Building your Adobe Experience Manager Sites team

Role Archetypes

Role Archetypes - a blueprint for building high-performing teams

Let’s focus first on how to build your AEM Sites team for the ongoing management of AEM Sites.

The type of staffing model and resourcing needs that are best for your organization will be unique simply because Adobe Experience Manager can be used for so many use cases and business needs. There is no single list of roles and no specific set of staffing levels or ratios that can be applied to all organizations. If you own both AEM Sites and AEM Assets, you will want to have a team for each solution.

That said, we can approach defining your operational model and team from a baseline of archetypes of needed roles, and your organization can adapt this baseline to fit your needs.

Archetypes are a way to represent the types of roles which must be filled. You don’t necessarily need a different person for each archetype and you could have multiple people in an archetype simply to cover all the work to be done. Using archetypes helps you identify the  breadth of responsibilities and skills to cover to ensure success. Looking at the archetypes holistically as a guide to what areas of ownership need coverage will help you alleviate gaps in staffing and ownership.

In building an AEM Sites or Assets team, we can approach the ongoing management of the solution from two parallel streams of operationalization:

• Strategy & Transformation - Includes resources to address large projects and integrations, typically aligned to focus on strategic goals and attaining outcomes such as value realization

• Basic Run & Operate -  Includes day-to-day work which needs to be accomplished to deliver multi-channel experiences efficiently, iterating to deliver new capabilities and content

Click through each tab to learn which archetype roles are important for each of these streams.

AEM Sites Role Archetypes

AEM Sites Teams - Role Archetypes

Using the streams of operationalization noted in the previous section, let's see which role archetypes fit into each category.

STRATEGY & TRANSFORMATION

Aligned for very large projects and/or integrations, typically working on roadmap items which are transformative in terms of technology, people and processes, to achieve large business outcomes, archetypes include.

• Product Owner - collaborates with teams on marrying technical and strategic visions; serves as the business owner of the solution, and performs many other functions

• Business Analyst/Architect - creates tasks for user stories and helps the product owner manage technical and business milestones

• Technical Architect - provides integration knowledge, works with the product owner to map technical milestones, and provides deep technical knowledge of AEM Sites.

• Development Team - provides Adobe Experience Manager knowledge and executes new transformative milestones with the Technical Architect

• UX Design Lead / XD Lead - establishes a design system which focuses on core components, modularity, accessibility and velocity

The most critical resource is the Product Owner who oversees the entire solution and manages across the different teams. There should be one Product Owner per AEM Solution (e.g. AEM Sites or Assets). These archetypes are recommended when executing specific milestones from your roadmap which might include larger transformation efforts focused on Content Supply Chains, Personalized Experiences, Operational Efficiencies, other strategic initiatives.

You might have a deeper investment in these resources for a critical period to deliver specific outcomes. You may scale back after delivering specific milestones while still having a continual core team across the organization to monitor technical guardrails, address issues or continually iterate from your roadmap, or you may have this team come on and offline between major efforts.

RUN THE BUSINESS - BUSINESS TEAM

Aligned to focus on the day-to-day content creation, review, approval and publication of experiences with a focus on productivity, quality, modularity and scale to efficient delivery, archetypes include:

• Admin Author  - updates the CSS skin and provides guidance to the authors who are updating and applying content. This role works on workflow configurations and creates guidance documentation for the content authors to apply. NOTE: In release 6.5 Adobe recommends using editable templates

• Content Authors and Reviewers - applies content and delivers communication issues and concerns as they arise with components, new styles etc.

For the business users in this group, change management is crucial to successfully transition resources from old ways of working, such as creating IT tickets, to quick content authoring. In AEM Sites, they will leverage a component framework, style systems and templates which allow content authors to create and publish content independent of IT, and the focus should be on delivering 80% of the experience without back-end customization.

RUN THE BUSINESS - TECHNICAL  TEAM

Aligned to focus on more technical elements of the program delivery, building workflows to drive productivity and scale, such as working on systems integrations, or architecting changes following a roadmap, often taking advantage of new product capabilities, archetypes include:

• Front-End Developer / CSS Developer - creates experience artifacts though repurposing components with new styles

• Back-End Developer - creates new components or can extend a core component. If done correctly, this role should not have more than one person, unless there is a need for large animation tasks

• Release Manager - oversees code deployment

This team is critical to creating more complex solutions, yet you want to keep this team lean and avoid over-customization, resulting in overuse of and increased reliance on back-end development. Over-customization could make work overly complex and slower, significantly reducing value realization and possibly even causing performance issues.

