Charting a New Course for Backroads.com

From tangled workflows to a streamlined content ecosystem

§ 01 — Challenge

Backroads came in looking for a website replatform. Discovery revealed the real problem: the entire content operation was broken. Content creation required hand-offs across departments with no clear ownership, print and digital teams worked from disconnected systems producing inconsistent customer experiences, and there was no infrastructure to support multi-channel publishing at the volume the business needed. The bottlenecks were actively slowing marketing output and undermining sales.

Outcomes

Content infrastructure: Print + digital unified

Content creation velocity: Defined governance

Strategic alignment: Phased CMS roadmap

Overview

Backroads, a leader in active travel experiences, set out to replatform its website — but discovery revealed a deeper need: a complete overhaul of how content was created, approved, and delivered enterprise-wide. Over a 19-month engagement, I led a company-wide transformation that modernized the front-end experience and rebuilt the content infrastructure supporting both print and digital channels.

Challenge

While the initial goal was a front-end redesign, stakeholder interviews uncovered systemic issues:

• Convoluted business processes are slowing content creation
• Lack of accountability across departments
• Insufficient technology infrastructure to support multi-channel content publishing
• Fragmented workflows between print and digital, leading to inconsistent customer experiences

The business impact was clear — content bottlenecks were stalling marketing efforts, undermining sales, and limiting the brand’s ability to respond to market demands.

My Role

Lead Product Manager

• Led stakeholder interviews across all customer-facing departments
• Audited all company content and mapped the end-to-end customer journey
• Defined technical and business requirements for CMS and e-commerce selection
• Managed vendor evaluation and selection process
• Directed first phase of Drupal 8 CMS implementation
• Collaborated with IT, Operations, and Sales to align on strategy and execution
• Built and maintained a CMS roadmap to guide long-term transformation

Process

• Discovery & Alignment
• Conducted company-wide interviews to understand customer experience pain points
• Mapped current UX flows and supporting systems to identify gaps
• Performed a competitive analysis of travel industry content architectures
• Platform Evaluation
• Gathered business and technical requirements from all stakeholders
• Assessed multiple CMS and e-commerce platforms, balancing budget, scalability, and total cost of ownership
• Recommended Drupal 8 as the enterprise CMS solution
• Implementation & Rollout
• Selected implementation vendor and provided ongoing execution oversight
• Managed first-phase CMS build with focus on usability and governance
• Developed foundational workflows for integrated print and digital publishing

Key Outcomes

• Delivered a company-wide content management ecosystem using Drupal 8
• Reduced content creation bottlenecks through streamlined workflows
• Established a single source of truth for print and digital assets
• Provided leadership with a clear CMS roadmap for phased improvements
• Aligned cross-departmental teams on shared content strategy and governance

Reflection

What began as a website redesign became a wholesale reinvention of how Backroads operates. By tackling content workflows alongside technology upgrades, we didn’t just deliver a better site — we created the foundation for a more agile, responsive business.

Visuals / Artifacts

Customer Journey Map — Mapped end-to-end guest experience from booking to trip follow-up and then produced a north-star future state flow

Key Questions

Q1: What do you do when a project scope expands significantly beyond the original brief?

Backroads came in as a website replatform. Stakeholder interviews revealed the root cause was broken content workflows, not the front end. Bex expanded the scope to address the underlying problem, securing alignment from IT, operations, and sales before proceeding. Delivering a new website on top of broken infrastructure would have solved the wrong thing.

Q2: How do you approach CMS vendor selection for an enterprise client?

Bex ran a structured RFI with workshops to translate stakeholder pain points into measurable requirements before evaluating platforms. The process weighed budget, scalability, and total cost of ownership rather than feature lists. For Backroads, this led to Drupal 8 as the recommendation over competing platforms.

Q3: How do you unify print and digital content production?

By treating them as the same content workflow with different output channels, not two separate teams with separate tools. On this engagement, Bex designed foundational workflows for integrated print and digital publishing from a single source of truth in Drupal 8, replacing the fragmented systems producing inconsistent customer experiences.