General Assembly transforms engagement for 80,000 global learners with composable approach
How an enterprise skilling provider made the journey to composable with Sitecore XM Cloud.
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When Jourdan Hathaway, CMO of General Assembly, and Jeffrey Rondeau, Director of Engineering for Merkle, took the stage at Sitecore Symposium 2024, a compelling success story unfolded. General Assembly, a global upskilling, reskilling, and talent provider, wanted to generate more leads for its public and private classes and build credibility among prospective enterprise customers. But it faced an outdated tech stack and limited people resources to get the job done.
A disconnected experience
We needed to make it easier to find our products and services, but we were hamstrung,” Hathaway said. “We knew there had to be a better way for customers to connect with us and stay current on our offerings.
Founded in 2011, General Assembly pioneered the concept of a tech bootcamp. Today, its enterprise skilling programs reach 80,000 learners around the globe. Through its bootcamps, courses, workshops, and other services, General Assembly works with individuals to launch their tech careers and helps enterprise organizations build diverse, scalable tech talent pipelines.
Vision for success
Working with Merkle, a leading a leading data-driven customer experience management company and Platinum Sitecore Partner, Hathaway and team outlined their top requirements:
- Improve lead capture to drive impact, economic mobility, and revenue.
- Increase visitor-to-lead-conversion rate by making it easier to connect with General Assembly.
- Make it easier to update the site to accelerate business enablement and speed.
A composable future
Merkle optimized for flexibility and recommended an atomic design approach to break ideas down into their smallest pieces. “Using Storybook, we built frontend components, providing developers and designers a single source of truth for ready-to-implement functionality that accelerated the speed at which General Assembly could design and deploy across channels,” said Jeffrey Rondeau, Director of Engineering, Merkle.
A new high-level architecture took shape, with Vercel as the frontend host and XM Cloud as the CMS. XM Cloud provides for omnichannel content delivery, but the CMS is not responsible for rendering the presentation layer. The resulting system provides consistency in the user experience yet remains highly extensible and allows for flexibility across any number of markets, touchpoints, platforms, and devices.
Delivering value from the outset
The new architecture promised to deliver value to General Assembly, as well as its customers, right from the start. The company would gain increased scalability, reliability, and performance, while at the same time improving security, flexibility, and intuitiveness for its website visitors.
When it came time to go live, the General Assembly/Merkle team avoided a big-bang approach and instead launched small product segments, while controlling the percentage of customers who were exposed to the new experience. In this way, they were able to begin testing site performance earlier by incorporating customer feedback and making key optimizations sooner.
Building the right fit
In a matter of days, the team accomplished more than they had thought possible. They quickly made a punch list of optimizations and ranked them for impact. Then they wrote, designed, and developed the solution, followed by a quick deployment and immediate measurement against KPIs.
“We mobilized, prosecuted, debated, decided, measured, planned, created, built, deployed, reported, and moved mountains in an incredibly short amount of time,” Hathaway said.
In a closing message to the audience, she summed up her experience in moving to a composable future with Merkle and Sitecore XM Cloud:
“Do not settle for a website misfit. Instead, build your right fit.”
Learn more about the benefits of a composable digital experience platform (DXP).