A digital transformation roadmap: Steps to adopting a content platform

For online retailers, digital transformation isn’t about integrating the latest ecommerce innovations — it’s about being able to adapt to an increasingly digital world and market environment over the long term. In many businesses, that means migrating their digital infrastructure from an outdated legacy content management system (CMS), to a more agile and more flexible content platform capable of helping them keep pace with their competitors, seize commercial opportunities, and better shape customer journeys. 

But migration to a new content platform isn’t something that you can just execute on a whim: you’ll need to think not only about your transformation goals, but how you’re going to bridge the gap between your existing tech stack, and your desired endpoint. In other words, the success of your digital transformation journey relies on you having an effective roadmap in place to guide necessary changes to your ecommerce and business models. 

In this post, we’re going to explore the digital transformation roadmap — as that applies to leaving a legacy system behind and migrating to a content platform that better addresses modern content and business challenges.

What is a digital transformation roadmap?

In the most functional sense, a digital transformation roadmap is a detailed plan that sets out the steps your business will need to take to achieve specific technology objectives — along with associated tasks, timelines, and key performance indicators (KPI). 

While roadmaps apply across the industrial landscape, and are useful in all kinds of development contexts, we’ll stay focused on achieving content management objectives, and moving from an outdated, legacy digital content tech stack, to a more flexible content platform, like Contentful. 

The importance of “why” in a roadmap for digital transformation

Before you can begin setting out relevant tasks and deadlines, your digital transformation roadmap needs to be predicated on the purpose of the change you intend to make. 

In other words, to develop an effective digital transformation roadmap, you’ll need to start with the “why”: What is the benefit of moving away from your legacy system? What capabilities will the new architecture provide? And how far do you want to move the needle in terms of what your content platform will enable you to do?

The answers to those questions will dictate the detail and shape of your roadmap: your timeline, anticipated challenges, KPIs — and ultimately, your digital transformation objectives. Beneath those points on the map, are all the other moving parts of your digital transformation: the need to manage multiple teams, evaluate new technology, implement training, engage with consultants and partners, adjust workflows, and so on. 

The point is, the more that your company, its stakeholders, its teams, and even individual employees understand why the digital transformation is taking place, the easier and more effective it will be to create, and follow your roadmap. 

So, with the “why” in mind, let’s take a look at the very start of our transformation journey: the legacy content platform. 

Legacy limitations

If ecommerce flexibility is a business objective, legacy software solutions may be showing their limitations in 2025 — especially for growing brands with diverse content needs. 

That’s because legacy solutions are typically designed as all-in-one systems that attempt to tick every possible content management box. These systems are monolithic in the sense that they tightly couple their services across their front and back ends which makes content management tricky because new uploads require a level of technical expertise in order to avoid disrupting underlying code. 

On top of that, content teams typically need to work on a separate CMS for every digital channel that their brand uses: one for the website, one for the mobile app, and so on — and, if content needs to be reused across channels, it has to be tediously copied and pasted between environments.

Legacy solutions not only slow down the creation and publication of content but, because they’re so tightly coupled, make it more difficult for developers to build in workarounds, or integrate new tools and functionalities — other than those endorsed by the provider.    

Digital transformation solves those problems by giving brands the power to throw off their monolithic, legacy limitations, and instead leverage the composable architecture of a content platform. 

Why a content platform, and why composable architecture?

Content platforms don’t impose the same limitations as legacy, all-in-one systems. Where the back end and front end are tightly coupled in a legacy system, in a content platform they’re uncoupled — which makes the software architecture composable and extensible. 

In that environment, brands are free to build out their tech stacks however they please, with individual components connected via application programming interfaces (APIs). The API-first approach makes content platforms code-agnostic, and makes it possible for developers to add new services to the stack, like modular building blocks, to meet specific business and content needs. From a content management perspective, that means you can choose (or build) your own headless CMS, and then plug in whatever microservices you need to shape your customer’s content journey — without having to worry about code incompatibilities, cross-channel formatting problems, or vendor-locked functionality. 

Composability makes tech stacks, and by extension, content strategies, flexible and scalable, and that means brands no longer have to rely on a single technology for every ecommerce functionality they need.

With that said, adopting a composable tech stack isn’t going to be the right move for every brand. For smaller businesses, with a limited digital footprint, the flexibility of composable architecture likely won’t deliver the same benefits as it would a global enterprise organization. 

If you’re still weighing your options, the following questions should help define the reasons for your transformation, and shape your digital transformation roadmap. 

What are my strategic business goals? 

Companies that anticipate a competitive landscape, where digital experience is a key differentiator between brands, are more likely to find value in composable architecture when developing their digital transformation strategy. In the long run, the extensibility of that kind of platform will help them stay at the cutting edge of tech innovation, build business value, and retain their competitive advantage over the long term.

What are the most important aspects of my digital experiences?

