Story Highlights
- Company-wide initiative: Unify Tata apps onto a single modern app that eliminates overhead of maintaining separate back ends for every brand
- On a hard deadline: Launch event is planned, but the app isn’t ready after a year of struggling to re-build with a DXP
- How Tata Digital uses Sanity:
- Seamless integration of 20+ tech stacks, consisting of third-party and home-grown data systems
- Flexible content model to bring to life every brand's unique vision and easily adapt to change
- Streamlined multi-brand workflows: Go from idea to production in under 1 hour, without relying on developers
The Vision
Better together on one platform
Founded in 1868, Tata Group is one of India's most renowned conglomerates. It has a diverse portfolio spanning 150+ sub-brands across a spectrum of sectors—from consumer products to consulting, travel to telecommunications, and hospitality to health.
In 2021, Tata Group doubled down on its digital strategy investing $2 billion to start Tata Digital, a digital arm focused on modernizing the company’s e-commerce, digital platforms, and online services. The goal was to accelerate growth by expanding reach and tapping into India’s fast-growing audience of over 1 billion mobile users.
At the time, Tata’s digital portfolio consisted of 20+ different mobile apps across electronics, groceries, travel, fashion, and others. This led to a fragmented experience for users—incessantly downloading and switching between apps. On the flip side, it came with a massive development cost for the company to build and maintain separate mobile apps with separate tech stacks.
To Tata Group’s leadership team, there was not a shred of a doubt: the brands were better together. The company tasked Tata Digital with its first company-wide initiative: unify all of Tata’s consumer brands under a one stop-shop—Tata Neu—for a seamless, connected e-commerce experience.
The Challenge
Rethinking the content layer for modern development
Internally dubbed the “SuperApp”, Tata Neu was no ordinary mobile app to build, and would require a “super” effort from Tata Digital to wrangle segregated tech stacks, business priorities, and teams. And they needed to do so against a hard deadline: a not-to-be-missed opportunity of exposure to 500 million viewers at the Indian Premier League (IPL). As the premier sponsor of the sporting event, Tata Group had planned to leverage its promotional placements to drive awareness and adoption for Tata Neu.
With one year to go, the work was cut out for Tata Digital. They needed to bring every app onto a single digital platform, without losing the flexibility to meet every brand’s unique business and technology requirements.
A critical layer of the digital platform, the right content solution was key to delivering a modern, multi-brand mobile experience. Initially, Tata Digital was inclined to stick to the company’s incumbent CMS vendor, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).However, when put to the test, AEM Headless posed insurmountable roadblocks:
- Rigid content structures
Whilst onboarding more brands onto AEM, Tata realized that a one-size-fits-all content model wouldn't work for the SuperApp, due to the complexity and diversity of multiple brands and verticals. For instance, fashion purchases and buying insurance differ vastly in product type and customer journey. Yet, on AEM, brands were forced to use fixed content types, despite having vastly different content requirements. - Disconnected tech stack
Every Tata app was at different levels of digital maturity, each with its own constraints—Tata Digital had to meet the brands where they were today. This meant interoperability with diverse, legacy systems was key. However, given AEM’s architectural limitations, Tata Digital couldn’t integrate with the third-party and homegrown data systems and tools that each brand used for their apps.
Due to AEM’s web-first architecture, it was challenging to build a modern integrated SuperApp. Tata settled for a progressive web app, putting websites into a mobile container, but created an inconsistent, fragmented experience—every website had a different look and feel. - Legacy developer experience
AEM’s new headless option still had remnants of a monolithic setup. Because their content backend was still tightly coupled with the frontend, content schemas were polluted with UI attributes, like CSS. This made it painfully complex to reuse schemas at scale.
Additionally, AEM imposed tedious workflows that would not scale, from manual content modeling via the UI to manual synching of schemas via zip file sharing across teams. It became challenging to govern change management, increasingly so, as the team grew from 20 to 100 developers.
Ultimately, the problem boiled down to one core blocker: when content is tied to the presentation layer, you’re limited in the experiences you can create.After experiencing delays in launching Tata Neu due to AEM’s failures, Tata Digital realized the need for a more flexible approach to build the SuperApp the way they wanted. They turned to the headless CMS category.
