This episode of Martalks features Casper Rasmussen, global VP of Valtech and president of the MACH Alliance, and Kyle Barz, global head of technology for Mars. They discuss their collaboration, and how Valtech helped Mars to transform their ecommerce architecture and adopt a composable model.
After previously having to replatform every 3-5 years, Mars initially intended to opt for yet another monolith. But with their goal of delivering a world class customer experience across an interconnected brand ecosystem, it became clear that composable was the better option.
Valtech guided Mars through this journey, bringing a blend of technological and cultural expertise that could gradually be adopted throughout the entire business. Over time, this move to composable has allowed the Mars organization to evolve and upscale, taking on more responsibility for ongoing management of the platform, and relying less on third party developers.
We discussed in this episode:
- Why Mars chose Valtech to guide them through the journey to composable
- The results of the changes, and how it has impacted the company culture for workers at Mars
- Mars’ ongoing process of maturing their in-house technical capabilities.
Listen to the full podcast here:
The cultural impact of composable transformation
Caspar: “Composability is more than a technology problem, and there is a big digital execution and cultural component that retailers often underestimate.
We look to enable. This notion of internalizing, in-housing, building up and maturing capability was known to us, and we encourage it every day.
That spirit is important to make sure that you ultimately enable client success.”
Commercetools starter kits for rapid prototyping
Kyle: “We were able to pull down those [Commercetools] starter kits and reskin those things so that it made more sense to our internal stakeholders.
We used that to show what’s possible in a short amount of time, and it made believers internally.”
Darrell: “So before you’re even live on the platform, you’re downloading their reskinning technology and putting out betas of what your site would look like with the new technology?
Did your head explode when you could do that? This would have taken a month if I’d been working with any other major enterprise scale platform on the planet?”
About The Rosenstein Group
The Martalks Podcast is published by The Rosenstein Group, the leader in martech executive search. For over 20 years, we’ve been recruiting heads of sales, channel sales leaders, and other members of the commercial team, across martech, supply chain, ecommerce, sales enablement and systems integration.
Find out more here.
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