It’s important to have a clear grasp of the metrics by which you can gauge the effectiveness of the digital experiences you create. Those metrics should help you decide whether digital transformation will help you meet your business goals, and therefore deliver value.

Do I have the right IT skills and depth of resources?

The more tooling your digital transformation journey requires, the higher the impact on the responsibilities of your teams. Connecting industry-leading digital technologies via APIs as part of a composable architecture, requires a level of DevOps that not all companies have the capability to deliver. That being the case, lean technical teams should only migrate to composable architecture if they are able (and happy) to get support from a managed service provider.

Step-by-step: The path to successful digital transformation

Let’s set out the steps you’ll take during your digital transformation — in this case, migration from an all-in-one legacy solution to a content platform. 

1. Review your rationale for going headless

We mentioned the importance of “why” earlier and so, before you initiate any changes to your operational infrastructure, or invest in new technology, you’ll need to answer the question: “Why do I want to move to a content platform?” 

Review the business benefits and define your ideal customer experience prior to your digital transformation. As part of that process, clarify the deeper functionalities, such as content personalization, and the workflow efficiencies, such as omnichannel content publication, that you want your new content platform to provide.

This review step is really about aligning on the “north star” of your digital transformation — which, essentially, comes down to making (or saving) money for your company. Every KPI on your digital transformation roadmap should be in service of that north star metric, so everyone in the organization should understand the changes that will need to be made as part of that process. 

2. Set up a steering committee to oversee the digital transformation

A steering committee will be critical in identifying and addressing challenges, and capitalizing on emerging opportunities during the digital transformation. Establish and define the stakeholder roles that your developers, writers, editors, and business leaders will fill as part of the steering committee, during and after the transition to the new platform. 

Your digital transformation steering committee should be responsible for developing an effective training program to support technical and nontechnical teams on either side of the backend/frontend divide. The program should illustrate how teams’ roles will change as a result of the transformation. 

Finally, the steering committee should also be involved in defining service level agreements (SLAs) in order to set measurable service goals for the content platform when the transition is complete.

3. Design the technical architecture for every stage of the transition

You’ll need to explain how the components within your composable tech stack will function as part of a microservice ecosystem. This means writing a range of technical documentation, including architectural design documents which describe how the modules are integrated, and data structure specifications which describe how different datasets communicate with each other. 

It’s also important to document the stages of the digital transformation — in other words, the order in which digital services and functionalities will be transitioned to the composable architecture. It makes sense to use business priorities to dictate this order. 

4. Effectuate changes to DevOps, infrastructure, and tools

Composable content platforms leverage cloud computing in order to power ecosystems of microservices. With that in mind, as you chart your digital transformation, you’ll need to plan an operational infrastructure that harnesses cloud technology and facilitates the use of multiple SaaS products. 

Your composable tech stack will need to be able to handle continuous deployments, and integrate an effective testing strategy for the numerous new applications and tools that you’ll add to facilitate your content goals.  

5. Design the front end

Creating the optimal look and feel of the front end of your content platform will require customer mapping, user experience (UX) research, and the development of website wireframes. You should ensure your UX and DevOps teams are aligned during this step in order to reduce friction during the digital transformation. 

Designing your front end means understanding where your customers are — and meeting them there. That will involve conducting research on the channels your customers use to engage with content, including website, mobile, wearables, store displays, and even screen and print media. There’s no point allocating disproportionate resources to a digital experience if those resources could be better spent elsewhere — in other words: you should focus on optimizing customer journeys in the environments those journeys take place. 

Your experimentation and personalization strategy can (once again) provide significant value for the frontend design process. By using data-driven insight into what encourages engagement for specific audiences, you’ll be able to optimize the effectiveness of every touchpoint.  

6. Measure changes with a clear set of KPIs

Ensure that each department has set measurable goals that link to your business strategy, and that can be used to gauge the success of your digital transformation efforts. Composable architecture offers another advantage here because each microservice you add to the ecosystem can also provide its own set of metrics which you can apply to any analysis of your transformation. 

Optimize your roadmap for digital transformation with Contentful 

No successful digital transformation journey is quite the same as another, but what is consistent is a careful consideration of operational impact — that is, how teams will be involved and empowered throughout the transition. 

While migration to a content platform may give you the tools you need to achieve digital content (and business) goals, the long-term success of your digital transformation will rely on your teams’ buy-in and understanding of what your new architecture can do. In other words, how it can make their lives easier, and feed their creative ambitions now and in the future. 

With that in mind, Contentful pushes the potential of digital transformation and composable architecture one step further. As a leading digital experience platform (DXP), Contentful combines the flexibility of composable architecture with native AI capabilities, to power next-generation digital experience for thousands of organizations around the world. 

From start-ups to established enterprise brands, Contentful is designed to help you realize your content ambitions — however high you’ve set them. If you’re ready to get started, you can create a free Contentful account today, and begin planning your transformation in the vast ecosystem of microservices found in the Contentful Marketplace.

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