How Agencies Help Enterprises Go Composable

Kerrigan Baron

Hello, Netlify Compose! It's so good to see you all and be here. As you may have heard, my name is Kerrigan Baron. I'm a senior technical director at Kin + Carta, specifically working in MACH and Composable.

Tyler Barnard

I'm Tyler Barnard, the Director of Product Management in Digital Experiences at Trimble Inc., managing the websites for corporate architecture. I've moved over into product to help integrate our MACH architecture into even more, and we'll go into that later.

Ayla Peacock

Hey there, Ayla Peacock. I look after the go-to-market strategy for Composable in MACH at Kin + Carta. It's a long title, but it's better than "head of headless," which was the alternative.

I'm 5'3". How tall are you?

Tyler Barnard

I'm 6'6", and I'm trying not to stand too far forward.

Ayla Peacock

Then, Kerrigan, come with me.

All right, to kick things off, Tyler, tell us about Trimble.

Tyler Barnard

So Trimble is a global technology company. We take on some of the world's biggest challenges. We do this through connecting both physical and digital worlds to help our customers unlock a better, faster, safer, and greener future. We work in many industries, and these are 4 of the industries that we serve — construction, transportation, geospatial, agriculture. We do this to empower customers to improve how we live, eat, and move for a better quality of life and a better future. One of the things I'm most proud of Trimble for is that we're really working on sustainability with our customers through the efficiencies that we provide through technology and innovation to provide that better tomorrow.

Ayla Peacock

Kin + Carta is a global digital transformation consultancy. Our services span from data to cloud to any experience that touches the user. We provide consulting services for the Enterprise, and perhaps more importantly, we are a B Corp, the first to be publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. B Corp doesn't mean B team or the A Team. B Corp stands for benefit corporation, which means that we're held to sustainability, diversity, equity, and inclusion standards that align with the sustainability work Trimble is doing for our clients. It means that we attract talent like Kerrigan Baron, who want to work at a firm with a heart and work on cool projects like this one with Trimble.

Trimble came to Kin + Carta somewhere between 3 and 100 years ago. It's impossible to know with the COVID break in the middle. Tyler used this to describe his web issues. They made around 100 acquisitions in the last 10 years, and Trimble had what Tyler called a black market of websites — no consistent brand, no consistent experience for users across websites, no way to track analytics at scale. MACH wasn't a big part of the conversation when Trimble came to Kin + Carta. They were using disparate monolith systems, in particular Drupal was one point of discussion, and we introduced a MACH philosophy to Trimble together, Kin + Carta alongside Tyler. Will you tell us more about the project?

Tyler Barnard

Absolutely. We had many disparate companies who would come in through either acquisition or through various industries. I had a vision of connecting these from a customer experience standpoint. I didn't know anything about MACH at the time, but the vision really melded with the MACH principles, and we started to work on building a scalable platform that would achieve customer consistency across all of our industries, which was an important part of the scope.

Kerrigan Baron

Absolutely. One of the biggest things there is that not only is it a marketing experience platform that Tyler was talking about, but a scaling platform, something that can grow and become more than what it was. For that, we actually have a little bit of a backstory on this.

Ayla Peacock

There's a technical challenge here to discuss, of course, but the cultural one is perhaps more complicated. We find with many of our clients going through a MACH transformation that they need a little bit of handholding. This is real footage, actual footage of an email Tyler sent me in what does that say, 2020? Can you read the subject?

Tyler Barnard

Yes, I was a bit nervous.

Ayla Peacock

... he says. And I'll read the rest: "Hey team, I'm getting the 2am worries about our roadmap. We only have a few working weeks in December, and we need to settle our direction. I'm getting a lot of pushback on the idea of moving away from Drupal… [Can anyone relate to this?] mostly fear-based around not understanding what Contentful really is, how much it costs, what our developers would be doing once it's developed.” This is normal. MACH is a big move for the C-suite. It takes time to chip away at them. And what I've found is that we do need one hero, and we're here to make our clients the hero.