NOTE: This list covers managing your AEM implementation post-go-live. It does not reflect all the resources you will need for an AEM implementation

AEM Sites Role Archetype Responsibilities

AEM Sites - Role Archetypes & Responsibilities

Below we share representative responsibilities for the various role archetypes.

STRATEGY & TRANSFORMATION

PRODUCT OWNER

• Defines the vision and strategy
• Defines the scope and objectives of ongoing work
• Possesses a deep understanding of business needs
• Owns the delivery and maintenance of the solution
• Well-versed in the latest technology and trends and leads conversations which drive innovation across the organization
• Owns and manages the backlog and roadmap of features, fixes, enhancements and innovations
• Mediates with teams to convert sometimes competing goals into a cohesive plan
• Works with stakeholders to take full advantage of new features to achieve maximum value realization
• Acts as primary liaison for business with the development team
• Prioritizes needs and addresses risks
• Oversees development stages alongside a Project Manager
• Primarily responsible for gathering and analyzing the high-level requirements
• Matches requirements against the definition of success, the criteria for success, and the KPIs (business and performance based)
• Brings expertise in the use of the AEM platform to meet customer requirements based on personal and practice experience
• Keeps with the constraints of the timeline and budget
• Works directly with the development teams on the breakdown of implementation options for requirements and documenting these into User Stories
• Provides broad business experience as it relates to implementing core marketing systems, including AEM
• May be called upon to be the voice of the customer to ensure the solution aligns with business objectives

TECHNICAL ARCHITECT

• Provides integration expertise and works with the Product Owner to map technical milestones, providing deep technical knowledge

BUSINESS ANALYST

• Creates user stories and helps the Product Owner manage technical and business milestones

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

• Provides Adobe Experience Manager expertise and executes new transformative milestones with the Technical Architect

UX DESIGN LEAD / XD LEAD

• Utilizes a user experience design strategy, user research, user journey guidance, wireframing and prototyping, user-testing and analytics to improve ease of use (usability) and to create the best user experiences for various personas by exploring many different approaches to solve end-users’ problems
• Establishes the brand standards which will be built out in AEM solutions
• Works with the Front-End Developer to establish a Design System which focuses on core components, modularity, accessibility and content creation velocity

RUN THE BUSINESS - TECHNICAL

FRONT-END / CSS DEVELOPER

• Creates experience artifacts in AEM, focusing on using core components, style systems, templates, content fragments and other AEM capabilities, focusing on re-usability, using the 80-20 rule – 80% of content from core components and front-end iterations and less than 20% requiring back-end development
• Must be intentional about instilling re-suability using the 80-20 rule, having less reliance on back-end development

BACK-END DEVELOPER

• Aligns with Product Owner on strategic objectives and best practices
• Extends core components or creates new components following best practices
• Creates deeper experiences not possible through CSS/front-end development
• May work on implementation, integrations, data modeling, engineering and QA

RELEASE MANAGER

• Leads Release Management governance and oversees code deployments
• Acts as a Customer Success Engineer to the team

RUN THE BUSINESS - BUSINESS

ADMIN AUTHOR(S)

• Owns governance for content creation and creates documentation (how-tos, best practices, etc.) for the content authors to apply
• Updates the CSS skins, manages macro edits
• Provides guidance to the Content Authors who are updating and applying content
• Works on workflow configurations
• May be a Super Author who has deep Admin and Front-end experience creation expertise and may author templates
• Works with the Release Manager to coordinate launches

CONTENT AUTHOR(S)

• Sometimes known as ‘lean experience creators’
• Applies content within the style system and governance framework to produce experiences for the business
• Communicates design or experience gaps and concerns
• May be segregated into creators, reviewers and approvers

AEM Sites Sample Staffing Levels

AEM Sites Teams - Sample Operating and Staffing Models

Adobe works with many of our customers to advise them on operating models and/or to augment their staffing though Adobe services and our network of partners.

Here are a few customer examples of AEM Sites operating models. Based on your unique needs, your operating model and staffing levels will likely differ from these.

