TYPO3 CMS Product Strategy

Since mid 2022, the TYPO3 CMS Product Strategy Group, with support from 4L Impact Strategies, has made significant strides in shaping the future of TYPO3. Through comprehensive analyses and end-user interviews, the team identified key opportunities and areas for improvement. These findings were thoroughly discussed in a series of workshops, culminating in an internal strategy paper first drafted in December 2023. It encapsulates the group's collective insights and outlines strategic objectives and forthcoming actions.

We conducted many analyses, in the form of business, market, JTBD, stakeholder, and SWOT analyses, to draw a global picture of the 2023 situation. We acknowledge that it is not possible to get authoritative data regarding the usage of TYPO3 and are aware of the difficult challenge of drawing conclusions from an incomplete picture. Still, it is possible to draw conclusions from common trends within the data sources and expressions from representative stakeholders (e.g. the JTBD interviews). During the ongoing efforts of the product strategy group, we will try to expand the analysis and get more insights, e.g. through telemetry. Additionally, a competitor analysis, together with market/technology evolution analysis, should be performed.

The product strategy, trend and market analyses, and this strategy paper will be updated annually, as a result of the group's ongoing work.

It's not new information to mention the decline in market share trends for old classics CMSs. TYPO3 is no exception to this trend, and is following the same curve. TYPO3 has seen an increase in migrations from TYPO3 to less technically complex systems. The TYPO3 Ecosystem is still too developer-oriented and is not talking enough about customers' pains and gains. Our challenge is to ensure that TYPO3 is also designed for a non-technical audience, even though it's a powerful, feature-rich tool.

Around 85% of all TYPO3 instances are from the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). The German market is a strong user and backer of TYPO3. The markets in the USA, Great Britain, and Canada are showing significant growth potential for TYPO3, with a proportion of new sites that already exceed the global average. We'll focus our efforts on expanding TYPO3 and its user community to all continents, including emerging markets.

Decision makers evaluate costs over the long term, and may consider a cost to be an investment, provided that profits can be expected. We have identified a number of long-term cost reduction opportunities, such as less manual work (automation), lower cost of managing content and design, cheaper infrastructure, regulation compliance, etc. The cost of keeping software up-to-date and secure is a major topic, and we observed that customers are slow to upgrade to new versions. As a result, the feedback loop between releasing new TYPO3 features and getting end customers’ opinion is too long, and we want to reduce it. Finally, marketing features directly linked to tracking user profits must be easily integrated.

Many national and local governments, their agencies, and public institutions are using the platform today. TYPO3 is recognized in this sector as a reliable, regulatory-compliant tool. This is an important strength that we must continue to consolidate. Public organizations in European countries are particularly sensitive to these topics, and represent a high-potential market.

Currently, there are many people engaged in product development on a regular basis (in core development and official teams). Most of the effort is voluntary, and the work of some people is sponsored by agencies. The structure of the teams is the result of a gradual, volunteer-based process, and it is therefore not based on the required, but on the available expertise. Teams need to restructure and address their missing resources to cover the entire product innovation cycle.

The TYPO3 Product is an integral part of the TYPO3 Project. The TYPO3 product strategy is built within the context of the TYPO3 Project, and never outside of it. As a result, the TYPO3 Product vision is the same as — or a subset of — the project’s vision:

Empower * to unlock their potential, creating opportunities through content. 

We believe that every person can bring something unique to the table. Content is fundamental to empowering people today to share knowledge, unlock possibilities, and achieve their potential regardless of who they are, what they believe, or where they come from. Our people, software, and services will empower content for everyone.

The TYPO3 Ecosystem is a big community consisting of, for example, agencies, solution providers, and freelancers. Additional services and solutions, like extensions, consulting, certification, and education are being offered. In contrast to, e.g. open-code models, TYPO3 is true open source, with key innovation delivered by community contributors. 

The overarching vision is to cover the broadest range of applications, from small individual solutions to complete product architectures with the TYPO3 product as a base. The strategy focuses on alleviating the pain points of the current stakeholders and to foster exchange and interconnection between all actors. Therefore, it is compatible with the Equalize Opportunities through Open Source purpose statement.

TYPO3’s end users should benefit from the Ecosystem through use-case-specific solutions with better visibility and discoverability. The Ecosystem mission where end users and solution providers can match.

Based on the results from the jobs-to-be-done interviews and a product strategy workshop, the group has arrived at the following ten strategic goals. The goals have medium to long-term time frames (3–5 years). The goals and their priorities will be reviewed and modified during the annual update of the overall Product Strategy.

“We want to focus our development efforts on the public sector and small to medium enterprises (SME).”

