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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#625: Creating an agile brand with composable approaches, featuring Chris Bach
00:47:35
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- [00:00]
Greg Kilstrom
Your brand may be staying on top of current trends, but are you agile enough to stay relevant, resilient and successful as customers, competition and the world continues to change at a breakneck pace? I'm thrilled to share the newly revised version of my first book, the Agile Brand. I'm calling it the Agile Brand Revisited. It's been updated to reflect our continually changing world and it provides seven principles that form the backbone of an agile brand, offering detailed insights and actionable steps for incorporating them into your business strategy. This is the book that started it all and I'm excited to share it with you. It's now available in print and digital formats and available everywhere. Learn more by going to the Agile Brand guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com.
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Chris Bach
The Agile Brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trend, trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show.
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Software is eating the world. That was written back in 2011 by Marc Andreessen and it seems like that's growing more true every day. Today we're going to talk about the increasingly digital nature of businesses, all businesses, as well as how the concept of composability, which has been applied effectively in the world of software, might just have applications well beyond technology infrastructure.
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Tell me discuss this topic.
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I'd like to welcome Chris Bach, Co Founder of netlify.
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Chris, welcome to the show.
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Chris Bach
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to this and welcome back to the show. I know we've chatted before, so why don't we get started with you giving a little background on yourself and what you're currently doing?
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Chris Bach
Yeah, well, so I'm the co founder of a company called Netlify. After 10 years I just stepped out full time. Still sit on the board Was very active in pioneering the sort of decoupled digital landscape which really led to composable technologies that are being adopted very wide scale today. Also was quite invested in building out the ecosystem. So today I do a bunch of board work, advisory work and in angel investment as well in a ton of companies across the space. Yeah. So a lot of composable technology.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, well, yeah, we're going to dive into that quite a bit today. I want to start with going back a little bit and I started the show with the Andresen quote. And more recently Satya Nadella from microso Microsoft said something similar about all companies are software companies. Do you think most companies are getting this message?
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Chris Bach
That's a good question, right? I think they are. I also think that we're going to the point like the way this is meant, right is that there's no business that's also not a digital business, right. And it goes to, in most cases it's digital first.
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Right.
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And you have to be sort of natively digitally thinking about your opportunities. Right. And I think so that's why you also hear the statement that all companies in a few years will have to be AI companies. That doesn't mean that no humans are working there. It just means that you sort of have to embrace AI to some extent in how you do business to stay at a competitive advantage, right. Or at least not like fold into a competitive disadvantage.
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Right.
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And I think today the ones that are sort of ignoring digital, there aren't a lot of them and there aren't a lot of companies that don't realize that. But those that are either have like super cornered resource, right. Or they are, they are at a competitive disadvantage and are sort of becoming obsolete quite fast.
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Right.
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But I do think that most enterprises, anyone that's also trying to scale and so on, they absolutely understand that digital is super necessary. That doesn't mean that they're always treating the way they do solutions in the way that it should be. Right. But I think there is sort of a, a board level understanding that they have to be digitally native.
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Greg Kilstrom
Well and so those that are, I mean either lagging behind or maybe lagging way behind, you know, what do they need to start doing differently?
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Chris Bach
Well, I think like it really of course we have to say it depends on the business, right? Like if you want to be an artisan shoe cobbler, you can get away with having a very basic E commerce site, right. You know, like it doesn't really matter to the same extent then if you're a larger company, of course we can already say that all the companies that are tech companies and selling software, which is, you know, quite a big sector by now, they are, of course, digital by default.
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Right.
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I think others just have to sort of talk to sort of go back and look at, okay, we might have had a way of building relationship with our clients when we started. We might have had a way of accentuating our brands and coming out and telling our stories and reaching our audience. But today, if we're still doing the same things, what are the channels that we're not meeting them on?
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Right.
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What happens when our demographic changes and we need a younger audience as well, that are more digitally native? And I think you have to start getting an understanding, first of all, of who's going to use your product and where are they and what are the terms on how they communicate and interact with any brands.
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Right.
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And unless you have some understanding of that, it's very hard to execute on it.
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Right.
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Like, I don't think it's just a question of getting the right business plans and hitting metrics.
