The search for the right stack
For Intercom to move faster and level up its marketing site, it needed to build a lighter tech stack, reduce time for page development, reduce barriers to contribution for marketers and editors and free up time on the engineering team. What they needed was a content platform.
They started with a list of more than 100 requirements, says Lauren Ottinger, product manager at Intercom. “There were a ton of stakeholders and people who this project was going to impact — from marketing, branding, content and demand generation to engineering.”
After grouping the must-haves into themes and prioritizing, four top criteria emerged: Brand flexibility, Fast build time, Overall ease-of-use and, Enable marketing team contributions.
That still left about 20 CMSes to choose from. The teams debated whether to go with a traditional or headless CMS. With a traditional CMS, the marketing team could make quick changes to the website, but the experiences they could create were limited and inflexible. Making another custom application freed up the creative side but saddled the engineering team with every tiny change.
They concluded that a headless CMS could provide the best of both worlds by making the content easy to update by the marketing team, while providing a system that’s easy to maintain for the engineering team. After speaking with several vendors, they chose Contentful for enterprise readiness, out-of-the-box features, single sign-on and modularity.
A huge deciding factor for Intercom was finding a platform that could support them where they were and grow with them. Since their creatives and engineers had started thinking end-to-end and holistically about the experiences they were building, they needed a partner for the duration. They had a lot of confidence that Contentful was a strong platform and would be a great long-term partner (implementing a CMS is never just a short-term decision).
Contentful enabled Intercom’s marketers to make content changes without being dependent on engineering, and it allowed them to scale their content. Intercom also built a reusable library of components. The key to these was finding that just-right Goldilocks size, according to Intercom’s tech lead. “If you make your components too large and opinionated, then every single page looks exactly the same. If they’re too small, then they’re a little bit too flexible. A content author can shoot themselves in the foot by composing too many things together.”
The team opted for components that were slightly too large and then broke them into smaller bits. The library reduced the time it took to build custom elements for each new page, and also increased team efficiency. In turn, cross-team collaboration drastically improved.