This is the first in a four-part series where I reflect on what it really takes to deliver composable digital platforms at speed without sacrificing quality or governance. These lessons are drawn from real enterprise work, not hypothetical frameworks or partner playbooks. If you're leading digital transformation, building out composable capability, or redefining how your teams bring brand experiences to life; this series is for you.  

Rethinking What It Means to Move Fast 

We’ve all heard the mandate: deliver faster. Fewer weeks. More velocity. But in the real world, speed in isolation isn’t that impressive. It’s what that speed enables that matters. And most importantly, it’s whether that speed is repeatable. 

So, let me be clear: fast isn’t heroic. Fast is disciplined. Fast is having clarity around what you’re doing, who you’re doing it for, and where the risks lie.

Twelve weeks. That was the timeline. A full enterprise website redesign. New stack. New frontend. New governance model. New editorial team. And a hard launch date with no room for extensions. We did it. And I don’t tell you that to impress anyone—I tell you because we did it without burning out, without breaking the system, and without making ourselves a hostage to technical debt.

And the truth is: we didn’t win that project by being more clever or better resourced. We won because we built on a foundation designed to move fast with intent. That foundation was a well-crafted accelerator. 

Why the Right Accelerator Changes the Game 

Let’s address the myth straight away. Accelerators aren’t templates. They aren’t shortcuts. They aren’t a sign that your brand is settling for something generic. When built properly, an accelerator does two things: it sets you up to solve known problems once, and it frees your team to focus on the parts of the experience that actually differentiate you.

In our case, the accelerator was the backbone of the delivery. It included: A pre-built set of modular, accessible components ready for branding and layout variations 

• A site structure optimised for scalability, multilingual needs, and performance

• Built-in integration with Sitecore Search for real-time content indexing

• SEO and analytics baked in from the beginning — not added in a panic at the end

• Workflows and permission structures that aligned with how marketing and content teams actually worked

In short, it gave us the confidence to say: we’re not starting from zero. And that changed everything. 

Beyond Components: What Acceleration Really Means

This wasn’t our first digital build. But it was the first time we truly saw acceleration not just in velocity, but in decision-making. In collaboration. In alignment. Here’s what shifted: 

We brought editors into the process early, not just to validate designs, but to shape the content model. They weren’t handed tools; they were part of the shaping. That meant fewer surprises, more clarity, and content that actually fit the system. 

We didn’t wait until UAT to “test governance.” We defined workflows upfront. We made decisions about content ownership, translation fallbacks, and campaign release processes in sprint 2. 

We embedded the QA team from the second sprint. Not to test bugs, but to validate assumptions. To ensure accessibility. To see if the SEO hooks were working. To pressure test what would happen when an actual campaign went live.

That level of maturity doesn’t slow you down, it lets you go faster, because you stop second-guessing. 

What the Business Saw

From the outside, what the business saw was impressive: 

• A fully redesigned and re-platformed website, delivered in three months

• Content editors trained, empowered, and publishing within the first few weeks

• SEO and search delivering immediate uplift, with no dip at go-live

• A project that launched on time, on budget, with no noise post-launch 

But what they didn’t see, the internal mechanisms that made it possible—are what matter most. Those mechanisms are what turn acceleration into strategy, not just speed.

Final Thought

Too many teams treat speed like it’s a one-time victory. But if your processes, governance, or delivery model aren’t set up for repeatability—then you’re not accelerating. You’re sprinting. And sprints don’t scale.

Real acceleration is sustainable. It’s structured. And it’s smart.

In the next article, I’ll explore the part of digital experience that’s too often treated as an afterthought: search. We made search a first-class citizen in our architecture, and the result wasn’t just a better UI, it was a more responsive, scalable, and intelligent user journey. Because what people can’t find, they won’t engage with. And in a composable world, that’s too big a gap to ignore.