Roadmap to Value with Content Supply Chain - Use Cases

Transcript

All right. Good morning. Thank you all for joining. Welcome to the session for today focused on the value realization framework, Roadmap to Value, led by Ewan Hruska, who worked at Adobe in the field engineering team as a principal architect. Just a note, this session is being recorded, and the link to the recording will be sent out to all those that have registered. My name is TJ Stone. I also work in Adobe’s field engineering department as a customer success manager, where we focus on helping customers get as much value as possible from the Adobe solutions that they use. Another quick note, today’s session is set up in listen only mode, so please make use of the Q&A and chat pods for any questions that do arise. The scope for today is going to cover everything from defining what content supply chains are, use cases, defining use cases, some primary use cases associated with content supply chain, and also how to build a use case roadmap. Adobe interviewed hundreds of executives and identified these five pillars as the most common barriers for realizing value. Each pillar represents a critical theme tied to delivering value. The lack of strategic planning in any one of these pillars can often be the cause of failure. Each session in this mini-series will highlight one pillar from the framework and share key artifacts to support strategic planning and accelerate value realization within your organization. For today’s session, we’re going to be focusing on the roadmapped value. Today’s session will be followed by four additional sessions that break down the value realization framework pillar by pillar focused on content supply chain uses. Session two will be led by Will Brisbane and will cover the North Star architectures, followed by an operating model design session covered by Bernice Blanc. Session four will then be covered by Kaylee Turnwald, who will cover how to establish executive sponsorship and then we’ll wrap the series with Sadev Tatik, who will discuss change management. Links for all of these sessions will be pasted into the meeting chat here in just a few minutes. Please note that these sessions are on different days of the week and different times, so it’s not a consecutive weekly schedule, but we do hope that you will be able to join us for the remaining four sessions. With that, I’m going to turn it over to Euan, who will kick off today’s session. Hi everybody, my name is Euan Urshka. As I said, I’m here joined with Diane hanging back there. She doesn’t say much, but she’s back here today. I’m going to cover the content supply chain. I’m going to be bouncing around, so I’m actually going to go off camera here, so I apologize for that, but hopefully you can follow along here. So I want to start off by level setting on a few definitions to avoid the confusion later. Today we are discussing the process or collection of processes known as content supply chain. Content supply chain is the end-to-end business process associated with planning, creating, managing, delivering, and measuring content across components. You might have heard the term Gen Studio. Gen Studio is a family or suite of applications. That includes Workfront, AEM, Creative Cloud Enterprise, Gen Studio for Performance Marketing, Firefly, Express, and AEP, and addresses those plan, create, manage, deliver, and measure needs that are associated with content supply chain. One more clarity on this. You probably have heard about our product Gen Studio for Performance Marketing. Just to be clear on that, that’s just one part of the Gen Studio family. So when you hear just the term Gen Studio, we’re talking about the suite of tools, and Gen Studio for Performance Marketing is one of the applications within that. And it is a Gen AI First application that enables you to plan, create, activate, and optimize all within the same interface. Many of you may be in organizations that have some variation of a content supply that looks something like this. It’s kind of a tangled mess. This is what we refer to as the Spaghetti Slide. You may have seen this before in your other conversations. It’s complicated, it’s confusing, and it’s error prone. Some of the core challenges for content supply chains are that there’s too many tools. There’s too many possible starting points, and there’s not enough clarity on what to do first and how to prove the value. This is where we start thinking about things strategically. If you can look at this broad picture and then dive into what needs to be addressed, you can move towards some success with your content supply chain challenges. What you’re going toward is something that looks something like this, where you have your different steps clearly marked out, clearly defined, clearly walked through. You’ll notice I’m not talking about any of the solutions yet, but I am starting to introduce something that we call the pillars. If you look across the top here, you have workflow and planning, creation and production, asset management, delivery and activation, reporting insights. These are the big needs, the big themes that are associated with content supply chain. This is going to come back into the conversations in a short while. The Gen Studio family of applications supports every role and connects them in an end-to-end process. Creative or marketing operations get things moving by kicking off a campaign brief and managing its progression from planning to execution. Creative teams ideate and conceptualize the outcome and create assets. Content authors discover, create and distribute content.