LIGHT LEAN TEAM - consumer goods, athletic apparel brand

• Product Owner: 1 (on shore, fulltime)
• Front-End / CSS Developer: 2 (on shore, fulltime)
• Back-End Developer: 1 (off shore, fulltime)
• Release Manager *: 1 (on shore, parttime)
• Technical Architect **: 1 (on shore, fulltime)
• Admin Author: 1
• Content Authors, Reviewers: varies

MEDIUM CAMPAIGN CENTRIC TEAM - consumer goods, global leader with multiple brands

• Product Owner: 1 (on shore, fulltime)
• Front-End / CSS Developer: 4 (on shore, fulltime)
• Back-End Developer: 2 (on shore, fulltime)
• Release Manager *: 1 (on shore, part time)
• Technical Architect **: 1 (on shore, fulltime)
• Business Analysts***: 2 (off shore, fulltime)
• Admin Author: 4-5
• Content Authors, Reviewers: varies
• Needed for large projects; for small to medium projects, the technical architect may handle most releases and deployments.
  ** Depending on the complexity, two might be needed for large projects.
  *** Sometimes called solution architects. May only need one.

LARGE GLOBAL WEBSITE TEAM - consumer goods, global leader using AEM Site and Assets for their intranet, not yet on the AEM Cloud Manager versions

Product Management Team - akin to a Center of Excellence for AEM Sites who collaborates with:

TECHNICAL TEAM: 1 on-site scrum team and 1 off shore scrum-team

• Creates roadmaps and submit to tech and IT for development
• Meets with Sites owners and hosts steering committee meetings focused around roadmaps for content management and governance (industry agnostic)
• Leads, manages IT teams
• May create new components for teams
• Onboards new teams to AEM Sites

BUSNESS TEAM:

• Dispersed authors around the world roll up in teams based on different areas of the site.
• One team manages merchandising, where users focus on achieving day-in-and-out business functions. Another team manages employee information accessible on the intranet.

What factors should be considered in deciding what staffing ratios and model to use?

• Be flexible. No one model fits all. Every organization differs in how they manage change and will have resources with different mixes of skills. You may have one person fill more than one archetype role.

• Understand your roadmap. You may need to have a more technical team at certain intervals or may need to pull in architects to execute more complex solutions successfully.

• Internal vs. external. Leverage and skill up internal resources where possible and be open to using external AEM specialists as well

• Location. Some teams will use a mix of onshore and offshore resources, depending on how much collaboration there might need to be in working with onshore Admins and business users

Potential Additional Internal Roles

Potential Additional Internal Roles During Implementation

During the implementation of AEM Sites, many additional resources are typically involved in the effort, with some roles filled internally and others more typically filled by experienced external consultants or implementation partners. Here are roles which may be filled internally, sometimes with augmented staff.


Project Sponsor / Executive Sponsor

• Responsible for providing the business case for the project
• Key to shaping and defining the scope and budget for the project
• Accountable for the definition of and criteria for success, including KPIs
• Provides oversight to ensure project leads and stakeholders achieve milestones aligned to the roadmap
• Acts as an escalation point for issues, risks, blockers

Business Stakeholders

• Have an interest (stake) in the success of the project
• Identifies desired business outcomes
• Contributes to project deliverables (requirements, etc.)
• May contribute to the budget

Technical Writers

• Write guidelines and manuals for specific groups. For example, a Maintenance Manual for system administrators or a User Guide for the Content Authors

IT/Security

• Responsible for the overall security concept and deployment, ensuring that it is aligned with any requirements and policies
• Responsible for security operations and recommendations for any hardware-based security concepts, such as zones and firewalls

QA/UAT Lead, QA Engineers

• Defines the quality metrics in alignment with all stakeholders
• Draws up the testing plan and ensures that it is executed
• Creates and delivers QA/UAT related reports to project stakeholders
• Responsible for the quality of the solution delivery, ensuring it meets the success and quality metrics criteria

Trainers

• Depending on the scale and nature of the project, specialized trainers can be used to develop and present training sessions for the relevant user groups

Change Managers

• Focus on the human-side of any organizational change, help drive awareness, education and change in behaviors amongst stakeholders to ensure the people being impacted by change are prepared for success and embrace change with minimal disruption to the business
• May lead or advise change/program communications, user research, program management, training development, execution and more

Potential Additional External Roles

Potential Additional External Roles During Implementation

Leveraging an implementation team who is experienced in AEM products and implementations can provide you with expertise, structure and guidance using proven frameworks for project delivery. Below are some representative examples of ways some Adobe customer operating models and staffing levels Each implementation is different, and each team uses resources differently, so your implementation project resourcing and responsibilities may differ, with more, fewer or other resources. Your implementation partner may provide similar or different resources, depending on the contracted scope.

