Chris Bryce: All right, I am going to just remove this and introduce everyone to the show. Welcome to Episode 35 now of Beyond the CMS, where we have deep dive conversations with content management industry leaders and CMS platform experts and leadership. We're currently live on LinkedIn and Facebook, where we encourage anyone who's making time out, lunchtime, Eastern Standard Time, and all different parts of the day for folks coming from around the world, to really ask us anything.

Chris Bryce: We're really open, and if you don't catch the whole show today, we do have our archives on your normal podcast channels, Apple and Spotify, and YouTube as well. So I'm Chris Bryce. I'm the CEO of Dotfusion Digital, where I specialize in coaching customers towards choosing the right CMS for them.

Chris Bryce: And then my team essentially designs and implements digital projects as well, but I really love chatting with industry thought leaders about content and content platforms. We're non-sponsored, grassroots. Just wanna thank everyone again for joining us today, and let's get started. Episode 35. I wanna introduce my special guest, Mario Lenz, the CPTO at Hygraph. Mario, thank you for making time in your evening. I know you're checking in from Berlin, and it's really wonderful to have you, and maybe you wanna introduce yourself before we dig in.

Mario Lenz: Yeah, Mario Lenz, as I said, and yes, from, how can I say, dark, nasty, dirty, coldish Berlin these days. So I'm the Chief Product Officer, Chief Technology Officer at Hygraph. Probably we will speak about Hygraph a little bit later, so it's a headless CMS company. In a nutshell, we can go into detail probably later, what's so special about us. I joined the company a little bit more than two years ago, so I'm not an industry veteran in that particular area. Rather, before, basically I spent a couple of different stations in different companies, always in this product leadership, CPO type of role. For that, essentially, me.

Chris Bryce: What were you doing before that or before this?

Mario Lenz: Well, you want the short story or the long one? The short story about my whole career, that will take a while. I mean, given I'm the, I usually refer to myself as the dinosaur in my team. So basically the first part of my career, the first 10 years, I spent as a CTO in a subsidiary. Then around 2011, so already, oh my god, that's embarrassing, 15 years ago, I stepped very consciously to product leadership roles, so typically these CPO type of roles in B2B companies, in scale up companies. That's what I've been doing essentially couple of times now with different companies.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. Well, the folks who typically join the show, they're primarily CMOs or kind of higher up in the marketing team that get tasked with making complex technology decisions, using the right platform, the right technology stack. My real goal today is to give you as much an opportunity to tell folks about what Hygraph's up to and the way you think about things from a content perspective. But you tapped into something earlier that I do my best to talk about, and you mentioned that Hygraph is essentially a headless CMS, and just as a way of kicking this off, what do you mean by that, actually?

Mario Lenz: So probably very well known is WordPress. We all know WordPress, and WordPress is powering the internet even today. I mean, let's be real. But WordPress essentially means you have a front end directly associated with it, so you see directly the website as you build your content, and you directly build it for a website, because the internet has been the website essentially for ages, well, for, what is it, 20, 25 years. And headless essentially means you are becoming independent of the front end. Yes, you can build a website, but you can also build it for a mobile app, or maybe your mobile, or maybe, we have customers in the gaming industry, for example, maybe it's part, it's an element inside your digital game, or maybe you bring it on, I don't know, on the screen in your car because it's in car entertainment, or going forward, a direction that I see very, very strong, that we see very strong, is we see how people, how users, how consumers are kind of googling less and chatting more. So they solve their problems not by searching for blue links and visiting a website, but by really responding or chatting with ChatGPT or Claude or whatnot. And that means your content needs to show up there. Your content needs to be ready for an AI that can reason with it, resonate with it, argue with it, compare your product, maybe even make it possible to buy the products. All of a sudden the front end is ChatGPT, and that is what headless enables. So it allows you this flexibility in terms of the actual channel and device by means of which you reach your customers, your end customers.

Chris Bryce: Okay, yeah, it makes sense. I have a bunch of different ways of describing that, and that's spot on, thank you. Maybe tell us a little bit about Hygraph, like what was the, what's the philosophy behind it, what makes it different, and then we'll get into some features and functions.

