Decoupled Together: How Vercel and Sanity are Making Teams More Effective in the Composable Era

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(mellow synth music continues) - There you go. - Yeah, yeah. I'm waiting to see myself here. - Woo. - Yay! - Woo. - Thank you, thank you. (audience clapping) Live studio audience. So I'm here with Malte Ubl, CTO, Vercel. - Thanks for having me.

- Thank you for coming. - Yeah. - And I'm Simen Svale, CTO of Sanity. And kind of the motivation for this event is partly, so you see in the loop with the video, you saw it here as well, so it's about this Visual Editing feature. And it kind of started with a coffee we had- - Right. - Back in October. - I actually remember the beers after the conference, but- (Malte and Simen laughing) - I only remember a cup of tea. - It was like, yeah, it was definitely a very spontaneous thing, kind of this thing going in my mind that we needed to do something in this space,

but I needed a content partner to actually execute on it. - Yeah, so I didn't know, like, you just sprang it. Did you have like a... I thought I invited you for a coffee, but you had like a plan. (Simen and Malte laughing) - Yeah, it was a very serendipitous. You know, I had been going for this for a while and actually, it was also a bit cheating. This was actually my plan for a hackathon at Vercel. And so I needed to, like, usually, obviously, you're supposed to kind make your project up the day off, but I was, like, months before kind of recruiting. - I could have this guy

do it instead. - Recruiting a partner to actually help us. (Simen and Malte laughs) - Yeah, so the thing you said was like, is there a way where, so the headless space or the composable space is, of course, amazing because it means you can compose your solution from the best technologies from each kind of area. But there's some downsides to that. - Right. Yeah, so the way I usually think about things is I both love and hate trade-offs.

And what I really love is if you see a trade-off and you can just get rid of it. Like, so I've been in this web space for a very long time, but interestingly, I was at Google doing other stuff, let's put it that way. - It's a secret? - No, it's not very secret. - That's good to know. - Yeah. But like from 2012 ish to 2022, so like, basically, a year ago, right. And so I didn't really have, actually, that much insight into what was going on in the world. But before that, in the zero years, basically, I was doing consulting in the web space,

but that was like all on these monolithic CMSs. So I was like used to a certain feature set. And then I come on the new world and suddenly, it's very clearly better because I remember suffering. I won't name any names 'cause some of them are still around. (Simen chuckles) But I remember suffering. And clearly, now, you know, there's this developer-forward way. But also, some of the features that I know people appreciated were gone.

And so I was basically thinking about it. Can we square that circle and bring it back, while, obviously, retaining the features that the developers love and that make us more productive, and allow us to combine best of free, blah, blah, blah? Like, all this stuff is clearly very good and it's successful because the trade-off was rivaled with wouldn't it be even better if we could get everyone in the same boat and be inclusive- - Exactly. - With all the roles. - And I think that kind of goes to what we are trying as platforms and what we are trying to partner with our users and customers about is investing