Headless CMS platforms promise flexibility, speed, and omnichannel delivery. In enterprise environments, though, the hardest part of a replatform is rarely the technology. It is getting people with competing priorities to agree on what the content model should do, and why.
In this session, Anna Kucera shares lessons from guiding a major hospital system through a replatform from a legacy CMS to Contentful. What looked like a technical migration quickly exposed deeper organizational challenges: more than a dozen stakeholder groups, inconsistent legacy content structures, decentralized ownership, compliance requirements, editorial needs, SEO considerations, and pressure to retire multiple systems at once.
This case study shows how content modeling can serve as more than a technical exercise. It can become a practical tool for building alignment across marketing, IT, strategy, SEO, clinical, and editorial teams. Anna will walk through how to shift teams away from migrating legacy page types and toward modeling reusable content concepts, how to structure workshops that make tradeoffs visible, and how to balance developer needs, editorial usability, governance, and business outcomes without over-engineering the system.
Attendees will leave with a clear framework for using enterprise content modeling to reduce political friction, improve decision-making, and create more sustainable headless implementations. This session is especially relevant for agencies, consultants, and enterprise digital leaders responsible for guiding decoupled CMS projects or content initiatives.
What attendees will learn:
- How to structure content modeling conversations to build consensus across departments
- How to translate business priorities into practical model decisions
- How to reconcile technical, editorial, governance, and compliance needs
- How agencies and consultants can use modeling to drive adoption, not just implementation
This session is especially relevant for agencies, consultants, and enterprise digital leaders responsible for guiding decoupled CMS projects or content initiatives. Attendees do not need technical knowledge to benefit from this session. Basic familiarity with structured content models will be helpful.
Audience
Beginner
Session Category
Agency and Business
Speaker(s)