Latest news with #techstack
Fast Company
29-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
From stack to sync: The rise of the marketing operating system
Marketing today isn't suffering from a lack of tools—it's drowning in them. Between campaign platforms, analytics dashboards, CMSs, CDPs, DAMs, and automation engines, marketers are cobbling together fragmented tech stacks with duct tape and good intentions. Enter: the marketing operating system (MOS). Yes, another acronym. But before you roll your eyes, consider this: What if the MOS isn't just another buzzword, but a fundamental rethinking of how modern brands operate? At its core, the marketing operating system is a unifying framework that reimagines how marketing functions. It transforms the traditional tech stack into a synchronized, composable ecosystem. It's the connective tissue that brings together siloed technologies, teams, and touchpoints into a living, breathing system—designed to deliver real-time engagement, personalization at scale, and measurable business growth. In other words, the MOS isn't just about managing tools. It's about orchestrating them around the customer. And in doing so, it creates the conditions for AI to operate meaningfully, woven across platforms, data, and workflows to accelerate everything. Let's break down the four key transformations the MOS enables. 1. FROM EXPERIENCE DELIVERY TO EXPERIENCE ORCHESTRATION This is not your legacy DXP—and it's definitely not just another tool. It's a philosophy. A system. A new way of working. A DXP is essential for managing content and delivering experiences across channels. But even the best DXPs often function as glorified content management systems, with limited orchestration across the full marketing lifecycle. A marketing operating system takes a broader, more strategic view, seamlessly connecting your DXP with your data layer. It synchronizes with engagement tools across email, web, mobile, and social. It also integrates AI and automation to drive personalization, real-time decisioning and continuous optimization. A DXP helps you build experiences. A MOS makes sure they're intelligent, connected, and aligned with outcomes. 2. POWERING RELEVANCE, CREATIVITY, AND SCALE Today's audiences aren't waiting for your next campaign drop. They're navigating ecosystems. They expect relevance in real time, tailored content, and seamless, frictionless journeys. This is where the MOS becomes mission-critical: • It makes personalization real. With AI baked into your MOS, you're potentially speaking to individuals—not segments—based on behavior, context, and intent. • It connects content with conversion. The MOS ties asset creation to performance data with which can allow AI to drive iteration. • It frees your talent. Automation doesn't replace creativity—it removes the friction around it. AI accelerates tagging, versioning, and even ideation, so teams can focus on the ideas that move people. • It embeds agile governance. A modern MOS builds in smart guardrails to protect the brand while scaling content globally. AI can flag risks, enforce voice, and ensure compliance in real time. The takeaway? AI doesn't work in isolation—it thrives when connected. And the MOS makes that connection possible. 3. BUILD THE SYSTEM, WIN THE CULTURE You don't buy a marketing operating system off a shelf—you architect it, and then build culture around it. Even if you're leveraging leaders like Adobe Experience Cloud or Optimizely, a MOS must be intentionally designed—with composable tech, cross-functional alignment, and AI embedded where it drives value (full disclosure: Rightpoint is a partner of both Adobe and Optimizely). This marks the shift from campaign-centric to systems-centric thinking. But even the most sophisticated system will fail without people. That's where experience-driven change management becomes essential, ensuring lasting adoption of both the tools and the mindset. Because this isn't just a tech transformation—it's a cultural one. It's about helping every function—from creative to data science—see themselves as part of a synchronized, customer-centric system. And when teams trust the system, they're more willing to trust AI as a true partner in their work. 4. DESIGNING YOUR MOS: A STEP-BY-STEP ROADMAP Building your MOS starts with a few key moves: 1. Audit your stack. Identify overlaps, gaps, and data silos. 2. Define what you need to orchestrate. Use your customer journey as a blueprint. 3. Choose composable, AI-ready tools. Modular platforms that integrate cleanly—and can scale with intelligence—are essential. 4. Align teams early. Bring marketing, content, data, and ops together around shared KPIs and workflows. 5. Lead with enablement. Train your teams not just on the tech, but also on how to work with AI so that it becomes a creative accelerant, not a black box. A well-designed MOS doesn't just scale marketing—it synchronizes it around the customer and across the enterprise. THE FUTURE ISN'T STACKED—IT'S SYNCED In a world where expectations evolve in real time, brands don't need more tools—they need orchestration. They need systems that turn noise into nuance, complexity into clarity, and creativity into impact. And the result isn't just launching campaigns—it's building intelligent, adaptive, always-on experiences. The marketing operating system isn't about infrastructure—it's about customer intimacy. It empowers brands to show up for consumers where they are, when it matters most, with the message that fits the moment. Not someday or eventually, but in real time, with relevance. While AI makes those experiences scalable, the MOS makes them possible.
