This third article in the series tackles the topic many digital leaders underestimate in the rush to embrace composable platforms: governance. It doesn’t get flashy headlines or sell conference tickets, but it’s the foundation that makes everything else scalable, secure, and sustainable. And when you’re operating across multiple regions, brands, or regulatory environments, governance isn’t a checklist. It’s your growth strategy.

Control Is Not the Opposite of Agility

One of the biggest misconceptions in modern digital delivery is that governance slows you down. I’ve seen the opposite. Real control, clear ownership, structured workflows, transparent roles, actually frees teams to move faster. Not because they have fewer rules, but because they know exactly how to operate within them.

In our recent enterprise engagements, the governance model we implemented was the single biggest enabler of scale. We weren’t building a single site—we were enabling a platform that could support multiple teams, markets, and use cases with consistency and confidence.

Start With the People, Then Build the Model

The mistake many teams make is thinking governance starts with the tech. It doesn’t. It starts with understanding the editorial roles, the legal constraints, the marketing calendar, the approval processes. Then you work backwards into the permissions, workflows, and publishing models.

For one project, we sat down with stakeholders from legal, regional marketing, corporate comms, and accessibility to map out exactly who needed to touch content, when, and why. The result? A three - tiered model:

• Global components and brand assets, centrally managed

• Regional configurations for market - specific content and language

• Local publishing controls, with defined workflows and audit trails

This structure wasn’t just technical, it was cultural. It reflected how the organisation operated. And that’s why it worked.

Designing for Localisation Without Losing Control

One of our biggest challenges was balancing central governance with regional flexibility. Markets needed autonomy to create and launch content quickly, but the brand couldn’t afford inconsistency or compliance risk. We designed our content model and workflows to support that balance: 

• Shared templates and components with controlled fields for localisation

• Structured metadata for language fallbacks and country tagging

• Workflow variations based on content type and risk level

This meant local teams could move fast—but they could only move within a framework that guaranteed brand integrity.

Permissions Aren’t Just a Checkbox

XM Cloud gives you the tools to manage roles and permissions—but how you use them determines whether your platform is collaborative or chaotic. We spent time configuring roles not just for authors and approvers, but for content reviewers, legal, compliance, translators, and regional leads. 

Each group had access only to what they needed and visibility into the parts of the process that affected them. That visibility built trust. And trust is what makes governance sustainable.

Scaling Without Rebuilding

The true test of any governance model is what happens when you try to replicate it. In our case, the accelerator plus the governance model meant we could launch additional sites quickly, without starting from scratch. New markets didn’t require rethinking the entire structure, they simply slotted into the existing framework.

That’s what made this more than a one - off success. It became a platform strategy.

Final Thought

Governance isn’t an add-on. It’s not a phase. It’s not something to revisit once the “real work” is done. In composable platforms, governance is the real work because it’s what enables scale, agility, and resilience.

If you’re serious about building a platform, not just a site, then start with structure. Build for control. And make governance an asset, not an afterthought.

In the next article, the final one in the series, I’ll step back and reflect honestly on what we’d do differently if we could start over. Because composable delivery isn’t just about moving fast, it’s about learning fast too.