Barry D’Arcy from Storyblock shares insights on the company’s growth and the benefits of headless CMS. He explains that headless CMS allows for flexibility in front-end frameworks and content reuse across multiple channels.
Three key points emerged from the conversation:
Staying Organized with Tools: In the podcast episode, Barry highlighted the importance of using collaboration tools like Slack, Notion, and Storyblok to stay organized in a fast-paced environment. These tools facilitate asynchronous work, enabling team members to collaborate effectively even in a remote setting. By utilizing tools such as Slack for communication, Notion for project management, and Storyblok for content management, teams can streamline their workflows and ensure tasks are completed efficiently.
Focusing on Trust and Listening to the Team: Barry emphasized the significance of trust and listening to the team as key principles for success. By establishing a framework that prioritizes trust and open communication, teams can foster a culture of collaboration and innovation. Trusting team members to do their best work and actively listening to their ideas and feedback can lead to remarkable outcomes. This approach not only empowers team members but also enables quick decision-making and adaptation to changes in the fast-paced tech industry environment.
Essential for Success in a Fast-Paced Environment: In the dynamic and rapidly evolving tech industry, staying organized with the right tools and fostering trust within the team are essential for success. By leveraging collaboration tools like Slack, Notion, and Storyblok, teams can effectively manage projects, communicate efficiently, and ensure tasks are completed on time. Additionally, prioritizing trust and actively listening to team members can lead to increased productivity, innovation, and overall success in navigating the challenges of a fast-paced environment.
Resources
This episode was brought to you by Storyblok: https://www.storyblok.com
The Composable Roadmap website: https://www.thecomposableroadmap.com
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Chad Solomonson:
Today we have an exciting episode lined up for you. Today’s podcast is brought to you by Storyblok, one of the hottest CMS platforms in the market. Storyblok is a headless content management system that empowers businesses to become market leaders by accelerating content delivery and innovative digital experiences. Leading brands such as Adidas, T-Mobile, Tesla, Oatly, and 200,000 other developers and marketers across 130 countries use Storyblok to create better content experiences. Today we have Barry D’Arcy, the Vice President of Partners at Storyblok. He is passionate about how digital data and technology can be used to build more diverse and inclusive work practices, and how it transforms business models to focus on customer experiences. Before his role at Storyblok, he worked for a large digital agency in Ireland as a Storyblok partner, where he delivered nearly 100 headless CMS projects. Barry also serves as a growth council member at the MACH Alliance and is also an executive member at Partnership Leaders. Today we’ll talk about the tremendous momentum of headless CMSs and why leading marketers and developers are moving in this direction. We’ll also talk about the changing partner landscape and how MarTech consultancies must adapt. To help me dig into these topics, I’d like to welcome Barry D’Arcy. Barry, very excited to have you on the podcast.
Barry D’Arcy: Thank you, Chad. Really delighted to be here. Obviously some topics that are very close to my heart. So looking forward to digging into a few of those questions.
Chad Solomonson: Absolutely. Well, um, with all the excitement of Storyblok, you know, coming, uh, really kind of hot into the States. Why don’t you give a little background on yourself so people get to kind of know you.
