Digital: Disrupted: Headless Content Management Systems: Powering Better Digital Experiences

Episode Transcript:

Paul Muller: So long-term listeners will know that I believe a company's website, and in particular the telemetry, the interaction data coming off it are an underrated part, a really underrated part of how a business can predict its future performance. Whether you're selling to businesses or consumers, your website is most often how your company and its services are found, typically through search. And it's how they're assessed by prospective buyers often before your salespeople are ever engaged, and the customer experience on your website could be the difference between making or breaking a quarter. In fact, according to the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, 75% of consumers decide whether a company is credible based solely on their experience with the company's website. The conclusion, at least from my perspective, is that your business marketing efforts are often only as effective and as agile as your website. The problem is that for most companies, their websites are about as agile as a brick.

And I speak from experience here. I recall my time at a Fortune 50 company when I learned that in order to change a few lines of text on the website, I had to get in line for months whilst waiting for a slot from the website's developers to become available. And I just want to say that again, I had to wait months just to change some simple text that was wrong. So, what can be done to make your web presence more responsive to a rapidly changing world? Well, before we answer that question, I'd love you to check out the website, speaking of websites of today's sponsor, Rocket Software at rocketsoftware.com to see why over 10 million IT professionals rely on Rocket Software every day to run their most critical business applications, processes, and data. Well, to help shed the light on the state of the art of web content management, I'm joined by co-founder and CTO of Contentstack, Nishant Patel. Welcome to the show!

Nishant Patel: Thanks, Paul. Thanks for having me here.

PM: Yeah, it's great to have you. I'm really keen to talk about this topic. As you can tell, it's a bit of a point of passion for me. It's also a little bit quirky, possibly for some of listeners, not quirky, maybe a little unusual or nerdy for some of our listeners who may not understand how websites are put together. So, before we get into the topic proper, maybe it's also worth talking a little bit about the modern web stack, but we have something we want to do before that, and that's the lightning round, the chance to get to know you through a slightly unusual lens here. Ready to play the game?

NP: Sure.

PM: Let's do this thing. He has a nervous look on his face, folks. All right. First question, what would people say is your superpower, Nishant?

NP: I think I would have to say curiosity. And for me it, it's continuously changing over time as I get older as well. Just curious about all sorts of stuff around me. It could be tech, business, finance, biology, chemistry, physics, all sorts of stuff. So, I think that's my superpower.

PM: You thrive on input.

NP: Totally, totally. And also, just kind of knowing there's so much out there that you don't know right? To be constantly curious about things and dig deeper.

PM: Yeah, I think I share that trait with you. All right, next one. The most disruptive technology of all time?

NP: Yeah. So this one, my wife keeps talking about prescription glasses, and I think I will go with that one. Can you imagine a world where you don't have that visual sensory? It'd be a pretty hard world to navigate.

PM: I love that answer. That is great. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I guess especially in a knowledge worker world, our eyesight, and I don't mean to again be ableist on, I don't mean to be ableist on this one, but our eyesight is really, for many people, is an important data feed. So yeah, it's a really great example. All right. The best quality a leader can have?

NP: I think it's humility that kind of grounds you in a way, because I think we all carry some levels of ego and some people have a lot, some have little humility. But it is important, kind of staying grounded. I think that kind of opens you to learn new things, see different perspectives. So, I would put humility at the very top.

PM: I'll take that one. Your advice to people starting their careers?

NP: Oh, this one I can go on forever. I think when you start your career, you know, you have sort of that youthful energy, I think it's seek knowledge, right? Don't worry about sort of titles and moving up in the world and all that sort of stuff. I think it's more what's going to challenge you, what's going to get you out of your comfort zone? And then put in the time, effort, work that goes along with that. So just continually seek knowledge, especially in your twenties and thirties. And as you get older, some of that stuff, there's a lot of other things you have to worry about as you get older. So early days, yeah, just go after knowledge I would say.