Mario Lenz: I would say there are two things. I mean first of all, Hygraph was born a couple of years ago. I was not there, to be very clear, I'm not a co-founder, I joined later. But Hygraph was born as the first GraphQL native headless CMS, so really it's all about GraphQL, or it was in the beginning. So it was really, because GraphQL gives you better precision compared to REST. It's sharper, it's more precise, it's more accurate. By the way, in the age of AI, it also gives AI this introspection, so AI can understand the data model. It's kind of a typed interface and typed API. So this is where Hygraph originally originated from. Of course others have built this as well, but we are still, I would say, still leading the pack here with everything. Basically everything is based on GraphQL, so there's no way around it today, I would say. Our real strength is when we talk, and I think we even have that in our, when we advertise this episode here, when we talk about complex content.

Mario Lenz: And what I mean by complex content is, I mean, imagine again, think about a retail company, a fashion company, a gaming company, and now you want to bring your content to many different countries, with many different locales, with many different customer segments, on many different devices and many different channels, and so on. You get it? So I mean, this topic is complex, and it's complex by nature. It's not because somebody made a silly mistake, it is complex. And this is basically, I would say, our job. I even say that internally, our job is to make that complexity, maybe not simple, it cannot be made simple, but make it manageable. Make it easier to manage. And this is where Hygraph has a number of things, probably that would go into too much detail here, that make it easier, that make it simpler to manage this level of complexity, with reusing components, and all these, essentially, I would say, a good software engineer would immediately understand when you think about, I mean that's my age, when you think about object oriented programming, and this kind of reuse. And this is where Hygraph is very strong. So complex content, because complexity is driven by the business of the customer.

Chris Bryce: Are you free to share any examples or kind of case studies where you have a customer with fairly complex content and how you're managing it?

Mario Lenz: Yeah, I mean for example, I cannot give you the name, but say it's one of the leading gaming companies of this world, okay? And now imagine, I mean, they're operating in many different countries, they have many different games, yeah, all these digital games. I have to say I'm not a gamer, the only thing I ever played, I think, was Angry Birds, everything else with me, I dunno, so it's not me, my boys are different, but not for me. So you have that, and then you want to basically unify all your content operations across all games, across all channels, across all devices. The message on the web in the US should be the same as, say, the Xbox in New Zealand or whatever. Or maybe, maybe New Zealand is a bad example because it's both English, say it's in Japan, because all of a sudden it's even different, but still the core message or the statement or whatever it is, is still the same, and maybe even dynamic, because you want in app purchases, when you have these pay to play kind of things, I can buy something, and I see the products, I buy a magic sword or whatever, so that I can fight better and win more battles or whatever it is. This is a typical example where we have such customers. Others include typical retail companies, furniture. Actually, I never, before that, I never thought how complex furniture could be, and I just go through your furniture, you say, hey, this is a chair, this is a freaking chair, what's wrong with it? And then you think about it, and all the dimensions and the material and the sizing and the color, and all of a sudden you literally have a million combinations for that chair. You get the complexity. So that is what we see, in this retail, furniture, gaming, all the different things. I mean, maybe to explain a little bit what we are probably not the best for, is if you want a simple landing page. I mean it may be beautiful, it may be wonderfully designed and whatnot, but in terms of how often does it change, how many different aspects, customer segments, customer roles, personalization needs, all of that does it have, it's relatively simple. Honestly, there are better choices than Hygraph.

Chris Bryce: So if you're dealing with, let's say, a furniture company, is it safe to assume that you're synthesizing data from a number of different places essentially, and then presenting it through different channels? So you probably have, like, a PIM somewhere and data from...

Mario Lenz: That is the case specifically in these more commerce oriented customers, and that makes a big portion of our customer base, so customers who really, say they do commerce, they, in the end, they want to sell their furniture, or say Virtue Motors in the UK, they wanna sell cars, and others. But they still have, say, a piece where they tell a story around their products. Maybe another good example, because I think this resonates very well, is we also have a major coffee brand, JDE, and of course you wanna sell the coffee, but specifically around coffee you wanna tell a great story about the plants and the harvesting and maybe fair trade and all of that. So you wanna do some marketing stuff around it, because in the end it's coffee beans. It's coffee beans here and coffee beans there, so the marketing actually tells you what's different. And these commerce oriented companies, yes, they have very often these PIM, product information management, systems. And then we have very often the scenario, or the example, for example, Dr. Edgar is a big customer of ours, where they say, yes, all these products sit in our PIM. You know our PIM, well, maybe I'm exaggerating, but only a bit, our PIM dates back to the 1990s. Bringing that PIM to the internet is just a no go, but we will not change it, because you know all the business processes and suppliers and production and manufacturing and whatnot, this will be a 10 year project. So that's why, what can we do? And this is again something where Hygraph is truly unique, we call it Content Federation. So actually, I talked about GraphQL earlier, we allow you, in a seamless way, to fetch that data from any third party data source. I mean, obviously it needs to have an API, it needs to have a GraphQL API, and fully transparently give it to you, give it to the developer, for example, who's building the front end, so they don't even know where it's coming from, whether it's coming from the CMS or the CMS just passes it through, essentially. So that's what we do with Content Federation, and that's what we see a lot, because, hey, you don't need to replicate, you don't need to copy your data, you don't need to create duplicate data lakes and all of that, you will not be out of sync, you will always be, you know, real time access, apart from technical aspects such as caching, but theoretically you're fetching it real time. And that is what we see, again, coming back to your original question, what we see a lot, fetching that data from third party sources using Content Federation. And of course PIM is a, whatever the PIM is, could also be the ERP system or whatever, so wherever your product data sits, that's what we see a lot.