Forbes
28-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How To Future-Proof Your Tech Stack In The Age Of Digital Disruption
Andrew Faridani, President and CEO at BreezeMaxWeb. As the technology landscape evolves at an unprecedented pace, we've entered an era where agility isn't optional—it's essential. This underscores the critical need for businesses to reassess and future-proof their technology stacks to remain competitive. Whether you're a mid-market business or a global enterprise, the systems, platforms and software tools you rely on today will either fuel tomorrow's growth or become tomorrow's bottlenecks. So, how do you build a future-proof tech stack—one that's not only capable of handling current demands but also resilient enough to evolve with your business, your customers and the market? Let's delve into what it truly takes to prepare your technology ecosystem for the next wave of digital transformation. Future-proofing doesn't mean chasing the latest tools. It means investing in systems and structures that can flex, scale and adapt over time. At its core, a future-ready tech stack is: • Composable: It's built from modular components that work together seamlessly. • Interoperable: It's able to connect with APIs, third-party tools and internal systems. • Scalable: It can support growth without requiring complete overhauls. • Resilient: It's designed with redundancy and failover in mind. The flip side of future-proofing and innovation is inertia. And in tech, inertia can get expensive—fast. I've seen this play out across industries. It's customer relationship management platforms that can't scale with customer data volumes. It's marketing automation tools with limited integration capabilities. Or it's legacy enterprise resource planning systems that are unable to support cloud-native apps. It's not that the tools are "bad"—they were just built for a world that no longer exists. Choosing software today is no longer about finding the most features at the lowest price. It's about finding alignment with long-term strategy. Here's a simple framework I call FUTURE to guide your decision making: • Flexibility: Can the tool adapt to evolving workflows and team needs? • Upgradability: Does the vendor have a strong product roadmap and commitment to updates? • Team adoption: Is the software intuitive and likely to be embraced by users? • User support: Are the documentation and customer success teams robust? • Reliability: What's the uptime? Service-level agreement? Security posture? • Ecosystem: Will it integrate easily into your existing and future systems? By applying this framework to your selection process, you can prevent costly vendor regret down the road. You don't need a complete tech stack overhaul to start preparing for the future. Small strategic shifts can have a major long-term impact: • Run quarterly tech stack audits: Identify overlap, unused licenses and performance bottlenecks. • Prioritize open APIs and integrations: Reduce vendor lock-in and increase agility. • Request product roadmap briefings: Ensure vendors are building for the future, not just the now. • Align tools with business outcomes: Every tool should be tied to measurable key performance indicators. As I often remind clients, your tech should serve your strategy, not the other way around. The most successful organizations over the next decade won't be the ones with the most tools—they'll be the ones with the most adaptable tools. That's the essence of future-proofing. Forbes Business Development Council is an invitation-only community for sales and biz dev executives. Do I qualify?
