Feature
The Gist
- MACH is evolving — but not easy. Adopters say it delivers agility, but only with the right team structure, planning and vendor alignment.
- Composable doesn’t mean chaos — if you prep for orchestration. Companies are learning that owning the integration layer is critical to long-term success.
- Mindset matters as much as tools. Success depends on bridging business and tech, embracing modular thinking, and resisting overbuilding.
CHICAGO — Composable commerce. Scaled AI. Martech modularity. These are challenges marketing technologists and digital experience practitioners grapple with on a daily basis as they navigate the complex realities of digital.
They need to build future-ready stacks while navigating internal politics, regulatory constraints and evolving business goals. Oh, and they need to ensure the martech budget doesn't explode, see to it that marketers have the tools they need to create digital customer experiences and marketing campaigns and serve as a liaison between all things business and technology.
So don't blame these developers and marketing technologists if they feel sometimes like they're in recovery mode after downing a couple of Windy City hot dogs and a few slices of deep dish.
Digesting martech is work. And it was the centerpiece of the conversations this week here at the MACH Alliance's Composable Conference at the Convene Willis Tower in the heart of the Midwest, where the beautiful spring weather belies this city's treacherous winters, like a great martech vendor demo ahead of the daily blizzard of managing marketing technology.
The MACH Promise: Flexibility, Speed, Innovation
That's why the MACH architecture movement — standing for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless — promises flexibility, speed and innovation. But as the concept matures, some organizations are grappling with real-world implementation challenges. From integration burdens and skyrocketing costs to questions of governance and interoperability, MACH adoption is no longer theoretical. It's often practical, complex and messy. You know, it's tech. When it is not?
Sometimes, it works, though.
At the 2025 MACH Alliance Composable Conference, I sat down with digital and marketing technology leaders from Altitude-Sports, Diageo and James Hardie to hear how they’re navigating these waters. Below, we explore three in-depth stories of composable strategy in practice — the pain points, breakthroughs and lessons learned.
- Yann Boisclair-Roy, solutions architect at Altitude-Sports, shares how his team rebuilt its ecommerce stack from scratch using composable technologies and lessons from a fragmented, high-growth past.
- Danson Huang, global VP of digital commerce at Diageo, along with Nat Gross of KPMG, describes how a global beverage brand is balancing agility and governance across 200+ brands using hybrid composable strategies.
- Sophia Zlatin, manager of marketing technology at James Hardie, details how her team is building a modular martech stack with privacy-aware AI guardrails and IT-business alignment at its core.
Altitude-Sports: From Shopify Shortcomings to Composable Control
For Altitude-Sports, a fast-scaling Canadian outdoor apparel brand, the journey to MACH was born from a bottleneck. The company was expanding fast, especially during the pandemic boom in outdoor gear, but its Shopify setup — split between full-priced products and a discounted storefront — couldn’t support international growth or a unified experience.
From Platform Limitations to Modular Thinking
“With platforms like Shopify, it's actually really two different storefronts completely. So it's hard to really get everything in sync, everything really synchronized perfectly together," Boisclair-Roy said.
As the team began running into customization limits and syncing issues between systems, they knew it was time to think differently.
When you start bolting things on top of each other, Boisclair-Roy said, it gets harder to build the experience you want. So they made the leap to composable architecture — embracing a modular stack where best-of-breed vendors could be integrated piece by piece.
The Build Phase: Speed vs. Ownership
The team partnered with system integrator Orium and began stitching together solutions like CommerceTools, Contentful and Fluent. But that flexibility came at a cost.
"MACH means pretty much plug and play, like Lego bricks, that's how it's sold," Boisclair-Roy said. "But they're is much more to do. You really have to understand how you take one Lego block and really try to understand what's happening in there. What's the ins and outs? Why are things happening? You have to understand those Legos well to make it go through. MACH is fast, it's true, but only when the pieces are tied together."
And you can only learn that as you go.
Early on, for example, teams assembled pieces of the martech stack. They relied on vendor-provided connectors — some of which were built in Java, a language unfamiliar to their Python-focused team. At first it helped them move quickly, but long-term it made debugging harder. Eventually, they rewrote the connectors themselves to gain better control.
