It doesn’t take an expert to see how quickly Kentico is delivering new capabilities in Xperience by Kentico, but it doesn’t hurt to get an expert’s opinion on the product roadmap. Brian McKeiver, Kentico MVP and co-owner at BizStream a Kentico gold partner digital agency, shares his thoughts on Xperience by Kentico’s public roadmap, how to think about it strategically for agency teams and client solutions.

Expert chat

Submitting feedback

The parts of this conversation that are most interesting to me are the ones focused on how Brian thinks about Xperience by Kentico's public roadmap.

I asked Brian if he has used the product feedback feature of the roadmap.

I like how it works, because as someone who is interested in a topic you have a couple choices of like "is this important", "is this critical", or is it not that high on my list of needs. I like how you can categorize your level of interest and it actually only takes like 3 seconds. [...] I like how easy it is to give feedback on the roadmap.

Taxonomies

Brian then reflected on the User-defined taxonomies roadmap item, which had not yet been released at the time. Should we port over what Kentico Xperience 13 had or maybe start from scratch?

I think this is a solid example of how we found a great solution for our customers and partners. You can create multiple taxonomies, each with their own hierarchy of tags. Those taxonomies and tags can be localized and assigned to content items using one or more Taxonomy data type field for a content type.

Unlike Kentico Xperience 13's Categories feature, we no longer limit you to 1 taxonomy hierarchy, a content item can have multiple taxonomy fields, a content item's tags are versioned and published with the rest of the content, the Content hub has taxonomy filters which can be used with smart folders, and taxonomies work across web, email, and headless channels!

At the same time, our approach to taxonomies didn't require a doctorate in rocket surgery. It feels intuitive, and all that started from a single roadmap feature.

Applying Refreshes

With a continuously updated roadmap and a product that is evolving every month, you might think that's going to require a lot of development time to stay up to date, but Brian reassures us with his experiences.

the neat thing there is the process to refresh or update your Xperience by Kentico site is painless. [...] I upgraded my blog project [...] my localhost instance, my dev site, my production site all in about an hour or less. [...] Because of the modern solution the updates are painless, they're easy, it's not something I worry about. It's something that you can deliver to your clients pretty easily if you're a developer.

Brian also mentions that this simple and iterative approach to updating solutions means you can explore new features as their released and at a pace that makes sense for your project.

I don't have to worry about all 300 things that came with that [Refresh]. [...] I can get started now, I can start thinking about it and planning on it and I don't have this giant learning curve. Basically, it's faster to try new features and a little easier to wrap your mind around new things.

Brian then mentions other personas that will be impacted by this new approach of product releases and updates.

If you're a marketer or a business user of Xperience by Kentico [...] the incremental change, the constant updating, the thing that should excite you about that is the fact you're gonna get your hands on new features and new capabilities faster than ever before and there won't be this large lag time. [...] It's less dependency on IT, which is something our clients ask us about all the time.

Benefits of SaaS for Kentico partners

We briefly move the conversation to the topic of Xperience by Kentico's SaaS offering for customers, which brings the benefit of managing your infrastructure allocating, hosting, security, and deployments for you.

Brian explains his perspective on the strategic benefit of SaaS for a Kentico partner agency.

Taking off my solution architect and client facing hat and putting on my partner hat with Kentico, if you're a partner listening to this out there, think about this - if you want to leverage the managed offering through SaaS to be able to go faster to start up a new project for a new client without having to wait for their IT team to spin up infrastructure, without having to wait for your team who is maybe on another projects. You literally can provision a SaaS environment in a matter of minutes [...] and deploy your starting point project that same day.

The strategy of understanding the roadmap

Wrapping things up, I ask Brian about the business strategist or C-level persona working for a Kentico partner and how they might have a different perspective or insights from Kentico's public product roadmap.

A task that you're responsible for as a strategist is to understand the road map of the digital solutions that you're putting together for your clients or your own teams and at what point will I have access to this thing or if I need to accomplish this goal what tool do I need to use. Is that this quarter or is that this year is it next year? So, using the roadmap can at least maybe give me some insight. [...] Where in the timeline can I expect these things so that I can best educate my end clients for how to meet their goals with Xpeirence by Kentico.

Brian goes on to mention how it's also important to understand the strategy of the product itself and how it aligns with your business' approach to tools and technologies.

One of the things that you're doing as that strategist is maybe looking at where is our current stack at and where are we spending on digital tools? Do we have too many things and can we consolidate them into one kind of platform that does multiple things? That's where Xperience by Kentico can shine.

Wrapping up

Brian and I touch on several more interesting topics in this conversation, including his approach to sharing he thorough knowledge of Xperience by Kentico with his team and keeping them aware of the roadmap and product bug and security fixes.

I'll leave that one in the video 😉.

How do you keep your team and clients aware of the released and upcoming features in Xperience by Kentico? How do you learn and explore the strategic opportunities they bring to DXP solutions?

Let me know what you think of this topic, the interview/video podcast format, and what other topics you'd like to hear discussed in the future.