Chris Bryce: That's interesting. Can I ask you a question? We don't do a whole lot of rehearsal before the show, so I'm asking you a question on behalf of a prospective customer of ours, and they are looking for a solution where they have PIM information for a product, it's a manufacturer, they have marketing content for the product as well, it could be ancillary images, it could be storytelling around the product, and they've got e-comm kind of transactional data. And they said, what is your solution for, one, being able to model that content so it's schema ready, so we have a nice, clear, structured bit of content that's coming from three sources, and then how do we kind of keep track of it all? How would Hygraph kind of approach that situation?

Mario Lenz: Yeah, I think that sounds like a perfect fit. I mean, we would not replace the PIM, we would just integrate the PIM, as I explained earlier, don't explain this too much, as I briefly mentioned earlier, so just fetch it in, provide an API, we call it Content Federation, and bam, you are there. So for example, every product, just to give you a very real example, because you asked for it before, every product that you see on the Dr. Edgar website, or on the Dr. Edgar recipes, or whatever they're building, whenever there is a product, of course they do it because they wanna sell their products, every product comes from the PIM system. And if somebody goes to the PIM system and changes the name, changes the ingredient, changes whatever, it's there immediately, you don't need to do anything in the CMS. Likewise, for commerce, we are not handling transactions, when it comes to checkouts and payment and delivery and, I don't know, return management or whatever, that's not us. That, again, we would integrate with tools like Shopify, for example, and then the marketing content would usually sit with us. So you would model, you would write the marketing content with us. That was a little bit, I was a little bit puzzled in your description, because it sounded like marketing, they also have a system, so actually they have three systems.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, yeah, there's a bit of a hybrid there, where there was some content that they wanted to have attached to product content that was in marketing. Not always the case, but, like, for example, one of the ideas, would there be a three dimensional kind of model that came in through marketing that would kind of be joined, that wasn't in the PIM natively? So they're trying to connect these sources.

Mario Lenz: Yeah, yeah, but then normally, I mean, you don't, again, with this, also with the Content Federation, you don't need to do that overnight. You can, because we actually have customers who gradually migrate to Hygraph. I mean, for example, just two or three weeks ago I talked to a customer, and they said, yes, we are all on WordPress, but you know what, we have 60 plus WordPress sites, talking about complexity, I mean, how do you manage 60 plus, probably different owners, different teams, different plugins, different, I don't know what, it's a nightmare. So what he can do with Hygraph is, of course, that he would gradually migrate the marketing stuff to Hygraph. You don't need to do that as a big bang. You say, okay, that's the first part, we move it here, we have it in Hygraph. But for the marketing stuff, or the marketing content, probably the natural evolution would be you end up having it in Hygraph. Not the payment, not the product data, not the commerce part, but the marketing part. So that's basically how I would envision that, how I would approach such a project.

Chris Bryce: Okay, yeah, and another one of their concerns was around, a big concern was around SEO, and the challenge for them was, they'd been using WordPress for years, and it has the Yoast plugin in it, that just does some magical SEO stuff, right, in the experience, and we're like, well, you're choosing a composable platform, composable kind of means that you compose different systems, I don't know if we want to be kind of hybriding at this middle thing, but how is Hygraph SEO aware, maybe the best open question for you?