Barry D’Arcy: Yeah, I guess, but before we jump into Storyblok and, and all things partner and headless CMS, it would be great to give you a quick bit of background about myself. So I am Barry D’Arcy. Um, I’m based in Dublin in Ireland. Weather’s not so great here. You might hear some rain in the background, unfortunately, but, uh, we’re quite stuck with that over here in Dublin. Um, but quick background on me. So I actually studied engineering in university, but never became an engineer. My journey in B2B SaaS started around 12 years ago. I actually, uh, I moved to Vancouver, Canada and lived there for about three years. And in my time there, I joined a startup called Tree Tier Logic, a consumer engagement platform. So that was my first venture into SaaS. After about three years there, I returned back to rainy Dublin and I actually ended up working then in a boutique agency called Together Digital. And my role there was on the operational side, so delivery of projects. So working with great teams of designers, developers to build many websites for our customers for that particular agency. So in that role, one of my actual responsibilities alongside some of my colleagues was to look at the technologies we were using to deliver. And that’s actually how my introduction to Storyblok came about. We were looking for a new CMS. We discovered this kind of headless movement and that’s where the relationship began. But I’ll dig more into that in a moment, but after the agency, my previous experience in Canada was more on the product side. I always had a desire to go back to a more pure SaaS role in the product space. And that journey then took me to Sage, cloud-based accountancy software company. Had a really interesting time there, but not for too long. Dominic, the CEO here at Storyblok, who had become a friend from my times at Together Digital, he reached out to me and he asked me to, would I be interested in joining Storyblok to help him build out the partner channel and build a team? So I joined Storyblok around three and a half years ago, a little more than three and a half years ago. I think I was employee number 22. Crazy to think that we’re now about 250 folks. We’re a fully remote company spread globally, 47 nationalities at last count, right? So quite a diverse group here at Storyblok. But yeah, that’s a quick bit about me, my background and how I landed at Storyblok.
Chad Solomonson: That’s awesome. Well, more on the personal side, I actually did a little bit of research in preparing for this conversation and I heard that you may have been a footballer growing up.
Barry D’Arcy: Yes, yes, yes. Maybe I talked about that at length in a different podcast that I actually did a year or so ago, but yeah, I played different versions of football actually here in Ireland and also in Canada, actually. Not football as you might know it in America. Soccer, as you call it, was my sport of choice. Spent a lot of time playing that. There’s also a Gaelic football, an Irish game that I was quite involved in recently, actually. I hung up my boots, so to speak, around three or four years ago. But I’m still a keen sports fan, soccer especially, but all things sports are super interesting to me. And with the Olympics not too far away from Dublin, I’ve been keeping a very close eye on that. I think the US are performing quite well, top of the leaderboard from what I seen last.
Chad Solomonson: We’re trying, we’re trying. Well, this is really just more of a self-serving question, but as a fellow soccer player, I grew up as well playing and played in college and a little semi-pro, but I was kind of on the fence to ask you this one before we kind of go forward, but who is your favorite Irish footballer that played at Manchester United?
Barry D’Arcy: Roy Keane has to be, has to be, although I am a Liverpool fan, right? So there’s a bit of conflict there, right? But I’m still, I know what good looks like, right? And Roy Keane, and I think he’s mellowed a bit. He does a lot of that TV stuff now, right? I’m a keen follower of him. He does, he does. But yeah, without a doubt. But there are good Irish connections there with Dennis Irwin as well at Man United back in the nineties, but Roy Keane for me is the best.
Chad Solomonson: Oh, fantastic. Fantastic answer. All right. Well, let’s, let’s kind of jump right into Storyblok. The company has raised over $138 million on the value of being a true headless content management system. You know, really for our listeners and mostly for my mom, what is your simplest definition of headless?
Barry D’Arcy: Yeah, for sure. I’m not sure my mom would be too interested in that explanation, you know, thinking she She believes I work in IT, right? It’s a little bit more niche than that, I would say. But yeah, for your mom, simplest explanation I can give of a headless CMS is that it’s ultimately a backend only system designed as a content repository. So content in that repository is accessed by APIs and to display ultimately on any device. So you’re separating your data, which is the body from the presentation layer, which is the head, hence the name headless and how that came about. So what this allows developers to do is to really have the flexibility to use any front end framework. And it also then allows content editors to reuse that content across multiple channels without being locked into any specific presentation method. And we might come to some of those cases and examples a little bit later. But hence, Storyblok as a CMS, we set about solving the content problem for both the editor and the developer, right? Giving marketers and technical developers full flexibility to build out their digital assets, mainly websites. So headless CMS as well, we’re separating the front end from the back end, unlike traditional CMSs, which ultimately combine both. And they typically output their content on one specific front end, which would generally be a website. All right. Do you think your mom would understand that one, Chad?
