DX Café with Sana Remekie

and welcome everyone to today's dxcafe event personalization orchestration and the composable dxp i'm matthew mcqueeny from conabus if you have any thoughts as we move along and before we open the floor towards the end as uh as i mentioned you can put them in the zoom chat we'll you know we'll monitor that if there's anywhere to jump in if you have a really dying test something or make a point i'm not gonna be offended if you jump in uh but if you uh just mute yourselves in the interim i know many of us working from home have kids around so if you hear something in the back that's what's going on here but again joining us today is santa remicky ceo of kancia and a newly minted mock alliance ambassador mock for those who might not know stands for micro services based api first cloud native sas and headless it's kind of everything that's going on right now on the catsia end that is a uh it's a company that is a composable api first personalization and experience orchestration engine that's a mouthful i'm going to ask a few people five times uh so this will be a great discussion because at least in my opinion personalization is one of those magical subjects today as is the topic of composable dxp so welcome sana thank you for being with us today if you would um could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how your background has led you up to this esteemed uh event today yes i can do that then thank you so much matt for uh having me here it's a pleasure uh to have a chat with all of you about composability and personalization so the background that actually got me here is not as straightforward as you would think um so i'm an engineer uh by trade uh from university of waterloo i did my system design engineering back in 2006. um i started my career at sapient now known as publicist sapient as a technology consultant so initially you know when i joined i was of course just a junior associate tech consultant thrown into the ocean with some really really big accounts um like walmart and oxford university press a lot of the e-commerce uh focused um accounts and um that's actually where i met doing my husband and also the cto of the company and you know worked on a bunch of different projects together and really all we talked about all the time was data and integration and how to solve the customer's problems who had all the the various monolithic platforms like the adobe adobes of the world sales force saps etc and we were really just our job was to customize and integrate and help them build their technology stacks because we were the consultants and you know on the side dwayne and i would always talk about how um it's crazy that these really really big companies can't seem to get anything done um in uh with these really um you know heavy-duty all-in-one solutions and we spoke about how um the biggest problem was the data silos you were not able to really access the data or the content very easily uh with any of these systems and that was kind of at the back of our mind as we move through um through our journey uh to various companies together after you know after sapient we actually joined uh in deca uh which is a search platform which eventually ended up getting consumed into the big red sea of uh oracle um but there that's actually i would say the basis of where the ideas around orchestration and data aggregation um came into uh being in in our in our minds and what uh the problem that endeca really solves is uh around search and discoverability of content right so and the way endeca does that and a lot of other search platforms do that is by aggregating all of the content coming from various data sources into a single index and then you serve the content to the various channels from that one index and we you know we loved in deca we were you know so excited that here now we can actually take all of this data and content out of these siloed systems put it in one place and we can actually serve it from this one one place and we don't have to worry about the fact that you can't have that data accessible through apis or through more real-time means in all of these backend uh back-end platforms uh like the adobes and and sales forces of the world um but one thing as as we were working on a bunch of different implementations for really large companies one thing we realized was that even though we can get a put a search engine on top of all of this data the problem is not solved because it's garbage in garbage out if you don't get the right data from these systems uh into oh did somebody say something sorry that's awesome okay good to hear um right so it's a garbage in garbage problem uh right and and so we thought you know um search is great and this is a good way of solving some of the problems but there's more to it than that um and so we actually after endeca we both actually joined another company which was also a search company but we thought that we would be able to influence their roadmap to tackle the actual underlying issue which was the quality of the data itself and and build something that would allow non-technical users to actually enhance the metadata um of the platform and and build uh something that would sit on top of any search engine um and and basically enhance the uh the quality of the content optimize the quality of the content for the purpose of better search and better discoverability um we did that but it didn't end up working out in our favor we we didn't get to influence the roadmap and the strategy that we thought we would be able to so dwayne and i both left and created our own company concia so the very first product that we actually worked on at concia was what we now call the dx graph at that time we actually called it view and view was the idea behind view was that we would create a single view of all of the content and data across all systems that were in operation and allow for a single point of access to non-technical users so they could go in and enhance and enrich that data themselves um and so we would provide you know we provided tools like natural language processing uh data cleansing tools data enrichment tools ai uh to to make the quality of that metadata better um and and it would feed into search platforms and in fact we actually had an implementation of uh elasticsearch under the hood as well if they chose to uh if the customer chose to go with elasticsearch we didn't really care what the search engine was we would we were really just responsible for getting the