Mario Lenz: Yeah, so, two answers here. I mean, in itself, Hygraph primarily is a headless CMS, and yes, we are coming from that composable stack idea, and we are really focusing on the things that we are good at. And the SEO usually sits with customers. So of course we have means to structure, so what we see a lot is that customers, for example, in our content models, in our content architecture, they explicitly model things for SEO, so having keywords there and all of that. But then what that content is, I mean, sorry, that's up for the customer, they need to know what kind of keywords are best, whatever. What we recently launched in Hygraph is actually, that's a very perfect segue into our second part that's also announced here, into AI, because we recently launched an agent AI framework on top of Hygraph, or with Hygraph, so that actually there are certain agents who automate certain, or agents that, for an agent, so they would automate a lot of the work. And one of the very first agents is exactly an SEO agent. However, as of today, we do not make changes, we don't change the SEO, we just give the customer a report. Basically we look at the page, we look at the information, and then there is a certain report on keywords and density and whatever the SEO, I'm not an SEO expert, but whatever is good or bad and can be improved. We don't improve it, we don't change it, because very often customers still don't want that full level of autonomy, they still want human in the loop and kind of what we call governance and control and guardrails. But at least it gives you that information and these hints on how to improve. So that's, but one addition to that, because you said SEO, again, coming back to what I said earlier, when you think about SEO, think about GEO, or whatever the future term of that will be, because it's no longer just being top ranked by Google, it means being mentioned by ChatGPT, and that means something. So I would already think about that.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, good points. And, you know, you're talking about AI, and I guess implementing that in the author experience, what's the roadmap, or what are you guys doing from a developer perspective? Are you opening MCP servers, or what's kind of your philosophy on connecting with agents and workflows?

Mario Lenz: Okay, that were five questions in one, I would say.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, gimme, gimme lots of options. Let's start with agent connections.

Mario Lenz: Yeah, I mean, first of all, we are very developer friendly. So basically everybody could go to hygraph.com, sign up for free, run a project, you can launch, you can start, edit it, it works. By the way, I'm the best proof for that myself, I'm running my very own product management playbook website. Yes, I had it on WordPress, but of course, being the CPTO of Hygraph, guess what, I had to drink my own champagne. So basically when I had a little bit of time, Christmas last year, I migrated everything to Hygraph, and it's now fully powered by Hygraph, versioned, and all of that. So it's, I mean, I could do it, you know, being the dinosaur here, so every developer can easily do that, that's all good, and it's all there, it's all well documented, API first. We also launched an MCP server, also just two weeks ago, I believe, and actually you could go to, and I saw demos already, personally I didn't try it myself yet, shame on me, but I saw, for example, some of my team members doing that. So you just go to Claude, you just go to ChatGPT, you chat with a tool, you embed Hygraph's MCP server, and you can create your own content, you can change your content, you can really play with it. The MCP server, as of today, is more, first of all, the first iteration was focusing on changing content, so it would not yet be the schema part of it, so creating a project from scratch would not yet work, but we are, that's coming. So the first version was basically, I have a running project, I have a running website, please add another article here, please add another page there, please make this and that change. So that's the kind of thing that we are having, and that is, of course, very, very developer friendly, particularly with MCP. So you talked earlier about CMOs, we have a little internal debate, yeah, I would bet CMOs, I don't know whether they know what MCP really means. So it's essentially, how would I phrase it for them, it gives you, it combines the power of APIs with AI and LLMs, essentially, and makes it possible to embed any kind of API in this Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, AI powered world.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, makes sense. Do you wanna talk a little bit about the roadmap? Where are you guys heading? What's on your mind?

Mario Lenz: Yeah, I mean, obviously we will strengthen further our AI capabilities, and one particular area, where maybe that's because of my history back in previous companies, that would go too far here, but maybe because of that, we are strengthening particularly our, it may sound a bit boring, I would call it governance features. I mean, what I observe is that essentially everybody is racing to adopt AI, but we all know, hey, this AI stuff, it's great, and it's great, and it's great until it isn't. I mean, I personally, I'm a power user of all these tools, very often I run into session end, and even I had screenshots where ChatGPT tells me, sorry, this is getting too long, you need to start a new chat, you are basically exceeding the limits. But all of a sudden you realize, oh my god, this thing just rewrote everything that we created before, where's my content? It's gone, it just went crazy, it deleted it, or whatnot. And of course this is something that we cannot afford with our customers. I mean, for example, we have healthcare customers, and you as a healthcare customer, you better make sure every little word, every comma, every letter that you put on your website or on your mobile app or whatever is true and has been validated. So, and that to me is this idea of governance. So how can we basically scale with AI but without the risk? How can we keep the human in the loop? How can we ensure the AI does not go wild? We have very strong tools for that at Hygraph already, so a number, or basically many of our enterprise customers, just love us for our governance features around roles and permissions and content workflow. So it's very accurate and very fine grained. So the whole idea is, hey, an AI is just a teammate, if I have to follow rules, the AI has to as well. So everybody has to follow rules, and that's the whole idea behind it. So that's one major pillar of our roadmap, to enforce further these guardrailing, governance features.

