. The position that we find ourselves in at Contentful is that we are ideally positioned to be solving those problems that businesses are facing with their content. We have the great, we have the best products in the market and I'm not just saying that. You know we, our product is the most uh, it's the most used on things like black friday. We have 90 billion api calls a month and that's up and going up and up and up.

Speaker 2: 12:50

Um, we have um scale with professional services. So the company has built the ecosystem around the product which you need to have when you start to talk to enterprises and people who you know they want to solve a particular problem, but they also, when they engage with a partner, they maybe need a bit more. They need to have the comfort and the knowledge, their support behind that as well. So, as a company we are, we have a great product, but we also have that ecosystem which gives us, I think, the the best advantage in the marketplace yeah, that's really interesting and, in terms of what you guys are seeing at contentful at the moment, what are the things that are really filling your inbox?

Speaker 1: 13:34

um, what are the things that you are most challenged by at the moment or and most excited by as well?

Speaker 2: 13:41

yeah, there are a lot of companies at the moment who are on that threshold of our old content management system isn't quite doing what we wanted to do our content strategy. It needs to be unleashed somehow and I coming back to the point about me having that that one foot in the marketing, one foot in the it camp. I think a lot of companies are a little bit confused as to how to move forward. Because there is this perception, because content management is about 25, 26 years old as a concept and the idea is that you put all your content into one platform and then you serve up web pages. But that's not worked for businesses for a very, very long time, but yet they still have these old style content management systems.

Speaker 2: 14:31

There's a lot of companies now that are approaching us and saying help us understand. You know, we see you around, but we don't quite get what we need. How do we change? How do we approach our new content strategy? How do we unleash the? How do we approach our new content strategy? How do we unleash the potential in our marketing teams? How do we increase the velocity of the content that's going through the business?

Speaker 2: 15:01

So we are in a lucky position, I think, where we are speaking to a lot of companies who just need help, and so that's a great position for us to be in. There are a lot of RFPs going on, and a lot of them have a great amount of value in them. I think what we're finding at the moment is that RFPs are almost like a cry for help in some circumstances where they say we kind of need to move off off our old content platform.

Speaker 2: 15:26

We don't know where we need to go. Um, so my inbox and my day-to-day at the moment is doing a lot of qualification, a lot of calls with people. Um, you approach it in a pragmatic sense. You have to. Um, there's this idea that rfps and and and that sort of thing come out fully formed, and they very rarely do. In fact, they never do. There is always a piece of work to be done by our partners, like you guys and us, to educate people, to help them understand where they need to go. So that's the day-to-day.

Speaker 1: 16:01

Yeah, interesting, and I always think of them as a starting point for the conversation and to bring your different points of experience together.

Speaker 2: 16:09

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:09

As a partner and a client organisation.

Speaker 2: 16:12

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:14

You know to talk about where a client might go to from there. But it's really interesting hearing you talk because you know when I started my career. You know a lot of the work that I did was in content management. You know particularly the clients who worked across geographical territories globally. Who was standing up? You know, 25 years ago, first big digital operations and trying to get their heads around.

Speaker 1: 16:40

you know the omni-channel challenge in a global context where people were using digital in very different ways to inform and then actually affect transactions in the digital domain. I think the one thing that is still very much true is the role of content as a key part of differentiating based on experience, and that is still the imperative is how a brand or a business in a B2C or a B2B context does differentiate, and the role of content in that is still absolutely fundamental and critical.

Speaker 2: 17:20

It is. It 100% is, and I find I'm interested in all aspects of digital experience and digital touch points and it's quite sad in a way, but when I get an SMS message to say that my package is ready for collection or my one-time code to log into my PayPal, I look at it and think somebody actually sat down and wrote that and they're writing content and it's everything. It's push notifications, it's returns, barcode information, it's every part of the user journey. Someone is writing content for that and I would say I've been fascinated and worked with content for a very long time, but it is, without a doubt, the lifeblood of a digital experience and you can't personalise.

Speaker 2: 18:10

Without content, you can't sell, you can't embellish your content, you can't talk about your brand. You can't do any of that without content and content is the key thing. It is the way by which businesses reflect themselves or project themselves out into the world and it's the way by which they get people excited, they get people on board, they encourage people to become customers, to become advocates. So it's the lifeblood of everything and it's kind of SMS messages, push notifications. Somebody sat and wrote that and I think about them and the systems that they use. I'm not obsessed by it, but I don't think about it all the time.

