Bridging Content and Data: A Contentstack Conversation with Bill Mitchell of MongoDB

MongoDB isn’t exactly a household name. Unless, of course, you’re living in the land of databases or cutting through the dense jungles of unstructured stuff that needs to be stored.

In the realm of data, MongoDB is kind of a big deal. One might say it has even achieved “celebrity status” as the go-to document database for building scalable, high-availability internet apps. 

To get a little nerdy (and because I’ve used it for years), Mongo’s NoSQL posture delivers a flexible schema that lends it to agile development. It’s super versatile, enabling users to start building applications without fretting over complicated database configurations. It’s been a fixture in my cloud deployments for years, and it keeps on keepin’ on.

So… about that name: According to lore, it’s derived from the word “humongous,” as in managing large amounts of data. Which makes sense, given its purpose. And since 2007, Mongo’s purpose has been data, forging its place as a well-established and persistent service within countless product architectures. 

MongoDB now has a worldwide footprint of over 57,000 customers, making it the most used modern database on the planet. This is due in no small part to its document modeling, scalability, and deployment options—which include AWS, Azure, and GCP.

It also has a website. Or websites, to be more precise. That includes properties for documentation, client libraries, and more. Like most enterprise software companies, it has developed an expansive ecosystem of digital content used for everything from marketing to technical briefs to thought leadership.

When I was covering ContentCon25 in Chicago last month—Contentstack’s fourth annual customer event and its largest to date—I had a chance to connect and chat with a lot of smart people at agencies and end customers, as well as Contentstack’s team, including CEO Neha Sampat (you can read our interview and the event coverage here).

When I saw MongoDB on the event’s customer list, I was curious to hear how an enterprise software company approached its CMS and DXP decision-making, and how Contentstack was fulfilling its needs. 

I caught up with Mongo’s Director of Marketing Operations, Bill Mitchell, who has been involved with the Contentstack relationship from day one. As a veteran marketing technologist with hard-earned experience at global brands like Pure Storage and HP, Bill brings deep insight to B2B web strategies. We chatted about the experience of moving to a modern composable solution, the role of data and content, and even where AI is presenting opportunities and challenges.

Feel free to watch the highlight video below on CMS Critic TV, or keep scrolling for more of the good parts:

Finding the right tool for the job

MongoDB has been working with Contentstack for about two and half years, and according to Bill, it’s been a solid ride. But their previous content management system—which was custom built—wasn’t cutting it for a myriad of reasons. 

“We needed to look at a new CMS stack for our company,” he said. “We were on an open source, proprietary tool. It was free, but a ‘get what you pay for’ kind of thing. We threw a lot of manpower at it, and it was limited.”

Part of the challenge was overcoming the internal culture of “build or buy.” As Bill explained, MongoDB is an engineering culture with smart people everywhere. This made the idea of a homegrown solution a possible pathway—and a big reason why the previous CMS was a custom job. 

The upside of having a technical culture? They weren’t afraid of technical problems. The downside? As Bill expressed, those technical resources focused more on maintaining an ailing stack versus investing in new features and capabilities.

Driving a lot of the challenges was a lack of basic control for his content team. They knew they needed a platform with forward thinking, something that could adapt to market changes and was future-proofed for capabilities like personalization. As a data leader, he was focused on leveraging a broad range of integrations across a marketplace of options. The previous system lacked all those things. 

“Everything was hand-orchestrated APIs, and it was just messy and wouldn't scale,” Bill explained. “We had to find a way to get a better platform underneath us, so we could move forward.”

Of course, finding a new solution required arduous discovery, something enterprises with Mongo’s size and scale are accustomed to when considering a big software transformation. They conducted an expansive search, looking at different technology vendors, and arrived at Contentstack—a choice that he and his team have been very happy with.

When approaching the decision, I asked Bill how that team consideration played into the calculus. The solution needed to fit into Mongo’s stack, but it had to work for its people, regardless of what roles they might have across the company’s marketing and web teams.

