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How to build technology and culture to embrace change

The Contentstack TeamMay 03, 20235 min read

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Keith Mazanec isn’t afraid of a pivot. Ten years into a career in retail, he decided to take a coding boot camp and forge a new career path that aligned with his childhood fascination with computers. Now, as the director of software engineering at Brad’s Deals, Mazanec is leading the company’s transition to a modern content architecture. 

He recently spoke with us about the retail lessons that can be applied to software development, why building trust is so important to transformation and the advice he has for other technology leaders driving enterprise change. 

Expand the definition of customer service 

The catalyst to Mazanec’s career pivot? A spreadsheet. As a customer relationship manager at a major department store, he was tasked with filling out and sending a certain Excel sheet to corporate each month and it felt maddening that such a giant retailer was operating with such a tedious approach. 

“That really drove me to look back at technology and how it actually impacts people in the workplace day in and day out,” said Mazanec. “In particular, when technology is neglected and how that can have a really negative impact.” 

Coming from the very service-oriented retail space, Mazanec has developed a keen sense of awareness for how his work affects other people and has carried that across to his engineering career. 

“It’s all about service,” Mazanec said. “Who is the customer in my role now? At a department store it’s clear it’s the person walking in the door, but it’s also my fellow employees there. In a software role the customer is often other people on your team.” 

Fortunately, technologies that serve internal teams tend to have a knock-on effect on the end-customer experience.  For example, setting up an automation system that saves the editorial team hours of rote data entry gives editors more time to curate interesting offers and write informative content for shoppers.   

“Customer service transcends retail or customer experience,” explained Mazanec. “It’s about who you are supporting in your activities day in and day out.” 

Build trust

“Honestly, the technology is almost always the easy part,” Mazanec said when asked about the most important factors of a successful transformation. “It’s the people, and the processes, and the relationships, and the inner workings of teams that really is everything.” 

Mazanec attributes his interpersonal skills, which have been key to navigating the human side of business transformation, to his early career in retail.  

“In many ways it was my business school,” said Mazanec “It was my HR training. I learned how to manage people, I learned how to lead, how to coach and mentor, and I learned how to deal with difficult situations and have difficult conversations.”

Ultimately, he learned that getting things done often came down to building relationships, whether with a customer that just walked in the door or a person you work with every day. 

“Retail, and sales in general, is a lot about trust, and working on a team of developers is also a lot about trust,” said Mazanec. “When there are issues that come up, or disagreements about how to solve a particular problem, if you have that trust amongst each other then you’re going to be able to overcome those things.” 

Even when the business value and risks of transformation have been calculated, the change can still feel scary to the people affected by it. Taking the time to understand people’s concerns and build up the trust that decisions are being made in good faith pays off by creating a culture that embraces change. 

“That mindset of we’re in this together, we’re going all in, we’re taking a leap of faith,” Mazanec said about the team culture at Brad’s Deals. “The sense that we’re linking arms and we’re doing this together.” 

Start at the end 

After looking into what drew return shoppers to Brad’s Deals, and what didn’t, the company realized the main way to improve the customer experience was to publish long-lived content more frequently. To do this, they needed to transform their existing content process that had editors moving between different legacy systems that were hard to maintain. 

Mazanec and his team wanted to make sure that the new solution was guided by the priorities of the people using it, and not by the capabilities of any particular tool. So they created a conceptual content model before even starting to look at technologies. 

“We started with the end in mind,” said Mazanec. “Where do we want our content model to be? Where do we want our site, apps, platform? What kind of capabilities do we want for the editorial teams that are finding and curating great deals? What kind of opportunities do we want to create for our partner teams to work with merchant partners better than we have in the past?” 

This big-picture model informs all technology and architecture decisions. From what parts to build in-house, when to bring in vendors, what legacy tools to sunset and how to break up the transformation into stages and avoid a big-bang replatform. Being guided by a long-term vision also helps the engineering team create a foundation that has the flexibility to adapt to each stage, as well as future needs. 

“Regardless of the conceptual model that we created, we knew that business was going to change,” said Mazanec. “The world would continue to change, retail would continue to change, publishing would continue to change, and so we needed to have a system that could change too, so that the model we came up with in 2021 could be iterated on and evolve for the next decade to come.” 

Expect a relay race 

Just as important as the flexibility of the technology, is the flexibility of the team. Transformation is often a multi-year process and, as people move in and out of the company, teams need to be able to adapt and progress. 

“You need to plan for business continuity regardless of how the team is going to grow and shift and change and shrink over time,” Mazanec said. “How do you keep momentum when it’s ceased to be a single race and it’s become a relay race?”

As new team members were being brought on that weren’t around for the early decisions and beta tests, Mazanec realized that a lot of key information about the transformation happening at Brad’s Deals was living inside people’s heads. So the team quickly put in place processes to improve communication such as documentation, training and onboarding. 

