Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
WebOps in 2023 – more pressure, more collaboration, more open source
By Josh Koenig, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder, Pantheon
Over the past three years, we have seen companies become more dependent on their digital strategies to survive, let alone grow. Websites went from being brochure-ware to a primary driver of business results. Many companies expanded existing eCommerce operations, while others got meaningfully online for the very first time.
In 2023, we’ll see more innovation around engagement and interaction online. This will be particularly noticeable in B2B and Enterprise sectors, where engaging customers isn’t a simple click-to-buy solution, and operations that are further “up the funnel” in awareness, or focused on engagement, loyalty, and retention. Everyone will be trying to better understand the whole customer journey and life-cycle.
Prediction #1 – Digital teams will rally around a single north star to drive results
These changes will put more pressure on web teams, and it will mean that developers, marketers, IT teams and content professionals will have to work together more effectively to achieve extraordinary performance. In 2023, these teams will have to collaborate so that their individual actions all add up to delivering on that bigger overall business goal, or ‘north star.’
Companies that get this right can see huge improvements – for example, Salesloft implemented WebOps to support its sites around spikes in web traffic. In the months that followed, the marketing team more than doubled its website traffic year-over-year and landed an impressive 70% increase in leads.
Prediction #2 – Economic slow-down will force more careful choices
According to Morgan Stanley, the US economy will narrowly dodge recession in 2023 with 0.5% growth in GDP. Europe and the UK are not so lucky, and should enter recession next year. In response, companies will have to continue marketing their products and services, but they will be a lot more careful on where they make those investments.
There will be the temptation to cut budget on areas like marketing and websites, but this can lead to long-term harm and lost opportunities. Any reduction in spending on these areas will take away from the primary channel that companies use to engage customers and generate results. However, within these areas there’s often a lot of opportunity to optimise.
So what will marketing leaders do in 2023? They will reevaluate their strategies to focus investments on the programs and channels that are driving meaningful business impact. They will cut shelfware and dial back on aspirational projects to focus on specific, measurable goals. Recessions can actually be very good for companies with the right approach, as they can come out of any downturn stronger and more effective. According to Harvard Business Review research, around 10 percent of companies came back better and more profitable than when they went into recession. These are the ones that usd the opportunity to face up to reality and drop the Vanity metrics. They don’t just blindly cut spending – they wind down unproductive or unnecessary programs and re-invest where they could see the most return. Marketers can work with finance teams to show where those potential returns are.
Prediction #3 – Modern web development is still at the tip of the Jamstack iceberg
Web developers are keen to adopt Jamstack for their front-end experience, and the business value of doing so is coming into more focus, as consumer expectations for quality are being set by native mobile applications, and the competitive advantage of delivering a compelling customer experience via extraordinary website performance is increasingly clear. Likewise, the traditional pitfalls of a developer-led solution – such as a regression in productivity for the rest of the marketing team – are now better understood and easier to navigate.
Jamstack will continue to develop and drive more web experiences. But it is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to designing and building full software experiences in a web browser. Just look at teams like Snap, where they delivered 3D lensing and augmented reality in the browser, or Figma with its collaborative design tools. These kinds of experiences will be looked at by the rest of the industry, and start to expand to the rest of the community.
Technically, the communities around JavaScript and WebAssembly are mature, so this will be about getting more examples of best practices out to those that might be able to use them.
Prediction #4 – Drupal and WordPress will take back ground around headless
Headless CMS systems are growing in popularity because they hypothetically make it easier for developers, content owners and marketers to collaborate on projects. During 2022, there have been new market entrants and companies getting significant funding around headless CMS products.
However, companies have found that there are potential problems when they rely on proprietary SaaS for their headless solution. Too many have found they have bought into a solution that doesn’t work for content editors and they need to implement their own UX on top of the vendor. They might also discover that they’re bending over backwards to work around limitations (technical or commercial) in how their vendor lets them model and manage data. In either case, IT leaders who were initially patting themselves on the back for their vision to “go headless” are now waking up to realise they are effectively now a CMS vendor themselves, with a customer base of one. This isn’t a sustainable position.
In 2023, buyers will share more experiences with each other, and this will inform others on the right questions to ask ahead of their purchases going through. They will more deeply consider the value of an open, composable CMS. Drupal and WordPress are open source projects; they are mature and have good communities around them, and both support increasingly robust headless configurations. WordPress has a high quality editorial interface built in, immediately familiar and usable to content teams, which is why it powers over 40% of all websites. Drupal has powerful data modelling, content workflow, and multilingual capabilities at its core, which is why it’s still the most popular open source CMS among enterprises which need the ability to manage databases of content, and reuse content in multiple contexts.
Once you realise that “build vs buy” is a false choice, and it’s really “build out what you’ve bought,” open source offers a fast, flexible, and foundationally firm start to your headless journey. You can take what exists, and leverage the pool of talent that is there to build on the best practices that have been developed over time. You won’t face an existential threat from your vendor being acquired, or going out of business in an economic downturn. In 2023, more companies will find they want the security of ownership, and that there’s a wealth of existing knowledge, expertise, and working code to tap into rather than having to build everything for themselves.
Prediction #5 – WebOps technology will be the key to delivering performance
Websites continue to take centre stage as brands work to engage customers and build trust in a digital world. Expectations are high, and speed and agility are the name of the game when it comes to creating websites that deliver impact. Website operations teams will need to dig deep to determine whether they have the right skills, talent and tools in place to meet these demands.
In 2023, legacy technologies and processes will give way to breaking down silos and identifying what no longer fits a team’s structure, workstyles or goals. Contending with fragmented workflows and disconnected teams will be a hurdle many teams face, as they strive to bring resources with the right tech skills and the right understanding of the business together. WebOps technology can make this whole process easier, as it enables cross-functional teams to drive their strategies simultaneously while ensuring they’re supporting collective business goals.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Pantheon, Josh Koenig is focused on making the Open Web a first class platform for delivering results. At Pantheon, Koenig’s mission is to liberate web teams from the confines of enterprise monoliths and the drudgery of infrastructure operations so they focus on their real strategic goals using the highest-quality tools of the trade. Championing the value of the developer experience, and the need to demonstrate impact with data, his work combines the visionary ideals of Open Source with the pragmatic utility of the agile approach.
