In this interview, Romain Piasecki, Product Owner at Tikamoon, provides an in-depth account of his company's journey with the Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless (MACH) approach.
In this in-depth interview, Romain Piasecki, Product Owner at Tikamoon, delves into the company’s exploration and adoption of MACH technology. From the initial stages of understanding MACH to the implementation of specific solutions, Romain provides a detailed account of Tikamoon’s journey. He discusses the challenges, successes, and future plans, offering a rich perspective on how MACH technology is shaping modern business solutions.
Our MACH experience is really at its infancy. We started hearing about MACH and MACH Alliance last year. After learning more, we realized it aligns with our goals, especially around microservices and headless architecture. We’re now educating ourselves more on this topic, and I even went to Amsterdam in June to learn more. We’re considering MACH certified vendors for our next big solution, and it’s a starting point for our future implementations.
Yes, we’ve been using Algolia for search recommendations. Being a furniture reseller, we initially had a fairly antiquated local platform with tons of Excel files. We decided to upgrade to a more modern solution, choosing Akeneo for Product Inventory Management (PIM). This approach worked really well, and we’re thrilled with Akeneo. We’re now looking at more MACH solutions for order management and stock.
We were exploring Akeneo before MACH Alliance because they are quite famous in France. They were the leader in this market, so it was a no-brainer to at least ask Akeneo, but we also met other vendors.
Definitely. MACH reduces risk and time. When implementing internally, you start from scratch, and it often takes three times longer than expected. With an external solution like MACH, the challenges are already solved. So yes, the biggest value is time to value and really reducing the risk in overspending.
We have an internal team of ten developers. They handle some issues and develop parts of the stack, but for massive projects like product and order management, doing it internally would take years and at a high risk. That’s why we prefer external solutions.
They’re starting to get it, especially after our success with Akeneo. I’m the internal evangelist of MACH, and I believe it will change how we do things. Now, they at least recognize MACH alliance certified vendors, and we’re considering more MACH projects, like DAM and CMS solutions.
MACH solutions are better for business, addressing specific challenges and facilitating a best-of-breed approach. You’ll get more value and features more frequently. Our experience with Akeneo, especially the import and export feature, showed the benefits we would have struggled to develop internally.
Possibly, but our marketing team is tech-savvy and used to dealing with many platforms. They might benefit from more exposure to MACH Alliance members, but overall, we expect more value and alignment with our web performance goals.
I don’t see any real boundaries. MACH Alliance vendors cover many solutions. If there are limits, they’re on the business side, depending on readiness for MACH or preference for off-the-shelf solutions.
We’re focusing on efficiency and speed but need to look at standard marketing KPIs like conversion and add-to-cart rates. We release new versions daily but aren’t strict about tracking performance uplift. Our major focus is making sure we improve our processes and deliver results more efficiently.
I’d like to know the most difficult part of the MACH journey and the most complex MACH component to implement. Understanding these aspects would help us evaluate and prepare better for our ongoing journey with MACH technology.
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