Experience Orchestration for CMS: Avoid Headless Pitfalls and Align IT & Marketing

In this conversation with Plate, Sana Remekie—CEO and Co-founder of Conscia—dives deep into the transformation of content management and the evolving needs of enterprises managing digital experiences across multiple channels. With decades of experience in digital architecture and orchestration, Remekie shares her perspective on why modern content challenges demand a new layer: experience orchestration.

Why Traditional CMS Models Fall Short

The CMS landscape has shifted dramatically. Monolithic platforms, once sufficient for managing web content, have become limiting in a world where experiences span web, mobile, smart TVs, IoT, and beyond. Headless CMSs emerged as a solution, promising content reuse and flexibility. But as Sana points out, many organizations haven’t fully realized this promise:

"The old thinking hasn’t changed. Companies still model content around pages, not experiences that span multiple channels."

Instead of modeling content to be truly reusable, teams often continue to structure it around specific pages or interfaces, undermining the benefits of going headless.

The Rise of Experience Orchestration

What’s missing? An orchestration layer that connects content from multiple systems and defines how it should be delivered based on user context. Conscia, the experience orchestration platform she co-founded, was built to fill this gap:

"We created Conscia so marketing teams could see all the content from various systems and orchestrate it for all their channels."

This orchestration layer doesn’t replace CMSs or commerce engines—it complements them, providing visibility and control to marketers without hard-coding presentation logic into the front end.

Content vs. Presentation: Keeping Logic Clean

Sana draws a critical distinction between content and presentation. Content should remain pure and context-agnostic, while presentation logic—how, where, and when content is displayed—should be handled by an orchestration layer.

One example she shares is from Conscia’s integration with Cloudinary:

“We have a partner, Cloudinary, for digital asset management. They store raw images and deliver them in a variety of ways to the front end. Transformations like scaling, zooming, or overlaying text happen at delivery time—keeping the original content pure and separating out the presentation logic.”

This decoupling helps avoid hundreds of redundant content variants and ensures scalability as digital channels grow.

Rethinking Roles: The New Collaboration Between IT and Marketing

In today’s composable world, the divide between marketing and IT is no longer feasible. Most digitally mature organizations now operate under a unified “digital” function where marketers, developers, and strategists collaborate closely.

“Marketers now need to understand APIs, headless, and cloud-native principles. The days of handing off content for someone else to implement are over.”

She highlights new hybrid roles—like content strategists and content architects—who understand both the structure of content and the systems it moves through.

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Misguided Headless Adoption

Many companies rushed into headless CMS adoption without a clear strategy. Instead of rethinking their content model, they replicated old habits—resulting in fragmented systems and inconsistent user experiences.

“They tied content directly to a channel. They may as well have stuck with their old CMS. Now they’re struggling to retrofit content for new touchpoints.”

To succeed, organizations must embrace content governance, reusable modeling, and experience design from the outset.

Final Thoughts: Education and Vision

Creating a new category like experience orchestration isn’t just a technical endeavor—it requires education, storytelling, and patience. Sana reflects on the journey:

“Every time I explain experience orchestration, I refine the message. It’s a long cycle, but we’re here for it. People will get it—and when they do, they’ll never go back.”

Experience orchestration isn’t about returning to tightly coupled monoliths—it’s about empowering marketers and developers with visibility, flexibility, and control. The future of content isn’t just headless. It’s orchestrated.