Three Ways to Use Composability in Your Digital Strategy
Roger Mitchell
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Let's explore how applying the concept of composability from software engineering can improve how your digital strategy is executed by looking at three use cases.
Composability allows us to create complex solutions from smaller parts, that are often reusable beyond the solution for which they're developed.
Consider we're launching a toy company that wants to give kids the ability to play with cars, trucks, planes, castles, doll houses, and anything else that might be of interest to them.
Do we design a single product, manufacture it, and then figure out how to meet fluctuating demand?
Or, do we create a set of smaller, reusable parts that could be assembled with the help of instructions or imagination?
The latter is a solution with high composability, yet each part is quite simple.
Think about composability as LEGO blocks (and no, I have not stepped on one today, but the day is still young like my son 🤞).
Let's get back to business and look at three use cases where this can apply to your organization:
Chaining web forms
Marketing email templates
Apps and systems in your organization
Chaining web forms
Instead of creating a long form with many questions, you can collect the bare minimum with your first form and build upon that response to collect more information with subsequent forms.
This approach works well because:
Longer forms risk higher abandonment that reduces the number of leads you convert despite them having interest
Subsequent forms can be personalized with information collected, which ranges from simply greeting by name or using logic to direct them into specific paths
People can restart the process later based on how far they made it in the chain of forms, so if they only completed the first form, they can start the second form later when prompted via a marketing or sales email
Marketing email templates
Unlike a typical approach to web forms where only a few may exist, email templates often proliferate to handle small nuances and variations between audience segments and campaigns.
However, practically all modern email marketing platforms offer conditionally rendered content blocks, which are basically digital LEGO.
To use this approach, create blocks to compose a single email template and reuse those across other templates by:
Customizing paragraphs within your messaging to a recipient via things like their industry, seniority level, stage of life, etc
Contextualize the call to action to where they are within the funnel and based on previous engagement data
Testing how blocks perform across multiple emails and campaigns to identify what resonates within and across audiences
Apps and systems in your organization
While vendors may push you to leverage everything within their ecosystem, composing a mix of apps and systems from multiple vendors can result in higher productivity and lower total cost of ownership.
This approach works nicely for creating your tech stack because you can:
Use best-in-class or best-fit tools to meet stakeholder needs without sacrificing usability
Connect systems with modern integration platforms that often have no-code or low-code options to facilitate moving data as needed
Maintain flexibility to swap parts as your organization and greater technology ecosystem evolves without needing large-scale changes
TLDR: Think about how you can cut apart a solution into smaller parts (like LEGO blocks) that could be reused elsewhere within your organization.