“It really comes down to having a great culture of writing, a great culture of open communication and ultimately building and rebuilding trust,” Mazanec said, explaining that this culture makes the team more resilient to change and also makes it easier to incorporate the insights that new people bring. 

“A silver lining of going through some of these challenges is that you wind up on the other side with fresh perspectives,” Mazanec said. “We’ve come out the other side a stronger team overall. With better processes, better communication, and, most importantly, a better foundation to build on top of for the next decade.”

Listen to the podcast

Listen to this episode of the “People Changing Enterprises” podcast to learn more about Mazanac’s career leap of faith and what customer experience lessons he learned while working in retail.

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Make unconventional decisions as your company grows

I've always leaned a little unconventional— a CEO sommelier. I am a first-generation Indian American growing up in a primarily Hispanic community with Filipino best friends— a non-techie leading tech company from a non-Ivy League school (that was a mouthful).It's been a fact of my life and my career. Part of it was because I needed access to the same opportunities early on, so I had to nudge my way through. But another part was more choice. If there's a "book" to live by, I prefer to take what works for me, throw out the rest, and write my version based on values and dreams.That's led to a lifetime of entrepreneurship and the ultimate dream of leading Contentstack from a product-within-a-service company to one of Deloitte's 500 fastest-growing tech companies this year.And guess what? I've made some unconventional choices along the way. Here, I've reflected on some of the biggest ones, with help from a recent "People Changing Enterprises" podcast.Starting where others didn't From the start, we had a good idea: we built a product the market needed. That's because we created Contentstack due to seeing first-hand the frustration our Raw Engineering services customers were experiencing because of their monolithic CMSs. The speed of business and culture was increasing, web, mobile, and social media platforms were exploding, and cloud computing was the apparent future. Still, their current systems needed help to keep up.This early customer testing ground led to customer funding when we spun out Contentstack. It's unusual. Many founders would move immediately to VC to scale fast. But we took longer to stay close to the customer, continue iterating based on demand, and prove product-market fit. By the time we did raise VC money in 2019, it was for a much more significant sum than we could have a few years earlier. We had laid the groundwork for a sustainable, customer-driven business model (vs. the growth-at-all-costs mentality that became popular). Those anchors don't tend to steer you wrong.In the People Changing Enterprises episode, Bjørn Kreijen, director of Digital and e-commerce at equipment rental company Boels, also transitioned from brick-and-mortar to digital-first unconventionally. While he knew the company would eventually move to a composable architecture, he chose the opposite direction at the outset: a monolithic CMS.This move allowed them to assemble the team and capabilities quickly. "First go for the monolith, make sure that you have the right capabilities on your team, that you have the technological knowledge. And then start decomposing. That's how we did it...But the CMS platform that we chose was built in the cloud, so it made the switch to composable easier."Investing in Customer CareWe're just one of many who know that focusing on customers is an innovative business practice. Bjørn explained that another unconventional decision Boels made was to build its entire online presence around five customer journeys – not personas (are you a painter, plumber, or landscaper?). The persona analysis needed to give them a meaningful distinction to build off of. However, they found the journeys differed based on the organizations' size, so Boels ultimately broke those out on a scale from corporate customers to individuals doing DIY projects.For Contentstack, these are some of the unconventional ways customer care comes to life:When we hire, we look for signs that candidates care about customers and their outcomes. Our interview scorecard asks if the candidate "Gives a damn."We built a proactive customer-level monitoring tool based on API usage that catches technical issues before they become a customer problems. This is a win-win because it ultimately helps customers save on infrastructure and helps Contentstack save on support costs.We created an ecosystem of support from Care Without Compromise™ to Contentstack Academy and the Go Composable website.In the most unconventional way, in 2021, we acquired a team of CMS experts from Raw Engineering, the service company I launched that served as the origin story of Contentstack. The team pioneered headless CMS years ago, coming home in a real full-circle moment. Together, all these efforts help customers with implementation, overcoming roadblocks, and developing their internal expertise. Looking for Talent in Undiscovered PlacesI didn't go to an Ivy League school. I had to fight like, hell at a previous company to hire someone who became one of my top performers without a college degree.Why would we revert to old ways of thinking and hiring when we've seen what diversity of thought and backgrounds can mean to an organization?At Contentstack, we focus on unconventional hires, including partnering with organizations that support mothers' re-entry into the workforce and placing underprivileged high school students in paid engineering internships. Our annual Tech Surf competition in India received over 34,000 applications from students across 3,000 colleges. The winners get a chance to apply for several Associate Application Engineer positions.We also focus on transferable skills more than direct experience. That's how we ended up with an accountant student as one of our top engineers and a bodybuilder as Chief of Staff. It's about finding people willing to learn and driven to build something and hustle. We won't change our unconventional ways anytime soon — and neither should companies like Boels. Instead, we'll continue focusing on building the most beloved product on the market by listening to partners and challenging the status quo. Like Judy Garland said: "Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else." 