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Right.
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Like, first understand what you're selling to whom and where they are.
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Right.
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And then from that notion, say, okay, this is where we can meet them. How do we do that? And that will require, for example, having a good tech stack.
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Right.
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So once they land on one of your properties, it doesn't take 30 seconds to load because then they're gone again.
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Right.
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And it has a million more things like that to it.
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Right.
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But I think the notion is to, to sort of go back and look at where do I really have an opportunity of meeting these people that, that I want to, to sell to. And, and in those cases, nine out of 10, if not more, you're going to see, oh, shoot, things changed.
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Right.
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There's new ways of interacting, and I'm maybe not utilizing that very well. And very often this also comes from learning platforms.
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Right.
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So you might have a company that says, you know, we're doing fine.
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Right.
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And maybe they take their foot off the gas a little bit or they're just, you know, coasting.
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Right.
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And very few companies, unless they have like, really, really cornered resources, will be able to not. Like we'll be able to ignore the competitors zooming past them.
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Right.
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And so once they start looking at what those competitors are doing, very often it'll be that they're much better utilizing the digital options ahead of them.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. And so, you know, I want to. Want to talk about the shift towards composable, but before we do that and focusing mostly on the you know, the large and the enterprise companies and obviously there's a lot of variation, you know, even within those by industry. But you know, how are some of the legacy, not only business models but you know, systems software infrastructure, you know, how, how are some of those things holding them back as they're shifting to more digital business, you know, a digital business approach?
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Chris Bach
Of course there's also many answers here. So let's choose one of them, right? One of them. When you go to your digital properties, at the end of the day most companies are interacting with their end users, whether it's B2B or B2C, right? Via some sort of UI, right? It's A, it's a site, it's an application, it's a store, it has a screen somewhere, right. And so we're talking about those kinds of digital properties, web properties, etc.
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Right.
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And, and I think when it comes to them, you know, we started up with just having a very basic digital touchpoint. We all left as enterprises a business card on the web, right. Then the sophistication grew. We got web 2.0, like the ability to have more sort of dynamic experiences and more interactives and as they grew outgrew these enterprise monoliths, right? That said, hey, we'll do all for you, right? As a one in in all solution, however, they came with an inherent number of issues, right? They're a huge bottleneck, right? So you have one big monolith trying to build out versions of every single applications for every visitor anywhere in the world across channels and so on. So you end up with enough something that essentially not best in class at anything at all, right?
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Chris Bach
But more importantly, and that now we're talking about the developer experience and the user experience, right? But where enterprises also really hurt here is there's a big login. So essentially like this is a practical example of saying, well, I'm going into this market and so these parts of my solution needs to be language varied. This big monolith doesn't support it. Now I have to change everything because this is one big solution, right? And it took five years to install and cost millions and millions. And we, you know, we are at the mercy of IT admins, right? Instead of the ones that actually drive the content, the marketing departments and so on, they should be able to make split second decisions. And so what you suffer there is very much time to market. But also this notion that in order to do anything, you need executive buy in all the way up and it'll take five years to do a Lift and Shift, where you build out a new solution. You port all the content and everything, right. And then you flip your feature freeze probably 18 months before you're live, right? And you flip the switch and then you'll find out if you bought the right software. And so this notion of going with these heavy traditional monoliths can be really, really exhausting for these kinds of companies, right?
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Greg Kilstrom
And so we've talked about composable, I would say quite a bit on this show, but in terms of software and infrastructure, it's been getting a lot of attention for years now. And certainly what the company you co founded, netlify, as well as your involvement in the mock alliance and other things, has been built on and contributed greatly too. You kind of touched on some of the background of why this is compelling because of some of these legacy things. But I wonder if you could give, and I'd love to hear your definition of what really is composable when done.