In the operations side, they scale the asset variants. Marketers remix on brand content for campaigns. And then a lot of times you have a legal brand component in there and they approve things. They make sure everything meets compliance requirements. The different channel teams deliver and personalize the content through many, many applications, appropriate channels that match their needs. And then strategists construct and review performance insights with leadership and operations. And it kind of becomes a circular process. Start over again. Okay, what did we learn last time? How do we move forward with this? So how do we get from spaghetti to streamlined? We have to think strategically about this. It’s not as simple as let’s just go do this thing. If you just go do the first thing that comes up as a need, you’re more than likely to run into some roadblocks there. So we start by defining your use cases. And this is something that you can start to develop. So start to define those use cases. Understand what your content supply chain architecture looks like, how your organization is structured, determine the appropriate roles and ownership of those, and then plan for the changes associated with it. You might have noticed that this is the exact same sequence that our sessions are covering. Today we’re going to talk about the first step, alignment to or development of use cases and subsequent subsequently a use case roadmap that allows you to turn your content supply chain vision into a sequenced measurable plan. A couple quick definitions that we’ll talk about in a minute. But first, use case development is a strategic exercise. By going through the steps to build out all of your ideas based on business needs and then systematically cataloging them, reviewing them, and prioritizing them, you can make sure you’re working on the right effort at the right time.

So this next section is going to go through the development of that, and then that will be followed up by how to prioritize them. First off, use case. What is a use case? A use case is a clearly defined repeatable way a customer, you, use Adobe capabilities to achieve a specific business outcome. This is expressed in the terms of who is the target, what action is desired, where it is delivered, and why it matters.

A use case roadmap is a prioritized time phase plan that takes all those use cases, right, and it aligns them with the business objectives and it sequences them out so you know when you’re going to deliver on those. Because content supply chain, the breadth of it is quite broad, we break the use cases down by theme.

If you’ve seen some of our other sessions on use cases in the past, this is because this is a very strategic, you have to think system, you have to use system thinking when you’re thinking about content supply chain. Think broadly and we break that down into these five primary pillars, workflow and planning, creation and production, asset management, delivery and activation, and reporting and insights. Same kind of things. These are the traditional pillars that are associated with them. You’ll notice that there’s no applications associated with these at this point in time because we want you to think about the business need before you go down the application track. In addition to these five pillars, also in recent years we’ve discovered a couple more and these have to do with the rise of AI capabilities becoming more important and that constantly need to do more with less in less time. So, remixing, optimizing that content and then automating and scaling that production. So, let’s talk about use cases in a little bit more, with a little bit more definition here. First, how do you start with a use case definition? Start with the why. What is the business outcome you’re looking to achieve? Okay. What part of the content supply chain is in scope? Understanding if it fits within which bucket, within which pillar is really important here.

And then what KPIs and business objectives are you trying to prove? Then you take that, if you take that use case, figure out who is involved. So, the team and you’ll hear the word who. One thing I’ve found on these is that you have to kind of dive in a little bit deeper than just who, but what is the target audience? Who’s the people that are actually going to be using that? Who is the key person related to delivering on that outcome? What do we want to do for that group? What does that group want to do differently? And then where will that happen? That’s where you start talking about the tools and the channels and those sorts of things. So, mapping this then to the how is where you start diving into more of the details. This is where you sometimes need, this is where you typically will need a little bit more help. A lot of the steps before this you could actually do yourself. You could start those things, but how a lot of times needs more help. That’s where you start to involve more partners. Adobe, what is the best application? How do I get to this point? How do I take these things that I want to do and make them happen? So, once you’re clear on the why, who, what, where, that’s where you reach out to your account teams and ask them how.

Some questions that can help you answer these things. Which content supply chain building blocks? What applications are involved? What components? What inputs, dependencies, and outputs are required? When I’m thinking about content supply chain, I usually think about a process flow. You have an input, you have an output, and you have the stuff in the middle. What does that look like? What constraints or blockers might impact your scoping? Typically, these are tech and you can categorize these as tech. What are the technical issues? What is the technology issues that may be in the way? And then what are the people issues? Sometimes you don’t have the right people in place in order to make something happen. Make sure you understand what those are. And then also, data processes. What are the things you need to establish to make it real? So, you combine all those things.

At Adobe, we use this model. I want to accomplish this for this person by what means, essentially, in order to have that success. Success, and then what is the success defined by and how will it be achieved? So, if you think about this kind of statement and you put all your use cases in that kind of statement, you end up with a tangible use case. When it comes to content supply chain, we have established some primary use cases. So, these are pillar by pillar. These are kind of standard use cases that have been vetted through our engagement with customers. This is across Adobe. So, they’ve come in from multiple areas. We’ve determined what the uses are. A lot of these come out of the product development area as well, and they’ve been vetted by a number of folks. So, first off, just so you start to understand the applications associated with each of these before we go into the primary use cases, we have workflow and planning. We have work front planning, work front workflow. So, work front workflow, for anybody who’s not familiar with that term, that’s the traditional work front. Work front planning is the new capability. For creation and production, we have frame IO. This is going to be a big topic in 2026. Creative Cloud Enterprise, Firefly Services, and Express.

