Few things stifle innovation and impede agility more than technical debt. This is even truer for projects working with headless CMS. One way companies can avoid and reduce their technical debt is through content modeling, leading to a lighter, maintainable, and extensible digital experience. Companies that understand in advance how they plan to create and present their content via content types and uniform templated approaches to different assets work smarter and faster. This article explores how content modeling reduces technical debt specifically for headless CMS projects.
What is Technical Debt in the Context of a Headless CMS?
Technical debt is the expected cost of poor choices made when developing digital projects. In a headless CMS, an ambiguous content model or a time-crunched goal to create one results in inefficiencies that bog down future efforts at a great expense. When content hierarchies are fixed, poorly documented, or overfitted, this adds to technical debt as it makes scaling and improvements challenging. Leveraging tools like axios parallel requests can help mitigate some of this debt by improving the performance of content-fetching operations, especially when pulling from complex or fragmented models. The quicker this debt can be repaid or, even better, avoided, the better for the sustainability of the project.
Why is Content Modeling Important to Avoid Debt?
Content modeling is the creation of a definitive hierarchy of how content exists within a headless CMS. A properly modeled content structure outlines the expectations of content types and requirements and relationships that allow for repurposing across many avenues. Effective content modeling increases flexibility and minimizes redundancies as it allows changes to be easier in the future, which minimizes technical debt. For example, entities that have great content models would not invoice themselves down the road for structural issues or maintenance because it would be easy to fix based upon beneficial content modeling.
How to Create a Modular/Reusable Content Type?
One thing that ensures minimal technical debt is the creation of modular/reusable content types. Modular content is information that can be broken down into singular units that can be used across many digital channels and platforms. Modular content types eliminate redundancies and inaccuracies while also increasing the effectiveness of creation and management to avoid future mistakes. Modular content types also simplify their updates and enhancements in the future, which means that naive/ill-advised structures will avoid additional technical debt costs.
Reduce Technical Debt by Enhancing Content Models with Flexibility
Flexibility is required for content models and future content when using a headless approach. Rigid content structures tend to become outdated quickly or become too confining as business needs change, which creates additional, unnecessary technical debt. A content model that includes flexibility is one that understands that changes will be made down the line, as well as an organization pivoting its content approach or the addition of new digital channels or technologies. This promotes a content culture with the understanding that structures are established while recognizing that change is needed over time, so it can be done with ease without any additional costs or redevelopment time.
Reduce Technical Debt by Implementing Standardization for Taxonomies and Metadata
Technical debt related to discoverability, governance, and reusability can be minimized by implementing standardization. For example, when taxonomies are created in their most original form and as clear as possible, there’s less chance of mis-filing down the road as well as excessive relabeling. Likewise, if metadata is structured properly from the start, it will define how content relates to itself, increasing integration potential for correctness, meaningful targeted delivery, and overall quality of content. Therefore, standardizing taxonomies and the idealized metadata at the outset minimizes the potential for complicated outcomes down the road related to misguided and/or confusing connections later.
Reduce Technical Debt by Increasing Quality of Documentation
Technical debt associated with awareness and transparency can be avoided by ensuring that content models for headless projects are thoroughly documented. This provides creators and steward services a localization opportunity to understand how these content structures should and should not be used, as well as which governance policies exist to uphold integrity and quality. In addition, the clearer content is documented over time, the clearer it will be understood what is needed to avoid confusion, problems, and poor quality results. Reducing debt through quality documentation reduces costs associated with what isn’t known down the road.
Thinking of Scalability from the Start
Considering scalability encourages the construction of content models sooner rather than later to prevent technical debt down the road. By anticipating potential growth, increased traffic, or even additional digital channels that may come into play, organizations ensure content models are relevant, ahead of the game, and manageable for the long term. If companies are looking to scale from day one and plan their resources accordingly, they prevent having to reconstruct the wheel a few months or years in when new, scalable opportunities already existed. Incremental growth from the beginning can help companies remain agile without impacting content management efforts and creating technical debt from overgrowth or drastic changes in the industry.
Collaboration Decreases Silos Inherent in Multiple Teams Working Across Projects
Collaborative content modeling allows all content strategists, developers, designers, and business stakeholders involved in the process to provide input and direction for the best content modeling. When the process is collaborative, sections of the project that focus on one requirement versus another do not live in separate silos, all hoping the concepts come together later on down the line. They instead help ensure content needs and technical aspects align for better system performance in the long term. When groups work in silos, there’s a greater potential for one group needing one thing and another needing something else that overlaps or is redundant. Collaboration, communication, and transparency all avoid rework and heavy maintenance later on, which can contribute to technical debt if initial intentions have been paved down a different path through disconnected efforts.
Audit Content Models to Avoid Technical Debt
Auditing content models over time helps organizations avoid technical debt. By assessing what’s been created thus far, what’s messy, what’s redundant, what’s duplicative, and what’s overly complicated, creators can evaluate what’s needed before it gets out of hand. Auditing over time based on stakeholder feedback and engagement, organizational change data, and check-ins helps bolster expectations to ensure content models are still relevant, clear, efficient, and valuable. Assessing what’s been created to potentially hindered pitfalls helps identify concerns before they become bigger issues down the road so organizations can operate efficiently in the long run.