Speaker 2: 19:01

I appreciate it, I appreciate that someone has actually taken the time and effort to think about it.

Speaker 1: 19:04

I appreciate that someone has actually taken the time and effort to think about the words that's going, that are going into things like the text messages and well, and I think you know, consumer expectations are at an all-time high in terms of people getting it right, um, in terms of the content that's been served up at the right time in the right channel, um, at the right moment. So know, absolutely we're allowed to be obsessed with it. You know, you've spent, you know, 20 years or thereabouts in the digital transformation space. You know, from your perspective, you've touched a little bit on seismic change. But what are the biggest like changes that you've noticed during that time and your time? If you look at Contentful, in the original days of content management systems, the focus was on the developer aspect of that versus the editorial and the marketers.

Speaker 2: 20:01

I would say the first seismic change was this whole concept of digital transformation, and every company went through that initial phase of embracing, in some form or another, the Internet, and so that was where the concept of content management systems sprung up. You know, they needed some way to manage the words and pictures that were out there on their brochureware websites way to manage the words and pictures that were out there on their brochureware websites. And the digital transformation is this ongoing thing. There are companies who made the initial change and started to digitise their operations, but the ones who really embraced it and made digital at the core of their business were the ones who flourished and did particularly well. So that's an ongoing thing.

Speaker 2: 20:49

I remember a conversation with a friend of mine who works for HSBC Bank and he said we are a marketing function who happen to do banking, and that, I think, for me, framed the attitude and the way that they view themselves in the world. There are trends, I think, in IT and in our business there are trends and then there are movements, and the trends are you know what's the latest cool programming language? Is it Python? Is it Ruby on Rails? Is it, you know, net? Is it whatever? Is it in JavaScript. Those trends come and go.

Speaker 2: 21:26

Then there's the movements, and the movements are the things that happen almost imperceptibly. And then suddenly they are everywhere. And the move to Mac and composable is the latest thing that we've seen with that, where Contentful is at the heart of that as a composable platform. But that's the latest movement that we're seeing at the moment and in conjunction with that there are other things going on, but that, for me, is the most interesting seismic thing that's been happening.

Speaker 2: 22:01

It almost happened imperceptibly because people were buying more and more things. They were buying their analytics platform, their personalization platform, their commerce platform, and they had all these little bits of technology all kind of dotted around in their the within their business, and somehow they had to start thinking about tying them together and making it work. And that became the. That became the composable movement, and composable the word composable is just the word component, I mean is bits of stuff that you kind of put together. So the word composable describes the component architecture that people have within their business.

Speaker 2: 22:42

That's where we are right now, which is an exciting place to be, I think, because we look at technology, we look at value. People look at how they measure value, how they measure the impact of the technology. People look at how they measure value, how they measure the impact of the technology, and I would say and I've said this before is that ROI? People think of it as return on investment. I would say what's more important now is rate of innovation. How quickly can you adapt and change and move as you need to as a business? And so, yeah, that's the, for me, is the big movement where we are.

Speaker 1: 23:18

Yeah, it's really interesting and as you talk about movement, I really also got a really strong sense of, you know, the move to the customer, because I, like you, when I started off my career in terms of the role that marketing teams play, they were at the tip of the spear.

Speaker 1: 23:36

In terms of the role that marketing teams play, they were the tip of the spear in terms of where the transformation actually started and had to really pull through all the entire organization. I did a lot in automotive very traditional manufacturing cultures and organizations that were all defined around the inception know the inception and launch and rollout of models and all of a sudden you had something come along as a wave of movement that required the entire organization to really pull together in order to be able to stand up to the customer and the transformation that that's kind of dictated you need to be able to make in order to survive and meet the customer. And it's quite yeah, you talk about the composable factor as well, of how to really I suppose I then got conductor in my mind to really be able to bring all of those things together in a way again that if we're going to use music as an analogy come together to play the right tune that meets the demand of an end user and an end customer in a way that is sustainable for an organisation.

Speaker 2: 24:52

Yeah, that's a great analogy because, if you think about any orchestral piece, we didn't set this up in advance by the way.

Speaker 1: 24:57

No, we didn't.

