MACH interview with Nearops

Tell us about your MACH journey?

The business did not understand MACH, we never sold MACH internally and MACH was never a thing in our organization. We did however incrementally convince the business around the value of Headless and that it is the only way forward. We made sure that all the projects we worked on incrementally added up to a MACH ecosystem.

Whilst France and Germany are some of our larger regions, we found a lot of push-back due to the hierarchical decision making and intricacies around local regulations that prevented us to move quickly. A number of successful projects delivered on time and below budget with a team of five has allowed for a very simple business case that helped to convince the board. They have in turn have approved a major investment to unify all eCommerce platforms across different regions on the same front end. The unified User Experience was meant to allow for consistent KPI tracking across all regions.

How did you bring the business users onboard?

The central team had a bad reputation which clearly is a bad place to start a major transformation project. Major concern for the business users was whether our proposed platform was cost effective and whether it would support all their requirements.

Portugal has proven to be the ideal region to trial new initiatives. They are one of the smaller regions and therefore over the previous years have not benefited with as much support from the central teams as the larger regions did. Also culturally are very straight forward and direct people to deal with which made it the perfect test bed for initiating new agile ways of working.

We kicked off the project by flying over to Portugal to go through the entire platform and their requirements. We have then also setup monthly and quarterly meetings that have proven to be extremely valuable to get everyone aligned. We have used those meetings to collaboratively define all features required by individual business units.

What about trade-offs and what are some of the compromises that the business team had to make?

There are trade-offs between priorities across different regions; trade-offs between business needs and IT; and trade-offs between priorities. Quarterly alignment meetings were extremely important in ensuring that everyone is aligned, and we have put a lot of effort into them.

We used quarterly meetings to get buy-in from all regions. Obviously when a region had a specific requirement and a budget this has enabled us to prioritize and hire more resources.

It was important for us in the IT to recognize that you always create technical debt.
” You know about it, but also don’t concern yourself about it too much. It’s about finding the right balance between business and technology. But when push comes to shove, business will always win in these discussions.”

To give you a more specific example around some of the compromises, it took us 6 years to develop a CDP capability to help the marketing team up their game in digital marketing and in particularly email marketing. Implementing CDP was a hassle. We initially ended up selecting a provider that was too small for our needs. We then then have attempted to create our own CDP in Google Big Query where we integrated First-, Second- and Third-party data which we then have connected to SendGrid. In countries that required more sophisticated requirements we have connected it to Salesforce.

One of MACH’s promises is the agility to iterate and deploy new releases quickly. How do you keep track of enhancements and measure their ROI?

Every enhancement has to be linked back to the budget and ultimately improvement in revenue. We regularly engage consulting firms to help us shape the strategy around the next improvements. As majority of our transactions take place in physical stores, Digitally Influenced Sales is one of our primary metrics that we track and forecast against before we make any enhancement. Every business builds their strategies around core pillars and to get the buy-in from the leadership team we had to show how our initiatives are aligned against one of those pillars. In our case MACH technology has allowed us to accelerate the marketing use cases and therefore Digital Transformation was one of the pillars that has helped us fund our initiatives.

What are your 3 biggest lessons learned and boundaries of MACH technology that you may have experiences?

1. If we would do it again, I would add a dedicated product owner on email marketing and specifically Sendgrid. There are so many intricacies around the email channel and deliverability that we simply did not anticipate. Things would have been a lot smoother if we had a domain expert looking after this.

2. Be very clear and intentional on your “Buy vs Build” strategy to avoid creating a Franken-stack. As a business you need to navigate a very fine line between making sure you are not too dependent on integrations, but at the same time you need to decide what you want to be in control of. Be aware that sometimes you may take it too far. Having to ask the marketing team to extract segments from a Google BigQuery CDP and uploading them to Sendgrid and combining them with email templates stored in GitHub not be the most practical solution.

3. In my opinion, there are not enough technical people now and possibly in the coming decades. Low wage countries such as India, China have enormous amount of technical talent, but it is hard to find talent that can operate to the same standards as local talent.

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

Where is your business at in the MACH journey?
When do you know when there is too much Composability in your stack and when to go down the monolith route? After all in Monolith approach are no surprises besides delayed projects and integrators that end up costing way more than expected.

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