Oct 20, 2023 | 3 min. read

Five rules of leadership rallying

You have a new goal to hit or a new tool or CSR program to launch company-wide. It's critical that you get people – a lot of them – on board.In Narisa Wild's case, she was preparing to launch a new Digital Skills Index across Informa, a massive events enterprise powering conferences worldwide. On our "People Changing Enterprises" podcast, she explained the Index would measure digital maturity to help balance the employee divide. But how would she get employees to take proficiency tests and leaders to prioritize digital upskilling – two responsibilities that can fall low on a priority list when tackling your "must-dos?"Rallying your people isn't easy. It's also not a moment in time. Successful rallying starts as early as building the right team and includes knowing when it's not your turn to lead, among other things. Here, I'll share the five rallying rules I've developed along my leadership journey. 1. Hire people with the drive to strive for better.As a leader, your time for rallying will inevitably come. Setting yourself up for success starts with hiring the right people. I don't look for people who want a job; I look for people who go after "better" when they see the possibility. I want to hear about a time when they chased improvement.That way, when it's time to rally around a new goal or challenge the status quo, they get excited by the potential. (Hiring this way also builds a culture of innovation.)On the podcast, Narisa advised: "If someone is smart, intelligent, willing, hungry, have the desire, they can pretty much wrap their arms around anything. Just look at our career paths. We probably didn't start anywhere near where we are now."I started in tech PR, moved to product management, and then to founding and running a tech company. So, I agree. 2. Show people how the cause positively impacts them.Would you hop on a bus with no destination? Or one with a destination of "nowhere special?" Leadership rallying involves clearly and repeatedly articulating a vision and how that vision impacts the people you want support from.Use empathy to understand the underlying factor that would most motivate the largest swath of your target group. Here are some considerations:Will the initiative make their jobs and lives easier?Is there a David vs. Goliath story?Will people have the opportunity to do something that's never been done?Will they get a reward or incentive for participation?Will they make important personal connections?Will they positively impact a community or close a societal gap?Will they have the opportunity to satiate curiosity and grow in new ways?Psychology Today published a list of common motivators that could help you think through this even more. But Narisa broke motivation down in the simplest terms of all on our podcast: describe "what this new 'toy' is bringing to them." 3. Make it fun.Nobody is hoping for another email telling them what to do. That can be part of a rallying strategy, but not the only part. Have fun and be creative with your initiative.One of our rallying cries, #LFG (it means what you think it means), was born out of the stressful post-pandemic period where we had lofty goals in what felt like a shaky market. I made #LFG tee shirts, shared pictures, and incorporated #LFG into our efforts. We hit the number, and I think rallying was a big reason why.Similarly, we recently wanted to rally around public voting tied to our South by Southwest Panel Picker submissions. Apart from distributing the voting call across all channels, we hosted a live voting session attended by close to 100 people. Our General Counsel, Jessica Shor, committed to donating a tree for every vote. We'll find out soon if our ideas are chosen, but the motivation here is clear: help Contenstack get on stage and improve the environment while you're at it. They aren't immediately relatable, but it works! 4. Build followership by letting people lead.In my youth, I went from student body president to part of the Pioneer Leadership Program at the University of Denver. This involved living on the same residency floor with 30 other Type A leaders. I learned quickly that I couldn't always lead. There were times when my most helpful role for the moment was following. That experience ultimately influenced my leadership mantra of unblocking and getting out of the way.Sometimes, the CEO or department head isn't the best person to rally a group. If you're looking for a Gen Z upswell on social media, for example, maybe it's a Gen Z leader, you must make it relatable. In these instances, listen to what the Gen Z leader requests from you regarding support and make it happen as best as possible.When team members request my participation in an initiative, I ask myself: do I have something unique to bring to the table? Can someone else make a more significant impact than me? I'd be excited about it if it's primarily tech-related but I would probably rely on our CTO or VP of Product, who have more authority. 5. Rallying isn't always enough.I've had moments of superb rallying that still led to failed experiments. I once built a parking app that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt and secured coverage in USA Today and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. We passed out fake parking tickets that served as app credits.All this rallying created a viral sensation in its day, but the app was unsuccessful, likely because we hadn’t yet solved for product-market fit.Rallying is excellent – even essential – to a new initiative's success. But it'll not be easy to go far without other pieces in place, like the right business plan, people, and product-market fit.A rallying leader propels their team and organization forward, transforming setbacks into opportunities. I hope these "rules" will help you go after those opportunities…and have fun.