Reducing Technical Debt for Future Content Models Through Analytics
Analytics are an excellent way to create insights for future reductions in technical debt through content models over time. Understanding how often content is leveraged, engaged with, or what performs helps teams know what should be changed or adjusted. For example, teams gain analytics to see what’s not working or overused and what patterns should be reinforced more based on analytics. Creating content models based on analytics learned from already used content gives the opportunity to improve these things more often and reduce technical debt later because when creating new content models, ineffective elements can be avoided. Over time, assessments of what’s working and what’s not increase efficiencies and reduce technical debt as elements won’t be allowed to fall apart due to misuse/underuse and teams can reposition their focus based on what works.
Debt Reduction Through Version Control and Governance
Technical debt can be reduced through version control and governance efforts. Technical debt issues are avoided with proper governance because there’s an understanding of relevance and due diligence. The more documented the process, the better so there can be a trail of transparency. Version control allows teams to see what has been done when things need to change so if someone needs to go back and revert something to an earlier draft, they’ve allowed it and aren’t reinventing the wheel from scratch because of a poor decision or failed experiment. When people document efforts and consistency exists, there are fewer mistakes that create technical debt down the line. Instead, what’s created can be documented, on brand, on structure, and repeatable when needed.
Prevention of Technical Debt Through Anticipating Future Integration Needs for Content Modeling
Content modeling will help reduce technical debt in the future by anticipating what integrations will be necessary before they’re even there. Content has to last and work with platforms, integrations, and channels of distribution. This means assets and attributes need to be flexible so when the inevitable changes occur, room will be made without having to redo everything. Reducing technical debt through content modeling that allows for potential needs before they occur avoids disjointed assets that will take a lot of time and money to correct down the line when new integrations occur that require redoing effective/inconsistent materials. Flexibility now will help avoid technical debt later.
Reduce Needs for Complicated Relationships
Technical debt can be reduced by ensuring that the content model has relationships that are not vague and complicated. When relationships are vague, for example, it creates a need for more complicated ways to retrieve data, complicated APIs, and more maintenance. If an organization understands how its content relates to each other even as a dependent, affiliate, or hierarchical role it can better foster a sustainable content model. This will ensure less complicated relationships that can lead to complications when interactivity or integration is desired in the future. In addition, this minimizes technical debt associated with complicated nexus systems.
Ensuring Content Modeling is Related to Business Goals
The more content modeling can avoid irrelevant or incorrectly developed content pieces based upon causal relationships and an audit/review with business goals, the less technical debt companies will have. Companies expand from clear strategic goals and having each piece in alignment with overall project goals lessens the chances of an audit revealing the need to adjust certain pieces in the future. In addition, technical debt occurs by ignoring business goals therefore, reducing pieces that create redundancy minimizes maintenance and resource revisit efforts that should happen sooner than later.
Transfer Knowledge/Training as Necessary
Another opportunity to reduce technical debt is to educate the staff on the best means of operating with a viable content model so that further miscommunications and mismanagement don’t occur down the line. For example, by transferring knowledge between cross-functional teams during the development period of conception and providing consistent check-ins, people will understand what’s expected of them and management of the content brand will be easier to handle. Similarly, providing relevant training checklists documentation, standard operating process templates, and frequent sessions lessens operational failures that can bring about incurred technical debt due to poor mirroring of expectations/poor understanding.
Flexible API Structures Reduce Debt When Adding in Future Functionality
Flexible, maintainable API structures reduce technical debt when using a headless CMS. When things change down the line, a non-flexible API structure becomes difficult, requiring rework to efficiently plug in new functionalities or new channels. But if the API is created with flexible intentions, standard endpoints, quickly retrievable queries and thorough documentation it’s easier to build in the first place with less maintenance down the line. This kind of work ensures that in the future, an organization can add on additional technologies without creating technical debt in the process.
New Development Methodologies that Support Iteration Avoid Technical Debt from the Start
New development methodologies that support iteration allow for increases in appropriate content modeling to avoid technical debt. When the new direction supports feedback and improvement rather than a strict one-time delivery based upon the previously established content model, teams can identify early on where they’ve gone wrong. By continuing to model and adjusting the content model to reflect shifting needs of the organization or users, for example, the project can avoid costly redoing and major refactoring that typically aligns with technical debt. Thus, new development challenges a project to take on micro-projects that support more fluid environments, creating technical debt avoided.
Conclusion
Understanding that appropriate content modeling will reduce technical debt associated with the headless CMS project for long-lasting improvements and adjustability allows organizations to seek out execution that avoids or lessens technical debt. By creating modular and flexible content types, standardized taxonomy and metadata, documentation and component scalability, organizations can lessen or eliminate technical debt. Organizations can also seek to reduce it based on collaboration, subsequent adjustments based upon analytics assessment and proactive governance. Ultimately, with effective content modeling, an organization will remain cutting edge and ahead of competitive concerns as the best use of headless CMS architecture for sustainable output and reliable digital experience delivery.