We worked with Tyler to take down the monolith. We introduced Contentful, we introduced Netlify, and we helped tell a story to the larger Trimble organization about what MACH could do. Can you tell us more about how you brought down the monolith?

Tyler Barnard

It's much more noble than it looks. I think it was really about convincing a lot of folks, both the developers on the team, as well as upper management of where we were going, what these principles of composable meant, and building in capabilities as opposed to just investing in vendor suites. It took a lot of challenge there, but I think ultimately, it's the right principles, and I think once you prove it out, it really does scale.

Kerrigan Baron

Absolutely. I think one of the biggest things was that when Tyler brought us on, agencies have a whole different view of how everything connects in.

Ayla Peacock

Some of the scary parts about taking on a MACH transformation are the multiple vendors you need to sign. A lot of C-suites say they want one throat to choke. An agency like Kin + Carta can be the one throat to chart the waters with our clients. What I found is it usually is one person who's making this case for a MACH transformation, maybe it's a handful of people, but it's grassroots. It's from the bottom up, and it can take years. If you're that person, we would like to work alongside you and maybe get on a white horse together.

Kerrigan Baron

Yes, one of the biggest things when we're talking about an agency helping an Enterprise actually change their direction like Tyler did is that our business is your business. Specifically, everything that we bring to the table is expertise, knowledge, all of the capabilities that we've done before. We've done this. We know this. But the biggest part of this is not only have we done this, but we are integrating and collaborating with you and your teams. Enterprise clients get the benefit of working interlocked with our experts to actually have a knowledge transfer so that by the end of the project, you're able to pick up and scale yourself alongside us. So, that's one of the biggest wins here, and as Tyler mentioned here, it's a very interesting journey that requires a little bit of trust.

When we started this journey, it was actually just a discovery, something that was small, a small engagement that was mainly looking at Drupal – is it the right technology? How does that work? Tyler, can you talk to us a little bit about the scale we were facing?

Tyler Barnard

As I mentioned earlier, we're going across 4 different industries. We needed consistency in the brand and had worked alongside the brand team very closely. So, building that system was something I was very interested in building out to the websites. But when you take away that control and build a platform, an ecosystem of scalable websites, you still need to be able to let the businesses in those industries talk to their customers in the unique ways that they need to. So, we needed something both scalable and flexible at the same time.

Kerrigan Baron

Absolutely. I think you did a good job of jumping in and focusing on the customer experience. When you're talking across these verticals and these different pieces of the business, you have to focus first on the customer journey. How is all of this connected? How is that experience going to go? Mainly because this is flipping the script in a lot of ways of how people actually try and figure this out. They're like, "Let me find my vendors, let me find my technologies first." We need to take a step back from that and focus instead on the customer journey.

Tyler Barnard

Yeah, that was one of the biggest things we needed to help with was getting the mindset shift from, "Hey, this is my Drupal site or this is my vendor that I'm tied to," as opposed to looking at the larger customer experience, the outside-in vision, which then allows the sites to completely transform what they're doing at the end of the day instead of being that outside-in or inside-out view.

Kerrigan Baron

Absolutely. And I think one of the biggest pieces here was we looked at the customer journey and the ideal journey and then figured out what is going to make that happen. Part of what we did was actually focus on a global design system that would allow us to have different capabilities and that composable approach that brings us to a more sustainable, faster, and efficient system overall.

So, one of the biggest things when we're talking about a composable global design system is that we need to avoid boiling the ocean because we just talked about, you need to have that customer journey, but you need to have an MVP. So, the biggest thing here when we're thinking about how agencies bring an enterprise along is the focus on how are we going to have a high ROI product that we can launch and make sure is winning at scale. Even though we define that ideal customer journey, we identify and slim that down to what makes sense for an MVP. What do we need to do to bring it down to something that is a set of blocks from the get-go? For us and Trimble, that was actually focusing on trimble.com. Isn't that right, Tyler?