Entrepreneur
19-05-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
The Costliest Startup Mistakes Are Made Before You Launch
Your startup might be built to break — and you won't see it coming. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Behind every digital product — whether it's a mobile app, a web platform or a SaaS tool — lies a foundation of tools and technologies that determine how it's built, how it scales and how it survives. This combination is known as the technology stack: programming languages, frameworks, infrastructure, databases and more. It's not an exaggeration to say that the choice of tech stack is just as critical as the product idea itself. No matter how innovative the concept, poor technical implementation can quietly — and quickly — destroy it. For non-technical founders, the tech stack can feel like a black box — something the dev team just "handles." But here's the trap: early choices often seem fine. Then months later, you realize you've built something fragile — a product that's hard to scale, expensive to maintain and nearly impossible to upgrade without breaking everything. Founders often make early tech decisions based on what feels most practical — what's fast, affordable, or easy to build with. And in the short term, that works. But the real danger shows up later: when the product can't scale, breaks under pressure or becomes too costly to maintain. Here are four common traps I see founders fall into — and how to avoid them before they slow you down. The clock is ticking Roughly one-third of the product rescues we've handled stemmed from stack-related issues, and the next case of a proptech startup is not an exception This startup had chosen Rust for its core logic and Xamarin for its mobile app. Rust, while powerful and high-performing, isn't well-suited for products that require fast iteration and flexibility. Xamarin, meanwhile, was discontinued in 2023, meaning the app was essentially outdated before launch. Worse still, the architecture relied on heavy client-side processing instead of server-side logic, leading to major bottlenecks as usage grew. Performance dropped, data became fragmented across devices and the system started to fall apart. Their options? Rebuild the system entirely — or replatform with a different stack. Both costly. Both painful. How bad stack choices show up By the time stack-related issues become visible, the damage has often already spread to other parts of the business. Here's what that looks like: It's difficult to attract and retain talent. There are very few developers using this outdated/rare language or framework. Another option — they are either incompetent or overprice the services due to the shortage of skilled specialists in the market. There are very few developers using this outdated/rare language or framework. Another option — they are either incompetent or overprice the services due to the shortage of skilled specialists in the market. There's no room for future startup scaling. One day, you find that the tech stack you used to build the minimal viable product (MVP) or prototype suddenly becomes unsuitable for adding new functionalities, increasing users or handling server load. One day, you find that the tech stack you used to build the minimal viable product (MVP) or prototype suddenly becomes unsuitable for adding new functionalities, increasing users or handling server load. You're patching holes instead of building. While you're constantly fixing bugs and makeshift solutions due to poor documentation or lack of community support, you're not investing in new features. This directly impacts your time-to-market and gives competitors a head start. Related: You Can Unleash Maximum Efficiency and Streamline Your Processes By Doing This One Thing 4 stack traps to avoid Too often, stack decisions are made for short-term reasons — cost, speed and convenience. But the real threat is long-term: lack of scalability, maintainability and flexibility. These are the four most common patterns I see founders fall into: 1. Choosing familiarity over expertise Many founders default to working with friends, former colleagues or the most "comfortable" dev team — even if they're not experts in the tech their product really needs. The result? Outdated or inappropriate tools get used because "that's what we know." When things start to break, personal relationships make it harder to course-correct. Loyalty shouldn't outweigh good judgment. 2. Chasing trends without understanding Just because a language or framework is trendy doesn't mean it's right for your product. Some technologies surge in popularity but lack mature ecosystems or long-term support. When hype-driven choices meet real-world complexity, things fall apart. And if your core developers leave, finding replacements becomes a scramble — or worse, impossible. 3. Overengineering or cutting too many corners Founders usually fear one extreme but ignore the other. On one end: slap-together MVPs that don't scale. On the other hand: overly complex architectures (like microservices for a simple app) that waste time and money. Either way, you end up with tech debt that drains resources or forces a total rebuild — both of which are avoidable with better planning. 4. Letting budget dictate your stack Early-stage startups naturally watch every dollar. But choosing the "cheapest" path — low-code tools, no-code platforms, or underqualified vendors — often costs more down the line. Some dev shops push specific technologies not because they're right for your product, but because they've got idle teams waiting to use them. That misalignment leads to slow progress, mounting technical debt, and brittle systems. Related: Why Your Business Should Simplify and Consolidate Its Tech Stack Final words If your startup has high stakes — whether it's investor commitments, aggressive scaling plans or a complex product roadmap — don't gamble on guesswork. I always recommend consulting an experienced chief technical officer (CTO) or technical advisors before making irreversible decisions. In technology, as in business, making informed choices from the start is what separates success from failure.
