Did you miss the Optimizely Customer Product Roadmap webinar? Don’t worry, we’ve summarized important points below for your convenience and quick consumption. The goal of Optimizely’s (Episerver) product roadmap is to provide a unified view across all products and provide customers and partners with an understanding of when to expect capability releases.
Market Data Driving Decisions
2020 was a year of change. A website is increasingly if not completely the foundation, of an audience’s experience online. 81% of marketers expect to be competing mostly or entirely on customers experience in the future and 54% of all traffic is coming from mobile. Creating the best experience online is not an option, it’s what your audience expects.
To enable organizations to provide the best experience online, Optimizely is investing in key areas and delivering features that cater to developers and ends-users. AI and machine learning will be built in so you can enjoy the benefits without an army of data scientists. Modern, technology-agnostic platform with .NET5 support and REST APIs for easy integration. Plus, Optimization as a Service (OaaS) for experimentation that harnesses data for continuous improvement. David Bowen, VP of Product Management explains OaaS, “targeting solves for who, testing solves for how, and recommendations solves for what.” Organizations will realize the value of their investment sooner with superior A/B/n testing and recommendation engines.
Brand Update
Episerver continues to move towards a full rebrand under the Optimizely name. Striving to make the creation of sophisticated digital experiences simple with one unified platform. To further this goal they recently acquired Zaius, best-in-class Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Optimizely Product Roadmap
Content Cloud
Mark Dememny, Director of Product Management provided a quick demo of “inline-block editing.” To modify content, you will no longer be taken off-page. By clicking quick edit in a drop down you can make changes, save, publish and reroute for review without leaving the page.
In Q2 of 2021, .NET5 core will be available to customers and everyone else to follow. The following will continually be released through the first half of 2021:
- Smooth Deploy – continuous deployment without interrupting production environment
- Content APIs – easier to integrate with other front end programming languages and support headless needs
- Content Editing Updates – streamlined edit and publish flow improves usability and easily scales for organizations with larger sites
Intelligence Cloud
Director of Product, Marc Bhones demoed email content recommendations with an AI-based self-learning engine for continuous release in the first half of 2021. This includes:
Privacy
Users obtain an ID to launch and track campaigns and experiments.
Edge Enhancements
Bringing additional capabilities to Edge through extensions, custom attributes and exclusion groups
3rd Generation Product Recommendations
Higher performing onsite product recommendations for increased conversions.
Enterprise SSO
Content recommendations and personalization will support SSO for enterprise corporate domains with a goal of enabling SSO for all of Optimizely products.
Content Analytics Dashboard
Pre-built analytics dashboards across 5 key content performance areas with the ability to drilldown to multiple reports within each dashboard. This reduces onboarding for marketers and increases the value of content intelligence.
Full Stack
Optimizely (Episerver) is planning a full, ground-up redesign of the platform enabling omnichannel experimentation and feature management at scale. Optimizely continues to streamline and refine their experimentation tools to allow for easier rollout and integration for full stack feature testing. With Full Stack 2.0, editors will be able to experiment with complete end-to-end feature sets with minimal developer involvement. Using flags, edit can configure feature changes to be available to only certain segments of customers, allowing organizations to safely gather data and feedback about new or changed features without full rollouts. The experiments feature also continues to be refined with machine learning to help accelerate and make more accurate the results of experiments.
Finally, Optimizely is making strides to improve the underlaying APIs and user interfaces for experiments to help give more power to website administrators.
Commerce Cloud
Optimizely plans on expanding the toolset for its Commerce Cloud product as well.
For the PIM offering, Optimizely is focusing on improving the overall time it takes to get product information into the system. Improvements to workflow and UI are in the works to make data entry simpler and more streamlined, as well as expanding the capabilities for product data across multiple languages. Additional planned feature enhancements to help with data entry at scale include bulk editing and multi editing. For automation at scale, Optimizely plans to add auto-assignment of product assets during import and rules-based category tagging to help make these previously cumbersome tasks more automated.
Get Involved
Optimizely (Episerver) is looking for customer feedback on product direction and needed updates. Your perspective is appreciated in improving the user experience. Get involved!