PM: Knowledge and experience, I suppose they go hand in hand, don't they? 

NP: For sure.

PM: All right. Your first thought that comes to mind when you think of the word purpose?

NP: Giving back. I think just in any way possible. I think a lot of us tend to think, well I need to go philanthropic, donate a lot of money, and all that sort of stuff. It doesn't have to be that. It could be just time. Whatever you've learned, be out there, share with the world. So just give back in any which way possible. Yeah, so I would say giving back.

PM: A noble thought. Last question from the lightning round. If you could use technology to solve one world problem, what would it be and why?

NP: I would say inequality and basic access to knowledge. I think access to knowledge can transform things in crazy ways. And we've seen this in the developing world where people getting access to mobile phones and internet, and it doesn't have to be fast internet, it's got such a transformative nature to that just changes everything, changes the game. And think about some of the human potential too. There's so many people that don't have access to these things and then we as humans are losing all that potential, if you will. So yeah, I would say inequality.

PM: I'll take that answer. Well, welcome to the show. Before we get into the topic of the modern web stack and what goes on behind the curtain on your company's website or our listeners' company's website, I should say. Tell us a little bit about you and your, your background. How did you come to be CTO at Contentstack?

NP: I started out as a software engineer, and I would say that was kind of a lazy route for me, which just, I'm just curious about everything. So, technology or programming just came naturally to me, and this is late nineties, and I just continued that from passion and to make money. I took a job, well, I graduated in 2000 and at six months into it, the company shut down the whole dot com crash. But eventually got a job, worked there for six, seven years. It was more integration software, and this is pre-cloud days. And I had this thing where, well, 2006 cloud came about and I tried it out back in 2006 and I thought it was going to change the game. So, what I knew at that time was integration, all the systems have to talk to each other. And so I'm thinking, well, with the cloud and people creating software in their internet, that integration problem will be there as well.

And so I said, well, okay, can we build integration in the web? So from that, I basically didn't know how to set up a business, run a business, nothing like that. I just quit and went on my entrepreneurial journey. So that's how I started. It was a little over 15 years ago, back in 2007. I also didn't have any knowledge of raising capital or anything like that. So, I knew what I knew, which was writing software. So, I helped people move to the cloud in those early days, whoever wanted to listen, right? So then ended up growing a services company. And being a product guy within the services company, I noticed a lot of things. Software was still old, and a lot of these companies basically said, hey, to enable in the cloud, they would just take their old software and just install it in the cloud and call it Cloud Enable, which was not the way to go. So we ended up building quite a few software products along the way, and one of them being Contentstack. I ended up building the integration software as well, which we sold in 2018. And then Contentstack also came about just from that whole journey and Contentstack went and raised Capital.

PM: That's an amazing story. So, let's talk a little bit about the modern web environment, or maybe even a little bit about the legacy web environment. I gave you that example at the beginning of the show, and this is back in my time in Silicon Valley, and I remember as a marketer seeing some copy on the website that just wasn't positioned the right way, it wasn't using the right language, it certainly wasn't search worthy. And so, I turned to the team and just said, let's update the website, and I get this answer back, we will need to go into a queue. I'm like, for what? Oh, you need to get the developers involved. And I'm like, sorry what, developers? I'm changing text here this, if the web copy was written in C++, I'd expect it, but it's just written in English. I mean, seriously, what's the story here?

And it turned out the entire web architecture was supported by, I mean, who knows what was behind the curtain, but there's all of these different technological components trying to keep this website up and running. And I'd probably even argue it wasn't, not only was it not Agile, it was quite fragile. If somebody touched the wrong thing, the whole website could come tumbling down. Maybe do you want to give your perspective, or maybe we could start by giving your perspective on what is going on behind the scenes of your company website that maybe our listeners, even people in IT might not appreciate what keeps a modern website going? Because it seems so simple, doesn't it? Everyone's got a website, so how hard could it be?

