March 2021 Summaries

Carla Cooper, the new Chief Financial Officer at Contentful, brings over 20 years of experience in the technology space, having analyzed tech companies for investment firms and driven financial decisions for multiple technology companies that went public. She views big decisions through an investor's lens, considering risk vs. reward, and emphasizes the importance of a growth mindset, varied experiences, and choosing wisely where to work. Cooper is excited about Contentful's high-growth potential and its modern approach to solving digital experience problems, and she looks forward to bringing her experience to the table as the company becomes more publicly capable.

The text discusses the best practices for multilingual SEO, a language-led approach that prioritizes languages over locales in user targeting and information architecture configuration. The author shares their experience managing 26 ecommerce experiences in nine languages as Nike's EMEA SEO lead, highlighting the importance of determining the scope of the project, finding a partner or software provider to help with translation, and using markup elements such as "hreflang" to signal to search engines which localized content to serve. The recommended multilingual SEO configuration is to use subfolders for URL structure, and the author notes that Nike initially used this approach before simplifying it to reduce unnecessary concatenation. The text also emphasizes the importance of utilizing "hreflang" markup to mitigate duplicate content risk and improve performance in localized search engines.

When it comes to choosing a content management system, quantifiable return on investment (ROI) is crucial, especially in 2021 due to the ongoing pandemic. Andrew Kumar, director of platform strategy at Contentful, has seen significant cost savings and increased speed and agility in his experience with Contentful implementations across eight organizations. With Contentful, operating expenditures are lower, capital expenditures are reduced, and implementation costs decrease drastically once infrastructure is set up. The platform's flexibility and portability also reduce risk by allowing customers to integrate other tools and services seamlessly. Additionally, Contentful offers flexible tech stack options, a composable design, and an app marketplace with "plug and play" capabilities, enabling developers to add functionality as needed. This results in faster project timelines, increased developer velocity, streamlined content operations, and a faster time to market. Overall, Contentful enables businesses to focus on creating new digital experiences while minimizing maintenance and upgrade costs.

To thrive in a digital-first era, businesses need to unify and deliver customer experiences across devices, channels, and mediums, addressing various stages of the customer journey. Contentful helps companies achieve this by accelerating innovation and meeting customer demands through its content platform, which enables teams to build fast and best digital experiences. The company is hosting Blueprints 2021, a customer roadshow featuring digital leaders, partners, and customers sharing their successes and best practices in scaling consistent, contextual content across channels and delivering immersive shopping experiences. The event will take place virtually on April 8 and 15, with pre-recorded talks, live Q&As, and keynote presentations from Contentful's CEO and other industry experts.

The COVID Tracking Project was launched on March 7, 2021, by Kevin Miller, Erin Kissane, Robinson Meyer, Alexis Madrigal, and Jeff Hammerbacher in response to the lack of publicly available COVID-19 testing data. The project started as a temporary measure but became a critical source of information for newsrooms, research projects, and even the White House. A volunteer team managed and updated the site using Contentful, Netlify, Gatsby, and Google Sheets, scaling from 0 to 200 million API calls per day in just three months. The team's modern technology stack enabled them to handle traffic spikes without slowdowns or crashes, making it a saving grace during an otherwise complex project. The COVID Tracking Project is a testament to what people can accomplish with the help of technology.

Puppeteer is a Node library that provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium, allowing developers to automate their interactions with a browser-like environment via a command-line interface. It can be used to generate dynamic images for social media sharing by taking screenshots of web pages and providing a link to a serverless function that generates the image. This approach can also be used in build pipeline tools, front-end applications, or as a way to provide richer experiences for users. The library can be installed using npm and can be used to create custom serverless functions, command-line interfaces, or front-end applications.

User-centric design is a human-centered approach to product development that aims to create solutions tailored to users' needs, expectations, and perspectives. It involves creating a connection with users through constant interaction and gathering feedback to develop a solution in accordance. This approach is crucial for product researchers as it helps create products that serve the end user rather than providing them with tools they don't need. The design-thinking model, which consists of five stages - empathize, define problem, ask questions, prototype, test - provides a structured framework for implementing a user-centric approach in research processes. By prioritizing users and incorporating empathy into every step, companies like Contentful are able to build products that serve the customer's needs, as exemplified by their core value of starting with the customer and working backwards.

The MACH Alliance, a global community of companies using microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless technology, sponsored the first global MACHathon in January 2021. The event aimed to help teams "get unstuck" by diving into MACH technology and composable architectures to bring groundbreaking ideas to life within an eight-day timeframe. Contentful was chosen as a content platform due to its App Framework, which makes it easy to connect tools and transform digital experiences. MACH technologies offer flexibility and customization, empowering teams to develop products and scale them to meet growing demand. The event showcased various projects that demonstrate the capabilities of Contentful and other industry-leading tools. These projects include the GraphCatalog, a GraphQL gateway API developed using Contentful, Apollo, Node.js, Ordercloud, and React, as well as the TeacherNator, which combines Contentful with Miro to create interactive curriculum content. The Ultimate MACH DXP proof of concept created a fully functional combination of content, commerce, search, and edge-based personalization with lightning-fast performance and a perfect lighthouse score. Additionally, projects like the Food Bank Connector, developed using Contentful, Algolia, Nuxt.js, Amazon Web Services, Auth0, Netlify, and the GiveFood API, aimed to improve the way food banks operate by connecting existing services. The MACHathon winners received the MACHnificent award, which is the prize for the overall winners, highlighting the success of teams using Contentful and other industry-leading tools.