“I came at it as a technologist,” he said. “I had a development team and the skills and expertise they brought to the table. I wanted to make sure we had a solution that one, worked for them, two, worked for us company-wise, and three, worked for others. We have multiple teams that have now adopted Contentstack, and if we had gone in other directions, that friction would be much more pronounced.”

While Bill was confident that his team could have rolled with the punches that other solutions might have presented, Contentstack helped his team overcome a number of technical limitations by unifying behind a single technology. With lots of teams working on multiple web projects, having confidence was going to be a key factor. Bill also said that Contentstack set him up with one of their certified partners to help make the transition successful.

Now that they’re operating at full speed, Contentstack is also providing continued innovation. As Bill explained, the partnership empowers MongoDB with a clear path for what’s ahead, and how customers like MongoDB can harness new features in the best ways.

“It's setting a trajectory where, as they build new capabilities, we get to adopt them,” he said. “It's putting us in a much better position to be forward-thinking about how we build digital web experiences.”

Realizing the roadmap for personalization

ContentCon25 was the splashdown for Contentstack’s new Data & Insights capabilities, which leverages the relationship between content and context – the latter term popping up across the CMS and DXP space as a sort of portmanteau for data. As Contentstack’s CEO, Neha Sampat, explained, the two need to interoperate to bring AI-powered personalization to life.

Data & Insights, which was made possible via the acquisition of the Lytics CDP earlier this year, brings a stunning scope of features to the marketer’s toolkit. This was all demoed live at ContentCon, where features like Audience Insights, Opportunity Explorer, Real-Time Data Activation, and Flows were test-driven on stage to the delight of many in the audience.

The emphasis on context came over the last 12 months as the company rolled out its new Contentstack Personalize solution, an A/B/n multivariate testing and segmentation engine. The suite also included the platform’s Brand Kit, which aimed to align AI-generated content at scale with a brand’s voice, as well as a bevy of new extensions for Contentstack Automate. 

“Content is critical, but data is the foundation that makes content work. You need both. Without data, content lacks personalization. Without content, data has nothing to fuel.”

Personalization continues to be the “Holy Grail” for marketers, and the promise of generative AI has made it more attainable than ever before. Of course, there are still challenges that persist, but as Bill relayed, Contentstack’s foray into personalization is showing real promise. It’s all still relatively new, but it's clearly becoming a game changer—and appealing to both the technical and marketing sides of Bill’s brain.

“It's interesting, because when we first went down this path, personalization was not part of their feature set,” he said. “And now, in that split personality world where the technology piece of me says we could deliver personalization multiple different ways, the marketer in me says we need it to be easy, efficient, and scalable, and get the power into more hands, rather than having a few people with technical capabilities trying to orchestrate content and manage different experiences.”

Bill went on to explain how MongoDB is leveraging Contentstack to distribute these skill sets to more people on his team, so personalization can be harnessed in a more holistic way. Composability is a critical part of this, as MongoDB is using Segment as its CDP, and they have a roadmap that aligns with a number of Contentstack’s features. He said they’re already personalizing to a few audiences on specific pages of their site, with ambitions to expand.

“I'm envisioning a world where we're personalizing to multiple segments on multiple pages,” he said, “completely changing how we approach that particular problem or opportunity.”

Back in February, as Contentstack was introducing its Contentstack EDGE concept—effectively repositioning its platform as an “Adaptive DXP”—Bill was quick to address the question of how data and content coexist.

“Content is critical, but data is the foundation that makes content work,” he posted on LinkedIn. “You need both. Without data, content lacks personalization. Without content, data has nothing to fuel.”

This might be one of the most significant motivating factors behind his continued enthusiasm for Contentstack. As an ecosystem, Bill sees it bridging the gap between content and data. Traditional DXPs haven’t had the composable posture to meet this urgent need, one that’s essential to realizing the value of AI.

On that note… what about AI?

As I reported from the ground at ContentCon, the conversation around AI was at a fever pitch. There was barely a session that didn’t evoke some modicum of discussion about an AI-powered feature, or how AI was affecting the entire trajectory of the DX industry. 

