At Necom, I led the engineering team building a CMS platform for government intranet systems. Multiple agencies across Addis Ababa adopted it. That sentence sounds simple but getting there was anything but.
The common failure mode for government CMS projects is this: you build a beautiful system, deploy it, train 30 people, and come back six months later to find everyone still emailing Word documents around. The CMS sits empty.
What we did differently
We made the CMS the path of least resistance. Instead of asking people to learn a new tool on top of their existing workflow, we made the CMS the workflow. Document approvals went through it. Internal announcements had to go through it. If you wanted to publish anything on the intranet, the CMS was the only way.
That sounds coercive, but it's really just product design. People don't adopt tools because the tools are good. They adopt them because the tools are easier than the alternative. Our job was to make the CMS easier than email.
The technical side
Nothing revolutionary. ASP.NET, SQL Server, standard role-based access control. The interesting engineering was in the permissions model — government agencies have complex hierarchies and the content approval chain had to mirror the organizational chart exactly. A document published by the wrong person in the wrong department was a political problem, not just a UX issue.
We also had to handle Amharic content properly — Unicode, search indexing, sorting. In 2015, this was still painful in ways that English-only developers never think about.
The real lesson
This was my first time leading a team, and the biggest thing I learned was that my job was no longer writing the best code. It was making sure the team could ship together. Code reviews, architecture decisions, mentoring junior devs, shielding the team from scope creep in meetings — that was the actual work. I still wrote code, but the leverage had shifted.
The CMS ran across multiple agencies. People used it every day. It wasn't glamorous, but it worked, and in government software, "it works and people use it" is the highest compliment.