Chad Solomonson: I think, I think maybe she’ll get there. She’s, she’s been trying. She read, she read the composable roadmap book that I put out with Greg Killstrom and she had a few headaches from it. So I said, well, let me, let me see if I can simplify this some more. I hope it helps. Thank you. Thank you. So from content writers to both front-end developers, I’m hearing a lot of feedback that Storyblok is just fast and easy to use. And its simplicity is what seems to be resonating with everyone. But it goes deeper than that. What does that really translate when you talk about being fast and easy into real ROI for companies that are exploring kind of moving off maybe another platform?
Barry D’Arcy: Yeah, like really good question. So like you touched on, like I touched on a little bit earlier, we really are trying to solve that content problem, both for the technical user to developer who’s creating these projects, but also maintaining that flexibility for the marketer, the content editor, when the project comes to life. And ROI is just one part of that, a very important part of course, and there’s a few connected topics to ROI in general. We conducted a report actually last year with Forrester, one of our analyst partners to do some research on the ROI of Storyblok and on implementing it. The findings from that, we knew we were returning a good return on investment, but even we were surprised by the amazing results that we’ve seen from that study. So Storyblok from that report was found to deliver 582% ROI over a three-year period. Generally speaking, we’re working in initial contracts for around three years with our customers. But another important element of that is the traditional cycle of kind of ditching your website every three years and throwing it in the bin and starting again. Headless CMS or component-based CMS systems, they lend themselves to being able to progressively grow that system. Again, making life a little bit easier for those two users, the developer and the content editor, as we mentioned earlier. But also within that study, some of the findings were that there’s less than a six month payback period for managing and scaling your content in that way, right? So your investment on Storyblok can give you a payback very quickly, right? Which is really important when you’re evaluating, maybe moving over from a more legacy system and trying to kind of modernize your tech stack for your website or whatever digital assets you’re trying to deliver. A few other key benefits related to ROI. In that study, we also learned that there’s a 3X productivity boost from efficient development setups, right? So from the developer being able to work in a more efficient way, we’re seeing a huge productivity gain. And that translates also over to the content editor. We’re seeing a real drive and improvement for customer experience through scalable content operations too. So Storyblok has a lot of great features around collaboration, around content workflows. And that drives a really successful and efficient content operation plan for organizations to utilize. So ultimately we strive to get customers to value quicker and to help them succeed from there. And yeah, that’s a few thoughts around why ROI is super important and what we’re trying to deliver into that. And we also actually from that study created an ROI calculator, which we have on our store website. You can take a look there and try and work it out a little bit for yourself. But this study I mentioned, it was done in conjunction with a number of our key customers who have actually gone and implemented Storyblok. So really interesting results there to take a look at.
Chad Solomonson: We’ll definitely put the link to the calculator into this episode.
Barry D’Arcy: Brilliant. Thanks, Chad.
Chad Solomonson: So with a lot of competition in the CMS market and some established players, to raise the money that you’re raising, to taking on the type of new customers and new logos that are emerging with Storyblok, what is really the difference? What is making Storyblok stand out and is really capturing a lot of the hearts and minds of marketers and developers at the same time?