data prepared for that now as we were going through that journey and and you know the product was gaining traction and we were doing well but what ended up happening is that we started to see the rise of you know contentfuls of the world and content stack and big commerce and commerce tools and this thought came to our mind that you know if we just take the content and the data out of these systems um we're not really fully leveraging the actual delivery mechanisms of the platforms like those headless platforms such as uh contentful we're simply just using them now as a data repository rather than a a platform that actually delivers content to the front end so that's where the idea of the second product came into play which is the dx engine which is responsible for doing real-time uh orchestration of content uh and data uh from the systems from the source systems themselves rather than um pulling the data out of those systems into one place and then serving it from there right so basically that's how we came up with uh with the concealer dx engine which you described earlier as a personalization and orchestration platform for composable uh dx stacks okay sorry so that was a mouthful that's kind of the background now that was love those uh entrepreneurial pathways right you know you kind of landed on a solution here why don't we start let's go back to the basics right yeah i'll give you a chance a really easy one for you let's what is personalization okay so personalization in the in the most basic form is uh the ability to um to put the right content uh in front of the right customer at the right time and there are three three components of personalization right so you have the customer and you know something about the customer right such as what uh their browsing history their preferences their psychographic information demographic information uh then you have content that you want to present to the customer right and that content has a very broad definition it could be products that you're presenting to them promotions could be blogs articles uh banners on on a landing page it could literally be anything that you can imagine that the customer will consume and then there's the context of the customer and the context is the real-time understanding of their intent their location their device you know what channel they're coming in uh from uh all of those types of things and in order to personalize the experience for the customer uh you need to really connect the dots between the three c's that you have on this slide right you have the customer content and context all coming together and you need an engine that has the ability to do that all in real time now the biggest difference between the way we do personalization and the way some of our other our competitors do personalization is that the content that you're looking at here we are not pulling that into a single repository first and serving that content from there we're leaving the content where it it originates from and accessing it in real time the engine is able to orchestrate the queries uh to customer data understand the taking the context in real time and then call out to those content sources in real time and bring it all together and serve it to the front end very nice so for me when i think of personalization i immediately think about my netflix queue and my amazon feed google and facebook algorithms i've also come to learn how much having little kids can ruin my hard-built personalized experience on spotify i'm getting a lot of cocoa melon and kanto but in in the particular enterprise segment that we tend to work within when we're talking about cms is commerce systems for instance can you walk us through how personalization actually works within those right so there you know um i think what you're showing here is what i believe to be the right way of doing personalization there are wrong ways of doing personalization as well but first of all i i mean i'm gonna go through what i believe is the way it should be done right so in large enterprises you have content and data that is scattered across the organization in different systems right so you have your content management and digital asset management systems such as contentful or content stack or cloudinary you have your commerce engines some monoliths some headless right so depends on what kind of organization you're dealing with you may even have multiple commerce engines um within the organization such as you know you have a big commerce or or salesforce implementation in other parts of the organization as well uh you have your search right um a lot of times people think that search itself is an orchestration platform and for all the reasons that i just spoke about earlier i believe search is actually just another data source which yes it can sit on top of other systems in an offline sort of setting you can index a bunch of data and put it into a search index but at the end of the day what search platform itself is providing to that next layer above it is is data it's it's uh it's data that's queried uh in a certain way um sorry just one second i'm getting a call here which i need to decline um anyway so and then you have customer data right so customer data could also be uh some companies have a cdp already in place a customer data platform that's already aggregated all of the customer data into um you know into one single view of the customer others have not started on that initiative yet so the data may still be sitting in um you know a user database it may be sitting and some of it may be in the adobe audience manager for segmentation uh and and again just scattered across multiple um back end systems now uh that in my mind is what we call a composable tech stack whether you have monolithic systems in play and headless platforms and play all of them together because there are a multitude of them we are talking about a composable tech stack uh at this point right uh or composed at the very least if not composable um it's it's all coming together um now what you need to do in order to present that data or that content to the customer in real time is orchestrate all of that content and data together right so that middle layer that we're speaking about here experience orchestration and personalization that should have the ability to connect to any headless or api first backend in real time it should have the ability to coordinate data and content across multiple sources so i'm going to stop for uh on that one for a second