NP: Yeah, it seems simple and it's not, right. There's two main personas here. You have developers and editors. I think those two kind of have to play very well together. Developers come into play because the front-end technologies, the experience layer that you see, there's a lot of code that gets executed there, be it the web browser or the mobile app or any screen that you see, there is some code that's kind of displaying that experience. So taking back before our technology, CMS’s were built, how traditional softwares were built, you had to actually install this thing in a data center and you know, have your production systems, your staging systems, your dev systems, and constantly you have to upgrade, maintain, monitor all these systems, and then get what the value that you're looking for out of those systems, which is the website. A lot of work went into just maintaining, upgrading, changing, because the software vendors will release some new things and then you have to go and install before you can actually realize the value. So, it was really fragile, and it's one of the reasons why we started Contentstack. I got frustrated as a services provider. We were installing things like Sitecore and AEM and just taking that old software and putting it into the cloud, it was the same problem. It was just a different data center. So, the cloud came about and it changed the way you deliver software. So, we took advantage of that, and we can talk about that as well in detail.

PM: Yeah, we’ll get into it. So you use the abbreviation CMS, and that means obviously content management, will, not obviously, it means content management systems. So maybe before we jump into what a content management system is, let's talk, you mentioned the developers and the user experience. Maybe we talk a little bit about how the digital customer journey is changing and evolving. Because again, going back to the sort of .com days, we were thinking we'd be doing a lot of selling online and people would be buying online, but it's taken us 20 years, but we're now at the point where, as I mentioned in the opening, your digital experience is most often the only experience that customers will have of you. So how is the digital customer journey evolving?

NP: It’s hanging every day. Our customers are pretty much on different channels. Back in the days it was just the web channel. Now you have the web, mobile, email, social media, there's new things coming up every day. So, the channels continually evolve. Also on the technology side, how to reach your audiences, keep changing, keep shifting. There's new and new technologies coming in, but now you have a ChatGPT, that's another channel, if you will. It's giving you responses, it's giving you answers. So, there's a lot for the marketers to look at and how do you get to that audience and serve them the right experience, serve them the right content. I think it’s key. There's definitely a lot of tools out there today to get to that, but you know, you got to spend the time to get to know all those tools and then how to orchestrate and make all those things work together to get to that audience. So yeah, it's a pretty exciting world. And at the same time, it's challenging as well.

PM: So we've got our web front end where our developers, as you mentioned, do a lot of the user experience, interaction design. And then you've got your editors, the people who put the content management, sorry, who manage the content I should say. So, tell us what is a content management system, and what role does it play, particularly maybe if we contrast how a legacy system might work, then maybe with a more modern way of doing it. But let's just talk about what is a content management system and what is its role in helping your marketing people, your product management people, get their message to the market, and how does that work with say something like the developers?

NP: Sure, yeah. So, you could take any brand, any brand that you interact with as a consumer, you are interacting with that experience, but the content that brand is delivering to you. So as marketers, you have to figure out what is that content, what is your brand? And then all the messaging and content that you come up with, you need a place to store it, that's your company's sort of message. And a content management system is basically giving you the software to store all the content for the brand. And once you store the content, there's another bit to it, which is content delivery. So how do you deliver that content to all the different channels that are available today? So, imagine the web and you take a big gaming company, for example, as you're playing the games, that's also content coming to you. And there's the game, the consumers on the gaming devices, they're all over the world. So that content needs to be delivered all over the world in milliseconds as well. So the content management systems of today basically not only give you the ability to manage content for your brand, but also helps you deliver that content to whichever channel it is and wherever in the world, in milliseconds. And you can scale with that. You can scale billions and billions of API calls without having to worry about a thing, like you had to do in the past.