"There was a big learning curve," Boisclair-Roy said. "When there's something up with a connector, it's missing information. How do we change it? And we didn't want to rely on different partners to do this kind of stuff. We wanted to own things internally. ... So we slowly removed that connector piece by piece."
Governance, Training and Letting Go
Perhaps the hardest part was change management. With 25–30 developers involved, Boisclair-Roy had to get teams thinking beyond traditional dev work.
"It's that mindset, stop trying to build everything," Boisclair-Roy said.
Sometimes it’s better to wait, see what’s on the vendor roadmap, and use that instead of burning two sprints doing it yourself. There could be new APIs. New features.
"Use the platform that is there," he said.
Marketers, meanwhile, were handed tools to configure their own experiences. They wanted to reduce their reliance on devs. They should be able to run campaigns and change layouts without tickets.
"So it's really like the fine balance between having a structure but still keep it flexible so they can just play with it," Boisclair-Roy said. "If they break it ... it's OK. We learn from mistakes."
Altitude-Sports: Connector Complexity, Martech Freedoms
| Challenge | Composable Strategy | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Platform rigidity and sync issues | Switched from Shopify to MACH stack | Improved scalability, more control over UX and data flow |
| Connector complexity | Started with vendor connectors, rewrote in-house over time | Greater dev ownership, faster debugging, tighter business alignment |
| Marketing reliance on dev | Self-service tools for marketers | Faster campaign execution and less internal friction |
Related Article: Is MACH Still the Blueprint for Modern Digital Architecture?
Diageo: A Hybrid Path to Composability at Scale
When you're overseeing digital experiences for over 200 global brands, composability isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity. At Diageo, which manages over 200 brands in 180 countries, Global VP of Digital Commerce Danson Huang leads a portfolio that supports both direct-to-consumer (DTC) websites and B2B commerce across platforms like Amazon, Instacart and Uber.
Agility vs. Governance: A Constant Balancing Act
His CMO wants agility. His CFO wants efficiency. His consumers want personalization and fast service. The result is a daily tightrope walk between scaling innovation and delivering governance.
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"So my CMO is always asking, 'Hey, how can we get the better agilities and the flexibilities that we can power the brands to scale faster?'" Huang said. "And my CFO is always asking, 'Hey, can we get efficient? And can we drive the better productivity and get some money back?' And especially now we're talking about this kind of digital AIs and other people are talking about savings, right? So there is kind of like a balance, which is something I'm trying to figure out. I don't have a perfect solution."
That’s why Diageo takes a hybrid MACH approach — using composable architecture for front-end agility (via, for example, Vercel, Contentful and Algolia) while relying on traditional enterprise platforms like SAP and PIM systems on the backend.
All told: managing 200 brands requires composability and strong governance. The ultimate goal: responsible marketing the right audience, deploying the right governance, the right flexibility, but also connecting and interacting and engaging with enterprise architectures in the right way.
"It's really hard if we don't go with composable and go with single solutions," Huang said. "Every brand needs to develop their own solutions. Translating the technology into the composable component for the brand to pick and choose and plug and play, and then make sure that 90% of the component can be reusable is amazing."
The Internal Ownership Challenge
Composability requires orchestration — and for Diageo, that means empowering teams.
The biggest challenge with being composable and ensuring marketing technology success? How can brands move from pilot and POC with AI to actually scaled enterprise capability in very short order.
"Realizing the value of investments," Nat Gross, partner, customer & digital consulting, head of media, UK, at KPMG, said when asked about challenges brands like Diageo face. "Particularly, obviously, in tech stacks and tech stacks like this. And then the operational change that that requires, in terms of being able to scale up the right amount of product and tech capability to actually deliver the value and be sustainable long term."
Lessons From the MACH Debate
When asked about recent criticisms of MACH — particularly a VTEX LinkedIn post describing MACH as operational chaos — Huang wasn’t swayed.
Huang said he supports a hybrid approach that combines composable architecture with traditional enterprise systems — a necessity for large, non-digital-native organizations like Diageo.
As a global corporation, digital is just one part of our business, and that’s why core platforms like SAP and PIM capabilities remain essential, especially for supporting off-trade and down-trade operations that don’t require frequent change. At the same time, Huang said they need more agility at the front end and in the middleware layer, which is where composable architecture comes in.