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Chris Bach
Well, yeah, I mean, the composable will open up the ability for companies to be agile, right. This is the agile brand podcast, right. Notion is that flexibility is super important and it makes sense, right. We talked from having one or two channels where we have conversations, they're pretty well set, right. They're not very interactive. Like, it's like there was a, you know, you had a model for how you did business and you could do that for decades and just keep harrying on it, right. And today you have so many more channels, right? You are, your brand is being discussed. At least if you're successful, it will be. Right. And there will be lots of opinions and how do you interact with that and do you let the conversation just free flow or do you try to get control over it? And, and, and how do you reach companies and buyers, right. Consumers, like across all these different channels. And, and so of course there's not going to be one size fit all the notion is that, oh, there's this intelligence tool that gives me everything I need to know in order to make good decisions over here. I need to implement that, oh, I can't because my monolith won't allow me or I have this more composable. That means that I have these different components that I can take and use and with very little friction, stop using again and explain, you know, replace with something else.
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Right.
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And that's the notion of being composable, right? It's just being able to, to behave like an agile brand in actuality. And so it's not just a theory in a marketing department, right? But it's an actual real thing that digitally speaking, you are nimble enough and flexible enough and you can have a time to market that actually means that you can go and say, okay, we can do something over here. We can change this. The commerce experience. Oh wow, social platforms are coming out. We can actually sell directly in social feeds. We, we can now get an add on to our e commerce presence that can do that without it taking years or having to change everything else or just being prohibitively either expensive.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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Chris Bach
Or costing so much time to market that, that it doesn't matter.
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Right.
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And, and you see the necessity around this has really, really come out with AI.
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Right.
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I think even though it's so nascent and we should all remember how nascent it is. Right. It's a few years old in the form that we're sort of familiar with right now around generative AI. Yet I think it's fair to say that if a company at no level, by vendors or anywhere else, takes advantage of this and they're an enterprise at some scale, they're now at a quite significant disadvantage.
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Right.
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And so if you just go by monoliths during this, it's almost impossible. You can't move fast enough.
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Right.
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But this notion, oh, this new tool comes out, you go and employ this. No one knows if this is going to be the architectural.
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Right.
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Approach moving forward again. We're the infancy of these times, right. So having that is great. Being able to implement it quickly is great. But also being able to discontinue it very quickly is great as well. Like this notion is that I think we are, where we are realizing that digital transformation that was sold to us 10, 15 years ago was not a thing. It's an ongoing thing.
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Right.
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And I always say that when I was an SI and I spent 14 years doing that before doing Netlify. What the headline for any conversation I had with a client at any level and I was chief digital officer in my, my last gig was finding the right solution for them.
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Right.
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It could have many different ways. And you can talk about the overall digital strategies or, or sort of more sort of a point solution for social media monitoring tool or whatever it might have been. But it was sort of like you could, that was a fair headline and now it's completely different. The fair headline today is how do I become as someone that owns it or digital properties or digital marketing properties or whatever it may be, how do I become agile enough that I can keep up?
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Right.
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How do we make sure that our time to market is sufficiently Low that I can take advantage of these new opportunities that come up. That's the goal.
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Right.
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Actually being flexible enough to have a contemporary up, to be able to offer a contemporary digital experience for all my users across all the different channels. Right. And to provide the right data also.
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Right.
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And the right analysis for my company to make the right decisions. And there is no right solution. I know it sucks, and if you're hoping that I'll say, like, just go and do this. Right. Sorry to disappoint, but the notion of being flexible is what it's all about.
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Right.
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And I think this is a great podcast that we're talking about this because the Agile brand must surely imply some of the same learnings, right?
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, no, totally.
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Yeah.
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And I mean, I see this in my own, you know, in my own work and, you know, I do a lot of work with big brands on, you know, platform selection. And, you know, the, one of the biggest challenges is how do we kind of navigate contracts with some of these monoliths and all those things so we can get the right thing, like the actual right thing in place at the right time and stuff like that.
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So.
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And I think, you know, the marketers that I talk with, because I primarily work with the marketers and, you know, collaborate with the data and engineering teams, but the marketers that I talk, it all makes sense, you know, what you're saying, like being more agile and being, you know, taking this approach. And yet so many organizations are kind of, you know, for reasons, some of the reasons you already mentioned, they're, they're a little bit stuck, whether it's a contractual thing or other things. But, you know, from what you've seen, like, are there other reasons holding companies back or, you know, who in the organization is likely to be, you know, opposed versus in favor of this, you know, just sort of to navigate within, you know, making a shift towards a more agile, composable approach.