Executive Delivery Leader

• Provides overall executive guidance during the implementation and beyond
• Advises the customer’s executive team on strategic vision and roadmap
• Highest point of escalation
• Works to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction and quality are being delivered throughout the implementation

Client Partner

• Works directly with the stakeholders, AEM Project Lead and executive team to ensure project is aligned to stated business objectives and providing the value expected
• Accountable for successful delivery of project
• Aligns with key project stakeholders to drive value realization
• Maintains open communication lines at the management level between the external implementation team and the customer
• Drives customer success through effective management of resources and risk mitigation
• Serves as key point of escalation

Project Manager

• Responsible for overall delivery of the project requirements, scope, KPIs, and success criteria provided by the Project Sponsor
• Provides leadership for AEM efforts on a project, as part of a larger program or as an entire project itself
• Manages the timeline, budget and materials
• Main point of communication for all project stakeholders
• Provides a deep understanding of Project Management in delivering Adobe Solutions
• Delivers timely communications to both internal and external stakeholders for the project
• Provides guidance on governance and the project change management process
• Manages administrative functions of the project (contracts, billing and travel expenses)
• Schedules and coordinates onsite and offsite project engagements
• Leads discussions related to managing project/program risk
• Drives the customer project using best practices aligned with the steps necessary for the customer to succeed
• Responsible for day-to-day success of the project by aligning customer expectations with project execution
• Supports the customer in the development of appropriate KPIs and business requirements
• Ensures the team is executing under a unified vision
• Drives problem solving and identifies solutions for barriers to success
• Evaluates customer requirements and provides recommendations aligned to business objectives
• Holds project team members accountable to timelines and scope needed to meet customer success

Scrum Master (similar to the Project Manager and may exist in addition to a Project Manager)

• Oversees day-to-day operations for the Development team
• Coaches the team, runs stand-ups
• Blocks or unblocks things as needed
• Gatekeeps and oversees work to ensure best practices are followed
• Works closely with the Product Owner to ensure the right priorities are addressed
• Coordinate backlog refinement efforts for story greening sessions
• Responsible for holding team accountable to scrum practices
• Coordinates efforts for backlog grooming/story greening sessions
• Responsible for defining and managing the development plan with the Project Manager and Technical Lead
• Drives the sprint estimates during the sprint planning meetings
• Conducts sprint retrospectives and introduces improvements through collected feedback
• Supports the management of testing cycle results (Unit, System/Integration, UAT)

AEM Architect / Technical Architect / Solution Architect

• Responsible for high-level design of the solution based on client requirements

• Defines AEM solution architecture and implementation strategy to ensure quality, efficiency, and maintainability

• Leads architecting the solution to meet the customer’s requirements, both functional and non-functional

• May define the concepts and guidelines around user roles (and related permissions) and the relationship between templates and components

• Provides guidelines around technical considerations to inform decision-making

• Responsible for the technical delivery of the project

• Designs and prototypes complex customizations and integrations

• Drives key performance and scalability goals

• Provides technical governance/oversight with focus on quality and efficiency

• Drives the implementation of the solution

• Responsible for accurate understanding and realization of customer’s requirements and expected implementation

• Owns the review, clarification and refinement of requirements and technical design

• Defines and executes development/integration processes, sets up required environments and tools

• Provides coaching and leadership to the development team

• Enforces AEM development best practices

• Leads the product configuration and development effort with focus on accuracy, quality, and velocity

• Leverages key connections with Adobe Engineering and Product teams to support customer requirements and implementation

• Support the customer through launch preparation

• May select the development methodology

• Provides deep technical and domain knowledge related to AEM implementations, may be called upon to lead aspects of an AEM implementation including:

