With a multidisciplinary background spanning software development, architecture, product ownership, and marketing, Fernandez is a technology leader working at the intersection of systems, content, commerce, and CX. In the last 20 years, Fernandez has led 250+ projects in 25 countries. Much of this work has focused on designing and delivering digital ecosystems, including CMSs, DAMs, commerce platforms, digital experience platforms, CDPs, and marketing technologies. He has led multicultural teams of content specialists, marketers, engineers, architects, and product leaders, working fluently in Spanish, Portuguese, and English across industries such as media, retail, banking, hospitality, and telcos.

Currently serving as Executive Director of Technology at VML, Fernandez focuses on the future of AI, content, marketing, and automation platforms, exploring how structured content, composable commerce, and data-driven systems enable continuous learning, performance, and growth.

If Software Engineers Solved This 30 Years Ago, Why Are Content Teams Still Reinventing the Wheel?

Content teams suffer common pains across industries. Duplication, inconsistency, and slow time-to-market. In many cases, not because of the lack of tooling or talent, but because they lack a systematic approach. Over time, content debt grows: content is created, copied, forgotten, and adapted across channels with little or no structure. Software engineers faced similar challenges decades ago and solved many of them with approaches like DRY, KISS, separation of concerns, modular design, and encapsulation, to name a few. In this session, we bring those proven engineering ideas into practical content strategy and operations. We will see how concepts originally designed to manage complex software systems can be applied to content modeling, reuse, governance, and delivery. We will see how treating content as a system, rather than a collection of documents, helps reduce duplication, improve consistency, accelerate updates across channels, and reduce maintenance effort..

In this session, attendees will learn:

• Identify and measure content debt using concepts borrowed from technical debt
• Apply DRY, KISS, and separation of concerns to content models and workflows
• Design reusable content components using polymorphism and encapsulation
• Understand how Conway’s Law explains fragmented customer experiences
• Build a scalable “create once, publish everywhere” content foundation
• Translate engineering thinking into actionable content strategy decisions