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Chris Bach
Yeah, I mean, like, it's a big question, right, because there's lots of faces, right?
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Greg Kilstrom
Sure.
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Chris Bach
And I think there is. You're going to come up against all kinds of things.
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Right.
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Like there's the notion of, hey, don't, don't fix it if it ain't broken, but.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Chris Bach
It might be more broken than you're aware of. Right. You might have lost opportunity and so on. Whenever a change is big enough to carry some change management as well, there's going to be some native fear in the organization of saying, oh, what does that mean for me? I'm doing all the manual operations over here, like in netlify's case, right, where it's, instead of running your own infrastructure in a traditional sense, it's an automation layer on top of it.
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Right.
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And so this mean, well, if I don't have to sit and do all these things manually, what does that mean for me? Like do I have a job anymore? Like should I be vehemently against this?
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Right.
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And most, in most cases it's like, well, do you have a to do list that of things you wish that you could do that would add great value to the company but you don't have time for? And they answer, by the way, over 10 years in thousands of conversation has never been no, right, there you go, right? Go and create, you know, make value add rather than maintenance and operation. So that's the, that, that's, that's a bit of the netlify perspective. But I would say in general, let's remember, right, that these monoliths comes at very great price tags, very expensive and so you can have some, like a large enterprise can easily have put in, you know, a significant double digit million dollar amount in building this out and having an implemented by big consultancies and so on, right? And so there's a lot of people vested in saying you weren't wrong and I think that's a bit of, of the fallacy of sunk cost as well, right? Like we have to not demonize the people that, that bought these to begin with, right? Because very often when they were chosen, they were chosen because that was the way to get the, you know, that was the best alternative at the given moment. Giving the traffic, giving the number of channels, giving the services, you know, the whole thing taking into consideration. But things changed, right? And now today you, you, you would have to choose differently, right? And then we'll, and I know we'll get to this in a point, right? But there's also, it's not a, it's not an on off switch, right? There's most definitely ways of doing hybrid modules and, and, and, and I think there is, and I know actually from, from my experience also in his eyes that there's a lot of sort of like, whoa, last time we did this it took seven years. Please don't touch.
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Right?
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Like we can't afford that. We can't, like these things are moving way too fast for us down and, and have a look at that. And, and I think that's the first thing that anyone should understand from a business perspective, right, Is that this is the first time you've been able to do things gradually. So changing everything till takes as long as it does to change everything. The big difference here is that you can change this part and you can turn it off. Instead of five years, you might have a month or two, and then you start getting value from that. You, you have higher load times, you have better conversion rates, whatever it is that you're changing. And I think that's the notion, right, that you can do things and you can slice things away and you can gradually migrate to a more composable approach. And I think that's really important to know.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, and I think that's, you know, and you did, you did touch on, on this, of course, this hybrid approach, because I think that's, that's, that is kind of, it's one of the scary things I think to, to those organizations is, you know, what you just said is like, okay, the last time we did this, it took X years x millions of dol and there was a lot of frustration and hand wringing. And it's also the people part of this stuff. But I like what you're saying, and I've experienced this as well, is there can be not only an iterative approach, but maybe even just a middle ground of it's not throwing everything out necessarily. But can you talk a little bit more about what can hybrid look like, again, knowing that there's lots of, you know, variables?
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Chris Bach
Absolutely. I mean, like, obviously, you know, there's a big part of what we're solving for at netlify. Right. Sort of what we set out for. So, so that this podcast is about that as well.
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Right.
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But, but, but just to take that as an example, right, what we set out to build was this notion of creating workflows that would make it viable to do these composable things. Right. So you need a developer's workflow. So once you have all these different components, how are they actually translated into building apps, stores and sites without huge overhead? That's the automation platform we provide. How does it run? Well, it's a distributed network. You don't even have to set up the network. It's just you push to get and you're done. But there's also for business stakeholders and marketeers. And that's where you say, well, we already have Salesforce, we have SAP. We have all these existing solutions and they need to work together with it. And that's what we sort of solve for in our connected cloud, where all these APIs can be accessible from one place. And so you don't have to write a hundred Integrations for each module that introduce. You just introduce it into one layer and then everything speaks together.
