MACHtales: Voices from “The Composable Conference” with Jina Zohori of Agility CMS

Jina Zohori is a customer fanatic. 

OK, maybe customer-centric is more corporately apropos. But given her passion and gusto, fanatic feels a little more on target. It reflects her enthusiasm for championing success at a human level – and bringing Agility CMS's powerful yet simple solutions to content creators and developers.

She also sees this rabid customer commitment as a holistic calling, one that marshals an entire organization's collective efforts.

“Being customer-centric isn't just marketing's job, or sales’ job, or customer success,” she said during our chat at “The Composable Conference” a few weeks ago. “It's an engineering job. It's everybody's job. Technology is for everybody. And that experience, driven through our technology, doesn't have to stop at our customers.”

That attitude is one of the many reasons why Jina is a rockstar leader – and exactly what Agility needs to navigate the dense and fiercely competitive jungles of the headless CMS landscape. As president, she combines her tech savviness and business acumen to drive strategy and meet the needs of her users, especially those in the deep trenches of digital experience and content creation.

When I met with Jina at the recent MACH Alliance conference in Chicago, I was eager to talk to a headless CMS that was a member of the open, best-of-breed cabal. This year’s conference modified the formula a bit, and I wanted some perspective on what’s changed through the CMS lens – and how the Alliance is continuing to support the goals of content management systems. 

This is a key question, especially as the market wrestles with questions about the ROI of composable strategies. As stories of failures and contradictory posts by VTEX color the decision-making, customers are looking to their trusted SIs and vendors to help them navigate the complexities.

As a 22-year veteran of the space, Agility is taking it all in stride. A big part of their success? You guessed it: customer centricity. And as Jina explained, that’s manifested through Agility’s focus on meaningful outcomes.

“Our bread and butter isn’t just our content management system as a platform,” she said, “but the experience you gain through that as an editor, as a developer, and of course as an end user consuming that content on the front end.”

The evolution to headless CMS

While we didn’t go deep into the archives, Agility’s heritage is arguably one of its key advantages. With more than two decades under their belt, they’ve seen market opportunity and turmoil – and continued to persevere. 

Over the years, the Canadian-born and bred platform has earned a stellar reputation, powering large-scale enterprise brands like Cineplex, Scotiabank, and Mitsubishi Electric with its headless CMS. 

Like many of its legacy peers, life began as a solution to a common agency problem.

“When we were building sites for our customers, we realized, 'Hey, it'd be really great if we had a CMS for this,'" Jina said. "Not only would we be able to have everything housed in one really nice package, but it would give the customer more autonomy, so they're not reliant as much on the developers, which would be us at that point.”

As a consultancy, building websites opened more doors for implementing their homegrown CMS. As the footprint expanded, the mission shifted from easing the burden for their internal developers and giving more ownership and domain to their customers.

The pivot to a headless CMS architecture came later, as CEO and co-founder Jon Voigt and CTO Joel Varty saw the advantages of decoupling to provide even greater control and autonomy for developers. According to Jina, this journey began before the headless “Gold Rush.”

“Prior to ‘headless’ being coined as a term, we were already looking at how we become more cloud-native, API driven, and decoupled,” she said.

It wasn't quite SaaS at that time, but as Jina explained, Agility was aiming for greater flexibility and optionality, so the front end – whatever it might be, whatever channel the presentation layer should be – provided greater freedom and control.

“It allows users to just be able to do more.” And the rest, as they say, is history. 

From an architectural perspective, Agility’s scalable and flexible posture makes it a seamless solution for composable stacks. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Agility UX, and it reflects thoughtful and persistent innovation. The company makes a conscious effort to engage customers around product betas to help perfect their tooling, which has resulted in its rock-solid Web Studio and other features that put the headless CMS over the top. 

The road to MACH

Agility has been a member of the MACH Alliance since mid-2023. Since then, the Alliance has ballooned to well over 100 member technologies, many of which have aligned to deliver a myriad of composable solutions. As Jina described, the MACH ecosystem of partners – and the resulting collaboration – has really made an impact for Agility.

“What MACH does for us is it gives us that sense of community,” she said. “Not just headless in the CMS space, but all these other vendors that come together and provide a full composable solution. Which, again, gives more autonomy to our customers to be able to easily plug and play with different technologies to fit their stack and their needs to better service their customers.”

Mapping the future with AI

AI was on everyone’s mind at “The Composable Conference,” from agentic AI to agentic commerce and beyond. Like all of its other endeavors, Agility has been careful and intentional around its AI roadmap, blocking and tackling around the hype and engaging with customers around their practical and “blue sky” wish lists.

Being at the conference helped crystallize things for Jina – and reinforce Agility’s approach.

“Obviously, AI is a big part of what our future roadmap looks like,” Jina said. “But being really strategic and listening to these kinds of stories helps refine that for us. So there's an idea of what you think your customers would want, and you're like, okay, I'm gonna give them AI. But really, how is it impacting their day-to-day experience in our platform to do more with less?”

As Jina explained, Agility’s AI play is focused beyond the low-hanging fruit, focusing on tangible ways to make their product experience easier, smoother, and more enjoyable to use.

“You're on the platform for eight hours a day sometimes,” she reminded me. To that end, usability is key, and AI should help simplify everything from block editors to manipulating pages and templates. 

“We're really focused on that day-to-day usage and how we enhance and make that better for our users.”

Takeaways from “The Composable Conference”

As I've written about previously, this year’s MACH Alliance confab provided different tracks for attendees, designed for the early “MACH Curious” to “Active” and “Pro” practitioners. Obviously, Agility falls into the latter, and I wanted Jina’s perspective on what stood out.

“I've been hearing some of the stories from potential customers, and a lot of the MACH Alliance members are telling us about their pain in the beginning of moving towards a composable stack,” she said. 

I heard this from attendees as well. She noted that some of this angst might have come from the lackluster promise of easy-to-use software combined with a gap in proper training – or even the introduction of “green” staff with limited experience.

One of the big changes Jina zeroed in on was the shift in narrative surrounding use cases. Based on her observation, last year’s content focused more on vendors and how their composable tech stacks were central to solving problems. This year, brands took center stage, and customer experience was the focal catalyst for composable transformation. 

Interestingly, Jina gained a lot of perspective on this from attending the “MACH Curious” sessions.

“I wanted to [know] what triggers people to want to move to a composable solution,” she said. “If they're solving these problems with their monolithic solution, and it’s doing the thing it's supposed to do – the website's up, it's running, it's great, it's converting – what's triggering you to think about what else you can do to make things easier?”

Smart. And as Jina noted, uncovering the factors requires a deeper dive with the people working on the product and the solution, and the brands in attendance were openly sharing their lessons on a multitude of dimensions. She found this to be incredibly refreshing.

“I love that we're [putting] customers first,” she said exuberantly. “It's not all about how I use these really great brands to build out my tech stack, and now we're making X/Y dollars. A lot of the presentations actually had some of the metrics completely wiped out. Because it wasn't about that – it was about the customer experience.”

An “agile” conclusion if there ever was one. 

Here’s six minutes with Jina: 

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