PM: Got it. So why is it that, because I mean there are existing content management systems, I'm trying to think of some of the names I'm guessing is Drupal one of them? You've got all of these sorts of, I guess traditional people's websites. I'm guessing when I think of websites, sorry, when I mentioned the word website, almost inevitably someone says, oh, I know a great WordPress developer, let's go and make the website. And then they involve this set of tools that, as you say, barely want to hang together because the wrong version of PHP or something's there and the whole thing crumbles to pieces, it does seem quite fragile. What's wrong with those older, traditional content management systems, which let's be honest, have been doing the job for the last 10, 15 years. Why can't they keep up?  And why are they holding businesses back?

NP: Yeah, I think if we give you an analogy, I think it's like gasoline cars versus electric cars. I think those two solve the same purpose, but it's absolutely different in the way they do it. So, WordPress, Drupal, AEM, all these guys have been around for a long time, and they've done their bits of providing the content management systems, but fundamentally they were built before there were multiple channels, it was just the web channel. And then also the way they built for software was, you know, had to almost install the software just for your needs. And that has a lot of problems with it. And the fact that you mentioned there's still people just kind of building WordPress sites, there's companies out there that basically help manage and host the WordPress insulation for you. And so that takes away a little bit of your problems of managing and installing, and things like that.

But it's still kind of built on older technology. They keep trying to retrofit it and add new and new things, but the better way, which is where we went down, is looking at the cloud. There is a new thing that came out, can you build it from the ground up? Right? API first means you can host many, many brands on the same system and when you upgrade, you change your software, everyone gets the upgrades at the same time, just like to give you an example, Facebook, you're not really installing anything. You just get new updates all the time. You don't care as a consumer. So, we provided that and so that kind of changed the game. It got most of the people out of maintaining the systems and then thinking about the experience, the software is just there. You don't even have to worry about it. You basically use the software to deliver that experience that you want for your audience. You don't have to worry about scale, you don't have to hire 10 DevOps engineers to maintain scalability and all that. We take care of that for you. You don't have, as a brand, you don't have to worry about that. So, it's a completely different way of thinking about software and for our companies, for the marketeers and the developers, for them too. It's just they're thinking about the experience, not necessarily about the system.

PM: So, a follow-on question from that, I mean you mentioned the use of APIs already. My question might contain its own answer you've used, but I noticed in your website you talk a bit about headless content management systems. What is a headless content management system and why do I want one?

NP: Headless CMS. The big problem, I think Paul, you were talking about changing the content, just a word on your website, and you had to go and get the developers, right? That’s because back in the days there was only one experience, which was the web, and the code was kind of tied with the content. It was all together. So, the person that's maintaining that had to be called, and developers are busy doing all sorts of stuff. So that's why the queue and you have to wait for the change. So, when we started to write this software from scratch using the cloud, using the new software delivery model if you will, we said, can we sort of separate code from content? And what that does is it gives you the ability for the content editors to just update the content regardless of where that code is going to be.

And on the other side, you have multiple experiences, not just the web, but you have code for the web, you have code for the mobile, you have code for the kiosks. So, the developers can just maintain that bit and just pull and get the content into that experience. So, the headless bit is essentially API first. It doesn't have the experience built in. That's why the head is not there. So content is separate, and the code is separate. So, I think it was Forrester that coined the term headless CMS back in 2014 and gave us credit for coming up with this concept.

PM: I love it. I’m going to try and take this back to something practical that I experience every day and just see if I can understand the sort of impact that something like Contentstack could have for my business. One of the preeminent companies we think about when we think about digital experiences and just beautiful software and hardware are Apple, or is Apple, but also famously you know when Apple's about to release a new product because their website goes down for maintenance. Why they have to do this, which I just think in this age of modern DevOps and 24/7 services, just strikes me as being quite bizarre. Is that a sign that maybe, I don't want to pick on or ask you to comment on Apple specifically, but is that the sort of sign that maybe a CMS, the web infrastructure is a little archaic and in need of modernization, would you say?