and double click on that so when we talk about coordination of data and content what does that mean right so you you may have your customer data sitting in um segment right your that's your cdp you have your content sitting in let's say content.ai or contentful now you need to be able to pull the customer profile in real time from customer from the segment platform and based on what you see in the profile present the right content from contentful or content ai or content stack to the customer right so that requires coordination right there are two systems involved just in that one small example that that are required to be coordinated by uh the orchestration uh engine uh the third very important thing that it needs uh to be able to do is give control to the marketing team um with the the composable dxps what has happened uh is that the marketers lost control over the end user experience over what you know what the customer should see uh in real time that control has now been uh relegated to uh the developers right so we need the orchestration platform to be able to provide that level of control to the marketing team so that they can decide what kind of content is relevant to what kind of customer in real time and if there is ai involved then we can talk about that later as well there should still be control over artificial intelligence ways to present that content um to uh to the customer right um fourth uh because it's so central to the overall uh platform or the overall stack the the orchestration engine should be able to create a 360 degree view of the customer now it's going to depend on where you are in your implementation of orchestration and personalization if if there's only one channel that you're controlling at the beginning it can't of course create the full 360 view of the customer but that should be the roadmap right it's the the idea is for it to eventually provide a single view of the customer so that any channel that uh the customer is interacting with the brand on can use that one 360 view so essentially a cdp without calling it a cdp okay unified experience api right so because this orchestration layer should be completely agnostic of the front end it needs to be able to instruct the front end on what the customer should see what content the customer should see through an api in a completely headless fashion and it should not care about what that front-end platform is or how that front-end platform is using that that api right it needs to be completely agnostic unopinionated about the look and feel of the content okay and then uh just a couple more things um should you know it can act as a gateway an api gateway so it should allow for optimization of the content structure before the content gets to the front end and then finally you know we know we're living in the world of legacy systems and monolith platforms so it has to have some story some way of working with those uh systems as well okay so that is the role uh it's a very extensive role it is very very central to the overall stack personalization is just one of the use cases uh the experience engine goes beyond just personalization great so this might be a very silly question but there's probably a lot of our non-us friends who look at the way personalization is written here and or hurt or hurt by it does i know it's way beyond that we're talking ai but based on where you are in the world will it put the word personalization the way it's supposed to with an s or z it should be able it should be able to do that absolutely it should be able to do that depends on how your data is structured and how your content is modeled but yes for sure it should be that's great so we said the api should be unopinionated but let's be a little opinionated here about this you speak and write a lot on the delineation between legacy monolith systems and composable dxp um you put a lot of great thought leadership out there on linkedin about this i kind of copped a few of those things here and i'd love if you could just kind of talk through some of these um graphics plus what the differences are between those two systems from your vantage point so monolith versus composable so i created this um little mind map of all of the various terms that you know buzz words really that you hear about um in in the space in the monolith and composable space and you know there's a lot of arguments about uh what's the right way right is monolith like one all-in-one solution the right way is composable uh the right way but my uh thought on this the biggest thought i have on this is why not first agree on terminology why not first understand what we're talking about before we start to argue because a lot of times people are talking about two different things um and they're arguing about something that's not meaningful if you're not on the same page about definitions and and terminology right so um the way i actually presented this in a session uh before was i zoomed in on each term right so i said okay let's start with um you know traditional what does traditional mean or what does monolith mean um and and then kind of go outward from there um rather than talk about it as a whole this is just a full mind map but let's focus in on you know one term at a time right so let's go to monolith that's what your slide title is we're comparing those two things um so a monolith may be uh a composable platform okay so it could actually be composable they may they're not mutually exclusive from each other a monolith just means that there's one platform that has a bunch of different capabilities right it has content authoring content design capabilities it has experience management it has personalization it may even have a cdp right so monolith in itself doesn't mean that it's not built the right way so in a way you can't really say monolith versus composable you could be a monolith and composable uh platform so and what that means then if a monolith is composable is that it is built from a bunch of components that are integrated with each other in a composable fashion in a headless or api first fashion right so that's the the definition of composable is it uh you know it's built on open and decoupled architecture um it is headless right each component is headless um and traditionally uh composable platforms uh or sorry traditional platforms typically don't have uh those apis and that's why there's a delineation between traditional versus composable but not monolith versus composable uh in this uh in this picture