Tyler Barnard

So, it was a great example. There was a lot of fear in the organization. What is this new platform? We're putting a lot of money into kind of reinventing everything that we had known. So, not only building the platform, but it was great to have an MVP approach to get trimble.com out the door, show what the platform could do, and then know that we had built it for scale so that then we could immediately pivot into the next sites.

Kerrigan Baron

Absolutely. So, once you've actually got your pieces, your components, the colors, blocks that will build that MVP experience, that's where you're building the factory. You've built the factory, and you've got that MVP capability, and now you're able to scale efficiently. You're scaling effectively, you're able to actually use wonderful partners like Netlify to rapidly accelerate your capabilities. For us and Trimble, not only by us working interlocked, we had the Trimble developers working alongside our Kin + Carta developers. We're all one team. They have the experience now, and they have the ability to keep going and keep building.

Tyler Barnard

I think that's a great point. The biggest difference here is that the factory is ours. We own the factory. We built the factory alongside Kin + Carta. Our developers, a few of which were on the room and on the call, they now know how to publish new sites very quickly, very fast. It's our capability to own now and to continue to scale.

Kerrigan Baron

Absolutely. I think one of the biggest keys when we're talking about that is when we're ramping up that quickly and we're scaling that factory, we need to have the right pieces and parts to know where we are going for that ultimate customer journey. But also, how do they fit together? How does it have a consistent brand message all the way through? Now, let's talk results.

Ayla Peacock

I'll let Tyler say some words after me, but I have a microphone right now. Trimble achieved digital channel maintenance costs across all of their digital channels. They're now on a path to have a corporation-wide consistent brand presence. Marketers can be marketers. New marketing websites can now be created quickly and efficiently. Data collection volume has increased by a factor of 10. Customer data collected on the company website increased from 14,000 to 1.7 million year over year, a 121% increase. What else you got?

Tyler Barnard

Yeah, we were able to launch not only trimble.com but at least 8 other sites after this within the following year and be able to do that with the same components, the reusability, all the things that we had set out to achieve. We were also able to make changes on the fly. Just recently, we switched our fonts out, and being able to cascade that through multiple sites was a breeze. It only took a smaller effort than we thought.

Kerrigan Baron

I think one of the biggest tells of this is not only did we start the relationship and bring a lot of that change through the organization alongside Trimble, but we also set up the system with them, trained them, and let them own because enterprises have that capability, and that's unique. So, Tyler, picking your brain for a second, what's next for Trimble?

Tyler Barnard

That's a great question. I think this has really been building the platform was a huge learning curve, but then it set us up for success moving forward. We've heard it several times today around building on those capabilities, those components to further scale it into more of a digital experience platform. Things like composable e-commerce. We're adding commercetools to our stack. It's going easier and faster than I think management expected because we were already set up from the MACH principles. We're also taking those MACH principles into development teams. My move over to the Product Team was an example of that and how we went from Marketing into Product, and now we're taking some of those principles into the development teams there to continue that learning of fast, responsive frontends that are scalable and that are componentized so that we can swap out our capabilities with best-in-class whenever we need to. I think the whole organization is realizing that we weren't just crazy when we started out doing this but that we were actually on to something, and it's good to be here to not feel so crazy. Also, that we've got a good community and great partners.

Ayla Peacock

If you are a dog person or a cat person, you're welcome to take a picture of my contact information. You won't. That's not a good joke because Kerrigan just screwed up the slide.

Kerrigan Baron

But there, I messed it up. I messed it up.

Ayla Peacock

If you'd like a copy of the deck or want to talk more about this case study or other work we're doing at Kin + Carta, I'd be glad to chat, be your therapist. I could put on a sweater vest like Kerrigan or offer some insight about technology and MACH.

Ayla Peacock, Kerrigan Baron, Tyler Barnard

Alright, thank you, thank you all!