1 Year (Back) at Sitecore

I'm now diving into my ninth year at Sitecore, with a short six year hiatus between my first eight and the last one. As I had the pleasure to chat with one of the executives on my way back in, I was asked the ever-important question, "why do you want to come back?" (with the appropriate warning that things are never quite the same as you remember them). As I had the pleasure to chat with one of the executives recently to recount my impressions of my year back, I was asked the ever-important question, "why did you come back?" Maybe I pride myself in better-than-average decision capabilities, maybe I do in fact believe in a bit of luck, maybe I'm certain that the trite assessment of the world being small and that a caring for those you'll smash into multiple times is yet more evidence that my mom and dad were on to something in their advice patterns....whatever the combination, I'm so thrilled that my answers to those bookended questions one year apart were so strikingly similar.

As always, we should try to appreciate the people / process / technology implications to these challenging projects we find ourselves in so I'll pick the two I enjoy the most as I relay my enthusiasm for my decision and my informed hope for the year ahead to you in the Sitecore community--the partners, customers, prospects and colleagues that continue to drive this great experiment in the overall technology landscape.

People

I choose the people topic first, because I believe in it the most. I find myself with an unfair advantage--an embarrassment of riches--in my "second chapter". The landscape of fantastic people in this community is the simple reason behind why this works. Years ago, many start up partners that saw the enormous potential to build their businesses on the Sitecore framework now find themselves much bigger agencies with continually growing Sitecore practices. Big agencies saw the potential too and grew (and/or acquired) practices of their own. Today new partners just leaving the garage are getting their hands on the pieces, helped by a newly energized mindset at the company where we can fully support that entrepreneurial spirit and fast idea-to-value cycles.

It's the people that have always made Sitecore so much more than a product or a platform--they've made it a place. A place to innovate, build, collaborate...a place where the vendor itself plays the role it should--advisor, supporter, collaborator, supplier, consultant, trainer--while the community that fills the place drives the next level of innovation for our collective projects.

I can't tell you how many times in my first chapter I had conversations with my colleagues (themselves amazingly technologically adept) that carried some giddy surprise (with just a tinge of embarrassed inferiority) when we saw what a partner had done with the platform. "Did you know that was there, did you know it did that?" The squeamish answer, "Ah, yeah, of course I did". But that was (and is) the main point. When you build great product, you build a launchpad to showcase the achievements of your partners. While you might not be the one in the actual rocket itself, you can bet that you'll be in countless control rooms, high-fiving the success of the mission.

As for my colleagues, I am so honored to be able to pick up exactly where those conversations left off, to carry with me the significant perspective gained in my six year hike through the wilderness outside. The talent in the room has grown in amazing ways, with our acquisitions folding into this always-valuable-never-easy debate around optimizing the path for these offerings that lay ahead. A special thanks to Patrick Wallace as he continually drives a team that has the unique and exciting challenge to craft approachable storylines out of amazing technical potential. I once again find myself surrounded by some of the very best professionals I've had the pleasure to have met.

The reason I came back is that a year ago Sitecore had already decided to build a new rocket with all the knowledge of the previous missions, with new ideas and new people all over the globe that would debate and test successful historical strategies against the backdrop of modern project realities, carry forward any learnings of historical missteps into the new technological playground. Most importantly, it's the continued commitment to the customer / partner / Sitecore triad that makes this possible. And great people, continually talking about the potential.

Technology

I so clearly remember the first time I saw Sitecore. I knew in that very first glimpse that I was seeing something new, exciting and necessary. I knew it was pushing the boundaries of the time. It was one of the founders of the company showing me this, so I had to ask my questions with a quickly calculated blend of curiosity (which I had plenty of), general technical acumen (I was working on it), and don't-ask-stupid-questions-Mike (two out of three ain't bad). At the end of the demonstration there was no question I was joining the company--I was already sure of the story I could tell around this and that my story was going to be told to people that readily knew the challenges this would help them solve, that the product was built with incredible care and enthusiasm, that the people in that small Mill Valley, CA office wanted me to appreciate their equal parts excitement, enthusiasm and care.

Of course the platform grew exponentially from that first demonstration I had of it. While--again--much of that growth came from the absolutely incredible ecosystem that grew around it, the product teams never slowed down either. Web Content Management excellence at the core led to digital experience capabilities on top, personalization (well before the sophisticated conversations of today) emerged as a natural evolution of great web content. Email templates (themselves a blend of great content and presentation considerations) seemed a natural fit for an incredibly well-architected platform that, at its core, recognized the evergreen benefits of the separation of content and presentation concerns. Was this evolution perfect? Of course not (ask my great, great, great granddaughter if she really likes her fourth thumb just so she can text faster). Software is always a compromise and the technological frameworks of the time enticed the calculus of building more, closer together, tightly coupled, consistent for purposes of development consistency which by definition can run counter to end-user use case needs for flexibility. With the realities of all that challenge, Sitecore created an amazingly broad and powerful offering, a cohesive platform that powers great experiences today and will continue to power them well into the future.

While we all know that technology evolves faster than any of our abilities to keep up with it, the important point is that it would be foolish to jump at every technological headline. And Sitecore didn't. It made decisions based on the level of internal debate and discussion that are the prerequisite for bold moves. While timing is also an optimization project that can't expect perfection, Sitecore architected an incredibly well-timed move as fast headlines became truly researched stories and as the landscape of headless, microservices, Next.js, front-end-as-a-service, edge personalization, omni-channel journey orchestration moved from entrepreneurial aspiration to foundational enterprise differentiation.

For the first time, Sitecore took the extraordinary chance on buying vs. building, assembling the key pieces that decades of experience has informed as the necessary building blocks of what digital transformation projects truly require. From content to commerce, with engagement as a core. There is truly no company as uniquely positioned to create the simultaneous independence of choice and closeness / complementariness of concerns. Sitecore has taken on the responsibility to prove to our partners and customers that they can now assemble the very best ecosystem for the critical 5 year plan ahead of them and that we are here to show how much we believe in our place in that plan...an entry point and roadmap that can differ from customer to customer, from project to project with a consistent strategy of people / process / technology that will fill the exact right gap for each individual approach.

New customers to Sitecore don't need the history lesson. All they have to see is the same level of excitement I saw in Mill Valley. That this is the ecosystem best poised to embrace those exciting slippery challenges they face. That there is no meaningful personalization strategy without persona-driven content readiness and operations. That this is the vendor that has embraced the bold change absolutely necessary at this exact moment, and that the pace of building a solution is now governed by a synchrony of building blocks that must span people / process / technology and that must span vendor / partner / customer.

From a technology perspective, the reason I came back is this: Sitecore could have simply continued to evolve its original path--software can get refactored, rewritten, rethought. It could have stayed only in that sandbox and played, as there are certainly still castles to be built. But Sitecore had the bold recognition that there were lots and lots of sandboxes emerging in the park and that our playgroup could now spread out and work on castles in all of them. OK, I'll stop my straining of metaphor. We all know that the modern technology landscape (and the thought leader players in it) are all-but-certain that optimization today means a breaking down of that tightness of coupling, that services become cells that are able to take on their own optimization project while still contributing to the optimization of the whole.

Why did I come back? I have the good fortune of having that lightning-strikes-twice moment where my excitement of what's ahead matches my original, that our ecosystem is embarking on a very similar journey of mutual success. I once again see the exciting, new and necessary....this time around coupled with a company wisdom and heritage unparalleled in the marketplace. And, as always, there's no place where this is more possible....so glad to find myself here, surrounded by all of you.