does that sort of make sense at a high level absolutely and i think from that one the other one i like here is uh is is walking through from this end because that might help break those uh you know break those differences down a little a little differently yeah definitely definitely so this is uh basically from left to right the transition from the old to the new world right so the old world was you have a web cms or traditional dxp such as um you know an adobe experience manager or or salesforce experience cloud or marketing cloud and and um what used to happen in the past when we did not we were not in the world of composable was that your content management and experience delivery were tightly coupled with each other the same people that were writing content were the ones who were also responsible for what that content should look like to the customer right then came headless right so when contentful comes in um content stack comes in and they say you know what we are now not just dealing with the web we have um all these other touch points such as mobile and email and chat bots and ar and dr we need to be able to write content once and reuse it all over the place so we need to separate those two things in a way that content can be reused across all channels and content should become unopinionated about the way that content should be displayed or where it's displayed or what why it's displayed um to the front end right so that's where that second layer or that transition to headless and decoupled work worlds came into play now what happened with that um with that transition is that the marketing team lost control over who sees what when and where because they they're basically forced into the world of just content management you stay down there you just tell us what the content is and the developers will build the front end experience they will grip build the templates and they will hard code the logic of what is seen when and where right into the front end right into the the head of the overall platform they became the head essentially right um and so marketing is still very very frustrated about that and and they really should be frustrated because they're the ones who really understand the customer they're the ones who know what's the right thing to show to the right customer at the right time and if they have to go through a whole cycle of communication with the developers to let them know upfront you know before the site is launched um what the you know what their customer needs to uh be able to see and they don't have that day by day kind of continuous control over the experience delivery that would be very frustrating and it just slows down innovation um and uh you're you're losing out on your competition right so the at the final stage we have now that we have composable this is more of a proposal of the way things should be and the way we've built our platform um to to kind of come in uh and solve the problem of marketing uh and business teams we are continuing with the concept of headless content sources so you have your cms1 that one should be cms2 i know why it says cms1 as well you know commerce engine search digital asset management pims um you know we have to recognize that content is not just coming from one system anymore right and you also have an omni channel presence you have content that needs to appear in a whole bunch of different places so what that now requires is uh controlled by the marketing teams on who sees what when and where and from what system not just when and where but where's that content they should know where that content is and they should be able to control how that content makes its way uh to the front end and in what context it makes its way um to the front end right so we're basically um you know i i we're differentiating between um uh maybe i should say this way we used to have this idea of a head and the content now the head has two pieces one is what the face is right which is the visual layer what you actually see and then there's the brain right the brain of uh that sits within the head that actually controls what content uh is seen um uh by the customer right so we're further uh delineating between those two things in the new world so this is this is great i thought maybe we'll take just a moment here i saw um dennis would would you want to ask your question a little here because i think we have a slide on why orchestration is so important to this that actual word and the fact that composable headless the untethered realities of that means orchestration is almost uh vital but dennis did you want to say it or should can we just should we just go right off of your chat there i thought it would be a good interjection sure i'm happy happy to say that um so yeah i mean i had recently heard from from some other uh folks that you know hey we've composable is just a buzzword it's nothing new because we've been integrating with best of breed systems uh for ages so i've been doing composable already and i wonder what you have to say to that is composable dxp a legit thing or is it just yet another buzzword that the cool kids are trying to use to sell product um and secondary secondly uh you know here in this diagram you've not the one thing that i note here and before in the slides is how this uh intelligence and orchestration layer stands out as as different is is that in your mind some a key kind of differentiator of composable vxp from the previous approaches and how does that relate to the people who had said before were integrating with everything so we were always compulsive right so composable is definitely a real thing it's it's just a different word um for a thing that has always been the case uh or maybe i should say that composed was always the reality in large organizations right so you always had um different types of applications coming together and integrating with each other in one way or another whether or not it was done through apis and zero code type of orchestration you know or large organizations have more than one product um that they are working with right the difference now is that what we're saying is that compose composable dxps or composable text stacks should be built a certain way and that each component within the composable text stack should have certain characteristics that make it easy to integrate with everybody else right so we're really just specifying um or qualifying certain uh technologies uh to be future proof um essentially right and that is i think that