Speaker 2: 24:58

But if you think about any orchestral piece, there are movements through the music where perhaps the strings are more dominant than the horns, and it's the same with business. There are movements through the year or through, as you say, product launches, where parts of the interacting tech landscape are more important than the other, and the ability to weave that together, conduct that together, is important. But businesses typically every business that I've run into, I've interacted with they have competing priorities. It's job is to make the platforms run, keep the lights on, keep things up and running and make sure that there is a service there right, so that the app is up, the website's up, whatever.

Speaker 2: 25:45

Marketing's job is to this agility, move quickly, change things, break things, and so you have these competing priorities where you want the stability of IT and the dynamism of marketing, and the role of people like us at Contentful is to provide that stability in the platform and then, in conjunction with partners like yourself, is to build that unlock that agility that marketers are looking for. So it's always a balancing act and I think that that's a key thing is to really understand where the balance of power is within businesses and who's going to be making the decisions, but on whose behalf you know. It making decisions on marketing's behalf is never going to be a great outcome. Marketing making decisions on IT's behalf is never going to be a great outcome. You need to find that middle ground absolutely so, yeah, that's, that's the of.

Speaker 2: 26:42

Every business has that.

Speaker 1: 26:43

Every single business has that yeah, and I think you know how you bring the voice of the customer yes into helping to maintain and get the right balance is really important as well in that whole dynamic and you know we've spoken about the fact that you come from a developer background You've played a role actually leading out on large scale transformation from a client site perspective as well. So you've kind of worked in the space, playing various different roles in doing so and have therefore not I don't like talking about sides of the table, but you have sat on different sides of the table. What advantage do you think that gives you in the role that you play today?

Speaker 2: 27:31

I think it's empathy. I understand the needs of the different aspects. So when I'm talking to a marketer, I understand that they want to drive business forward. They will have key objectives that they want to achieve. When I'm looking at a developer, they want to be working on projects. They want to be working on platforms that just work, that they're not spending all night trying to fix obscure bugs or on hold to support lines trying to get stuff working.

Speaker 2: 28:01

So I think that when we approach when I approach opportunities and we're speaking to customers and we're working with partners is really understanding the 360 view of a project and not as a single entity pulling something along. So not not a marketing function pulling people along. It has to be a unit that moves as one, and so my I think my position on that and my experience with that is to really understand each part of the equation and and where they, where they they're placing their bets in a way. So if they choose a Contentful, what are they going to get from us in terms of the developer experience? And then what would be the usage experience? Because when you implement the platform, of course the marketers will be using the platform not just day one, but day, three, six, five, two years down the line.

Speaker 2: 28:54

And our partners play a great role in helping define that because ultimately they, you know you guys would own the relationship with a company from an implementation perspective and an ongoing perspective as well. So, you know that's, I think the advantage is just to really understand the dynamic in the room and I think it gives me a little bit of credibility that if I you know that's, I think the advantage is just to really understand the dynamic in the room and I think it gives me a little bit of credibility that if I, you know, haven't been a developer, I'm one of them. You know it's. I wouldn't like to write any code nowadays, but I understand the role and what they do and, yeah, I have that empathy.

Speaker 1: 29:34

No, that's really interesting and you touch on that. You know when the journey an organisation goes through when they're implementing the technology and I think you know we've both been around enough to see organisations who have gone through various different implementations. You know, and it's easy for platforms particular platforms to get a bad rap, but often it's everything that's happening around that that maybe hasn't been quite what it might have been in terms of driving success off the back of those platforms. I don't know what your thoughts and views on on that are yeah, successful projects have effectively have three key ingredients.

Speaker 2: 30:22

The first is that they have a clear objective and where they want to go. So they and we talked a little bit about it a few minutes ago that if they come into the table with an rfp andP and they're talking about stuff that they want to do, it's important, I think, as a partnership and, you know, working from the contentful perspective, but from the digital perspective, is to one pick what are they really trying to achieve and what's the key objectives that they're trying to get to? The other thing that I think that we you've got to understand is how are the people, how are they measured? Right? How do how are those people measured in their own role? So someone's coming to you asking for a, a new strategic direction in terms of their marketing technology. How are they measured? And you can lean into that and you can start to draw out, draw out those, those objectives. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that it has to have buy-in from across the business, and and not just across the business, but from up and down the business um, so buy-in is we accept that this is going to take time, it's going to cost money, it's going to be maybe sometimes a bit of a bumpy road, and that's inevitable. But when we hit those bumps, who do we turn to? What do we do? How do we fix it? How do we get the thing back on track? We've been around long enough to know that there's not a single project in the world that hasn't hit some sort of problem where you need to go back to the platform company to get something explained, or you, you maybe need to change direction. So that's the second thing, so the buy-in is the second thing, and then the third thing is just a general acceptance of the fact that you, you're going to keep measuring as you go along. You've got, you're going to, when you get your first phase, your minimum viable product or whatever it is you're testing and measuring.