Based on the results from the jobs-to-be-done interviews and recent market developments, the group concluded that TYPO3’s focus for the upcoming years has to be on the public sector and small to medium enterprises. This does not mean that all other TYPO3 customers and end-user groups will be excluded from our efforts, but that the main focus will be put on meeting the needs of these two representative customer sectors. 

“We want to reduce complexity in order to enable more people to use TYPO3 CMS efficiently without the need for training.”

In order to better support end users with their daily tasks, TYPO3 should offer a modern and consistent user interface, self-explanatory workflows, and clear and unified best practices. Getting TYPO3 up and running has to be super-fast, easy, and bulletproof for newcomers.

“We want to help you deliver better content and better communication.”

TYPO3 should enhance the editors’ content creation experience by providing feedback and suggestions, promoting best practices and streamline task completion. For administrators, TYPO3 should assist in system management and health monitoring by providing feedback and suggestions within the user interface. 

Additionally, TYPO3 should efficiently integrate with external tools, offer task automation, and use the built-in dashboard to enhance editors’ understanding of website health, trends, and content performance across multiple sites.

“We want to improve solution/use case communication and customer-oriented communication.”

Customers and end users should obtain better backend user experience through clear best practices and in-system support. This includes the creation and maintenance of several official solution-oriented cookbooks, how-tos, and overarching marketing and communication for use cases and business needs.

“We want to establish good Governance around product development, quality assurance, and cybersecurity.”

The TYPO3 Product Team can innovate more efficiently if all activities and other interrelated or interacting elements are managed as one system. The TYPO3 product development process should help the Product Team identify opportunities, create and validate concepts, and develop and deploy the best solutions. The process should include quality measurement KPIs, ideation, innovation mechanisms, and security and quality assurance by design.

“We want to make fact-based decisions, and provide facts — also to our community.”

Enhance decision-making processes by grounding them in factual data and a better understanding of the market and user dynamics.

This goal aims to optimize product development and market positioning for TYPO3. It underscores the commitment to making informed, data-driven decisions to ensure that technical and organizational strategies align with real-world usage and market demands. 

“We want to be more interconnected.”

We aim to position TYPO3 as a highly connected and adaptable solution in the digital landscape by expanding TYPO3's integration capabilities and allow effortless connections with popular systems. This involves user-friendly integration processes, ensuring that TYPO3 can seamlessly interchange data with external systems, and improving the communication about such capabilities both internally and externally.

The efforts to establish official collaboration with external vendors should be strengthened. Official integrations with listings on vendors’ websites can enhance TYPO3's credibility and expand the Ecosystem.

“We want to make updates and maintenance easier.”

To deliver a high return on investment, TYPO3 should deliver customer value by offering  long-term support and straightforward maintenance and updates. TYPO3 should promote the importance of keeping software up-to-date and secure, while also being accessible and less costly to maintain over time.

“We want to increase the end user’s success (lead generation/conversions/content delivery).”

TYPO3 should have clearly defined communication and feedback channels in order to build transparency and trust. Consistent storytelling and joint marketing efforts should be undertaken in order to leverage the increased visibility and reach. The Project needs to offer official and central marketing and sales support assets to help agencies succeed in selling and marketing TYPO3 CMS.

This goal also includes the definition, implementation, integration, and connection of success metrics as well as the establishment of official, centralized lead generation. 

“We want to make the CMS more scalable.”

SMEs can profit from both scaling up and down, and thus spending their IT resources more efficiently.

The public sector needs high content availability and the ability to scale up on demand in response to increased request load. They also require efficient, distributed caches (CDN) and huge amounts of file resources (cloud storage).

TYPO3 should be refined for cloud hosting, incorporating a test chain to evaluate key functions, and ensuring horizontal scalability, e.g. the ability to scale down to zero. There is an opportunity in exploring push-based principles for frontend operations to align with modern cloud architectures and making TYPO3's performance in the cloud measurable. 

TYPO3's compatibility with diverse cloud, on-premise and shared-hosting environments should be enhanced to optimize the operational efficiency. Different operational modes should be explored, including serverless models, standalone application servers, and asynchronous PHP solutions.

Stay tuned for updates, surveys, and community forums where you can actively contribute to shaping the next chapter of TYPO3.

Thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm. The TYPO3 CMS Product Strategy Group is eager to embark on this journey with you, and together, we will elevate TYPO3 to new heights.

As a now official TYPO3 Community group, the CMS Strategy Group will adhere to the general rules and provide quarterly reports on current updates for the entire ecosystem. 

More About the TYPO3 CMS Product Strategy Group