Explaining Composable DXP to a Chief Executive Officer

Transcript

Note: The following is the transcription of the video produced by an automated transcription system. 

Akshay Sura: Welcome to I don't know what this is another session where we talk about things. So, today's thing we're going to talk about now that we have Matt, is we're gonna pose a question to Matt, the question is, if you were to explain what a composable dxp is to a CEO, how would you explain it?

Matt McQueeny: Yeah, Akshay, this is something that you and I have really been thinking a lot about. I know he released a couple of days ago. How headless is almost like burger delivery at McDonald's based on the movie, the founder, and that great scene, where they're trying to create the speedy system. We've been talking a lot to partners, organizations, folks who are on the front lines of the composable, DSP, jam stack, headless market, I mean, I've been fascinated, I mean, put upon or put an analogy in front of me, forget it. So, I'm really excited. And then on top of it, I think there's often a bit of a challenge when you're talking to the C suite, especially the Chief Executive Officer, but really, anybody in the C suite, not because they're not very smart, not because they're not capable to get where they are. But I think often when you're running a business, something in the technology sphere, can change in no time. I mean, we've heard this from several of the companies, we work with very big companies, you know, multibillion dollar market cap type companies. And they're saying, we looked at a monolithic content management system, only five, six years ago, and it was everything we needed. And now we're worried because how do we explain what the future is? Without looking like we've made a terrible decision. So this ends up being a lot of our job is to explain and, you know, when we were looking at this subject, I was thinking of several things with how do you explain it to a chief executive officer, I always like to explain from a fun angle from, from a kind of a content, consumer angle, I always start with composable. dxp is a little like cord cutting, right before, if you call the monolith, the all in one, the digital experience platform that has your marketing suite, has your personalization has your ability to email. It's almost like the triple play, right? You have a television provider who provides your internet and also provides your phone. And then over the years, you start to say, this is pretty expensive. one and then two, you start to see who What's this, what are these over the top services where you can get essentially cable television, over the internet. And it's coming from Google. And it's coming from Hulu. And there's you know, a lot of other ones that come out play Netflix, the original, right? And you start to say, okay, these might be best to breed. I can bring my cost down and get a better experience. If I get rid of the television part. Then I get rid of the phone part because I already have a cell phone. Yeah. And so that's in a lot of ways. And it's scalable, right, your internet exists. You can keep adding new peacock comes out, right? Like Paramount comes out. Like you can add these on and mix and match best of breed best of content. I don't know how we can watch it all. Yeah. But I was also like, I like the idea of an iPhone, right? I've been on an iPhone for many years as have you. But when you first buy an iPhone, before you personalize it, when you first buy it, it comes with maybe five or six apps on it already. It comes with email. It comes with the Safari browser. It comes with the phone, it comes with the text comes with notes. It comes with reminders. But what will happen is it's a good starter. It's a good all in one. But they have the app store. The App Store allows you to go in and say, Well, I can get WhatsApp, I can I can get Evernote, I can get services that are the best that are even better than the ones Apple can put. It's a good start. Yeah, but I can choose the best rate that I can add, I can have three screens worth of really cool apps. So that's the that's one I really liked. Lastly, I'm going to speak a debt exam. I'm going to speak right to the Chief Executive Officer. I was really thinking about this one. So when you look at a CEO, you'll also hear other terms in the C suite. I mean, there's a million of them sometimes right but there's the ones we really know the CMO chief marketing officer, CFO, Chief finance officer, and then you go up in that Chief Operating Officer CEO. I worked in A company once where I felt like there was half the company was a C suite, they have Chief Revenue Officer, Chief relationship officer all this. But I would almost say