Speaker 2: 32:21

The projects that are most successful are the ones who don't use the words well, I think that, or I feel that, or I you know it's the ones that go. The data shows that, and if you start to measure the outcomes and you start to say, well, the data shows that. And if you start to measure the outcomes, you start to say, well, the data shows that this content is not performing. I want to be able to change it. I want to be able to make a quick change. How do I do that? And then that then engenders this collective direction of a project, and that's the key, I think, the key inputs of a project, and that's that's the key, I think, the key inputs of a, of that, that, that of a, of a successful project. But it is a, it is as I say, it's a, it's a unit all moving in one direction.

Speaker 1: 33:05

Um, so those, yeah, that's yeah, no, it's really interesting and you know you allude to it. You know there are people in, there are human beings involved in this process. Yeah, that you know. We're all trying to achieve something in their own career journeys and need to be successful and and have impact within their organizations. Um, and and change often, particularly when you're working at an enterprise level, when an organization has operated in a certain way for a long period of time, it's you know, that changing of behaviors and practices. You know that changing of behaviours and practices is, you know, brings with it all the challenges that we know exist with change, that people are often fearful of change and the impact on their own roles, etc. So I think it's being able to traverse that journey with an organisation at scale.

Speaker 2: 33:55

And that's, I think, where the real value of a partner like Andigital comes in is managing the expectation of change right from the outset. You know it's that conversation, and it's often a conversation. It's to say we're going to put you off in a direction, we're going to set you off in a direction that we're going to set you off in a direction that we know works. Here's all our case studies. Go to our website. Here's the case studies of the people who have been successful with our services, our Contentful platform, and the reason that they did this and the reason that they are successful is because they changed the way that they thought about their business. They changed the way they thought about their content. They changed and understood the way that they thought about their business. They changed the way they thought about their content. They changed and understood the way that content operates and exists within their business.

Speaker 2: 34:41

If you trust us and there is trust, that's another word that comes into it that if you trust us to help you readdress how you look at content, then we will take you on a journey. It may not be the easiest thing, because you've got 25 years of baked in. You know the old content management system that's baked in. People have this expectation that that's how content works and can only ever work. When you start to unpick that and you start to say, trust us, let's help you, let us collectively help you, move towards a different way of thinking about how content exists, those are the best outcomes and essentially you talked about um like an mvp or even a minimum lovable product yes we like to call them sometimes um, but that need to be able to actually also build the confidence in an organization by delivering at pace as well and being able to have some demonstrable output as a team.

Speaker 1: 35:41

And I think you know we we certainly put a lot of value in that in, in terms of being able to hit the ground and get real pace and momentum behind something and start to not not like the old days where organisations would go into a black hole. You know the supply goes away and is doing something to an organisation of really working collaboratively, really sharing knowledge as we go, but being able to demonstrate within a client organisation that you can deliver at pace and give it the visibility that it needs.

Speaker 2: 36:15

Yeah, and it's the only way Because, as I said, content complexity of MarTech it is a complex world out there. The other thing that we tend to forget is marketers and even IT people aren't experts in the technology landscape out there. They're not experts in every facet of what we do and technology landscape out there. They're not experts in every facet of what we do and they have to lean on us as we lean on them. Help us understand how you work, how you operate, how you're judged, how you're measured, and we will help you understand how the modern content and MarTech world works. And those are the best relationships.

Speaker 1: 36:53

Yeah, that's great We've touched on this, but I just want to make sure that we cover it comprehensively. So a big area of focus, of course, for you and the Contentful team are composable architectures, Mac principles more than anything, and articulating what that really means for organisations and their next phase of transformation. For those that haven't yet been initiated into the world of composable and Mac principles, could you set the scene a little bit and tell people and our listeners why it does matter and what composable means from a Contentful perspective?