We were very clear from the beginning—a CMS should not dictate the presentation layer. Content is the data, and the UI is a projection of the data. We don't want content to become the UI projection. When you couple UI with data, you muddle the pristine vocabulary of content and end up with a schema that departs significantly from the core purpose of structured content.
The Solution
Composability: the key to Tata’s vision
In their search to find the ideal content solution for the SuperApp, Tata Digital conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the top headless CMSes on Gartner’s list. It wasn’t just a matter of finding the right technology. They had to galvanize leadership and internal teams around the new vision: treating content as data. And composability was the means to get there.By storing content as atomic data units—detached from the UI—a composable content layer would allow content to be restructured and reused for any context. This was the unlock for Tata to scale multi-brand experiences.
There’s a common misconception that projecting data onto a UI requires significant transformation. In reality, everything displayed on the screen, from navigation to media and animation can be driven by data. With precise control over how data is handled and displayed, Sanity allows you to build dynamic UIs in real-time, even as the data evolves.
Headless, but not composable
To ensure they met every brand requirement during evaluation, Tata Digital involved key cross-functional stakeholders from the start, including product, content, marketing, and engineering. After scoping the use case for every business unit, the team spent two months exploring top headless CMSes.
Most headless CMS vendors didn’t make it past the first technical requirement—including Contentful, ContentStack, Storyblok, Strapi, Prismic, Agility CMS, DatoCMS, and ButterCMS. Like AEM, they all came with the same limitation: schema creation through the user interface (UI). This meant the structure of their data would still be dictated by how it appeared on the authoring UI, making it untenable for the following reasons:
- Limited flexibility: Most headless CMSes offer predefined content types via their authoring UI—they lack the flexibility to customize content models and the authoring UI to meet different requirements across teams.
- Workflow frictions: No developer wants to manually create and modify schemas by clicking through the UI, when they can do it faster, and to better effect, via code. Also, version control in code is much simpler to any UI-based versioning, and allows for cleaner code reviews via pull requests.
- Hard to scale: Tata planned to add more brands onto the SuperApp—this would mean new use cases from different verticals and teams. When schema design is controlled via the UI, it’s not easy to reuse and modify content models—it would require recurring rebuilds, which was a non-starter for Tata.
The team was on the verge of giving up on the search, and building their own CMS—until they came across Sanity.
We recognized that each brand in our multi-brand portfolio has unique content requirements and structures. A one-size-fits-all approach with a universal schema wouldn't suffice. Code-driven schema design was our top criteria for a CMS. We were looking for a programmatic way to build and modify schemas at scale. This would allow us to explore and evolve our content structures over time, without being limited to fixed design patterns.
Sanity solves for scale and flexibility
Sanity met Tata's top two solution criteria. Where AEM and other headless CMS solutions fell short, Sanity’s composable content platform offered two technical differentiators:
- Schemas as code: During their proof-of-concept, Tata Digital pressure-tested every use case on Sanity. By the end, they were confident in not only meeting today’s requirements but also scaling easily in the future. Code-driven schemas offered developers the much-desired flexibility and control to easily reuse and adapt content structures across brands and use cases. Tata’s developers loved the added benefits of content modeling in code: from version control with Git to writing easy-to-read schemas in TypeScript.
- APIs and webhooks: Sanity offered a level of interoperability that AEM had failed to offer—anything with an API could be connected to Sanity, from third-party tools to homegrown data sources. This made it easy to integrate every brand onto one platform.
Tata Digital has been able to create a schema structure complex enough to federate different brands, industry verticals, and complex use cases—and then seamlessly paint it on a single mobile app. Every time I've seen a new use case, I've been able to accommodate it. Thanks to Sanity, we were able to evolve our schema structure over time.
The Results
11 million downloads in 2 months
Within 4 months of purchasing Sanity, Tata Digital was able to launch Tata Neu—debuting in front of 500 million Indian Premier League fans in March 2022. With this massive exposure, Tata Neu amassed 11 million downloads within just 2 months of launch.
