Why Composability Matters in Your Tech Stack
And why LEGO bricks won the toy world
In the 1930s Kiddicraft was the top dog for producing interlocking plastic building blocks—the LEGO before LEGO.1
Kiddicraft had what a nearly uncrossable moat for the tiny competitor, LEGO:
Kiddicraft had the patents for the first ‘self-locking building brick’
Kiddicraft had a customer base that loved their product
Kiddicraft had the first-mover advantage
With all the advantages Kiddicraft had, how did LEGO win?
Well, for the first 20 years of existing, LEGO didn’t win.
They tried to make bricks in prettier colors and they tried to change the placement of studs in the design.
Nothing seemed to give them the edge over Kiddicraft.
LEGO clung to solvency only by the skin of their teeth.
But in the late 1950s, LEGO had created something that made their product the clear winner.2 They added posts on the bottom of the bricks that allowed LEGOs to fit better with other parts. LEGOs now fit together seamlessly, creating structures greater than the sum of their parts.
With this new innovation, LEGO structures could be built with more creativity, longevity, and stability than any other competitor.
If you were a parent who wanted your kid to explore the limits of imagination, you bought brand-name LEGO.
Kiddicraft couldn’t compete with that.
What is Composability
Composability refers to the ability of different components to work together seamlessly, allowing people to build complex systems that can accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.
For example, an Erector Set was composable.
An Erector Set was designed with components that could be supplemented with whatever standard parts you had in your garage.
Instead of being limited to what came in the kit, the toy parts could be combined with hinges, screws, motors—whatever pieces needed to complete your project.
Without the ability to interface with other pieces, the Erectors Set wouldn't have seen the success that it did.
Composability in MarTech
In MarTech, composability means that businesses can choose from a variety of specialized software components, each designed to perform a specific task, and combine them in ways that suit their unique needs.
MarTech is all about results.
Despite what any tech salesperson will tell you, having the right tech solution is less important than having the right customer result.
The concept of composability is at the heart of this approach—by adding functionalities as the need arises, businesses can leverage the strengths of each tool, while also minimizing the overall cost, risk of vendor lock-in, and rigidity of an off-the-shelf solution.
For example, a startup company might use a spreadsheet as a CRM and a personal email as an email marketing tool. As it grows, it would add tools as needed rather than jumping for a $20,000/month/user all-in enterprise software solution.
Instead, a marketer might use one tool for email marketing, another for social media management, and a third for analytics. By combining these tools, they can create a comprehensive system that tracks and analyzes the performance of their campaigns across multiple channels without adding huge amounts of unused tooling to their spending.
How Is MarTech Like LEGO?
The key to composability is interoperability, or the ability of different software components to communicate with each other effectively.
LEGOs won in the physical world because of the focus on interoperability. Each LEGO brick produced since the 1960s can still easily connect with the same standardized brick since then.
Composable MarTech solutions will win in the software world because of their same flexibility.
For MarTech, the ability to connect everything requires standardization of data formats and connections that allow different tools to exchange information seamlessly.
Why Do I Need That? I Have X Tool…
If your company made the decision in the 2010s to build out everything to use Hadoop, you would have been on the cutting edge of the time.
Ten years later, and the proprietary components within the Hadoop community might be keeping you from migrating to a more self-service Snowflake instance.
Composability and interoperability enables you to build systems that are flexible and adaptable.
If a new tool emerges that offers better analytics capabilities, you can easily integrate it into your existing system without disrupting your team’s workflow or requiring a complete overhaul of your tech stack.
Composability also enables businesses to take advantage of the latest innovations in technology. For example, the rise of AI and ML has enabled new marketing tools that can analyze massive amounts of data and generate insights that were previously impossible to obtain. By integrating these tools into their existing systems, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and gain a competitive advantage.
Composability Challenges
However, composability also has its challenges.
The biggest challenge is the need for technical skills and knowledge to plan, to build and to maintain complex, composite systems. (This is what I do professionally at evolv consulting)
This technical skill requirement can be a significant barrier for smaller organizations that lack the resources to hire dedicated IT staff or invest in training and development programs.
Additionally, interoperability between current and future potential components requires a clear view into potential use cases and a Master Data Management approach to ensure data streams don’t spiral out of control.3
Companies that are siloed will find the required visibility extremely difficult to maintain and will likely be unable to maintain true interoperability.
Conclusion
Despite these challenges, composability is becoming increasingly important in MarTech as businesses seek to build systems that can meet their evolving needs and adapt quickly to new technologies, data sources, or changing market conditions.
By embracing composability and focusing on interoperability, businesses can create systems that are more flexible, more efficient, and more effective, enabling them to achieve their marketing goals and drive business growth.
Yes, the marketing for the whole LEGO ecosystem is also important here, but the product innovation truly was the seed that grew into the current conglomerate
Spiraling out of control here can be either excessive compute spend or excessive data creation