  • Leading or advising on complex implementation and development tasks
  • Coaching client technical team members and developers in AEM and Adobe
  • Consulting on best practices

Business Consultant

• Provides broad business experience as it relates to implementing Core Marketing Systems, including AEM.  Drives business and marketing strategy conversations to ensure the technology implementation stays aligned to the customer's business goals. May be called upon to:

  • Lead discovery workshops
  • Identify and document business requirements
  • Act as the voice of the customer to ensure the solution aligns with business objectives
  • Drive the strategic business objectives and solution roadmap

DAM Strategist (AEM Assets)

• Owns governance for asset management use cases
• Manages the Content Structure and Metadata
• Defines and configures metadata & taxonomy in AEM
• Works with the business and technical resources on metadata, taxonomy structure, tagging, instrumentation and rollout of DAM
• Ensures digital assets are successfully migrated with accurate Metadata
• Identifies individual SMEs (power users) to work with Product Owner and DAM Strategist as creative SMEs
• Communicates issues and concerns that arise with DAM

Content Architect (AEM Assets)

• Drives digital strategy in partnership with other leaders on metadata, taxonomy structure, tagging, implementation and rollout of the AEM DAM
• Defines and configure Metadata and Taxonomy in AEM
• Promotes asset & systems governance

Developer(s)

• Delivers technical design, documentation, coding and code testing
• Develops templates, UI components, workflows, etc.
• Develops programs to integrate with external systems
• Develops, performs and assists with content migration program
• Work with customer technical team to deploy and configure Adobe products

System Engineer

• Responsible for overseeing the project infrastructure
• Responsible for the setup of internal development and test environment and matching those systems to the client systems
• Provides hardware recommendations, monitors the various implementations and provides operations support both prior to go live and afterwards

Lead Front End Developer

• Works with UX/UI designers and Architects to translate the customer’s UX design into optimized, performant functional front-end code
• Validates best practices from the design delivery, global view of UI architecture and of the visual language
• Implement the designs, with a focus on user experience (device, accessibility etc.)
• Integrate design into AEM components/templates and build structure
• Leads the front-end development effort with focus on accuracy, quality, and velocity
• Drives the implementation, responsible for accurate understanding and realization of customer’s requirements and expected implementation
• Act as primary contact for front end development
• Drives problem solving to keep project on track and identify solutions for barriers to success
• Holds team members accountable to timelines and scope needed to meet customer success
• Defines and executes development and integration processes and set up of the required environments and tools
• Enforces front end development best practices

Front-End Developer

• Works with front-end lead to translate the design into optimized, performant functional front-end code
• Implement UI components
• Ensures the adherence of front-end development best practices at all stages of UI development
• Helps the AEM team to translate the UI components into AEM components
• Implement pages layouts according to the designs

Performance & Load Engineer, UAT (AEM Sites)

• Prepares test environments
• Creates load test scripts
• Creates load scenario
• Sets up monitoring tool
• Loads test execution
• Analyses load test results
• Prepares reports
• Understands customer expectations and business critical scenarios
• Designs workload models
• Loads test objective optimization objectives
• Defines tolerance factor and scalability
• Defines test criteria and approve test design
• Reviews test results
• Prepares executive report

UI/UX Designers

• Primarily staffed for AEM Sites implementations
• Works with Lead front-end developer to implement customer’s design into AEM Sites
• Utilizes a user experience design strategy, user research, user journey guidance, wireframing and prototyping, user-testing and analytics to improve usability and create the best user experiences for various personas by exploring different approaches to solve end-users’ problems
• Establishes the brand standards which will be built out in AEM solutions
• Works with the front-end developer to establish a design system which focuses on core components, modularity, accessibility and content creation velocity

QA Lead / Quality Lead

• Leads overall QA strategy
• Provides guidance and direction for the quality practices on a project
• Sets the quality metrics
• Aligns with all stakeholders, defines and executes the testing plans
• Creates and delivers reports to project stakeholders
• Assists with design approach, migration plans, and integration strategy
• Develops test cases, writes test programs, and performs testing
• Ensures quality best practices are followed
• Orchestrates customer participation in testing activities

QA Engineer

• Oversee and sign-off on Quality Assurance testing of AEM implementation
• Develop test cases and test scripts
• Performs cyclone testing
• Assists with user acceptance testing