NP: Totally. I think there's a lot of brands. I don't know what Apple uses or if that's the reason they bring down the website. There might be other reasons, but a lot of brands struggle with this, where they can't do these releases as often as they need because this technology is just kind of coming in the way. You have to bring down something and then push something to production and then turn that on and then cross your fingers, hope everything works. But Contentstack is very different. We have releases and you can actually just schedule that release and it'll go out and their experience will be live. We have customers that are doing thousands of experiments on a daily basis and changing that experience and getting analytics on it and continuously iterating and making changes as you go. That's the new world, everyone's kind of getting to that.

But there's a lot of people still using some of these older technologies that are stuck in this crazy world. That was what we lived through back in the early 2000’s. And the key thing to move to this new world is you don't have to, one of the big blockers for these individuals is like, oh my god, I'm have to re-platform this whole thing because you have this behemoth that you are managing. And in their minds, it's like, oh my god, I have to replace this whole thing and then bring in the new system and get all my people to use this new system. Well, the whole thing about these newer technologies is you could actually take a couple of webpages or couple of experiences and try out Contentstack, and it will work alongside your older technology and then slowly you could replace it, if you like. So, it'll literally just give you value right away just by maybe taking some couple of small projects that you are just stuck on because the developers are busy and it's like two months of waiting in that queue, right? So, you can just try out a small thing on Contentstack and can move forward.

PM: So, one last question for you as we wrap up. I mean, it sounds so compelling to me and so obvious to do. Why do you think organizations are, I'm going to use the word stuck in their old way of working when it comes to their web platforms, what's preventing them from modernizing? And if somebody's listening and thinking, gosh, this is resonating with me, I want to do something about it. How can they help build a case for change?

NP: Yeah, we talk a lot about it. I mean, you could go to contentstack.com.and check it out. We are pushing this thing called composable DXP, which means you're composing different technologies, picking the best of breed technologies and composing it into the experience that you need. And we have a lot of content to help you go down that journey. But what I would say is change is constant. And in today's world, you know, you have to move fast. I mean, pandemic was an extreme case where in two weeks you literally had to pivot and change your business. For a lot of us, this is kind of the new norm, if you will. So from a technology perspective, how do you think about this differently? Well, don't put all your eggs in one basket. So, you start to work with a lot of these newer technologies, you compose the solution that you need and then deliver that experience that you need. So, you could start out very small. That's the beauty of this, is you don't have to get approvals for a massive project. You could pick a couple of projects that you want value out of right away and use one or two of these technologies including Contentstack to deliver that experience and thereby you get sort of the buy-in from the business and then you can do more down the road. So, start small with these new technologies and then kind of grow from there.

PM: Fabulous stuff. I was going to ask where people can go to learn more, but contentstack.com., is that right?

NP: Yes, contentstack.com.

PM: Perfect. Well, that was amazing stuff. I've got one last question for you, and it relates to our show sponsor Rocket Software. So big thank you to them. They've got a set of values, their company values that they talk about, things that matter to them, empathy, humanity, trust, and love. What matters to you right now?

NP: I think for me, I would kind of go back to getting rid of inequality. And there's many, many ways we can do that. And us as at Contentstack, we have that in our values as well. And we always think about it, we report it to the board. We're all busy, we're trying to run a business, but there's certain things we could do and just kind of nudge the system, if you will, little by little and provide whatever impact you can to help with the equality. So yeah, that's always on top of my mind as I go about running Contentstack.

PM: Fabulous answer. Well thank you so much Nishant. Really enjoyed having you here. And thank you to Rocket Software for bringing us another episode of Digital: Disrupted. And thank you all for listening in. If you like what you've heard, please do give us a thumbs up on Apple iTunes, Spotify, wherever you happen to be listening. You can also reach out to me on Twitter @xthestreams is my handle or at @Rocket to reach out to our show sponsor. So, if you've got any questions for our guests or ideas or topics you'd like to hear, just any sort of feedback, hit us up. We'd love to hear from you. With that, we'll see you all next week. Stay disruptive, everyone!