is the biggest uh the biggest difference it's you know i i don't like to get too uh stuck with terminology um it's more about the idea what what's what what is the right thing to do and we know as dx practitioners that certain technologies are easier to work with than others um and the ones that are easier typically are in in terms of an integration at the very least are the ones that have apis have ways to connect to other technologies uh etc that experience intelligence and orchestration layer um in the old world in the web cms and the traditional dxp world was that coupling between the content management and experience delivery and it was hard coded right into the platform and it couldn't be really reused anywhere else right so if you brought in let's say if you're working with adobe adobe has a certain way of presenting information certain way of personalizing which works very well within their own ecosystem but as soon as you go and bring in uh another technology um it's hard to integrate with it right in fact some of our customers um are switching over to a headless cms but they still have an adobe experience manager as the platform for delivery and all they they have a hard time making those two things work together right so i what we're doing with experience intelligence and orchestration is allowing all of the various types of technologies to work better together and have that central point of control for marketing and it gives marketing and business users a choice to work with whatever platform or whatever technology or vendor uh they want to be able to right i'm going to jump a little bit sana that's okay yeah yeah because we we did i think it did obviously a great job in in the pitch of uh stimulating a lot of the slide by slide things we had one one that really sticks out for me is it's often noted that the web channel is still the primary front-end destination for most cases however the headless marketplace always touts the benefit of omni-channel delivery and i'm just wondering if there's a best example that you've come across that really shows maximal omni-channel touch points and orchestration i guess we would say i'm just more not questioning it but just it's one of those things is the is the reality of all of the ability of these different touch points happening out there yet so i think it is and i think it's still slow um because not not because people don't want to do it it's because they are stuck in uh in the old ways and to transition from the old to view a lot of times you know it just takes time um one of the customers that we're actually working with right now a very uh large hardware retailer uh here in canada is actually doing true omni-channel uh experience delivery and what uh what they're actually doing uh so they have a web application right so web website basically they have a mobile app uh they want to be able to send emails at certain points in the customer's journey um so that's a third channel uh they have stores they have you know thousand stores that they want to be able to use the the same intelligence the personalization and the intelligence about the customer to offer um real-time promotions and real-time discounts and offers to their customers at the pos so pos you know although an offline channel they want to be able to use the same logic and the orchestration that we're doing and all all these other channels along with a single view of the customer uh to to really give the right experience to their customers while they're in store they also have kiosks in store where you can actually log in to your account and see product recommendations and you know content or promotions that are more relevant to uh that user so there are organizations that are thinking about on the channel and definitely going down that path but i agree that you know 80 to 90 percent of the web is still very much single channel and and you sometimes wonder you know why are we saying uh that we what we care about on the channel at all right because you don't see that all the time you don't you don't experience that but it's going there that's at least what from what i see in all my conversations uh everybody wants to do it but is having a hard time getting there absolutely um oh uh cam just uh has a uh chat item here cam did you are you in a place where where you want to speak to that or you want me to read it off i'm sure you can read it up we'll do i have the good mic all right great uh yeah so cam says the best example that he's seen of the true omni channel is ea games yeah gaming's a great uh example they deliver in gameplay in gameplay content to players to help them right if they're stuck on a specific level then they will give them different hints based on where they are stuck all the content is driven from a headless cms which also drives other screens within the game yeah that's kind of the original second second screen kind of right the the video game experience that's a great that's a great example um makes sense on to this this one here i'm real interested in this as somebody who tries to explain concepts to customers to prospects to friends and i imagine for you that it's daily that you speak pitch and refine your presentation about the concia platform with decision makers do you find that your job is more of a chief education officer than an executive officer [Laughter] yes when it comes to sales um i find that most of the time most of my time is actually spent explaining the why uh you know and the how of our platform to our potential customers even to our our partners right this space is very new um still i would say where this idea of composability uh even though as i said you know we've always had multiple platforms working together this whole idea of the right way to compose applications and and orchestrate all of these applications together still very very new to people so yes absolutely um i i would say most of my time is spent in educating people about what orchestration means and and why you got to do it this way now this interests me right because composable dxp does feel like an optimal business state but you can also see where the pitch from a monolith provides some level of comfort even if you can't deliver it all you know oh everything in one platform when you're kind of on on the ground speaking in this world so intensely are there general pain points that you hear from customers and prospects when discussing headless and composable and how do you answer those i mean is it the old choice conundrum