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Right.
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And I think that's one way of saying, okay, we are going to choose a way that these things interoperate. We're going to choose a glue layer and then we're able to interoperate all the different parts.
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Right.
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So we can take and change one part or another part and so on. And one component, a new content management system or a new design tool or new commerce backend or something.
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Right.
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On uerp. And we can do that gradually. But then the way that they've sort of said, well to. For this to be manageable, there's no way to manually interact, you know, like there's no way to manually set this up to speak to all the different solutions.
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Right, right, right.
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So instead I'm choosing one layer, I'll just integrate that module into that once and then it can speak to the other parts.
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Right.
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And read and write data. And I think investing in automation like that. And we're talking about these digital properties, right. There's also many other parts of the stack that you could have similar examples for.
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Right.
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But for here I think that becomes really necessary.
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Right.
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I don't think it's very viable to have, you know, a thousand different components and then just sit with your own sort of AWS stack with tons and tons of different modules that are great.
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Right.
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But you have to operate them also because introduced well, I have key holders that are specialized engineers all the way down. And what translates into is that if I need to move the blue block on my website from left to right, I now have like to go through like seven different engineering teams that each have their own tickets and sprints and so on.
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Right.
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And now it takes eight or 12 weeks to do anything.
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Right.
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And so I think like you, you there are definitely, once you do, composable at scale, you have to think about automating your workflows. You can't keep on doing operation and orchestration as usual. So I think that's one practical way of doing it. Right. But I also think another way of, of, of thinking about this that's important is sort of understanding like sort of where can I start? That has, you know, maximum impact on my bottom line, but sort of minimum impact on operations. Right, Let me try this out. Let me just take this checkout page and this workflow because, you know, conversions there matter tremendously for us, right. And move that over to a new way of doing it, reap the benefits, understand what it means for conversion rates and everything else, and then start sort of extending that to the rest of what I do. And so I think there's a lot of lots of best practices when it comes to this.
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Right.
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There's also the opportunities of just doing, hey, I have a new thing. Like it's very separate from everything else. We do very much of our microservice approach anyway, I'll do that greenfield project out here. That becomes a lot easier.
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Right.
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But I feel like at scale, that's rarely an option. I think that was what we originally also at netlify tried to solve for. Like, let's make sure that those greenfield projects can be meaningful and frictionless. But I think at scale for enterprises, it is not composable or not composable. It's a hybrid.
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Right.
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And so you need to adopt workflows that sort of work across both what you have already and what you want to change. And just because it came as a more of a monolith doesn't mean that there's not components that doesn't work well or what you say the overhead of changing this just doesn't make sense to us.
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Right.
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It doesn't have enough impact on our bottom line to take that on. Right. And so being able to identify what.
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Greg Kilstrom
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So I know you and I chatted a little bit about this already, but you know, want to share with the audience here as far as a lot of these concepts and this idea of being more agile and being able to test things, being able to learn from those and see what does as well as what doesn't work, I mean it works great with software, but I think there's applications beyond software for an organization. I want to get Your thoughts on this as well? There's lots of silos in the enterprises and organizations that we all work with. So there are some well documented examples of some organizations that have done things differently. Spotify with squads, Gore Tex with its lattice approach. There's many others that are documented that have tried new things and kind of broken up that hierarchical structure. So question for you is similar to legacy systems and data stores and all those things that are siloed, the human teams and organizations are siloed. Siloed as well. Can siloed teams work effectively in a composable environment in the long term?
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Chris Bach
I think in most cases a team inside a company today is. Their success is defined by how well they interoperate with other teams to a great extent. Sometimes it's really just what they have as a singular output isolated from everyone else. But in most cases, success really comes from how well does it integrate and exchange across the organization. I think there's a ton of examples if we're talking software, of course, right. Like you see a lot of these teams now has someone that, that comes from the business side as part of the team. It's no longer like engineering is over here, business is over here. And then sometimes you try to get something spec so they can deliver something.
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Right.