Barry D’Arcy: Yeah, again, really, really good question. I guess what we focused on so far in talking about Storyblok as a product is its uniqueness from the more traditional monolithic CMS systems. But what makes us stand out as a headless CMS, I think is also a really important question. The first thing that we’re very much known for is the visual editing capabilities. We were the pioneer of that feature. So what we mean by that is being able to update and edit your content in real time, having a bridge to a visual editor where you can see your updates made in the content management system reflected in real time. Again, making things really seamless, really easy for the market or the content editor to visualize quickly. Some of our competitors and some of the other, there’s some really other great products out there in the market. We have some similar offerings, but we have a much more flexible visual editor I would say is one of our key unique value propositions that we offer here at Storyblok. A few other elements that are super important when we talk about why we’re important in the headless space, that component based architecture. So being able to build websites or web assets in a more modular way, we really feel we have a huge offering there in terms of what you can do with the Storyblok capabilities and feature set. We have a super flexible API as well. So comparable in some ways to some of the other headless CMSs out there, which are all ultimately API led content repositories. But we have a lot of really great and easy to install integrations, which can be very helpful to get developers to value quicker when they’re building out these websites. I touched on it briefly earlier too, but. Collaboration tools are also a very important part of Storyblok and something we’re trying to continue into our product roadmap. We recently just launched Ideation Room, which is a tool where you can actually keep all of your content in Storyblok. I think anybody who’s familiar with running a website project or updating content on a website would be familiar with keeping documents in sync and sending Google Docs or Word files to anyone in the organization, offer approval. We’ve built a tool connected with AI also that’s all contained within the Storyblok app, right? So you can do all of that collaboration right inside the app. You can comment and collaborate with your colleagues, seek approvals, activate workflows, all from one place rather than having to live within multiple tools. So that really sets us apart, I believe too. And I would say the last thing I’d like to call out is our pricing, right? We really stand over being predictable when it comes to pricing, when we talk about ROI and The organizations who we’re working with and who we’re trying to present Storyblok to, they ultimately want to know how quickly they can get the value, what the total cost of ownership is going to be to get a project activated. Be that with some of our great partners being involved in the mix there too, but being predictable on pricing and being very clear on the ROI that we can deliver, I think is a key component of what we offer to our customers as well.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, from, from my personal experience, I think the, the openness and, and the, the ability to bring that, that predictability to the conversation with clients has really kind of separated out story block and a lot of the conversations we’ve had with our customers.
Barry D’Arcy: Yeah. Yeah. You want to know how your project’s going to scale. You don’t want the success of traffic to, to drive your pricing on your, your tooling through the roof, right? You want things to be predictable when you’re. maybe going off to seek approval to invest in new technologies. You want to have that predictable element to how you’re going to scale. So yeah, super important that we’re able to deliver that.
Chad Solomonson: Yeah, absolutely. Well, speaking of clients, what are some of the maybe more recent real world examples where Storyblok has been implemented quickly? I know we have one that we’ll be talking about shortly to the market that came in under budget and within the timeline and it’s scaling fast, but what are some of your favorite stories that you like to talk about that were Storybloks really shining?
Barry D’Arcy: Yeah, yeah. Really exciting projects coming through our partnership, Chad, for sure. So we can tell that story again in the future. I’m sure there’ll be lots of information and case studies on them as they develop. But a few of my favorites, probably my favorite implementation case study of Storyblok is with Tesla. I think everybody at this stage knows who Tesla are. Tesla are using Storyblok. They had a challenge where they needed a scalable solution for their in-store kiosks. So anybody who’s ever gone to maybe a car showroom or Tesla obviously have a different take on that. You might recall an experience where there’s an in-store kiosk where you can ultimately look at the different models of Tesla that are available. You can kind of customize the car that you’d like to buy. And all of that is done in a kind of a large tablet format in store. Storyblok was implemented as the solution to manage all of the content for those kiosks and different complications around data sources for configurations to get pricing back to the user in real time. So that was a really interesting implementation of Storyblok, not just on your more traditional websites. And being able to deliver good results there, like real content updates. We obviously support multilingual there was a big thing for Tesla and ultimately giving a really good user experience in store. I think that’s an interesting edge case of Storyblok outside of the traditional websites with a very well known brand.
Chad Solomonson: Absolutely.
Barry D’Arcy: One other one I might just mention quickly. A more traditional use case is with Oatly, the oat milk brand from the Nordics here in Europe. The challenge they had is they wanted to go quick, right? In the short summary, but ultimately they were managing digital experiences in many different languages. Oatly is a global company, websites across 25 countries. They chose Storyblok to be able to leverage the flexibility and deliver into multiple markets, multilingual. really important component of the decision was our ability to translate content and collaborate on content through translation phases. But back to their original challenge, right? Speed. They wanted to get that out quickly. They built 16 global websites in just two months, which was crazy, right? Giving developers really good freedom with the technology they were using to deliver that efficiently. not having to kind of replicate across different locations. Right. So it different than maybe more traditional use case on, on scaling your content globally. So Oatly is also a really good case study there. And you can find lots of, lots of interesting case studies on our website. And maybe we could link to some of those too in the description. Absolutely. But that’s just to call it a couple of my favorites. And I do like. to enjoy an oat latte from time to time. So it’s always nice to get one of our brands when you’re purchasing your coffee.
