Coaching composability: On’s run with Contentful Professional Services

“If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself” — when implementing a new technology or architecture, most companies share this sentiment. After all, most of them have a team of talented engineers with the technical knowledge and business context to make such transitions a success. But even these parties enjoy some reassurance before embarking on larger, more impactful projects — Swiss sportswear brand On included. 

Since its founding in 2010, the company has been transforming the sporting goods industry with performance footwear that marries the latest technological advancements with sustainable design. Eager to bring that sustainability to its content creation processes and web development, the company adopted Contentful — with a little help from our Professional Services team.

We recently caught up with Omer Abdul Maroof, Senior Technical Project Manager at Contentful, and Rahul Ravindran, Senior Lead, Software Engineering at On, to learn more about the collaboration behind impressive development milestones including a website redesign, mobile application, and more.

Adjusting initial implementation: Migration and space management

How did On begin its engagement with Contentful Professional Services? 

Rahul Ravindran: When I first joined On in 2020 as a Senior Engineer, we were already using Contentful to power the content on our website. Around 2021, we began a website redesign which mandated a migration and changes to our content models. We realized that our content models weren’t set up in the most efficient way and we wanted to change that. 

Our domain was split into multiple spaces, which wasn’t ideal at the time. The orchestration features that exist with Contentful today — which allow you to fetch content from other spaces — hadn’t been developed yet. We also had a few too many content models floating around. Some spaces had two or three, which increased the complexity of our setup. 

As our brand began to scale and more complex engineering requests came in, we realized sustainable management and content creation would require us to make some changes and develop a more composable approach to content creation. We began using Professional Services as a consultant to double-check the changes we planned to make before taking action. 

What was the communication and collaboration like?

Rahul: The communication was really collaborative. We have a shared Slack channel that includes a few Contentful team members and several members of our Digital Engineering and Product teams. Throughout the entire engagement, there was one Contentful expert in particular who was really helpful — he was our go-to and had so much in-depth knowledge. If a problem arose, he was able to quickly recommend a fix — which was a huge help. Examples of this include offering workarounds for caching issues, helping us create local copies of sunsetted content, and resolving 404 errors that came up between staging and production. 

Omer Abdul Maroof: Our customers know exactly what they want to achieve and what constraints they have to work in due to their technology setup and resources, while we know the ins and outs of our platform. Together, we can brainstorm ideas to determine the best path forward. It’s about empowering our customers to own their implementation by giving them new knowledge and greater insight. 

Innovation Day 

What is an “Innovation Day”? Why are they so valuable? 

Omer: Innovation Days are one-day events where a team of our in-house experts visits a customer onsite — usually at their headquarters — to inspire and educate core teams and other internal groups on how to better utilize our product. It’s also a great opportunity to celebrate the wonderful work they’ve already done on Contentful and network with key stakeholders. These events build trust and community.

Can you walk us through the agenda of On’s Innovation Day?

Omer: The Innovation Day is broken up into presentations and breakout sessions organized by topic or contributor roles. Key topics included moving back to a multispace architecture (given Contentful’s updated orchestration features), exploring additional omnichannel use cases — On is currently using Contentful for its website, mobile app, and chatbot), and finally, a general discovery of all the ways On is currently using Contentful across various teams.

We also invited long-time customer Dormakaba Group to present its approach to localization and multispace management. 

Rahul: For On, it was an opportunity to bring cross-functional teams (i.e., marketing, content, SEO, etc.) together to discuss existing pain points of current use cases and explore new ways to leverage Contentful.

What takeaways will impact On’s use case going forward?

Omer: From the Professional Services side, the open conversation between different teams has given us a different lens of the inputs and needs required for localization and regionalization as well as more insight into existing content structures. This knowledge will ultimately shift the recommendations we provide. 

Rahul: Right now we’re using a translation management system to translate our content for seven different languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Italian), but we want to be able to empower regional teams — content creators and marketers specifically — to create content that’s relevant to that niche group of customers without needing support from developers. We want to get to a point where every piece of content we create is relevant to the person consuming it. We’d also like to have our website navigation be tailored to the categories and content that’s most valuable to those markets. Some of the product updates are shared by the Contentful team as they have the potential to help satisfy those wants and needs. 

Omer: The updates we shared included information on Contentful Studio — specifically features like the AI Content Generator, AI Image Generator, Workflows App, and Live Preview. We also presented the following Contentful Platform updates: external references, cross-space references, and visual modeler.

What was your favorite part of the experience? 

Rahul: The presentation by the Dormakaba Group was both interesting and applicable. They provided insight into the different ways multispace architecture could be leveraged. 

Omer: For me and my team, it was getting organic customer feedback. This has become such an important part of the experience and our overall process that we’ve given it a name: customer signals. We share feedback from these sessions and our regular engagements with our product team and, if enough customers share the same sentiment, they might see new features or platform updates inspired by it.

Wrapping up

For more on the success story behind this post, check out On’s complete case study and video featuring Kris Hedstrom, Head of UX/UI Design at On, and Laura Mason, Head of Digital Product at On).

With Contentful Professional Services, you don’t have to go into your next build alone. Now you've seen how it works based on our engagement with the Swiss athletic apparel brand, On. 

Looking for guidance and consultative support for your unique Contentful use case? Get in touch with Contentful Professional Services.

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