where it's like there's so many things to think about that it's hard to really center in on one on one thing like what do you come across with that yeah definitely and and i think that goes back to the definition or that that graphic that i showed earlier where you had content management and experience delivery on all the various channels you know when they were all um coupled together uh the marketing folks can go into this one system and see what the content looks like as well as what it's going to appear to be on all of these different channels well in the past it used to be only web now that's that's the hard part uh when you move to omni channel and you move to composable um you know infrastructure what am i gonna see in the front end if i am the user that preview the wysiwyg you know what what you see is what you get is completely uh missing so that is definitely um something that we hear a lot about there's also the uh the pain point of not having a single hand to shake or a single throat to choke right if something goes wrong you know whose fault was it was it um the cms that uh didn't provide the content there it was that their api was it the personalization api was it you know the headless commerce engine that broke everything what you know where was the issue right so uh that's actually one of the uh the things that we're trying to address with experience orchestration is to give the organizations a single view of all of the systems that it is connecting to in fact uh on our roadmap which is uh should be delivered within the next month is a dashboard of uh all of the various systems that we're integrating with all of the back-end systems that we're integrating with and getting a real-time view of what is up and what is down and what the performance is of each system so that the customer can come to that one like single point to see how everything is behaving and where the problems um are right uh so that's uh that's actually very exciting but absolutely the uh the right thing to talk about you need a way yes you know we're working with distributed systems and a very distributed reality you still do humans think in a it like differently they don't they don't want to think about a chaotic ecosystem where they have no control over anything they still want to be able to make sense out of where everything is yes it can be distributed but i want to know what's happening with all of these things that are distributed so that central line of control um is is definitely an important thing it's great and not not to be in a sales pitchy kind of way but i'm kind of interested in concia feels like it has the ability to slot in at many points along the customer's composable journey do you find there's a best efficient more optimal time to start the conversation with you is it at the beginning of a move to composable at a more more mature level somewhere in between all of it i think uh yeah that's a good question i i think the um the one thing that we um assume when we're talking to people um or when we're reaching out to our target accounts is that they have at least made an initial move towards composables they have maybe selected a cms or a commerce platform a commerce engine and they want to get to the next step of really giving marketing the control over that front-end experience uh you in in the new way the control that they have lost they want to gain that back and that's where we come in and we provide uh the uh you know the intuitive interface to marketing users to be able to control who sees what when and on what channel in a very centralized way our primary use case i would say at this point is personalization uh just because it's something that everybody is talking about and commercially speaking you know if we gotta we gotta go with where the market is going and if the market's talking about personalization and that seems to be the easiest conversation to have then that's where we start what we do see however is that the conversation expands to beyond personalization very very quickly and it gets into orchestration of all of the various components um that the organizations maybe or all the different vendors and applications that they may be working with as almost a second step and once they learn about all of the capabilities that we have then we can actually expand the conversation to include it all but the first step right now um is definitely personalization which comes after having uh having a cms or at least one other content source uh in play that's great again i'm jumping around i'm throwing throwing it off a little bit keep it fun keeping me on my toes right absolutely keeping you on your toes so this we've shown this quote on each one of the dx cafe sessions because it really is a great one the idea of moving from monolith to composable is a journey as we've said a lot today it starts with composable business composable thinking before the industry can move on to composable dxp now i talked with dennis a lot on this the um the idea from a resourcing standpoint as you speak with and work with composable businesses or moving towards composable businesses how do you see the roles shaking out within these companies you know in the past there might have been a back-end developer a front-end developer content writer seo qa do you see these roles morphing do you see new roles being created because of composable um i think the one thing that i see in terms of the operating model of businesses in a composable setting is that instead of having siloed teams that are all individually responsible for different parts of the digital experience such as you know content authoring and content design and experience management and development and whatnot um or front-end development uh what it requires really is everybody to come together and work together towards the same vision um because if you if you have the situation where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing it gets exponentially worse with uh with a composable um a platform because there's just so many different moving parts that if you you're not working together and fully understand all of the different layers of your tech stack and understand how exactly you know uh all these different content sources are gonna you know um influence your experience or how orchestration is working for instance um you're just not it's not gonna work right so it's it's not so much that the individual roles and specialties are changing they could pretty much in my opinion stay