Speaker 2: 37:36

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 37:37

So MACH, m-a-c-h, I mean it's quite a technical term, it's just a way of building things. The bottom line of it is it's a way of building products, I should say platforms like Contentful, I can tell you microservices, so each part of the platform has its own specific service that does something in particular, like, for example, update a content item. You know, simple as that, api. So that's the API first. So application programming interfaces, which developers love, and then cloud first, or cloud native, so it's actually hosted, built in the cloud, and then headless, headless being. So it's actually hosted, built in the cloud, and then Headless, headless being the delivery mechanism, the experiential part. Headless can be an app as much as it can be a website or a web app. It can be a kiosk, a point of sale thing. It can be anything where that content is surfaced. And that design pattern, that way of building platforms, lends itself to an ecosystem of products that are certified under the guidance of the Mac Alliance, who are an industry body who kind of sprung up about I think it'd be about four years ago now, five years ago. It's been a while, but they define what a mach solution is now.

Speaker 2: 38:58

Composability is effectively the ability to connect those things together, and a great example from a contentful perspective is that it's very easy to build apps in contentful, where you can connect things into contentful using the mach principles. A great example of that would be, for example, personalization. So typically you would buy your, you'd have your content management platform and you'd go off and buy your analytics platform sorry, your personalization platform and you would, if you wanted to build some personalization into your app or into your website, you would write the content in the content management system and then you would go off to your personalization system and you would write your test in your personalization system and then you would pull the content from one or push the content from one to the other. With contentful in, our role in in the composable aspects of it is that you can do your personalisation, for example, right from within the app. So a marketer who's spent time and effort and got themselves certified in terms of being able to use the Contentful app can now do the personalisation from within the app. But importantly, and unlike the old-style digital experience all-in-one monolith platforms is that they can change that personalization engine if they want to.

Speaker 2: 40:20

So this is coming back to the composable part of it. They say that personalization isn't powerful enough or it's too expensive or doesn't quite work for what we want to do. I want to change that, swap that out and put in a new one, but I still want to use it from within my Contentful UI. That's where the power of Composable comes in. So we are very much. We play the role of the Contentful platform, plays the role of the management of that content experience, and in fact we call ourselves a Composable content platform because it's not just things like personalization. You can connect commerce straight into contentful and manage the, the product placement on pages or product recommendations, and so there are. That's for us, that's that's how it plays in in everyday life and that's how a lot of our customers use our platform.

Speaker 1: 41:15

That's a fascinating and easy to comprehend explanation. So thank you, charlie, you know. As you know, we're talking about the good, the bad and the ugly of digital transformation. We've spoken about some of the challenges for organisations who have perhaps not backed the most appropriate or best digital horse, or whose digital experience platform has reached simply reached its end of life, and there's obviously a huge investment that does go into getting these decisions right and having the impact that any client wants to have. If you get it wrong, you effectively then have to. I like the analogy of changing the engine whilst midair. How do you navigate that? What are the good, the bad and ugly examples that you can share?

Speaker 2: 42:11

Well, we touched a little bit on the good stuff, the people who are successful, as I say, the people who are coming at it with a very open attitude in terms of help us be better. You know, they have a clear direction, a clear understanding of where they want to go. Content being in an old style content management system, it is quite daunting Absolutely, and I get it and there's often this idea that I need to take all of that and put it into a new content platform and suddenly that will solve all my problems. Well, it probably won't, because when you start to look at a platform like Contentful, there's a golden opportunity to restructure the way that you use your content. You can create reusable components and whatever.

Speaker 2: 43:02

But, crucially, anybody who's looking at a migratory path off an old content management platform that's been around for a while and we all know who they are, but there's a lot of content in there that can be a source of content that feeds into contentful. So you can stand up contentful really quickly and start to manage and build your content structures in there. So you can start to create your content types and you can use the old cms as a as a way of feeding that content into the new Contentful platform and then you build your headless experience on top of that. You may already have a headless experience, but you build that and you start to work immediately with Contentful as your new content platform. That makes it a lot less daunting for people, so that's the very good way of doing it.

Speaker 2: 43:57

I think that there is a lot. They'll have a lot of customers who've taken that approach, and then the idea is that as they migrate more and more content naturally into new structured content within Contentful, then the old content management system sort of just fades away and you can set a timeline on that, and companies often do, because they'll have a subscription expiring and that sort of thing. So it's not a one-and-done, all-or-nothing type approach that it used to be, Getting on to the bad.

