by Lars Birkholm Petersen, co-founder of Uniform
Take a moment to reflect on this statement “What Got You Here Won't Get You There”. This was used by Marshall Goldsmith in his book with the same title . Think about it in relation to the various website and web application projects you have been involved with over the years, whether you have been on the technical or business side.
What was your latest web project and what were the objectives that guided you to where you are today? Will this project and those objectives still be relevant over the next couple of years?
Over the past 20 years of web projects, the industry has gone through many changes in order to get us to where we are today:
From Altavista to Google
From frames to tables to CSS
From frontend to backend to frontend to backend for the frontend
From on-premise to cloud
From servers to serverless
From HTML to JS Frameworks
From traditional CMS to headless CMS
From page publishing approach to a dynamic page generation approach and back to a publishing approach
What was a new, state-of-the-art website 3 years ago is outdated today. In the same way, what we recently launched most likely won’t continue to meet our needs a couple of years from now.
What are the factors we need to consider today that we didn't consider yesterday?
1. Performance
Performance is the new frontier of digital business. Sites need to be blazing fast. This is important as Google, in 2018, started to change their search rankings for mobile search. In mobile search, performance is a ranking factor. They are extending this beyond mobile and are planning to build performance into Google Chrome. If you have a slow site, your future customer's first impression of your brand might be a message like this:
Bottom line: if you are not optimizing your site for the fastest possible performance, the result will be a negative impact on future traffic, first impressions and bounce rates. And this means a negative impact on your business results.
2. Time to market
Just like getting content to your customers fast is important, it is important that you are able to execute digital strategies quickly. Activities like launching a new campaign, creating a new site or app, and adding functionality on your current site cannot wait for months of development, dependent on small number of resources with hard-to-find skills who can do the job.
Time to market is about adoption where the web is headed. JavaScript won the web, at least for the foreseeable future. Moving towards JavaScript-based technologies for building website front-ends like React, Vue or Angular - and their corresponding static site generators - will make it easier to find the right talent to work on your project without being locked into a specific agency or vendor's way of doing things.
Justin Watts, Engineering Director, from Loblaws - one of the largest retailers in Canada - used the statement “What Got Us Here, Won't Get Us There” as the title of his talk at the 2019 JAMstack conference in San Francisco. He highlighted how Loblaws needed to re-architect their stack. The result was a dramatic improvement in time-to-market: from creating 9 awesome digital experiences in the past 7 years, to be able to build 150 amazing experiences over the next 2 years. What got them to the first 9 wasn’t going to scale for the next 150.
Loblaws re-architected using a JAMstack approach, along with optimizing their internal processes. They saw a 10x time reduction in time to market, cost and security exposure, along with improvement in performance and business impact.
Bottom line: your business needs to be able to launch new functionality with shortest time to market. If not, you are not able to react timely to trends and demands from your customers.
3. From platform to stack
The difference between a platform and a stack can be thought of as the difference between a department store and a mall. In the department store, you have most of what you need in one store, but with a limited selection. At a shopping mall, you have multiple stores that offer a wider variety of options. Smaller, specialized stores are often quicker to get the latest products on their shelves than the department stores that cater to a more generalized customer base.
In a technology landscape, we are constantly playing catch-up with consumer trends like voice, augmented reality, mixed reality, new devices and so forth. We need to be able to easily expand our stack so it can serve our customers using voice or showcase our new product leveraging augmented reality.
A platform is a good swiss army knife to get started. But with most platforms, you are at the mercy of the vendor's roadmap. A stack approach, enabled by the commitment to integration and interoperability that modern marketing tools have embraced, lets you choose the best tool for the job, while giving you greatest flexibility to own your stack roadmap.
Bottom line: moving towards a stack approach puts you in the driver’s seat. It lets you assemble and connect the technologies that are right for your organization, rather than forcing you to change your organization around your technologies.
4. Happiness and retaining talent
We all want to do what we love. What do developers love? They love working on leading edge tech. It's personally and professionally rewarding. They love being empowered to choose the right approach for the job. They don't love being constrained by legacy technology and the accompanying rigid processes that add extra overhead (with little business value) to get their jobs done.
Bottom line: in order to attract and retain the best talent, you need to give them the flexibility to use the right tool for the job. The fewer constraints imposed on them, the larger the pool is of developers and agencies that you can work with.
PS: Read more about building a talent pipeline.
5. Personalization at scale
Website personalization for the enterprise started in earnest more than 10 years ago. Yet here we are, a decade later, and very few enterprise organizations are optimizing experiences using personalization. Part of this is due to a lack of people and process. I co-authored a book that focused on this challenge in 2014.
Using systems that were designed for the personalization needs from 10 years ago has a major impact on your ability to deliver meaningful personalization today. That generation of personalization products never anticipated the amount of traffic coming to a site, where that traffic would come from, etc. These products struggle greatly under the load of modern web traffic patterns. Simply put, more traffic means slower performance. As a result, those organizations who are interested in personalization are unable to deliver it at scale without major compromises in performance and have decided to delay implementing personalization.
Bottom line: personalization is - and will continue to be - important to contextualize the experience with the most relevant content for your customers. Personalization needs to work at scale and be blazing fast.
We believe the next years will see a dramatic increase in the adoption of a JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs and Markup) approach. This approach does not prescribe specific technologies to use. It describes a pattern for how to design and deploy blazing fast sites, with minimized security exposure and significantly reduced complexity when it comes to scaling, all based on modern web development technologies and best practices.
Our friends at Netlify recently released a whitepaper detailing the rise of the JAMstack in the enterprise, which also covers the Loblaws case. It’s worth filling out the brief form and reading the details!
JAMstack can help you get where you need to be the next 2-4 years because it addresses the major challenges that organizations will continue to face over this timeframe. But as many organizations invested in different technologies that predate the JAMstack, a move to a JAMstack approach could appear to be a daunting - if not impossible - task.
At Uniform, we believe the right approach to realizing the benefits of the JAMstack is to adopt of the technology incrementally, building on top of your existing enterprise stack. Just because your current CMS was not designed to be a high-performance delivery engine or was built with technical requirements that prevent personalization to scale as required today (for example, due to a requirement that a call be made to your origin database) doesn't mean the benefits of the JAMstack should be unavailable.
This is why we have used the last year to develop Uniform, a platform that JAMstack-enables your existing digital marketing stack technologies. The result is blazing fast performance, scaling personalization and fast time to market.
Uniform connects content, front-end, delivery and optimization focused on blazing fast performance in context of your visitor’s intent.
Uniform helps customers and agencies using legacy platforms to get where you need to be tomorrow, starting today.
Where are you going? And what technology will help you get there?