For asset management, AM assets. Pretty clear there. Delivery and activation, we have Sites, Adobe Journey Optimizer, Realtime CVP, Marketo, Engage. There’s probably a few more actually that could fall into that bucket as well. Reporting and insights, customer journey analytics, content analytics, which is coming out in 2026. The additional layers are the remix and optimize content for performance. That’s where we see Gen Studio for performance marketing, work front, AM assets, content analytics again, and potential new product in the Gen Studio suite. Automate and scale production of asset variations are Firefly Services, work front, and AM assets. So, each one of these, I’m not going to go into the entire body of all these. You’re going to get a copy of this deck to leave behind, but I’m going to go through and just kind of show you what we’ve developed here. So, you have this as a nice resource going forward. So, from the workflow and planning pillar, we recognized four use cases. The way to look at this is to look at it from what is the business objective that you’re trying to meet. When I’m trying to figure out, when I’m looking at a large body of, you know, a large list of things, I need to figure out the things that actually are associated with my needs. So, this is organized in a way that you look at business objective. The business objective is made up of a KPI. So, time to market is the KPI. And what do you want to do with it? You want to decrease it. So, it’s meeting the business objective of it. And then we’ve also emboldened, bold? We’ve made the key points bold here for, you know, what to look for in here. So, I want to streamline the strategic planning workflows, right, to decrease the time to market. So, for each of these, as you’re looking at them, you can see how that maps by looking at the bold area. And then diving into the details a little bit more and seeing if that matches up with your use case. If your use case doesn’t match directly with these primary ones, it doesn’t mean that it’s not a content supply chain use case because it’s a very broad area. One thing to keep in mind here is that this is, you know, it’s an extremely wide categorization of tools, but it’s in the effort to deliver content. When we talk about creation and production, you’ll notice a couple things here on the business objectives for all of these two. The decreased time to market is a common business objective. So, saving yourself time, right? You’ll see content ROI more and more in the creation and production and asset management area. And what that’s saying is we want to reduce the amount of spend and improve the return on our investment. Just this model so you can kind of see where this is. The asset management one is really straightforward. Again, this is a lot of the things too that you would normally associate with like AEM assets may be in one of the other pillars. So, note that these are the map over scaling production of assets. There’s a lot for AEM assets there.

When we talk about delivery and activation, this is about orchestrating and optimizing cross-channel experiences. Again, you’re decreasing the time to market on these. When you talk about reporting insights, this is about delivering, you know, optimizing your bottlenecks. This is really about how you use a report, what are the advantages of a dashboard report analysis visualizations of your data can result in. And then remixing and optimizing. I’m going to go ahead and skip over these bits. A lot of this will be a leave behind that you can reference. But I want to get into the nuts and bolts of this conversation here. Populating a use case roadmap is kind of the key next step. Once you have these individual use cases and you’ve defined each one of those, you want to put them into what we call a use case details directory. This is a list of a list of use cases, essentially. It’s a special list that can include things like current status, the different blockers associated with it, the value, and the effort. Value and effort are things that you kind of populate once you have all of your established use cases recorded. So, if you’re looking at, so go through for each use case, explain what it is, what the status is, what the various blockers may be. And then as a whole, when you’re looking at the whole list, then measure the value and effort. Those are relative with each other. So, high value, medium value, low value. You could potentially go through this and add more variants. You do a five point scale or something else to match your organization’s needs. We tend to go with the high, medium, low. One thing to note is that value and effort are opposite in this situation. You want a high value, low effort use case, typically, to address first. That’s your low hanging fruit. We populate a chart that looks something like this. Ours look a little bit different from this, but when you’re building this out, this is one way to build up this use case detail directory. So, you classify everything by the pillar and content supply chain. So, it’s a nice way to organize your different use cases. Add the definition of what the use case is. We have the current status. Because these are all future facing, I’ve got it proposed, but you could say it’s in progress once you start going, when you start actually building out the use cases and they come into play a little bit more. You might want to have different statuses that your organization uses to describe where those use cases are. If there’s any technical blockers, you’d put those here. If there’s any people and process blockers, you’d put those here.

These don’t, the value and effort on these don’t necessarily match with what you may end up using. So, ignore that. Just know that there’s these different classifications.

It’s good to accommodate for people that may have some color blindness. So, using a shape to define that in your drawings is a good way to do that. So, in this situation, strategic planning workflows use case has high value and low effort. That’s what we call a low hanging fruit. I don’t think I have an example here of what we call a major strategic effort. Now, a major strategic effort, big block, or big bets is what you’d call those, would be high and high. Sometimes those end up being a higher priority than even your low hanging fruit because they’re like the big things that your organization needs to get done.

