Three pillars of successful digital experiences: technology, experience design and data

At Contentful, we’re lucky to have some incredible partners that help our customers bring digital experiences to the market. FFW is one of these strategic partners. Pitching JAMstack-based solutions with various industry-leading tools is nothing new to FFW. Their team has been building digital experiences in this way for over a decade. I spoke with Ricardo Osuna, director of partnerships at FFW, to get his take on using stacks to tackle their clients’ most pressing digital challenges.

Building effective connections between FFW, technology partners and clients

What’s your expertise and experience in tech? 

My name is Ricardo Osuna and I’m the director of partnerships at FFW. I’ve been working in web, digital content production and marketing for over 10 years. Throughout that time, I’ve become increasingly more fascinated with the connection between technology, people and the collaboration that happens at that intersection. My role at FFW means that I get to spend my days building effective connections between FFW, our technology partners, our clients and a practice to support that collaboration.

What do clients need to build successful digital experiences?

There is a lot of focus from our clients on the challenges that come with scale. A great digital experience is first and foremost a human interaction. There’s a person on the other side of the screen and our clients are always thinking about how to best serve that person. How can you make sure that every single person that engages with your brand digitally has an equally great experience? How do you balance consistency with flexibility, especially across many brands and touchpoints? What has to be done to ensure that digital experiences — and the platforms that power them — scale into the future?

How does composable architecture help solve problems of scale? 

Using composable architecture empowers teams to be in full control of their digital presence. Choosing the right technology, at the right time, for the right purpose ensures that an organization isn’t just selecting technology based on its status, but also choosing the platforms and tools that are the best fit for their particular needs. In 2020, Gartner proclaimed that “the future of business is composable,” advising organizations to focus on ensuring their business is built on interchangeable building blocks. Composable architecture ensures that digital experiences, and the technology that powers them, are ready for that reality.

At FFW, we think about digital scale as having three overarching dimensions that organizations need to be conscious of:

1. Scale across touchpoints: how do you power digital experiences across all the channels that matter to your customers?

2. Scale across an organization: how do you drive internal adoption of a technology stack? 

3. Scale into the future: how do you ensure that the investment you make today scales with your business into the future? 

There is no single “right” answer or solution to each of these big questions. The answers will always depend on specific business needs and context. Composable architecture allows our clients to use the best tools for their business and empowers them to tackle each of these challenges with solution stacks that are built on their terms. 

What benefits result from switching a legacy CMS for composable architecture?

There are many. What immediately comes to mind is seeing big benefits in operational efficiency. When you choose a piece of technology based on it being the best fit for a specific function, and you carry that philosophy through to all functions within your digital experience operations, there’s a powerful efficiency ripple effect that spreads to the different teams and individuals across the organization. In the long term, this helps to drive adoption and factors heavily into a lower total cost of ownership. 

How can an agency partner help companies through the process?

At its best, a composable architecture gives organizations the ability to deliver contextualized and personalized digital experiences at scale. In order to reach this level of maturity, selecting the technology is fundamentally important. But there are also other pieces to consider.

At FFW, we think of Technology, Experience Design, and Data as the three pillars of digital experience success. As an agency partner, we bring valuable expertise to the table, both when it comes to technology implementation, but also in creating an effective digital practice that brings together these three pillars in order to create, manage and optimize digital experiences.

Read more about the key technology trends and software practices digital leaders are adopting to produce cross-functional, agile product teams.

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