Seamless digital experiences are driving competitive advantage in almost every organization. As a leader in custom software development, Thoughtworks helps its clients to integrate strategy, design and engineering to drive digital innovation. In 2020, it became apparent that Thoughtworks’ own Content Management System had reached its end of life and we required a more sophisticated and scalable CMS to match our growing business. Our existing CMS had limited functionality and was not able to scale across multiple geographies, and languages.
As a global organization that operates in 18 countries, we needed to find the right partner to provide a platform that would power our website and all the tools needed to deliver content – including editorial, workflow, reporting, organization and security.
From a user perspective, we needed a headless CMS that could help with speed to market and consistency and have the added benefit of delivering custom experiences with modern development languages.
From an internal perspective, we wanted to structure our information architecture, to bring consistency and governance to content authoring, and to provide a central hub for organizing, storing and retrieving our digital assets.
Working across multiple regions and timezones, the Thoughtworks Digital Techops and Digital Marketing team embarked on a six week requirement gathering and vendor evaluation process and agreed on Adobe as our partner of choice.
So much more than a platform migration
One often sees a migration as a mere ‘’lift and shift’’ of moving content from one platform to another. The scope of the project was immense as we had to migrate approximately 75,000+ pages, but we also saw this as a chance to improve many aspects of the digital ecosystem.
Content and governance
In addition to revamping the site architecture and rethinking how our content is organized and designed, we took the opportunity to:
Undergo an extensive content audit, ensuring outdated and irrelevant content was retired.
Implement a headless CMS that could deliver custom digital experiences such as the Thoughtworks Technology Radar.
Partner with a market leader to overhaul our search functionality on the website, making content more discoverable for our audiences.
Enable localized, region-based content delivery for 15+ versions of the website.
Improve our mobile experience to provide a fast and responsive journey.
Implement accessibility best practices to improve the usability of the site for all.
Establish a rigorous and enhanced editorial governance structure and new workflows to bring consistency to content delivery.
Develop SEO-friendly content through proper keyword usage, tagging, logical URLs, alt text for images, and a structured hierarchy for content.
Modernizing our MarTech stack
Customer behavior is always changing and it’s critical we use best-in-class tools to meet their needs. We knew it was time to consolidate and standardize many of our MarTech tools and introduce new products that could be easily integrated with other Adobe solutions. By doing this we could bring new efficiencies to our digital marketing activities and set up the foundation for our long term goal of creating an integrated digital experience platform (DXP) to enable a seamless experience across channels.
Here is our Adobe stack which forms a part of our larger DXP (MarTech) stack:
AEM - web content management, managed service by Adobe
Adobe Launch - tag management, SAAS
Adobe Analytics - site analytics, SAAS
Adobe Target - A/B test and personalized content delivery, SAAS
Adobe Marketo - B2B marketing automation
Adobe Creative Suite - design tools
Adobe People Core services - audience library and attributes, SAAS
Adobe Brand Portal - brand asset collaboration and sharing, SAAS
Adobe Dynamic Media - adaptive image delivery, SAAS
Skills, training and talent
A new platform is only as good as its users so we invested early on in growing and upskilling the team. We expanded to include a dedicated Content Operations Lead, a Visual Designer, a User Experience Designer and an Adobe Experience Manager Platform Lead
Today we support 160+ users across 18 countries with ongoing documentation, knowledge sharing and training. This includes:
- Live monthly refresher sessions highlighting new features.
- One-on-one onboarding for new users.
- Monthly newsletter full of site updates and recognition for innovative usage of the platform.
- A video library with step-by-step guidance on site, asset and page-building.
- Comprehensive training guide.
Navigating change with speed and agility
It would be amiss if we did not mention some of the challenges and opportunities for growth we encountered along this two-year journey.
The project was delivered in-house by the Thoughtworks team. This included all aspects of delivery including development, user experience, design, content strategy, training and enablement.
The project kicked off in the midst of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Our team was fully remote during development, rollout and enablement. The team demonstrated incredible resilience and empathy and this helped to strengthen our relationships and team camaraderie.
We embarked on a new visual identity and brand positioning in tandem with the platform update. The timing of the site launch had to coincide with the brand refresh which meant replacing imagery, fonts, colors and logos across the website.
In September 2021, Thoughtworks became a publicly listed company on the Nasdaq stock exchange. This exciting milestone meant a brand new investor website and regulatory compliance that was required on our site.
A phased approach delivers early, continuous value
Prioritizing where to start when migrating approximately 75 000+ pages and how to bring value to our visitors as quickly as possible, we decided to split the project into 3 distinct phases. We had to ensure there was business continuity throughout the migration, operating seamlessly across platforms. Certain sections of the website were completely revamped and created from scratch while other sections were migrated with some enhancements.
Outcomes
Thoughtworks AEM implementation scored in the top 15% in terms of adopting the AEM platform features to deliver a modern web content management system capability and top 12% in AEM Assets utilization** (as of Aug ‘22).
We built a script leveraging an Accessibility testing tool and ran this on many pages across the site. As a result the homepage has a Lighthouse Accessibility score of 100%, as do most other main landing pages.
The website team played a critical role in bringing our new visual identity and brand positioning to life. Last year, Thoughtworks was named for the first time in Brand Finance’s report of the 25 most valuable and strongest IT services brands globally and again in 2023.
Regions can now easily customize content to their market making it more relevant and localized to their target audience.
Through SEO, tagging, auto content aggregation and a revamped website search, content is now much easier to filter and find, which directly impacts our clients and candidates digital experience.
Mobile optimized pages and responsive design have vastly improved the user experience.
Structured Information Architecture has positively impacted site navigation increasing content engagement and time spent on the site.
We implemented a digital asset management (DAM) platform and now have a central hub for organizing, storing and retrieving media. This ensures a more consistent customer experience, increased asset velocity and the efficient reuse of assets.
Many new features have reduced time to market and increased team efficiencies, including dynamic device-based asset renditions resulting in reduced design time for designers and auto content aggregation, a significant time saver for editors.
By migrating to an integrated suite of Adobe products, we have streamlined processes and governance, unlocked a new level of agility and taken a leap towards delivering digital content at scale. The team has laid the foundation for operational efficiencies and engaging digital experiences for our customers across the globe