Speaker 2: 44:29

I think the bad ones are the companies, the projects.

Speaker 2: 44:34

Where it is a, I would say it's difficult. I don't want to judge anyone, but I think the difficult ones are the ones who say we just want to move from there to there and we don't really care about addressing any of the the the ongoing legacy issues that we have. Or, even worse, we don't want to look at the opportunities that this presents us. We just want to do this at cost. Well, you know, for as cheap as we possibly can, as quickly as we possibly can, and um, and then you know, you get six months, 12 months down the line. They go well, we kind of know better off than we were before, and you say, well, that's a missed opportunity, more than anything else, and I think I don't want to judge anyone for that, but we do see that sometimes is that there are companies who just take that approach and I think the ugly good, the bad and the ugly I think the ugly ones are just the ones that are very, very cost focused, very cost driven, and I know everyone not everyone's got huge budgets, especially in this environment. But ultimately it's a very difficult approach to do something on a budget. I'd like to use the analogy of if you're building a house, you can borrow a certain amount of money from the bank and the bank will give you a part of a mortgage and they, when you've got a certain amount of build in that house done you know you've got the foundations, or maybe the or the the house is watertight you get a bit more of the money.

Speaker 2: 46:06

I think you can take an ugly project and make it into a good one by just taking the time to say OK, I know you're cost driven, I know you're cost constrained, I know that you have to go to your CFO and justify this. Why don't we take that mortgage approach and say, if we can get you from here to here in the next six months and we can prove that there's value to be had? You can then go back to your CFO and say, look, this is working, I've got more leads, I've got more conversions, I'm selling more, we've reduced the cost of creating content, we've increased our throughput of content, et cetera, et cetera. And, like I said, not opinion but facts. Then you know any C cfo anybody who's interested in the growth and health of a company is going to have a very good look at that and say actually yes.

Speaker 1: 46:58

So for me I think the ugly ones are the, the ones that really miss that opportunity and, just you know, try and throw something together quickly yeah, I think that's fascinating because I think also, you know, in my experience, the ones that are set up as transformations sorry, replatforming you know they're never replatforming and probably the worst thing that you land up with is this kind of trying to do the monolithic shift and do everything, missing the opportunity and just the organisation becoming really overwhelmed by that. So, you know you're struggling to actually affect the migration at this scale. You're missing the opportunity that it's presented and you're no further forward as an organisation.

Speaker 2: 47:51

Yeah, absolutely. About 10 years ago there was a lot of companies did these what they called cloud transformation projects, and what they did is they took a bunch of servers running in a basement somewhere, so they would take the virtual machines off those so a little bit technical, but they would take the actual server instances that were running in the basement and then they would put the actual server instances that were running in the basement and then they would put them into the cloud, whether that was IBM or Azure or whatever AWS and they would go oh well, we've moved to the cloud, but nothing's changed. And you go well, all you did was move it from there to there, and the same applies to MarTech. All you do is take it from there to there. The cloud and the same applies to MarTech. If all you do is take it from there to there, the cloud presents a huge amount of opportunity, and I think the role of somebody like Anne Digital is to say you know you could do that, but it would be really great if you thought about this, this, this because now you're at a point and for a lot of companies, a point that they haven't had for a very long time because they've been stuck in this business as usual type environment and I think that you know, with the faith and the confidence in a company like Ant to say we kind of know how to do this.

Speaker 2: 49:04

If you trust us coming back to that word again, trust if you trust us to help you, you're at an ideal inflection point in your transformation journey, or your digital journey, where not only are your business going to improve, but you will improve.

Speaker 1: 49:18

You'll learn a whole lot more about stuff, and that's a far better conversation to be had, you're let people in to help actually demonstrate and build a case, but also that speed to value and delivering that incrementally being such a much easier way for most organizations to navigate a transformation. That's great. So we've gone a whole podcast so far without mentioning AI Definite pat on the back. But in all seriousness, obviously AI is going to have a huge impact on both of our organizations, but more broadly from a societal perspective. But in Relate we'll keep it to specifically contentful and the world of content. What are your views in terms of the industry and the impact it will have?

