James Hardie is Building Composability from the Ground Up With Data
Sophia Zlatin brings a martech strategist’s eye to James Hardie’s IT transformation team, proving that if you don’t solve for data first, nothing else scales.
When your digital ecosystem spans legacy infrastructure, evolving expectations, and shifting cross-functional ownership, the easy part is buying the tech. The hard part is making it work.
At James Hardie, that challenge fell to Sophia Zlatin. Brought in midstream during a major transformation effort, she was tasked with translating business priorities into a roadmap the organization could actually execute. Her approach? Start with the data, align on what’s essential, and equip every team to move with purpose.
Leading with Data, Not Tools
When Zlatin joined James Hardie, changes were already in motion. Projects were underway. Platforms were selected. But the data, the thing that would ultimately power personalization, measurement, and agility, wasn’t yet structured in a way that made transformation scalable.
“For most organizations the biggest challenge is the data,” she says. “That’s the first piece of advice I give everyone: Make sure you have a very thorough, long piece of discovery before you even start day one of your project. Because if you're doing it during your project timeline, that's going to be timeline and budget risk.”
Accordingly, the James Hardie IT team’s first priority at James Hardie was to define the data layer. That meant auditing what existed, aligning stakeholders on taxonomy, and helping business users understand what could and couldn’t be delivered. In short: de-risking the roadmap before it ever went into production.
“Data is 80% of the work,” she says. “If you don’t have your data mapped, then you don’t even know what you can accomplish.”
What MVP Really Means
Part of Zlatin’s job is helping teams understand what’s realistic. That doesn’t mean saying no, it means reframing the wish list in terms of value, effort, and business impact. There’s never been a project where the wishlist wasn’t bigger than the budget.
Her team approaches every initiative with a clear MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mindset, defining not only what needs to be built, but also what success looks like, what blockers exist, and how future phases will pick up where the MVP leaves off.
“A lot of what I do is look for what is MVP and what isn't MVP,” she says. “You really have to figure out how to accomplish what you need to accomplish to launch your website or app, within the constraints you've already laid out, and without compromising too much.”
For Zlatin, it’s not about perfection. It’s about momentum.
Aligning the Organization
James Hardie has embraced change more readily than many large enterprises. According to Zlatin and her peers, the culture is one of collaboration, not resistance. But even in a receptive environment, alignment doesn’t happen automatically. It takes clarity, empathy, and a shared language.
“People aren’t mind readers,” she says. “You have to help them understand what’s being asked, why it matters, and how it connects to their work.”
She sees her role as both translator and guide, bridging IT, marketing, and product by surfacing the right details to the right people at the right time. Whether it’s isolating a single data element for review or framing an integration in terms of customer impact, she always starts by asking, Will this make sense to them? If not, she keeps refining.
“It’s about giving people the tools to help you,” she says. “You have to have empathy for your coworkers and for the people that you're partnering with.”
Measuring Composable Success
Measurement in a composable environment isn’t always tidy. With systems decoupled and data pipelines shifting, traditional dashboards don’t always tell the full story.
The James Hardie IT team’s approach is grounded in practicality. “Sometimes you have to just sample your data,” Zlatin says. “Take a look at your performance metrics for leads or nurture or general page views—whatever metric matters to the business at that moment—and even if you can’t do apples to apples can you sample? Can you look at a month or an event and see what that data tells us?”
In this case, there was enough historical data to establish baselines. As composable systems came online, her team was able to isolate performance changes, validate the shifts, and share results in a language the business understood.
That feedback loop created motivation. Teams saw the progress. They trusted the data. And they began to believe in the process.
Incremental Change That Adds Up
Zlatin doesn’t romanticize big-bang launches. Her preference—and her advice to others—is to focus on steady, incremental change.
“We’re building on excitement, which is great because we really are looking at incremental changes,” she says. Not everything has to be a breakthrough. Sometimes it’s just about doing one thing a little better and stacking those wins over time.
That mindset has helped shape James Hardie’s approach to iteration. New ideas aren’t thrown into a backlog to be forgotten. They’re explored, tested, and prioritized based on impact. That keeps momentum high and burnout low.
It also builds confidence across the organization. As each improvement proves its value, teams become more willing to take the next step.
A Cautious, Clear-Eyed View of AI
Like most enterprises today, James Hardie is exploring the possibilities of AI. But they’re doing it with intention.
“We’re cautiously optimistic,” Zlatin says. “We’re looking at AI’s capabilities and brainstorming how it can be used. What has business value? What are the tradeoffs? But we’re very cautious about it as well, because once you let the genie out, you can’t put it back in again.”
For now, the focus is on foundational work: securing data, clarifying use cases, and ensuring any implementation supports, not disrupts, the broader strategy. As for agentic systems or hybrid automation models? They’re on the radar, but not at the front of the line.
“I think with every technology, there's that moment of what’s that flashy new thing? But is it really practical and does it really add business value?” she notes. “Sometimes you want to be first to market. And sometimes you don’t.”
Closing the Gap
The focus of the James Hardie IT team isn’t about breakthrough tech. It’s about the human work of transformation, bridging knowledge gaps, clarifying expectations, and turning raw potential into real results. Start with the data, bring people along, and make sure they understand the plan. Then you can scale.
At James Hardie, that approach is already unlocking meaningful change. Not with a single launch, but with every step forward.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.