Chris Bryce: And how would Hygraph work if, I think this may be the best way for enterprise to move forward, where they're implementing and integrating their own LLM, because they've kind of got a federated bunch of AI stuff, so even if things go haywire, it's haywire within the farm fence, in a way. How do you guys deal with that?

Mario Lenz: Yeah, that would be exactly MCP, and we do actually have customers like that, so I think I can mention them. So Ancestry, for example, is a customer of ours, and they have, and there, when we started this whole journey, I had a conversation with them, and they actually described, hey, you know what, we are already doing a lot of AI. So what I would refer to that as, they do a lot of their own AI behind the firewall, so to speak. So basically they do it themselves internally, have their own LLMs, or maybe special contracts with OpenAI or whatever, however they do it. And now basically the ask was, okay, if we do all of that, how can we, at a certain point in time in that whole pipeline, integrate Hygraph? And here MCP would be the response. So, hey, just embed MCP over there, and your LLM can talk to the MCP server of Hygraph, and then you can interact with your content. That's exactly another great use case of MCP server. So not just making it very simple, say, for developers who play around, but also this bring your own AI, you could call it, you have bring your own key in the security and domain, I would even call that bring your own AI, and we see that demand definitely, and we serve it with the MCP server.

Chris Bryce: I love it, bring your own AI. I mentioned this a bit earlier, time goes kind of quick as we get near the end here, but we're good to stay a bit long. I did wanna make sure that we covered just anything else that you think folks should know about Hygraph, and then the second part would be, how do people get in touch with you, how do you get a demo, get hands in the tools?

Mario Lenz: Yeah, what we, I mean, basically the most things, I think we touched, so it's all about complex content. Whenever it's difficult, probably complexity is a little bit challenging. I mean, would any customers say of themselves that, hey, we are complex, probably not. But, you know, again, when you're working in many different regions and many different locales, many different market segments, many different devices, channels, all of that, also velocity is a key thing, so how often does content change, for example? I mean, you cannot do that, we talked about WordPress before, I mean, try keeping 60 plus WordPress sites up to date every day, every week, I mean, just not possible. This is where Hygraph is the perfect fit. So basically that's how I would summarize it, and there we have all the tools that come from very classic content management, but also with the AI tools and workflows and all of that. How to get in touch? Well, there's hygraph.com essentially, there's a website, you can, everybody, as I said earlier, it's free to use, everybody can sign up, just create their own account, play with it. We also recently added a lot to our marketing website, particularly maybe when you say chief marketing officers, there are a lot of guided tools on our website right now, so no blurry videos, no pause, it's real, it's basically screenshots of the tool, and it's a guided tool. Yes, you cannot change it, you just are guided step by step, but you see how it really feels and how it really looks and what the journey really is, click by click. But with that, you know, it makes it simpler, it makes it easier, you don't even have to log in, even, you don't even have to create an account and all of that, that would be the next step then usually. So, but I would suggest just go to our website, and then there is a lot of content that explains to you what we are doing for developers, what we're doing for marketers. The website is even organized in that way, so I think people will find their way very easily. If not, I mean, also find me on LinkedIn, send me mario.lenz@hygraph.com, send me an email, whatever, I mean, I'm here, happy to help.

Chris Bryce: We'll get your links in the comments too, on LinkedIn here. Well, thanks a lot for joining us, that was really great.

Mario Lenz: Thank you.

Chris Bryce: Thanks folks for listening in now, and in the future as well. This has been Beyond the CMS number 35, where we're talking everything about Hygraph. We've got Mario Lenz with us. We'll post your contact details everywhere that this content goes afterwards. Just a big shout out to everyone, I think we have another mini session before the holidays as well, so stay tuned here on LinkedIn. Mario, pleasure to have you, I can't wait to meet you one day, and thanks for informing me too, really appreciate it. So, signing off, okay, have a great time in Berlin, and thanks everyone for listening in.

Mario Lenz: Thank you. Bye.