MACH interview with Flaconi

What benefits have the business users seen through adopting MACH technology?

We have implemented a new composable frontend over 3 years ago. Whilst we have been able to provide more flexibility for developers this has not necessarily provided the business users with more agility. This has achieved our primary objective of launching new front end quickly, however the business user experience was a secondary priority. In the hindsight if we had more time, we could have done things differently.

Has MACH brought technology and business teams closer together?

I would not necessarily say that the technology itself has brought teams closer together, but rather the need to collaborate on so many projects has resulted in tighter alignment. We have not intentionally set out to transform people and business, but are rather focusing on making small incremental changes. For example, we have trained cross-functional teams on Dynamic Yield’s back-end integration capabilities which is now starting to deliver results.

What challenges did you experience when implementing MACH technology?

There is an underlying challenge between front-end vs back-end integrations. In fact, the conversion optimization teams are a conflict in itself. They need the ability to change the content on the ecommerce site whilst at the same time we have a front-end team that is also optimizing content. This results in a constant friction on alignment. Allowing someone to overwrite the content on the front-end is an issue and we are going in the opposite direction to reduce the technical debt. Due to previous inefficiencies we used to allow it in the past, but now users have an expectation to be able to do so. But we want this to only be possible via the be back-end integrations and remove the ability to do so via the front-end.

Can you share a business challenge that you are trying to solve using MACH principles?

I am sure most of my peers would agree, but I don’t want to see big transformation projects anymore. We need to continuously innovate and constantly provide incremental value to the business. Let me give you an example.

We had high hopes of centralizing everything in a single marketing automation platform. One design system for Content, Emails, Mobile Push and Transactional Messages. Whilst the chosen vendor was great for marketing emails, unfortunately, we have discovered the hard way that they have limitations in delivering transactional emails and now we are also encountering new challenges with their Mobile Push capabilities. Our learning was that perhaps the development team should be owing the transactional messages. Challenges like these with individual vendors is forcing us to slowly decompose the marketing automation capabilities.

Most vendors are good at one thing, but I need a solution that addresses the requirements of all channels: email, social advertising, paid media, on site., etc. The solution we are going down is having a CDP that orchestrates across all channels and still allows for better insights across this multi-vendor component landscape. What is making this harder is that that each vendor is continuously developing their capabilities into the direction that they think is right. Whilst it may seem great as an individual vendor, for us as a client the overlap in capabilities between various vendors is becoming greater with each year. There is nothing wrong with developing additional components if these components are genuinely separate from capability, licensing, and pricing perspective.

It is certainly a topic that vendors need to reflect on. For them to remain competitive they need to ensure that they develop much more powerful individual features to justify ripping out an existing vendor that already covers a variety of use cases.

What questions would you like to ask your peers that are currently embarking on the MACH journey?

How do you make decisions around selecting vendors when there is so much overlap in their capabilities?

What questions would you like to ask other brands embarking on the MACH journey?

I’m curious to know how they manage their budgets, considering the continuous desire to do more and improve the platform. How do they prioritize? Additionally, how do they take advantage of offloading DevOps?

Read the next interview ›

DOWNLOAD THE PRACTITIONERS GUIDE TO IMPLEMENTING MACH ›