Confessions of a CMS Salesman: What Your Developer Is Really Thinking

Let me paint you a picture. It's Tuesday morning, and I'm on a sales call with a marketing director who's enthusiastically describing how they want their new website to "pop" with animations that trigger when you hover, scroll, blink, or possibly even think about blinking. Meanwhile, their developer—camera off, of course—is sending me private Slack messages that would make a sailor blush.

Welcome to my world as a CMS salesman, where I'm frequently the translator between "wouldn't it be cool if" and "dear god, please no."

The Secret Language of Developers

After years in this business, I've become fluent in Developer. Let me share some translations:

• What they say: "That timeline seems aggressive."
  What they mean: "I will be working Christmas Day."
• What they say: "We should evaluate our options."
  What they mean: "I already built a prototype in the framework I want to use, and I will die on this hill."
• What they say: "The existing CMS has limitations."
  What they mean: "If I have to hack one more plugin to make your PDF download button sparkle, I'm updating my resume."

What Developers Actually Want in a CMS

Here in Michigan, we appreciate straight talk. So let me be straight with you about what your development team really wants from a CMS but might not say aloud:

1. They want to use tools they actually enjoy

Shocking, I know. Your developers don't wake up excited to wrestle with that enterprise CMS you bought in 2014. This is why so many teams I work with at Cosmic are relieved to find a headless CMS that lets them build with modern frameworks while marketing gets a user-friendly interface. It's like discovering you can have both Detroit-style pizza AND Chicago deep dish at the same party.

2. They're tired of being content janitors

Every time your developer has to drop everything to update the CEO's bio, a small piece of their soul dies. What they really want is for you to be self-sufficient. With Cosmic, I've seen the look of pure joy when developers realize they can build a system where marketing can actually update things themselves—without breaking the site.

3. They dream of clean APIs

To non-developers, an API is that thing developers mention when they explain why something will take longer than you hoped. But to developers, a well-designed API is like a perfectly organized garage where every tool has its place. Cosmic's API documentation regularly makes developers on my calls practically giddy—which, for developers, means they unmute to say "this actually makes sense."

The Projects That Make Developers Run for the Hills

Want to see fear in a developer's eyes? Mention these projects:

• "We need to migrate 15 years of content from our old CMS."
• "Can we just clone our competitor's website but make it better?"
• "The design is finished and approved. We need it live in two weeks."
• "We want a custom solution that works exactly like WordPress but isn't WordPress."

I've seen developers mysteriously develop "connectivity issues" during these conversations.

A Better Way Forward

After helping hundreds of teams find the right content management solution, I've learned that the most successful projects start with one thing: listening to your developers.

When organizations choose Cosmic, it's often because someone finally heard what the development team was saying about flexibility, performance, and maintainability. The marketing team gets what they need—a way to create and update content without developer intervention—and developers get to work with modern tools they don't hate.

Of course, I'm biased. I sell Cosmic for a living. But I sell it because I've seen the before-and-after, and there's nothing more satisfying than watching a team that was previously divided over their CMS suddenly start collaborating effectively.

The Truth About CMS Projects

If you're considering a new CMS right now, I'll leave you with this: your developers probably already know what they want to use. They've been researching options during meetings when you thought they were taking notes. They have strong opinions formed through years of maintaining systems that don't quite work the way anyone wants.

My advice? Ask them what they think before you start the process. Not after you've already signed with the vendor that had the best swag at the conference.

And if your developer mentions "headless" or "API-first" and gets that rare gleam of hope in their eye—give me a call. I speak both Developer and Marketing fluently, and I'm pretty good at negotiating peace treaties between the two.

Your developer will thank you. Maybe not out loud, but perhaps with slightly less sarcastic comments in the project Slack channel.