Chad Solomonson: As do I. Yeah, that’s always top of mind in the morning. For sure. Well, let’s shift a little bit. So we’ve talked a bit about the platform, some of the clients, but a lot of these projects don’t really get there without the help of partners. And certainly that’s your focus at Storyblok. You have a really unique view across kind of the globe of different types of partners, large, small, with different emphasis on how they bring value back to businesses. You know, certainly the market’s challenging in different areas and partners are having to potentially rethink how they go to market. Are there any major shifts or changes that you’re seeing in how Storyblok and its partners are working together to really continue to find ways to better articulate value to customers or go to market more efficiently?
Barry D’Arcy: Yeah, again, really good question and one that I’m super passionate in my role leading the partner team here at Storyblok. I wouldn’t say like, leaning into the question, right, I wouldn’t say we’re seeing any major shifts per se. I think that things are constantly evolving and how we can service our partners in a better way and always learn from them and collaborate with them, right. Keyword being partner, right. How can we get, give value on both sides in all of these different size relationships, key to our success. And to tell you that story, I might just rewind a little bit further though, right? So obviously I talked a little bit about my past. I was on the agency side. I became one of the early stage Storyblok partners. So I’ve kind of sat on both sides of the desk, right? And I understand the challenges of implementing a new technology into a partner organization, be it anything from a boutique SI right up to a global SI like a Deloitte Digital or the Accentures of this world. Bringing about change in your organization to be able to roll out new technologies can be challenging, right? You might have a certain set of skills within your development team that may need to evolve slightly and we always want to make that as easy as we can. Storyblok has a global network of over 2000 agency partners. Partners have always been a really core principle of how we want to deliver into the market and succeed. What I didn’t mention earlier, we’re a company founded out of Austria. Our two co-founders, Dominic and Alex actually came from an agency called Netra, where they worked again on project execution up until 2017 when they spun out with Storyblok. So relying and understanding the value of partnerships was always in our DNA and we’ve evolved that and maybe that’s why we have so many global partners that are active on Storyblok. But what we’ve done over the last kind of four years or so since we introduced our partner program is we’ve really tried to evolve how we’re able to enhance our support for partners. How can we build out better tools, more resources for partners? A partner portal, which is a part of our partner program where you can get a lot of self-serving educational content around how to understand the full feature set and technical scale of Storyblok, but also understanding how to position Storyblok into the market and how to tell your customers as a partner, why Storyblok is the right solution for them. So continuously evolving that content to be relevant in today’s market is a key part of how we’re delivering for our partners within our partner program, but again, In partnerships, right, increased collaboration, I would say is the real key to success, right? Looking as closely as we can about how we can make these partnerships as integrated as possible. We have a pretty big team of partner managers here at Storybuck. The partner team that I work with is, I think we’re currently at 23 people. It’s about 10% of our org and we’re working with partners of all sizes from the boutique SI or local SI. to the regional SIs, which are maybe in the middle, then right up to the big guys, the GSIs, but we want to make sure everybody has access to get value from Storyblok and that partnership. That’s why we assign partner managers to those different cohorts and we really support them in slightly different ways, depending on the types of customers they’re working with, of course, but focusing on how we can kind of scale that relationship and build joint go-to-market efforts together so we can win together, but also most important is putting the customer at the center of that and how we can deliver value for them, get them to value quickly. And we talked about that a little bit in the UROI topic, but how can we deliver a really good product in a really efficient way for a customer to get them to value quick and to let them scale that success ultimately. So leaning into partnerships, like I mentioned, core part of our DNA, and it will always be a part of the Storyblok story. And we’ll continue to evolve those relationships. We’ve got some great partners of which you are one, Chad. And we’re always looking to grow those relationships.