Matt McQueeny: would you run such a company as the Chief Executive Officer? Where everybody comes in every day, and all works together? Probably not. You have certain times for that. In our company, we have a first Monday, we all come together and say everything. And we're not as big as some of these companies in terms of people. But even at 30 plus people, it gets a little a little unwieldy, right? Yeah. So all of these, I hate the word silo here, but I'm going to use it here. All these divisions have a hierarchy, where marketing functions are able to take marketing to the farthest level finance to the farthest level, in some ways, that is what composable dxp is, Gartner said in 2019, the future of business is composable. In some ways, business has always been composable. Right? We got this hierarchy, all of these divisions are working in their own way to create the greatest thing within their own. Again, Silo, yeah. Come in some ways, the Monolith is if the chief executive officer walked into a big amphitheater, and the whole company was there. Yeah. And, and finance is telling tech what to do. And I know this still could happen. But everybody's at the table, and it's just a bit of chaos. Things are not moving forward. Things are just completely stopped up, people get frustrated. A beautiful symphony is all of these elements working together. So you kind of are composable is your technology platform, though, because now the promises to actually match what you have in your suite C suite and down the org chart with technology that matches that level of specialization and excellence within each part of the company. Akshay Sura Yeah, and those are all like great analogies. Right. And the funny thing is, the reason why we started asking this question, like Matt said, is, we actually got asked by two separate multibillion dollar companies. Hey, by the way, just last question, Can each of you take couple of minutes of your time and explain how I would explain this to my CEO in one case, and in the other case, we went through an education process, and it was kind of nice to see this executive pick it up. And while delivering a speech, in a presentation with his fellow executives, he was able to actually explain things really well. That's when we knew that something clicked. That's when we knew that Ah, okay, like we are putting in effort to, to educate them. And it is paying dividends in terms of how they are able to now speak with their own colleagues.

Matt McQueeny: Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's, it's it really is an educational process. And this has been one of the great parts of all the conversations we've been having is we're looking for the education, we're looking for the long form conversation about this, because it is a shift, even with all the analogies, it is a pretty fundamental shift in what, in what organizations, especially the Chief Executive Officer at the top, who's not paying attention at the levels that you need to follow this market, headless. Really, what was it? 2017 2015? Yeah, that was coined JAMstack, which turned into composable dxp. Is it even the right word still, right, a lot of this is still germinating. But the idea at its core, is the best of breed, tied together by API's, and micro services, micro service architecture. Yeah, and you get the best of everything. Maybe you want to use MailChimp as your email. I'm not saying that's the best, but maybe you're using MailChimp as your email. You know, you're using Google Analytics, you're using Power BI, you can use a headless CMS, maybe from Contentful, or content by Kentico, or content stack, there's many options. And they all come together in the presentation, and in the kind of the backend where you need to get it. But each of these experts in these spheres can work in their own place in their own way without having to go to you know, we were we were talking to somebody who's on one of the monoliths, and again, not speaking bad of it, because the whole market is actually going towards this headless composable DSP direction. But if you're on one of these all in one solutions, things just certain things can tend to go wrong. And then all the sudden, you're on calls with strategists and technologists looking over logs, trying to figure out what's doing this. This doesn't make sense. This doesn't happen in the dev environment. It's happening in the production and talk Look at inefficiency in time. Yeah. How many people are together working on? What is one, what in the grand scheme is one little thing. And it's taking potentially hours of time of several people, you know, the job changing a lightbulb together to figure it out. And that's not even getting it to the market. Right? So, if all these things can tie together, you can use each service in the best way it's supposed to be used everybody's humming at different times together. There's no there's not redundancies. It's really a very, it's really interesting and modern facing in this environment.

Akshay Sura: Absolutely. And then I'm going to pose the same question to a couple of others because I kind of like the analogies right. So, you gave us three, which is awesome. Actually, you might have given four, so they gave us cord cutting you threatened me, I phone, you gave us a kind of like sim you use the word symphony, right. And then another one I forget now, but it'd be nice. So, I'm hoping that by speaking to other people and seeing what they how they would explain, basically to someone who is not as technical. And someone whose job description is so broad that technology is a little piece of many pieces they take care of So as Matt said, that's super important for us and hopefully we can keep coming back to you with more info on this and we're getting a lot of good feedback on social so please do comment. Help us help you right in in spreading this knowledge. Thanks again for watching this

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me. @akshaysura13 on Twitter or on Slack.