But in order to figure that out in certain situations, especially when you’re dealing with multiple use cases, it’s good to add a value versus effort matrix. So, you take these two. So, we have these five use cases that we’ve captured here, and then we put those into a nine box, essentially, where high value, low effort is at your upper left. High value, high effort is on your right. So, high value, high effort, that’s your strategic big bets, right? Low hanging fruit. And then you get down into this stuff. If you have anything down the low value, high effort, those are the things that you don’t, if you tend to omit from your roadmap, right? You’re not going to have time to go into this. You’re not going to have time to address that, or maybe you don’t want to address it. So, you add your use cases to a roadmap. This is a chart that is divided by short term, mid term, long term. Typically, we divide those into one to three months, three to six months, six to six months to a year. And you may build things a little differently. You may go, you know, from now until, you know, now to six months, six months to a year, a year plus. It really depends on the organization there and how fast you move through things. Typically, don’t want to go on more than six months on the first few phases. Typically, because the strategic bets take more effort, you aren’t going to, if you use the three month basis, you’re not going to put the strategic bets front and center. You probably put your quick wins. This can vary by organization, just for clarity there. And then, I like, just specifically for content supply chain, I like to use different color coordinates, colors to highlight the different pillars. It makes it a little bit easier to see when you’re looking at a roadmap, what you’re working on. And sometimes you can say, well, you’re my guy who’s working on content efforts. I can have those folks that are working on content that clearly, so you can see it clearly in the roadmap. What that looks like is something like this. This is where you have the same data, but it’s prioritized over a time period. So, I know in my organization, and this is done as a group, you know, a lot of times it takes your strategic leaders and stuff to take that list and figure out where things lie. Make adjustments, figure out when you can address things.

I know in this next three months, I don’t have a lot of ability to focus on more than one I’m going to focus on streamlining my strategic planning workflows. You may have teams that are working on assets that are different from the ones that are working on your workflow and planning. And you could have multiple efforts here that are included in this in this swim lane. And so, you could maybe move things around a little bit.

This is a very analog way of doing this. I’ve seen some really spectacular ways of doing this with work front planning. You may have other tools that you use as well. This is an easy way to deliver it, that we deliver things to our customers through our engagements, through a everybody has. And you can see the value and effort. And there you have your use case roadmap.

So, a use case roadmap is, you know, a critical strategic resource. Building that will address some of the common issues that you might face when embarking on a content supply journey. It’ll help you put the needs before the tooling. It will guide you to what you need to do first. And it provides a value foundation you can refer to in later conversations. It is meant to be iterative. So, when we talk about iterative, that means that at a regular cadence, typically quarterly, you go back in here and you readjust. You figure out where you stand on things. You add more use cases. One of the questions I get a lot is, what do we do with those low value, high effort items? I’ll typically keep those in my use case details for at least one term. Let them be there. If you find after a second cycle that you aren’t going to address that, then you can remove it from that cycle. Because eventually, it’s just taking up space. It is good to catalog those things in case maybe things change. Maybe the value goes up over time. It’s good to have those things already registered. Other things. So, just kind of wrap up this conversation. Identify a list of initial use cases for prioritization. Design and execute that action plan. And then, when you get to a point where you need some help, and we advise you to do this anyways, contact your Adobe account team. Let them know about what your plans are. They can help align resources, people. I shouldn’t say resources. I don’t like saying resources. Align people to help you out through this journey. It will really help you move things forward. That concludes our content section.

Now we ask that you fill out the poll that I think we’ll be launching here shortly.

And we’re going to allow some time for Q&A. I cannot see the chat, so TJ, if you can let me know if there’s any questions on there. We may not be able to address them all on here, but we’ll make an effort to address them afterwards if we aren’t able to address them here. The poll is live. There is one question in the chat. It says, where would dynamic media fit in the pillars, asset management or delivery and activation or both? It would probably be in two of the pillars. It would be in asset management, and then it would also be in the automate and scale production of asset variations.

So that’s where I typically would see dynamic media fall. Because you’re scaling your content, essentially. Any other questions from the group? I’m going to stop sharing now. All right, well with that, if we don’t have any other questions, just make sure myself if I can get this. And just as a note, there will be an email coming out with these details in the deck, the lead behind that Euan has mentioned. So look for that and I think we can go ahead and wrap if there’s no other questions. I don’t see any in the Q&A or OK. That sounds like a plan then. Awesome. Thank you very much for doing this, Deborah. Thank you all for your time and we will look forward to seeing you in the next event.

Those invites or the links have been pasted in the chat if you want to go over and grab those.