Chad Solomonson: With that many partner teammates, it definitely, it shows and demonstrates your investment and focus on partners. For a company your size to have that focus is rare. And to see how you invest in supporting partners, truly understanding the platform and how to grow their businesses. And with that theme in mind, and again, you’re seeing lots of innovation from a really great perspective across the globe. Are you seeing some things that are emerging that have you excited about how partners are building innovation on top of Storyblok and are there some examples that you might want to call out here?
Barry D’Arcy: Yeah, yeah. There’s always so much exciting stuff happening in general with partners, right? But I would say one, really kind of relevant and hot topic right now is this kind of accelerator motion. Yes. Storyblok is a composable technology or a headless technology, an API first technology. There’s lots of other different categories of composable products out there, and we live within that ecosystem. And we have partners who I’ve talked to in my previous response that are implementing Storyblok, but we also have another whole channel of ecosystem partners. at really good technology partners who are collaborating with to find combined value for customers. So to mention a few, the likes of Netlify on the hosting side, we have Algolia on the search side with lots of digital asset management partners that we’re working with too, Localize for translations, for example. So bringing all of these technologies together is an important part of how we tell the story being a composable product or technology, but Back to the question, right, and having the partner involved in helping us deliver those composable technologies in a stack that’s meaningful to bring to market to a certain group of customers, depending on what industry that might be, is super powerful. One of the obvious ones I forgot to mention is e-commerce, right? We’re collaborating with the likes of BigCommerce, Commerce Tools, Commerce Layer, Spriker, many in that category. It’s a very active space, right? But working with our partners, our implementation partners, to be able to choose those best in breed technologies, to be able to build an accelerator where those technologies are paired together in a meaningful way to target value for a specific customer group. That’s a really trendy topic right now that we’re trying to deliver into the market. And again, lends itself to what I mentioned earlier. How can we get to value quicker for the customer? How can we make this new system, this new technology that they’re investing in, just work for them seamlessly as quickly as possible, right? And partners are super excited about that and getting away from the more legacy systems where the all in one system where everything’s there, you may only activate a certain percentage of it. Why not go out and just pick the best parts and put them together? Invest your time in building something that’s really meaningful with the best technologies, rather than having to take the full box and trying to pick the pieces that you might need from that box. Best in breed is really a topic that’s very powerful with our partners at the moment.
Chad Solomonson: Absolutely. I think bundling coupled with industry focus is going to be a hot topic for the partner channel and us specifically in really helping customers kind of put the pieces together that that makes sense to their specific business. So I think there’s a there’s a lot of runaway there for us to have a lot of value back to our to our clients. For sure. For sure. So just a few more questions before we wrap up. We touched on it just now, but for businesses that are evaluating and looking at various platforms, you have IT champions, you’ve got marketing champions, everyone knows that there needs to be more efficiency in their organization, more agility. What would you say is the most important first step for a customer to take when starting this journey?
Barry D’Arcy: Yeah, we’re always trying to try and figure out the best way to kind of support you in making that decision. But like ultimately each organization need to start with evaluating their needs. So assessing your current CMS limitations and what is your future content strategy or goals I think is a real key place to start. So what are the pain points and where do you need to add value to how you’re operating with your CMS I think is the first place to start. You then of course, you need to get into research, right? You need to look into the different options out there, the different headless CMS options, of course, Storyblok being a very important component of your research there and to find the best one to fit your needs, right? And when you’re evaluating as well, I think it’s very important touching back to that predictable pricing topic as well. Make sure that you know what you’re getting yourself in for in terms of how it’s going to scale. Try and build predictability into how you’re going to grow that project over time. forget about this cycle of trying your website out every few years and figure out how you can build success and just modify and evolve that success rather than starting from scratch with a new strategy every few years. That’s a really important part of the early stages. And one thing that we see that works quite well is also like, maybe you can start small. Maybe that suits some organizations. So beginning with a small pilot project and working with a partner is also a really key part of what you should consider. Working with a Storyblok partner for implementation support, for example, it allows you to leverage their immediate expertise and maximize the potential of the platform quickly, right? And these are the experts that can support you in getting to success quickly. So I have to say, selfishly engaging with partners would be a very important part of that evaluation too. But yeah, it all comes down to the specific business needs. And sometimes you can start with a proof of concept that a partner can help you with. We’re very lucky, we’re very proud of our product, and generally speaking, when we do get into these organizations and these new customer groups, people love Storyblok. You alluded to it earlier, and we’re really happy about that, and we’re happy for people to grow with success of what they’re trying to deliver in terms of their digital assets.
