The rush to adopt headless architectures has created an unexpected crisis in digital experience delivery. Technical teams who championed these modern approaches are now facing uncomfortable questions from business stakeholders who find themselves locked out of the very systems meant to accelerate innovation. As Lars Petersen bluntly put it at Digital Experience Assembly (DXA) 2025, "The symptoms are telling: everything requires a developer. If you want to change a component, you go to a developer. If you get a new creative idea, you go to a developer."

This disconnect strikes at the heart of why many organizations are experiencing what industry insiders now call "headless regret." The truth is unavoidable: composable architectures can only deliver on their promise when they empower both technical teams AND business users. The missing piece? A visual workspace that bridges technical excellence with business agility.

The typical journey into modern architectures begins with the best intentions. Technical teams select a headless CMS and modern frontend framework like React or Next.js, promising faster performance and greater flexibility. Developers celebrate clean separation of concerns and freedom from templating constraints.

But marketing teams discover they've lost crucial capabilities three to six months into implementation. The visual editing tools they relied on have been replaced by abstract content forms that are disconnected from how customers experience them. Making even basic layout changes requires developer intervention, creating bottlenecks undermining the speed these architectures promised to deliver.

One enterprise marketing director at a global retailer shared her frustration: "We spent millions modernizing our stack, only to find ourselves unable to launch a simple holiday campaign without filing IT tickets three weeks in advance." The business consequences are real: delayed campaigns, compromised customer experiences, and teams that spend more time managing dependencies than innovating.

This isn't just a usability problem; it's a fundamental business issue that threatens the ROI of digital modernization efforts. As technical debt has decreased, what we might call "marketing debt" has increased proportionally.

No one's suggesting we throw away our modern tech stacks and crawl back to the monolithic CMS dark ages. That's not the answer. Instead, what's happening is a quiet revolution in how forward-thinking companies bridge their technical and business worlds.

"Think of visual workspaces as the missing middle layer," Petersen explained, drawing a diagram for attendees. "They sit between your content sources and delivery channels, giving marketers intuitive tools while developers maintain their clean architecture." It's not an either/or proposition—it's about creating appropriate interfaces for different team members working on the same digital products.

"We're not talking about page builders from 2010," Petersen clarified. "Modern visual workspaces are fundamentally different—they're composition layers that connect structured content to visual experiences through configuration rather than code."

These workspaces recognize a fundamental truth: business users think in experiences, not content models. A content creator doesn't want to update an abstract "product description" field—they want to see how that description will appear on a product detail page, in a category listing, in a promotional email, and on a mobile app.

Multi-source editing is particularly transformative. Rather than forcing users to jump between systems, modern workspaces pull content and data from multiple repositories into a single interface. This isn't just convenient—it fundamentally changes how teams think about digital experiences, shifting focus from system boundaries to customer journeys.

Nested editors take this further by allowing users to modify content from third-party systems without leaving the experience context. A marketer can adjust product information coming from a PIM or personalization rules from a CDP while seeing exactly how these changes affect the customer experience, all without a single line of code.

The limitations of traditional approaches stem from a fundamental misalignment in how we think about content. Conventional wisdom has long favored content modeling—structuring information for maximum reuse without considering how it will be displayed. This creates highly organized content repositories that make perfect sense to developers but leave business users trying to imagine how abstract entries will render across channels.

Lars Petersen advocates for a paradigm shift toward experience modeling, where content is structured not just for reuse but for meaningful composition in customer experiences. "Content doesn't exist in a vacuum," Petersen emphasized. "It exists to be experienced by customers in specific contexts, and our tools should reflect that reality."

Experience modeling doesn't abandon structure—it contextualizes it. The difference becomes clear when you look at innovations like entry previews. Traditional headless interfaces might let you preview a blog post, but experience-focused systems show how that content will appear in every implementation simultaneously—as a featured article, in search results, in related content blocks, and in mobile notifications.

"When content creators see their work in all contexts, quality improves dramatically," Petersen noted. "Suddenly they understand why fields like meta descriptions or alt text matter, because they can see them working in real environments."

This tackles a frustration marketers have complained about for years: in most visual editors, you can only change what developers have specifically allowed you to change. Want to tweak that product description that appears in three different components? Sorry—back to IT with a ticket request.

Petersen demonstrated this live by showing how a marketing user could start editing visually, notice a content issue, and then click through to edit the full structured content record—all without switching systems or contexts. "When we showed this to one client's marketing team," he recalled, "someone actually stood up and cheered. It sounds simple, but it's revolutionary for teams accustomed to being told 'the system can't do that.'"

Let's cut through the marketing speak for a minute. Yes, composable architecture sounds great on paper—who doesn't want flexibility, agility, and faster innovation? But here's the painful truth Petersen laid bare in his keynote: most implementations have actually slowed organizations down rather than speeding them up.

"We've created this bizarre situation," he explained, "where IT teams celebrate their technical freedom while marketing teams are more constrained than ever." One Fortune 500 client told Petersen they now have six-week delays for campaign changes that used to take hours in their "outdated" monolithic system. The very architecture that promised speed has become its biggest obstacle.

"You can have the most elegant technical architecture in the world," Petersen observed, "but if your marketing team needs three sprints and two developers to launch a new landing page, you've failed." Technical excellence alone doesn't deliver market success—it must be paired with business user empowerment.

This reality challenges us to rethink how we evaluate digital experience platforms. Feature checklists can't capture whether a platform enables the speed and experimentation organizations need. The key questions become: How quickly can business users implement new ideas? How much developer intervention is required for common scenarios? How seamlessly can teams collaborate across roles?

Visual workspaces and experience modeling directly address these questions by creating what Petersen calls "appropriate interfaces for appropriate roles." Developers work with code and components, content creators work with structured forms, and digital marketers use visual tools—all connecting to the same underlying systems without compromising each other's effectiveness.

The business impact is substantial. Organizations that implement balanced architectures report campaign launch times decreasing by 60-70%, dramatically higher experiment volumes, and most importantly, improved business outcomes as teams can rapidly respond to market signals instead of waiting for technical resources.

As you evaluate your digital experience strategy, look beyond the technical architecture to consider the full experience creation lifecycle. The most successful implementations provide both technical excellence and business agility—what Petersen memorably called "building a car that can win races, not just a hobby car."

Start by auditing how much developer intervention your current processes require. Map out the steps to implement common scenarios like launching a campaign page or testing a new layout. Calculate the true time-to-market for digital initiatives, including all dependencies and approval cycles.

When evaluating platforms, look beyond headless capabilities to assess visual tooling, multi-source editing, and business user empowerment. Ask vendors to demonstrate how marketing teams can work independently while respecting technical governance. The platforms that will lead the next generation will balance developer experience with equally thoughtful business user experiences.

"The future belongs to balanced architectures," Petersen concluded. "Technical teams that prioritize empowering business users won't just build better platforms—they'll build market-leading businesses."

In a digital landscape obsessed with technical innovation, sometimes the most revolutionary act is remembering who technology is supposed to serve: not just developers, but the business users and ultimately customers who determine market success. Composable architectures are indeed the future, but only when they work for everyone.

See Lars’ full presentation here.