In reaching this milestone, Tata had seen content migration as a risk—they had massive amounts of data to get out of AEM and into Sanity. To their surprise, they were able to migrate everything—a whopping 20,000 documents—with a single script in under 17 hours. This is a testament to the real-time APIs and flexibility of Sanity's schemaless back-end database, Content Lake. Every content type, from text and images to references, was structured and ready for production. They also discarded unnecessary documents in the new world of Sanity—where infinite nesting of documents and objects allows you to consolidate schemas and organize data more efficiently, thus reducing complexity.
Today, streamlined data pipelines are the norm for Tata Digital.
- Surgical content updates: Developers can pull and push data to any context at any scale with a single API call.
- Unmatched querying power: Using GROQ, developers can send the exact data for every front-end request for optimal rendering—and even transform data into the right format on the fly, without altering the back end.
- Schemaless datastore: Developers can ingest any schema and absorb the real-world messiness of third party and homegrown sources.
Bringing to life every brand vision
Product categories on Tata Neu app The shift to Sanity gave birth to a new mindset: no idea is off limits due to technology constraints. Developers can say “yes” because they have the right building blocks and flexibility to solve even the most complex problems. This confidence is inspiring teams to think bigger, from exploring new growth strategies to reimagining user experiences.
Sanity’s flexible code-driven content modeling has allowed Tata Digital to absorb the complexity of multi-brand e-commerce. Having gone through the process of content modeling across verticals—grocery, fashion, electronics, jewelry, etc.—Tata Digital is confident they can build anything on Sanity. And the content team is now equipped with reusable design patterns across brands.
Complexity made simple
Tata has been able to build complex user experiences, which wouldn’t have been possible with other headless CMSes.
Behind Tata’s seamless travel booking experience, lies an interconnected web of moving parts: real-time flight and hotel listings, a search engine, personalized recommendations, promo offers, checkout flow, check-in flow, loyalty points, etc. Tata has been able to simplify the complexity thanks to Sanity’s schema as code and API-first data pipelines.
Tata offers over 20 products under the financial services umbrella—personal loans, digital gold, quick EMI, credit cards, and more. By writing schemas in code, Tata has been able to create a base schema, and layer on product-level requirements across the financial product portfolio.
I cannot imagine building complex experiences like travel or financial services in any prior CMS. No one is going to sit there and manually input schemas through the UI. It’s impractical and doesn’t scale. The schema has to be designed in code for you to build what you want, and make it simple to manage as your app evolves.
New revenue opportunities
By connecting every brand on one platform, Tata Digital has unlocked new growth strategies like NeuPass, a cross-brand loyalty program.NeuPass customers earn 1 NeuCoin for every rupee spent on Tata Neu, and can use NeuCoins across any brand on the app. This winning retention strategy incentivizes return users to explore and shop Tata brands. Were it not for Sanity’s real-time, two-way data integration, building a rewards-based payment system wouldn’t have been feasible.
Idea to production in 1 hour
Before Sanity, content teams would regularly run into developer dependencies to ship content and troubleshoot issues. Mission-critical campaigns during festivals like Holi, Diwali, and Christmas meant late nights for both content teams and developers. Now, content teams are empowered to launch campaigns on demand. Tata’s development teams are completely hands-free and stress-free—no more phones buzzing at midnight because something isn’t working, yet again.
Not only are content teams autonomous, they’re able to go from idea to production in under 1 hour—successfully delivering time-sensitive content and campaigns with all the bells-and-whistles.
Streamlined multi-brand workflows
Fully customizable authoring UI, Sanity Studio empowers Tata’s team of 20-30 content authors to manage content seamlessly across brands, without having to go through multiple hoops. They ship fast with confidence thanks to powerful features like live previews and real-time collaborative editing. From content types to validations—everything editors need is configured up front, so no one has to worry about stepping in later.
To further simplify content management, Tata’s developers have been able to build powerful customizations and automations for their editors, including one-click template creation, approval workflows, and programmatic content personalization.
Enthusiastic about the future with Sanity, Tata plans to continue pushing the bar on upleveling the editorial experience. They have exciting customizations planned, including using AI for image curation and content creation.
With content teams in the driver’s seat and development teams freed up to build new products, there’s no looking back.
Success is about simplicity—for Tata, that’s the ability to manage content across brands in a unified seamless direct manner without having to jump through multiple hoops. And, to do it in a way so that a small team can manage big things.