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Like I think like these things has to be much more joint at the hip, right. And as, as we talked about in the beginning, right. Digital is becoming more and more important, right. And so we also don't have yearly releases, we have releases by the hour.
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Right.
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So you constantly have to measure how things are going and tweak real time and so on.
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Right.
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And that doesn't really come very well from being completely siloed. So I think the, the users inside the organization from the marketing departments or business analysts or whatever it might be, needs to sit very integrated with the people that are doing product and coding and so on.
- [28:42]
Right.
- [28:43]
And so like the successful teams there are like quite integrated already, right. And, and so another thing is like, you know, I work with a client here and, and let's just say they do a lot of fitness bikes, right. And, and so originally, like if you look at someone like that from a digital property point of view, they might have developer documentation, they might have a big dot com with a commerce and they sell subscriptions and all these things and you know, huge turnover. They have every single enterprise stakeholder in the, in the, in the company looking at this, right? They have one off marketing sites, they have fitness bike, right. There's an app on that, right? Where Someone is yelling at you to bike faster, right? And you're like, why am I paying them anyway? But you know, like that's, that's a thing, Right, right, right. And, and if you think of them immediately you would say, well, the use cases are too different. They're just completely siloed. There's no, I don't really understand why they have to touch each other.
- [29:34]
Right.
- [29:34]
But the reality is like why would you do, you know, why won't you use the same remote based access control for logging in on the app as you do online, like on the main.com? why should that be different? Why should you treat all your code assets and your, you know, branding assets and all those things differently across these properties? A lot of this could be super shared. And once they're shared shared, developer shared all your, your short staffed over here. Well, it's not like I have to, you know, invest two years in re educating a developer to go and work on this. This is not done on like the, the fitness bike app for example, would just be a web app, right? Like done in basically in the same principles as the websites.
- [30:15]
Right.
- [30:15]
So now all of a sudden I have teams that can move around, which makes my organization a hell of a lot more flexible.
- [30:22]
Right.
- [30:22]
And so on and so forth. And so by adopting best modern practices and by thinking a little more holistically, you are able to all of a sudden have teams that work much more efficiently across these boundaries. And what it does is just reduce overhead. They move a lot quicker, they implement much more fluidly and much more simultaneously across these different platforms. So it gives much more of a cohesive brand experience for the end user. Like there's only winners in those equations. Right. But it does mean that you're looking at your silos and really sort of thinking about how can I break this down and how, you know, how important it's. And at the same time I think like I'm not, you know, I'm obviously not for the monolithic version of we all work on the same thing and we all stand in line and no one can move.
- [31:13]
Right.
- [31:13]
There's this notion of slicing things out in microservices that you can go and work on and really get very far before it has to go and be implemented into what you're already doing is also really important. But I think the workflows around it, we were talking about the teams here, right? That notion of being really plugged in to the same overall workflows as well becomes really important.
- [31:33]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, and by that token then, I mean, it's, you know, it's the same principles that really apply, you know, to how software is thought of as how teams could be thought of. Right. I mean, it's, Yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's just kind of an interesting. Because hearing you talk about it, it also seems like it could be really rewarding for employees. I mean, the customer wins, I think, to your point as well. The customer wins when they get the best possible product and it's at the speed that they're expecting and all those kinds of things. But also the people working on the product win because they get to do valuable things and they get to cross train. And if the hierarchy of the organization is more composable, then an employee that can contribute a lot of value over here can, you know, quickly and easily be moved somewhere else where they can contribute value.
- [32:29]
Chris Bach
Absolutely.
- [32:30]
Greg Kilstrom
They're doing valuable work in different ways and not kind of stuck doing the same things either.
- [32:35]
Chris Bach
Absolutely. I think like the notion actually when you, when you deal with these things and you optimize these product processes, there has to be all three winners, right? It has to be good for your end user, right? And end users want something that loads immediately, right. That speaks their language. A customer journey that's, that's, you know, as short as possible compared to what it is they want. So on.
- [32:53]
Right?
- [32:53]
They want to be inspired. They want, yeah, they want to feel secure. And in dealing with your brand, there's a bunch of things that they want. And developers want flexibility, right? They want the notion of saying, because some marketing coordinator are familiar with this content management updating notion tool, now I have to go and work in php. Why, why should that have anything to do with each other? Why should their choice be my choice?