where they are but they just have to work more closely together to know what my peer is doing so for an example of that would be um you know in uh there's this idea that we talked about uh with respect to wysiwyg um for an end right so marketing wants that control they want to be able to control what content is seen by who when and what that looks like right so in a in a headless or composable architecture you um come up with a bunch of templates right that are gonna define that front-end experience now if the the templates are being defined by marketing like i want a banner at the top and i want my featured products and then followed by that i want a recommendations rail and blah blah blah both the developer and the marketer need to be very much on the same page about where the input from the marketing team is going to come in right marketing is not necessarily looking to go and change the color scheme every minute um or every every day what they're really looking to do is control specific components of the page so both the developers that you know the digital team the marketing team needs to work hand in hand to really define what that overall experience needs to look like and and who is in control of what parts of that experience right so that requires some coordination and orchestration even within the organization not just at a technology level but at a at an organizational from a work process standpoint uh we need to think about that as well that's great i have some more i'd love to just if there's anybody else who who wanted to ask questions i mean i've been having a great conversation let's see yeah if there's it's all last one while we're oh there are some okay i think in the chat window i see some comments here i'm just wondering if there's a question so i see uh brian brian with uh with a few nice comments here um brian lloyd really liked the way you are framing monolith versus composable and thank you that's another example of omnichannel um right canada those are good insights so i know one thing that i'm extremely i mean i'm interested in all of it right but the idea from a product and business point of view and in this ever-changing world where you're trying to find a place and a position in it how do you how do you roadmap is it like weekly [Laughter] so um the way we've actually built concealer from the ground up is that it's a very flexible api first microservices first uh platform and it was built in a way that you could do a lot with a platform in a very zero code kind of way right so we've built you can think of it as a like lego blocks we've built all the lego blocks that we think are going to cover all of the various types of functions and features that we would want in the future right and it's now a matter of us using those lego blocks to you know assemble them in a way that would give us those new features right so you know the the ideas keep on coming of course every time we talk to a new customer or a new partner uh they want to do something slightly different right so what we've actually tried to do is give our partners and customers also those same lego blocks so that they can configure the platform in a whole bunch of different ways so for instance um you know the engine itself is built with this idea of components right and each component could be uh something that either um that either instructs the front end on what content to show or it could be a logical component that um performs a whole bunch of business logic and maybe inputs that the or takes an output from one component and and serves it as an input to another component so those components are really like lego blocks and you can you know mix and match them and and add a whole bunch of logic to them without actually writing code right so that's always been our foundation is to build the thing that helps you build more complex things rather than build those complex things up front right um so that's uh that's been the strategy we're always of course improving the efficiency and the efficacy of each of those individual lego blocks but we believe that what we've done with the platform is the right thing right from the start uh and and build it in a way that uh is reusable in a whole bunch of different ways and a whole and in a whole bunch of different use cases that is great so um there's one question that we can handle i think probably in a linkedin post or even in the chat here uh just what you read and consume on a daily basis to stay up to date on on the industry i mean i know you're creating a lot of the content that we should stay up to date with but that might be a really great uh resource we can we can provide the the audience so we can be as absolutely i mean my biggest source i think my biggest source just like for most people out there is actually linked in itself um i i make sure that i stay on top of you know i follow a whole bunch of industry leaders um in the space and just make sure that every day i'm looking through all of the content that's posted at least you know once a day i'm guilty of doing it more often than i should as i get distracted um and have a little bit of adhd going on but we i definitely stay on top of linkedin that's one um also look at articles that are posted daily i get a feed from cms wire from uh martech um what else do we have um basically i mean i start from linkedin and then i just kind of spider out um and look at all the other the sources that are um that are referenced in one way or another there and just start to branch out from that point well that is great so we'll make sure to follow sana i know we're running up against our one o'clock here um i just wanted to thank you so much for uh being on and dispelling your wisdom to the group thank you so much would like to just quickly uh note here a couple of our things that we have coming up our dx cafe toastmasters club our executive board is set um anybody who has interest in the club has received an email whether they're inside konobos or outside but if there are any questions on that contact our friend ken gray who's on the uh the list here and his emails right there and of course we're always looking for any topics papers that folks would like to come on and speak to in the dx cafe as well as nominating those individuals groups who you think are doing a great job and you want to pay it forward with a nice word and you know we'll put something nice out about them so i thank everybody here it's been it's been fantastic thank you so much for having me matt