Customers are increasingly opting for self-service options like knowledge bases, help centers, and chatbots over human support, with 81% willing to try self-service before reaching out to a human being. A knowledge base is a powerful tool providing easy access to information, deep insight into products and services, and contextual information at the right time. It can replace phone service as the most commonly used communication channel, reducing costs for staffing and maintaining call centers or customer-facing teams. A knowledge base also serves as an excellent resource for employees, providing consistency across the organization, standardizing common definitions, and solidifying support solutions. By analyzing search data and page hits, a knowledge base can provide valuable insights into what customers want and need, improving products, support materials, and content. Additionally, it keeps information in a single repository, charting a company's growth and expansion over time.

The Contentful community has been actively engaged, with a revamped GitHub list of useful tools and projects being added to, courtesy of the community's suggestions. The team has also been hosting livestreams on YouTube Live and Twitch, discussing topics such as GraphQL, web development, and Next.js, with upcoming sessions featuring experts like Felix Boenke and Salma. The team has also shared knowledge on performance optimization in React applications and highlighted new features in Contentful, including the ability to restrict public access to assets based on customer requirements, and new filters for sys properties in the GraphQL API. Additionally, the community has been sharing their own projects and experiences, such as Marco Link's app that generates TypeScript types right in the Contentful UI. The team is also looking for more contributions to the awesome-contentful list and invites developers to share their projects on Slack or Twitter.

The author, a Contentful developer evangelist, was inspired by the NYTimes Moveable Type installation and created a low-powered E-Ink display using the AdaFruit MagTag to showcase past Contentful blog posts. The display uses the ESP32-S2 wireless module and supports CircuitPython, allowing it to be easily programmed using Python. The author used the Contentful API via HTTP and implemented GraphQL to reduce the number of calls to the API, reducing the payload of the response. The MagTag buttons allowed users to send notifications with links to full articles, which were sent through the Courier API. The display was able to show content on a 2.9-inch screen and provide feedback when a button was pressed. The author has made the source code available on GitHub, and plans to expand the project by covering the lobby of the Berlin Office with more MagTags.

The author built an RSS feed for their microblog using Node.js and Netlify functions, despite having no front-end frameworks, as part of their "no-frameworks" philosophy. They used Contentful's GraphQL API to fetch data, built an XML string, created an XML document, and sent it to the browser with a "text/xml" content-type. The author tested their function by pushing code to their repository, deploying to Netlify, and accessing the URL of their function in the browser or using the Netlify CLI. They also added auto-discovery metadata to their index.html file to enable readers to subscribe via RSS feeders. The author concludes that RSS is a valuable tool for enabling people to access content in whatever way they choose.

Eric Feige, managing director of strategy at VShift, discusses the importance of decoupled tools and digital transformation in driving business growth. He shares his approach to helping global enterprises operate like startups, using digital technologies and internet-based approaches to grow. Feige emphasizes the need for business executives to understand that there's a proven method for launching new products and growing revenue with digital technologies while working through internal IT rigidity. He highlights the benefits of Decoupled Web Architecture (DWA) in achieving speed to market, shifting control over digital experience from IT to business leadership, and significant cost savings. Feige also stresses the importance of high-value digital interactions, speed to launch, culture metrics, and organizational design in driving transformation. He suggests that traditional annual budget processes for digital and innovation needs should change to quarterly and be more flexible. Feige shares his perspective on how Contentful empowers agencies to help their customers transform into digital-first companies.

Companies faced unprecedented challenges in 2020, accelerating their digitization by three to four years and increasing digitally enabled products in their portfolios by seven years, according to a McKinsey Global Survey. However, scaling those digital wins is crucial for future success. As businesses grow, technology infrastructure must adapt to support increased complexity, sophistication, integration with new technologies, and accelerated speed to market. To ensure scalability, businesses should consider various types of growth, including volume increases, changes in workflows, governance, supporting technology, and security needs. They should also ask questions about capacity, spikes, fees, penalties, complex workflows, governance, integration with other tools, global scale, diverse business cases, granular permissions, roles, translation, localization, currency, legal, regulatory requirements, download speed, and reliability. Choosing an experienced technology partner can help navigate these challenges and ensure enterprise-grade availability, disaster recovery, performance, security, and compliance policies. Ultimately, a platform must be able to support accelerated growth across seven dimensions of scale.

When it comes to succeeding in the digital-first era, legacy systems face many of the same challenges as their customers, having evolved before cloud infrastructure and content channels were widely available. To accelerate into this era, brands need cloud-based, API-first platforms that are purpose-built for robust, multi-channel digital experiences. Many DXP solutions claim to have similar features, but it's the underlying infrastructure that determines how well those capabilities scale. Legacy systems are limited by outdated infrastructure and can't meet all of a company's marketing needs, leading to long implementations and delays in achieving value. In contrast, cloud-native platforms like Contentful empower digital teams to collaborate and iterate faster with extensible solutions that add value through customization, scalability, and flexibility. To survive in the digital-first era, brands need builder-centric, API-first platforms that support speed, flexibility, extensibility, scalability, and reliability.