For her part, Neha Sampat focused on the positive opportunities being activated by AI. During her opening keynote, she painted a picture of what’s ahead for those daring enough to make the journey. As she said, there’s no bridge from the “safe” to the promise of the future. Crossing that chasm is an act of courage.

But even the best-built bridges can make people anxious, especially when you’re taking the first steps across. I asked Bill what he thought about the outlook with AI, how the market is changing, and where MongoDB is headed with its own AI trajectory. 

Is it scary? Sure, he admitted. But the momentum is undeniable.

“You're taking steps without really knowing that it's the right step,” he said. “You know you need to move forward. There's no doubt AI is going to drive change from top to bottom in every organization. I think in our world, we're trying to do the basics, get chatbots going, and help people find content and answers to problems. But on the internal side, we're still struggling to really crack the code, if you will, on the best way [for AI] to bring scale and opportunities to how we do business more effectively. And that's beyond just the web.”

In terms of the early AI gains, Bill’s documentation team launched an AI chatbot for its dedicated docs site a year and a half ago. It was initially focused on documentation, allowing users to ask a question, be served an answer, and link to the correct doc for a more complete story. Given its success, they’ve pulled it into Mongo’s dotcom site, where it’s evolving the experience in new ways.

“We’re building out this custom LLM that has all our content housed in it,” he said. “Now we’re trying to figure out the right recipe for what it is, because it’s not just a web experience anymore.”

As Bill mentioned, a lot of the AI-powered topics being discussed on stage at ContentCon—things like automating campaign generation or setting up audience segmentation—are still being classically orchestrated. Although everyone sees and understands the potential for AI, tapping into the full potential is still an ongoing process. This is where Contentstack’s culture of support and guidance is proving decisive for customers as they try to predict what’s next. 

For Bill, finding solid ground to land AI is the goal. “Leading into AI, there’s still trepidation around driving content without human oversight, which will limit the variations for personalization,” he said. But the potential to scale up to the right number of variants is a game-changer.

At ContentCon, the Magic 8-Ball predictions were focused on 2030 and anticipating how things will change in just five years. Neither Bill nor I had any idea what the software and marketing world might look like, but he had one response that rang true:

“I know it'll be a hell of a lot different than it is today.”

Leveraging the power of human support 

As the composable, MACH-driven approach has caught fire, enterprises have struggled with the role of accountability in the equation. In many cases, agency partners have assumed the risk associated with any recommended technologies in a stack. But for some organizations, internal teams have been struck with hosting overages or other issues related to a point of failure. In those cases, who’s responsible?

When I spoke to Contentstack about this in Amsterdam at the MACH TWO Conference back in 2023, they were already evolving their “Care Without Compromise” program to answer this conundrum. Since then, it has become a foundation for its composable ambitions, providing a deeper relationship promise for customers to help ensure success. 

Does it work? According to Contentstack, the program boasts a 98% customer satisfaction rating and a 97% customer retention rate. While the company furnished those numbers, they're pretty compelling metrics.

I asked Bill about his experience with Contentstack’s support, and what the idea of “Care Without Compromise” really means to a customer like MongoDB.

“Having worked with lots of technology vendors, I tend not to put much faith in those statements, but I was really surprised by how well they've catered to us,” he said glowingly. “We had to get off the ground with content modeling, new tools, and integrations. We were working with a vendor on some of these things, but Contentstack was in there, making sure we had the right advice.”

As Bill explained, Contentstack was involved in multiple dimensions of the relationship, supporting Mongo’s decision-making around strategic pathways. And now, as they transition to personalization, AI, and other advanced features, Contentstack’s support and technical services teams are engaged, conducting periodic check-ins and helping them think through what’s next. 

“They're rolling stuff out all the time, which is great from a product side,” he said. “But there are people to help us ensure we can build a plan to utilize it, which is important. Otherwise, it's just shelfware, and we're not able to take advantage of it.”

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