Speaker 2: 50:15

Well, again, it's another movement. It's a seismic movement. We already have it integrated into our platform. You can generate content straight from within our UI. You can build and write articles and stuff like that. It is a case of as a platform vendor, we have, I think, a very particular responsibility to our customers to make sure that they are able to use Gen AI in a compliant way. A lot of our customers have regulatory and compliance considerations around how they use content and how they generate content, but things I think the really interesting stuff is yet to come.

Speaker 2: 51:00

I used this phrase a few weeks ago it's an old Winston Churchill thing when he was talking about you know, this isn't the end. It's not even the beginning of the end, but it's the end of the beginning. With AI, I think we're very much at the end of the beginning. People have woken up to this seismic shift in the way that things can be generated imagery, um, content. It's really really good at things like seo and and and generating content that people would normally find quite boring Description, keywords, seo titles, etc. But at the same time, it's very good at things like writing articles. It's very good at translating articles, where I find I like to use the term augmented intelligence and I think the way that the reason I use that is because the way that I've used chat, gpt or whatever to generate some content is that I've used it as a as to. I've asked it to build me some, some content, and you can use the prompting to say make it more friendly, make it more whatever.

Speaker 2: 52:11

The one thing that human beings are very, very good at is spotting patterns, and as good as things like ChatGPT and things are, and Gen EI is, it's very patternistic.

Speaker 2: 52:22

I don't even know if that's a word, and if you do enough of it, you start to spot patterns in the way that it phrases things, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem. I think it's fantastic for people to be able to say generate me a product description. Then what I want to do as a marketer with my own marketing head on, with bearing in mind my brand values, our tone of voice, the way that we want to present ourselves, I'm going to take that as a template and I'm just going to embellish it with our own stuff. That I find to be very, very exciting and you can do that within Contentful. Right now we demo that probably every day to people and they're always astonished and I think that's really nice. It's a really nice thing when you show that, literally in front of you, generating content, they go wow, that's amazing, really powerful, and I can't and I and I think we're in that very short window where people are still massively amazed by it.

Speaker 2: 53:21

Um, because very much you know, I think in in six months time, people will be like, well, you can, yeah, that's, that's cool, but what else can it do? But it is a thrilling prospect. The other angle that Contentful have on this is structured content, is the way that you build AI, machine learning. So our platform people who have structured content inside Contentful already or are putting it into Contentful you can train models with it and so you can start to build your own models with the content that you have within our platform. And I think that in a few years' time we'll start to see certainly regulated industries. I think you'll be able to plug and play AI and our platform will become a well, it already is, but you can plug and play your own AI models into Contentful and then it will generate the content that's compliant, fully yours, fully owned, whatever else it needs to be. So it's a mind-blowing prospect and I think we're just scratching the surface. Yeah, agree, it'd be interesting to pick up the conversation in six to 12 months' time.

Speaker 1: 54:28

Mind-blowing prospect and you know, I think we're just scratching the surface. Yeah, agree, be interesting to pick up the conversation in six to twelve months time and yeah and to your point, we're very much at the embryonic stages of the impact that we'll see absolutely yeah, great, and we all, as you know, charlie have and titles here at Ant Digital that denote, yes, we are professionals, but we also have interests in another dimension to ourselves as people and human beings. If you were to join us, what would your antitle be?

Speaker 2: 55:10

Well, I used to be a skier. Um, I also I'm a music. I play music but I'm not like a musician. That's a bit a bit of a stretch. I pluck away a guitar. But my real passion is in, um, in engineering and mechanics. I, yeah, I can, probably couldn know, but I, my first car was a real banger. You know, it was just an old, broken car and it broke down all the time. But I could. I could pretty much dismantle the engine and and all that so it could dismantle the engine, put it back together, took the whole top. So I was a mechanic.

Speaker 1: 55:48

Oh, I love that. I see I see a hobby there, engineer. Yeah, something like that. Charlie's retirement long ahead of you, charlie. I have thought of it Doubling in.

Speaker 2: 56:00

I have thought about having a garage, yeah, and doing something like that.

Speaker 1: 56:04

I love that. Thank you for sharing that with us it. Thank you for sharing that with us. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us. That is everything for this edition of being a Digital Leader the good, the bad and the ugly of digital transformation. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do remember to follow or subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode to enjoy. And Digital is on a mission to help close the world's digital skills gap. One of the ways we're doing this is by helping organisations deliver digital transformation more successfully through upskilling and reskilling.