- [33:17]
Right?
- [33:18]
And so for them to say I'm going to use the best tool for the job and get this done as fast as possible in the best way as possible is very important. And that's what happens once you're componentized, right. Where one monolith doesn't dictate everything and you can slice these things out. And of course, I think the businesses as well, well, they want less overhead, right? They want to utilize their resources in the most efficient way possible and they want happy customers, right? Because that gives higher conversion. At the end of the day, businesses measure two things is making more money and spending less, right? Like those are the two things that, that things has to translate into, right. Then of course the other stakeholders inside the company also want to be move fast, right? So let's say that marketer, right, like, yeah, they want to choose the two, but more importantly, like, they want to make sure that when they want to try an AB experiment test or something like that, it doesn't take three weeks, but it takes two seconds to implement, right? And it's very easy to read the results, right? So they want to be able to do things quickly and they want to be able to measure the results quickly as well. And those results have to be actionable, right? So that has to lead to other actions, things they can do to optimize, right? At the end of the day, they also want high customer satisfaction score and they want to, to convert whatever it is they're doing, right? So whether it's brand liking or whether it's bigger basket size or whatever, right? So, so, so I think when you do these things, right, you should really sort of play it out across the organization like, hey, who is this helping and is it doing anyone a disservice? And so, so at least that's definitely my business philosophy. Whenever we did something was like sort of thinking, okay, we're catering this audience, but they have to cater other stakeholders inside the business. Is anyone not winning by doing this?
- [35:00]
Right.
- [35:01]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So last thing I want to ask you here, and we touched a little bit on generative AI and some of these other things, but when we're looking at, there's a few concepts here, the citizen data scientists, I've seen some really interesting demos of people being able to query data and you know, ask, ask questions in real time using prompts, you know, prompt engineers replacing, you know, software engineers. You know, there's all these kind of concepts flying around here. How much of this is attainable or even, you know, desirable? And you know, do you think that the role of AI becomes, you know, more as collaborator, team member? Is it replacing people? I know that's like 20 questions in one. But you know, where do you see this kind of headed in the, at least in the short term?
- [35:55]
Chris Bach
No, those are good questions, right? And it's obviously something we spend a bunch of time thinking about, right? I think and there's many ways into the answering this, right? But I think from AI, right? It is game changing, right? I think like even in like the current form of this summarizing generative AI, it can automate a bunch of tasks. I think what happens when you do this is not that something is replaced and now it's automated, it's that we do a lot more. Like, if you look at it all the time, right. Like 25 years ago, 35% of engineers knew machine code. Now it's less than 1%. We don't have less engineers. In fact, we have like 10 or 100 times as many as we did back then.
- [36:36]
Right.
- [36:37]
And every time we have an abstraction that enables us to do more, we do more.
- [36:42]
Right.
- [36:43]
And so I think this notion is that AI is just kind of, there's not going to be nothing left. I don't believe in that. So let's take web development and how you create these digital experiences, because that is so key when we talk about digital solutions for brands. Right. So how you create these digital experiences now you could say, well, web developers, are they going to be replaced? And there's all these demos and so on. But the reality is that at least in a foreseeable future, they're not going to come in and totally replace developers. It's much more of a, it's much, it's very powerful developer tooling.
- [37:20]
Right.
- [37:20]
So these developers are helped to do more rather than being replaced entirely. Now, can they just keep on using the same JavaScript framework and just staying still? No, but they never were able to anyway. Like, you keep having to evolve what it is you do. You'll use a different kind of prompting than like, code looks differently all the way up. But you can say like prompt engineering exists today if you buy. Prompt engineering means that someone that know how to develop code.
- [37:47]
Right.
- [37:48]
Can go and build a website, for example.
- [37:50]
Right.
- [37:51]
Just go to Squarespace. You can easily drag and drop something with the parameters and restrictions that comes with using something like that.
- [37:59]
Right.
- [37:59]
And it's the same here. Like this is not like artificial intelligence, not like really intelligent. It's very, very good at summarizing, but it's not, it's not going to go out and, and, and, and create this. It'll create a lot of defined, so, you know, tasks.