Chad Solomonson: Fantastic. Thank you for that. So I always wrap up these podcasts with a little bit of insight on how to kind of stay more your best self as a professional. And you’re an executive at a very hot technology company. How are you staying sane throughout the fast-paced environment that we all live in? Do you have any specific tools that you love or use on a daily basis that keep you fresh and keep you at the top of your game?
Barry D’Arcy: Interesting question. Yeah, like we use obviously, we’re a fully remote company, as I mentioned earlier. We have a lot of tooling. We also make a tool called Headspace available to all employees to support their mental health needs, which is important as a fully remote company. You don’t see the people sitting in front of you, right? So you’ve got to look after your health as your wealth as the great saying goes. So tools like that are super supportive for me and for everybody else on the team. A few tips I think that work well for me to keep me organized in the day to day, like Being fully remote, a lot of async work is what works well for us. We kind of have a rule to not always meet just for the sake of it. You know, we do of course have regular meetings and we check in with the team a lot, but being able to work effectively in an asynchronous way, using collaboration tools like Storybloks, Slack, we use Notion. We, yeah, we were able to collaborate in a very good way across the tooling that we have within the organization. We were always remote first, even pre-COVID, right? So we’ve got good foundations on the tooling we use to succeed and keep ourselves on track. But as a leader, I would say just staying active and keeping your hands a little bit dirty, right? Being in the weeds of things from time to time is always important, right? And being able to understand what your team members are doing on the front line is super important. Like we’ve got that big partner team, but. What I always try and tell people, I mean, we’ve got a new partner manager onboarding right now in America, to tell them to think of yourself as an embedded teammate in the partner organizations that you’re working with. And I like to try to live in that space too, right. And really understand what’s happening at the front line so we can stay on top of things. And then a really important thing and principle that I have here is, it’s a company wide thing, it’s Storyblok, but I really try to double down on it and the partner team is To be able to build a framework to execute and to constantly evolve that framework and to trust and listen to your team. And then you’ll achieve great things, you know, put people in front of their best work and they’ll do remarkable things and success will come after that. So focusing on trust, allowing the people to have a good voice into how you evolve things and make changes quickly, make decisions quickly, I think is a key to our success here at Storyblok. So long may that continue.
Chad Solomonson: Uh, it’s fantastic. That’s great. Uh, it’s great advice for our listeners and, and for professionals that kind of live in this space that, uh, is very, very high, high paced and, and, um, and pretty intense at times. So it’s, uh, it’s great, uh, to get your perspective on it. So Barry, outside of you being a Liverpool fan, I feel like this was a really great conversation.
Barry D’Arcy: Don’t forget about that piece. Put our rivalries aside.
Chad Solomonson: I’ve always enjoyed talking with you, and this was a great conversation. I think it’ll be really helpful for our listeners. Again, Barry is the Storyblok’s VP of Partners. Thank you so much for joining the show, and we will put plenty of links into this podcast. You can check out Storyblok at www.storyblockblok.com. And Barry, thank you so much. Have a wonderful rest of the week.
Barry D’Arcy: Thank you, Chad. Really glad for the invite and glad to have joined.
Chad Solomonson: Thanks again for listening to The Composable Roadmap. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe. You can also access more episodes of the show and helpful resources at thecomposableroadmap.com. Until next time, lead boldly and keep building. Thanks, everyone.
