Beauty Retail: From Monolith to Microservice
I have spent the last two years working with a beauty retailer to migrate off of Oracle ATG to Contentful and prep the content management ecosystem for a whole new world of creative AND content... increased throughput at scale! in order to power their content and personalization journey.
Client: Premium Beauty Retailer
Role: Senior Product Manager, Content Management Domain (CMS, DAM, PIM)
Duration: Aug 2021 - May 2023 (1 year 10 months)
The Challenge: To migrate from a legacy monolithic ecommerce system to a new microservices based ecommerce and content ecosystem. My focus to be Content Management ecosystem (CMS/DAM/PIM).
In parallel client is implementing building a bottom-up approach to Personalization, which requires optimizing workflow for all involved foundational systems as well as operationalizing content and creative production AT SCALE to support the increased demand for speed and volume that Personalization will require. Attention to the short and medium term roadmap is critical to get this right.
FE Developer reaction transitioning from ATG/BCC to Contentful. It is important to delight your developers as well :)
Top Use Cases
Site: Comprehensive UI for production team to support no-compromise responsive design website.
Email: Support content to compose email and deploy via existing ESP.
Apps: Ability to manage both site (Desktop/Mobile) and apps (iOS/Android) via single content model and enable experience parity between the two.
Campaign: ability to compose campaign assets in headless CMS to then deploy to multiple channels with a single entry via a new design system to support it.
Roadmap
Year 1: RFP for Headless CMS, MVP Site Homepage, POC for Email & Personalization.
Year 2: Migrate from legacy ATG/BCC system to new Headless microservice ecosystem for Site & Apps.
Year 3: Educated Stakeholders and brought together cross-departmental principals to create business case and attained approval for year three roadmap to operationalize content automation via new Design System to drive Site, Apps, Email, Campaign management from a single content model.
Solution
RFP: Conducted in-depth comparison of top three vendors in the headless, api-first CMS space. Including workshopping stakeholder use cases and pain points. Turning those into functional requirements, and vendor criteria for evaluation.
Post once, publish everywhere strategy: transformational move to Headless, API-First Microservice CMS & DAM re-implementation to enable a reusable omnichannel content experience.
Content Model: Transformed legacy content model in BCC (that had undergone recent RWD redesign, allowing client to skip this step) to new “atomic” content model that facilitates modular and reusable components.
Content Audit: Executed a comprehensive legacy content audit and planned year long migration roadmap by category, type, template, and component.
Migration Utility: (Simplification Award Winner!) Scale migration of hundreds of brand and category content programmatically via custom app for data transformation and migration. What was estimated to take production team hundreds of hours to move manually was executed in under two hours.
Creative Automation: Lead transformation to a content-as-code strategy to enable the breaking down of creative assets and copy to assemble modular content for delivery to any channel while still allowing content authors to access a user-friendly and efficient UI.
Flexible and Extensible: Created custom built-to-purpose apps to improve and extend content author’s ease of use and efficiency. Example: Bulk Editor that allows producers to download content-type templates and upload content in bulk via csv.
Proposed - Modular Omnichannel Design System: Modular & dynamic content enables business users to build and deploy highly templated content at scale to Site, Apps, Email, SMS, social, and stores.
