Sports Tech How TrackMan uses Storyblok to scale as the leading sports-tech product for world-class athletes globally

TrackMan is a fast-growing Danish sports-tech company that specializes in high-end radar and camera tracking products and solutions for golf, baseball, football, and American football. Founded in 2003, the company’s signature product is the TrackMan 4, a golf launch monitor that measures more than 50 data parameters related to club motion and ball flight. TrackMan technology is used by major equipment manufacturers, the PGA Tour, and top golfers, including Scottie Scheffler, Dustin Johnson, and Rory McIlroy.

• 3 months build and migration time to launch

• 1 to 3 days to create a new component within Storyblok

• 7 languages

• 40% increase in speed optimization (Google Lighthouse)

Although the company has more than 200 employees worldwide, most of the TrackMan team sits at the headquarters in Vedbæk, Denmark. This includes the marketing department, which consists of creatives and a dedicated web development team that uses Storyblok daily.

Prior to using Storyblok

Before Storyblok, TrackMan.com was built using a traditional monolithic CMS approach. This solution was clearly outdated and came with various performance, scalability, and maintenance challenges. The CMS was difficult to configure and manage within the digital marketing team, such that even simple updates would require a developer’s attention. Due to limited resources, web work was often deprioritized and postponed. 

With all these factors in mind, the newly established web team realized that looking into new technology — such as a headless CMS — could streamline all their processes and projects on both the technical and content sides.

Janis Stipnieks joined TrackMan in early 2021 as a technical lead focusing on marketing and eCommerce project development. He was tasked with finding a new solution that would meet the requirements of TrackMans's new website, scale up as the company grows, and be straightforward to work within a relatively small team. Some of the main features that Janis considered were:

• A built-in localization setup within the headless CMS 

• A simple and easy-to-use content delivery system via APIs

• Overall usability that would meet the needs of TrackMan’s various roles (content editors, developers, designers, etc.) with the help of the Visual Editor

Adopting Storyblok for scalability into new markets

Storyblok came onto Janis’ radar shortly after he joined the company through a recommendation from a colleague within the R&D department. He started building the first proof of concept in April 2021, and the development of the new website began in June. The team was able to fulfill the following requirements they were seeking with Storyblok through: 

• A clear and transparent pricing structure that could fit not only with their budget but the flexible package offerings that could match with their team and intended growth

• The ability to use a best-of-breed selection with localization tools as the company expanded and grew into new markets and languages (with Lokalise) 

• Developers being able to use any technology stack or framework they are familiar with within the CMS 

• A visual editor with a UI that was easy for both developers and marketers to understand 

• The ability to define roles and workflows within and between teams 

• Allowing marketers to make their own decisions and changes without help from developers 

The marketing team's favorite feature was the ability to localize content easily. Currently, TrackMan is available in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Japanese, and German. 

Storyblok’s visual editor was another popular feature. The WYSIWYG setup made it easy for developers to create new components and pages, then hand them off to the marketing creatives to add content. This resulted in TrackMan building and launching their new website in less than three months. 

Cross-collaboration between marketers, developers & designers

Currently, TrackMan uses Storyblok as the central content hub for their website. The frontend application is built using NextJS and hosted on Vercel. Optimized data delivery strategies from Storyblok and Vercel result in a fast and performant application that can instantly deliver content to users. TrackMan's website aims to build a stronger brand presence online and, most importantly, to generate quality leads worldwide; therefore, site speed and localization are highly critical.

Within the marketing department, the web team consists of three roles: developer, project manager, and UX/UI designer. The project manager coordinates any new tasks related to site improvements. Whenever a new page or component is needed, UX/UI designs are developed within the web team, which means a simplified handover process and implementation for developers. Suppose a new component is required, or development is needed for functionality. In that case, the team collaborates on creating designs, where then Janis takes over the development work. Once completed, a handover is done towards the overall editing and content experience to Christian and Mari. The process starts with creating UX/UI wireframes, which are then converted to completed designs using Figma. Together with developers, they investigate if a new story component is needed or whether it is possible to reuse and modify one of the existing components frameworks. In terms of the development experience, creating new components, such as any of the frontend components, would usually take 1 to 3 days to build until the handover to the marketing team to use inside Storyblok. 

The need for speed: Accelerating content editing and localization effortlessly 

Throughout the entire adoption process and TrackMan’s usage of Storyblok, it was mentioned that the overall speed from idea to finished product and the ability for developers and marketers to work independently from each other was the most beneficial aspects of their experience. While speed and flexibility were vital, the localization setup helped TrackMan fix previous time constraints in translating content and setting it up in their prior CMS. Within Storyblok, the company uses field-type translations alongside Lokalise for translations and internal translations with agencies and their own global team.

Key Takeaways

TrackMan was able to use Storyblok to strategically streamline their entire processes internally, where they:

• Used Storyblok to streamline their processes and allow creatives and developers to work independently

• This helped the company scale up their web presence and deliver localized content in key markets, with a foundation in place for further expansion 

• TrackMan was able to build and migrate its initial MVP to launch in just three months while incrementally updating its localized website over time in seven different languages 

Storyblok is excited to grow with TrackMan in its future endeavors to innovate the sports-tech space worldwide. Like Storyblok, TrackMan aims to test and push the boundaries of technology in their industry to bring solutions across golf, baseball, football, and more in how the game is played and viewed, with Storyblok serving as their CMS of choice for their website.