"We need to find agilities in the front end experience and middle layers that will report more composable architectures," he said.
Diageo Summary: Brand Agility Balanced With Enterprise Stability
| Challenge | Composable Strategy | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Need for brand agility with enterprise stability | Hybrid composable + legacy stack | Brand-level speed with global consistency |
| Governance vs. speed | Centralized reusable components | Faster launches, better compliance |
| Vendor overload | Careful tech evaluation, business-owned models | Focused investments with long-term ROI |
Related Article: Composable Control: Q&A on MACH, AI and the Modular CX Stack
James Hardie: Martech Modularity Meets Responsible AI
Sophia Zlatin, manager of marketing technology at James Hardie, which provides home improvement products, has seen martech evolve from static HTML sites to modular, privacy-first AI architectures. Her career began with hard-coded websites and evolved into leading digital transformation projects — and today she’s guiding her organization toward composable marketing with eyes wide open.
Digital Transformation With Guardrails
For Zlatin, composability isn’t about hype. It’s about building what you need — and knowing when not to overbuild.
"A lot of what we're working on is just making technology more modular, eliminating tech debt, really kind of setting ourselves up for success and less pain in the future," Zlatin said.
She explained that her organization is often required to pivot its technology strategy in response to shifting business needs. As those needs evolve, so do expectations for the tech stack and the applications that support it.
One area currently under exploration is artificial intelligence. Like many companies, her team is actively evaluating business use cases for AI, but Zlatin emphasized that AI introduces a unique set of challenges. Unlike traditional software systems, AI operates in a less controlled environment and evolves by learning, which raises significant concerns—especially around data privacy. She said there’s a constant need to strike a careful balance between innovation and caution, particularly when the long-term implications of AI adoption remain difficult to fully predict.
Vendor Management and Business Alignment
One of Zlatin’s biggest roles is serving as translator between IT and marketing — and between vendors and internal teams.
Call her the liaison between marketing and IT. When marketing requests a feature, she doesn't just go to the vendor. She helps define requirements, vet feasibility and protects timelines. That includes choosing modular solutions that don’t lock the business in.
"It's important to really kind of understand your requirements for being composable-first," she said.
She emphasized the importance of clearly defining short- and long-term business needs — whether they’re three months, one year, or five years down the line — to ensure any technology decisions made now can support scalability and modular growth over time. Her team works closely with vendors not just to validate their own plans, but to tap into broader industry perspectives.
She noted that while internal teams often have a solid grasp of what they need, it’s essential to look beyond internal thinking and avoid creating an echo chamber. At the same time, she stressed the need to establish practical boundaries and timelines to ensure new technology initiatives remain realistic and manageable.
"We definitely want to bring in external ideas," Zlatin said, "but we also want to set those parameters and guardrails to make sure it's a feasible project timeline."
James Hardie Summary: The Desire for IT and Business Alignment in Martech
| Challenge | Composable Strategy | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Tech debt and lack of modularity | Modular martech stack with swappable components | Scalable, future-proof architecture |
| AI risk and privacy | Private AI environments with data access governance | Responsible AI exploration without security tradeoffs |
| Vendor overload and siloed teams | Zlatin acts as translator and requirements lead | Fewer delays, more alignment between IT and business |
Conclusion: MACH Success Takes More Than a Tech Stack
Composable strategies are no longer aspirational—they’re operational. And as our interviews with Yann Boisclair-Roy of Altitude Sports, Danson Huang of Diageo and Sophia Zlatin of James Hardie show, MACH success depends less on choosing the right technologies and more on how well companies prepare their teams, their architecture and their expectations.
Across all three organizations, we saw recurring themes: aligning IT and business goals, empowering internal ownership, managing integration thoughtfully and resisting the urge to overbuild. These leaders didn’t just adopt MACH—they adapted it. And in doing so, they remind us that composability isn’t a silver bullet. It’s a discipline that demands orchestration, patience, and above all, a mindset shift.
Those themes echoed throughout the hallways of the Willis Tower this week in Chicago. And the onus is on the end-user organization to make it work — marketing technologists, it's on you, particularly.
As the MACH Alliance matures and more companies move from monoliths to modularity, the conversation is shifting from “should we go composable?” to “how do we make it work for us?”
