The Project
"How might PayPal achieve a +200% conversion lift to their digital content across international markets?"
The delivered solution:
A new product that allowed marketing and product teams across the organization to 4x content production velocity, cross-link SEO markup data, and implement a new 3.0 design system across all PayPal domains.
The Problem Statement
PayPal’s existing CMS was over-engineered and built on an inflexible decade-old infrastructure with fragmented authoring workflows. This created obstacles including:
- Difficulty complying with regional regulations and localization needs, leading to market entry delays
- Duplicate and outdated documentation spread across repositories
- Low organic findability and SEO value due to ineffective metadata and templating
- Bottlenecks for marketers to publish and update central websites, landing pages, documentation, and articles
- Lack of optimized content authoring workflows for global teams
In order to identify and define this problem, I took a systematic approach to discovery through stakeholder interviews, content audits, and deep analysis of technical limitations. It quickly became clear that launching a new ECM platform was critical to unlock SEO value and accelerate global content publishing.
Product Discovery Approach
Once problems were validated through research, I moved to align stakeholders on a solution approach. My strategy included:
- Conducting working sessions with 20+ subject matter experts in design, marketing, and engineering to map high-level needs.
- Leading brainstorms on the use cases of developing our own proprietary Content Management System (CMS) that could ensure our vast content libraries could be properly optimized and globalized.
- Developing an ECM Requirements Document outlining 250+ platform capabilities based on gaps identified in discovery. Categories spanned SEO, authoring, governance, and integrations.
- Creating a globalization framework that marketing utilized to prioritize market-specific localization, and align regulatory and content needs for regions 5 Core markets, and 4 Emergent markets.
- Building a migration plan to efficiently transition legacy content and minimize authoring disruption. Which included content freezes and staged cutover.
- Instituting a risk management process including tracking risks like platform choice, migration, and global template rollout. Mitigations included piloting and change management.
This immersive, collaborative planning enabled us to build confidence in our ECM strategy across stakeholders. My inclusive approach was key to driving alignment on solution architecture before kicking off development.
Introducing PayPal's
Enterprise Content Management System
Main Use Cases: Purpose built for scale and integration
Have similar use cases to implement? Email or schedule time with me to learn more.
Overcoming Key Challenges
While thorough planning paved the way for success, any large-scale transformation inevitably surfaces obstacles. During the 6-month development timeframe, we faced numerous challenges, which I’ve outlined below and the remediations I put in place to mitigate:
- Challenge #1: Resource constraints for engineers supporting legacy systems led to launch delays. We mitigated through closer dependency planning.
- Challenge #2: Tight budget limits required creative solutions like leveraging internal tools and documentation to lean on existing multi-platform API integrations.
- Challenge #3: Scope creep from new regional requirements needed careful prioritization to prevent feature bloat.
- Challenge #4: Unanticipated effort for integrating new front-end components and design features, global site analytics and other core infrastructure modifications caused schedule overruns.
To tackle issues proactively, I led bi-weekly risk reviews, tighter scoping of upcoming sprints, and open communication with team leads. My focus on transparency helped maintain trust and morale despite hurdles.
In the end, we delivered a stellar MVP that met our core goals within 2 months of timeline. Post-launch, we continued improving the platform and addressing internal stakeholder priorities.
The experience reinforced that even seasoned PMs encounter blindspots. While I excelled at mitigating risks, I learned to further strengthen contingency plans for large programs. Our shared success overshadowed the roadblocks along the way.
Performance Boost
The launch of the new Enterprise Content Management platform enabled PayPal to unify and centralize content operations globally. Which increased digital conversions on average by 40%
Content Production
Implementation of flexible APIs and authoring tools empower faster content velocity and localization across 6 international markets.
SEO Optimizations
With robust SEO enhancements and optimized web experiences, PayPal's ECM system drives increased organic visibility and engagement across 4+ billion annual website visitors.
Conclusion
The new Enterprise Content Management platform went live in January of 2023. Since launching, the ECM system has transformed PayPal’s global content operations.
Powering over 200 sites, and hosting over 1.5 billion structured snippets of content that spans across 6 international markets, the platform has unified content under a single infrastructure. With its robust APIs, globalized authoring, and modern SEO enhancements, the ECM solution has strengthened PayPal’s online presence worldwide.
Annually, PayPal’s websites receive 4+ billion views combined. The success of this monumental replatforming validates the value of our user-centric approach. Despite roadblocks, the team delivered an innovative platform that solves core business needs.
I am proud to have led this initiative from vision to reality. The program reinforced that clear stakeholder alignment, immersive planning, and transparent communication enable us to achieve ambitious goals.
The ECM platform stands to benefit PayPal for years to come through accelerated content velocity and amplified global visibility. But more importantly, driving this change exemplified how cross-functional leaders can unite around a common purpose to pioneer game-changing solutions.