Why Your Digital Experience Platform Migration Plan Shouldn’t Start with Features

image by James Wheeler

When organisations decide to migrate to a new DXP, the conversation often starts in the wrong place.

“What features do we need?”“Which platform has the best components library?”“Should we go with WordPress, Sitecore, or Optimizely?”

Those questions will matter—but not yet.

In my role leading digital transformation and platform migrations, I’ve worked with clients ranging from global financial services brands to top-tier universities. One consistent pattern I’ve seen? Projects that go off track usually did one thing wrong:

They led with features instead of goals.

What Happens When You Start with Features

When platform selection is driven by a checklist of features, you get:

• A bloated scope full of things you may never use

• A mismatch between platform complexity and internal capability

• Confusion over governance, workflow, and who’s responsible for what

• Delays, rework, and frustration post-launch

It’s like shopping for a car based solely on the dashboard design—before you’ve even learned to drive.

What to Do Instead: Start with Business Outcomes

Before choosing any platform, ask:

1. What does your team need to deliver faster, better, and more consistently?Are you trying to decentralise publishing? Increase campaign velocity? Launch multilingual content faster?

2. What are your operational gaps?Is it lack of governance, poor asset management, or bottlenecks in content approvals?

3. Who will actually be using this CMS—and how confident are they?Your content editors are your power users. Their experience matters as much as your devs'.

When you begin with these questions, the platform conversation becomes more focused and strategic.

A Framework I Use Before Platform Selection

Here’s a simple exercise I use with clients during Discovery:

Step	Question	Outcome
1	What business goals must your content platform support?	Aligns CMS to real business outcomes
2	What’s slowing your current workflow down?	Highlights blockers that tech alone won’t solve
3	Who are your users (editors, marketers, devs)?	Reveals CMS fit for team capabilities
4	How will you measure success?	Defines future KPIs (e.g., time-to-publish, engagement)

Only after this process do we look at features, and often, what looked “essential” at first becomes far less important.

Choosing Between Platforms

Each platform has strengths. But those strengths only matter when they’re matched to your context. Some platforms are robust but requires deep investment, best suited to mature teams with in-house dev capability and a clear need for complexity. Others are more suited for mid-to-enterprise teams wanting to scale content and experimentation, with strong editorial UX and rapid time to value.

No platform is “better” without the right problem to solve.

Platform Migration is an Organisational Shift

If you're migrating just to get new features, you're probably solving the wrong problem.

But if you start with your real business goals and define how success looks beyond launch, you’ll end up with a platform that enables growth—not just a shinier CMS.