In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, brands need to be agile to seize opportunities, mitigate risks, and continuously learn and adapt. However, their web CMS platforms often fail to keep up, turning what should be small, simple changes into major obstacles. This article explores the concept of technical debt and explains why marketers should care about it.
What is Technical Debt and Why Should Marketers Care?
If you’ve experienced any of the following scenarios, you’re likely dealing with technical debt:
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Your marketing team needs to launch a campaign page with a simple CRM integration, but the development estimate feels disproportionate to the task.
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You want to reuse a feature from one site on another, but the cloning cost is nearly as high as building the feature from scratch.
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Applying a security patch turns into a major project because multiple related upgrades are required before it can be done, eating into your marketing budget.
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A small branding tweak across your websites leads to extensive code changes, affecting overlapping but separate features on your CMS.
These are all symptoms of technical debt, which can significantly hinder your marketing agility.
Technical debt refers to the cost of rework that arises when a simpler, faster solution is chosen instead of a more robust, long-term approach. While this may save time in the short run, it often creates more work down the line as the system becomes harder to update and maintain.
How Did We Get Here?
Technical debt can occur for several reasons, some intentional, some not. In some cases, businesses knowingly create temporary solutions (often referred to as JFDI development) to meet a short-term goal. While this can be a legitimate approach if the business is aware of the future implications, it’s more common for technical debt to accumulate gradually due to small, pragmatic decisions that eventually create long-term issues.
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Reluctance to invest in regular maintenance: Marketing budgets often prioritise visible, exciting projects over ongoing technical upkeep.
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Agile, but without planning: Rushing to implement without proper planning can lead to quick fixes that build up over time.
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Design tweaks: Continually modifying digital design guidelines without a clear system in place can lead to inconsistency and inefficiency.
Brand Consistency vs. Technical Agility
Marketers strive for brand consistency across all digital touchpoints, but achieving this across multiple sites—often running on different platforms—can introduce technical debt. To ensure consistency, many organisations create digital style guides, playbooks, or pattern libraries that outline how elements like buttons, forms, and layouts should appear across websites.
However, when these guidelines are applied by different designers across various applications, the result is often multiple visual treatments. Presenting these inconsistencies to development teams leads to varied implementations on different platforms, resulting in more technical debt.
Systems, Not Just Guides
While style guides are helpful, they are not enough to ensure technical agility. Guides provide flexibility and allow designers to innovate, but this often leads to divergent implementations. In contrast, a system is rule-driven, ensuring that design elements can be modelled, configured, and executed in a single technology platform. A system provides the flexibility to innovate within a structured framework, reducing the technical debt that comes from inconsistent implementations.
Unify the Front End
The first step to reducing technical debt is to unify the CMS front-end. This means creating a framework where the consumer’s interaction with your brand is driven by a unified, brand-consistent, rule-driven system. This framework should also ensure consistent usability, accessibility, search visibility, and device compatibility. By baking these elements into the system, marketers and developers can avoid reinventing the wheel every time they need to publish or update content.
By unifying the front end, you gain several advantages:
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Manage your multi-site web estate from a single platform, reducing the complexity of maintaining different codebases.
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Ensure your brand is executed consistently across all markets and languages.
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Make strategic decisions about what to manage centrally and what to devolve to local teams, giving you flexibility without losing control.
How Meta Design Systems Can Help
A Meta Design System is a powerful tool to manage technical debt across a multi-brand web estate. Unlike traditional design systems, a Meta Design System is unbranded, meaning it can power multiple brands with different visual identities. It lives in a “super-instance” that addresses 100% of your web estate’s needs, deploying design patterns and functionality to each brand and market instance as required.
Once configured with a brand’s specific settings—like colour palette, typography, and iconography—the design system is rolled out to each language or regional site, ensuring consistency while allowing for flexibility. Each design pattern can be tailored to look and function differently based on brand or use case, providing a unified system that powers diverse brand experiences.
What This Means for Your ROI
By adopting a Meta Design System, you can manage technical debt more effectively, resulting in:
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Lower opportunity costs: Your marketing team can focus their budget on activities that drive consumer engagement, rather than on tedious, repetitive technical work.
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Lower cost of ownership: Your development team supports a single codebase, meaning any new feature benefits all users of the system.
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Better brand effectiveness: Your consumers experience consistent branding across all platforms, enhancing their engagement and trust in your brand.
In Summary
The next time you look at a complex web estate—whether in pharma, financial services, or the public sector—ask yourself how many platforms are driving these experiences. If the sites feel bespoke yet unified, chances are a Meta Design System is at work. This approach reduces technical debt, increases marketing agility, and ensures that your brand delivers a seamless, consistent experience to your audience.
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