- [38:14]
Right.
- [38:14]
And so it'll definitely be something where you can build prototypes quicker and you can do more and more things and, but take a website today, it's a fairly static experience. Like, so we even talk about sort of, hey, we need instant cash validation. Everyone has to see the same at all points. It will be weird if you go to a website and you see different. It has to be the same packaging and so on. We might do a B testing on the headline communication, but I think that's because it is, it's seen as an asset.
- [38:42]
Right.
- [38:42]
It's weird. If I see a TV episode, you see a different TV episode. Right, but, right. How are we going to discuss what happened in season one, right. But the notion is that as soon as it becomes conversational, right. And that's what I think is going to happen. Let's just talk about websites, right? Is that it's going to be hyper personalized. So I think that we're going to be able to with this modern tooling Instead of having one experience or three or ten 400,000 visitors, you're going to have a hundred thousand experience for 100,000 visitors. They're going to be much more conversational and much more interactive experiences. Now that's more, that's doing a hell of a lot more like those experiences have to be catered, right. And have to be guided experiences. And we're going to have to be very good at bringing in information around this, tweaking this, putting in foot into the modeling, right. Making sure that the brand is never compromised in these different experiences. And then we follow up and the promises made to individual develop to individual clients, right. Are kept and never out of line. And there's just a billion small things here that has to be followed up. Something you can't do today because it doesn't matter if you're Apple and have infinity money, you can't go out and create a hundred thousand experiences for a hundred thousand users today. That's not how a website experience works. But it could be, right? It would require a lot of automation which what is AI? I think that just creates a bunch of people. I don't see an individual marketing coordinator to just sitting by front creating that.
- [40:13]
Right.
- [40:13]
I think that might be at some point but then I'm sure at that point we'll also have even more channels and there'll be AI and there'll be sort of rendering graphics all over the city when you walk around. And then that will open up to who's maintaining that and who's com, you know, QA that and who's you know, writing the code and building out the standards and so on.
- [40:33]
Right.
- [40:34]
So, so my notion and my take is that that these revolutions that are technology enabled always create more. That's the headline.
- [40:44]
Right.
- [40:45]
And so yes, you'll be redundant if you sit still, but I don't think you can just say oh so developers it that's just a, that's just a robot in two years. Great, let's go towards that. I don't think that's the case at all.
- [40:58]
Right.
- [40:58]
I just think you can do so much more. What does that translate into though? That translates into the answer to the very first Question which is that yes, software is eating the world even more than ever before. And yes, all companies are by default software companies. Right. Or even AI companies. That doesn't mean that we are all going to be replaced by robots. But that means that if you're not like, you will have to embrace AI in one way or another to run your business in an efficient way. Right? Yeah, that's a pretty cool thing in a way.
- [41:25]
Right.
- [41:25]
Like we shouldn't be that scared of, well, we might be scared of singularities and so on in other ways. Right. But within the digital realm, AI is an enabler and not a replacer.
- [41:35]
Greg Kilstrom
So. Yeah, yeah, no, I love it. Well Chris, thanks so much for joining. Always love talking with you about this stuff. Before we wrap up here, one last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [41:51]
Chris Bach
Yeah, well, I try to keep learning new things. Right. Like that's really important to me.
- [41:55]
Right.
- [41:56]
So today I joined the Market alliance as well. Right. I sat on the board for two years there, helped create the enabler category, stepped out of that, as I said, out of my full time role in Netlify recently. I'm an angel investor in around 50 companies. I sit on a number of advisory board, executive boards. I now leaning into climate technology as well and there's so much cool stuff happening there and so much stuff for me to learn and I really think that's, that's the way I stay agile is, is keep learning stuff that I didn't know already that changes my way of doing things and, and, and so on.
- [42:28]
Right.
- [42:28]
And, and keep. Yeah, there's never something that can't be optimized or can't be changed.
- [42:33]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I love it. Well again I'd like to thank Chris Bach, co founder of netlify for joining the show. You can learn more about Chris, netlify and more by following the links in the show notes.
- [42:45]
Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively future fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [43:39]
Chris Bach
The Agile brand.