How to Convince Programmers Function-Driven Content Is Worth It

Nothing gets done without stakeholder approval, and nothing gets built well without programmer buy-in. Those are two different problems, and people constantly confuse them. The executive says yes and writes the budget. The programmer says yes and decides, consciously or not, whether your project ships clean or limps across the line. You need both, and you earn them in completely different ways.

Let me start with a story that explains how stakeholders actually think, because it reframes the whole exercise.

Stakeholders do what they want

A consultant once told me about his boss resolving a resource conflict. A colleague, Scott, had a project that would make the company a few million dollars. Scott's boss had his own project that needed the same engineer. Scott, unsure how to handle the conflict, asked in a meeting how they should prioritize. The boss smiled and said: the engineer will work on my project first, then yours. That was the entire decision. No ROI analysis, no resource model, no long-term-goals discussion. Just "because I can."

That sounds cynical. It is actually freeing. It means the goal is not a perfect deck. The goal is to make the thing you want the obvious, self-interested choice for the person with the power to greenlight it. And the most reliable way to do that is proof.

Prove it small before you ask to scale

The single most effective thing I do to win approval is build the proof by hand first. Before introducing function-driven savings, ratings, product counts, deals, and SKUs at a national outdoor-gear retailer, I made those exact changes manually, on a small set of pages, for more than six months. I measured everything. Then I presented the results and asked to scale it with functions. By the time I made the request, upper management and the owner had reviewed the evidence more than a dozen times. The answer was an easy yes.

Test it like a drug headed for FDA approval. Take a set of pages, add the content, and compare them against a control group of similar pages you left alone. Compare month over month and year over year. Rule out algorithm updates, holidays, and special events that could muddy the numbers. When the lift is real and repeatable, the decision makes itself.

That experiment was real and recent: 25-plus pages, 30 to 60 words each, three to five internal links and some text decoration per page. Some pages exceeded 2,000% visibility improvement in SEMrush. That is the kind of evidence that makes a half-hour conversation with a skeptical owner end in a yes. And not every yes is full-throated, some companies decide to half-commit in the short term anyway, so be patient and keep gathering data. But proof is still the lever.

The objection every programmer raises

Stakeholders are one battle. Programmers are the other, and they ask a sharper question. At one kickoff, a programmer cut straight to it:

That is the whole pivot. The objection assumes function-driven content adds work to engineering forever. The truth is the opposite: it front-loads a few weeks of work to eliminate the endless trickle of one-off content requests, manual title-tag edits, and "can you just update this on 4,000 pages" fires that programmers quietly hate. You are not asking them to do the writers' jobs. You are asking them to build the machine once so nobody has to do it by hand again.

The benefit that sealed it was concrete: by the next quarter, the team would be able to update title tags, meta descriptions, and H1s across 5,000 pages in under ten minutes, and revert it all in another ten if they wanted. By hand, that is hundreds of hours. Programmers understand functions, almost every one of them already works with them daily, so the concept needs no translation. What they need is to see that the trade is a few weeks now for thousands of hours never spent later.

What programmers actually want

During a training session I asked a team directly what most earns their support. The answers were refreshingly honest, and they map to three things worth building your approach around:

Notice none of these are about the elegance of the technique. They are about not wasting effort, trusting the business case, and getting paid. Speak to those and you are speaking their language.

Committed versus not: the difference is everything

This matters because a programmer who is merely complying and a programmer who is genuinely committed produce completely different projects. It is not a small gap. It is the gap between a build that works and one that limps.

When programmers are on board, something close to magic happens. They stop being order-takers and start being collaborators, and a committed engineer will surface possibilities the marketing team never imagined, because they know the data and the system in ways no one else does. That synergy is the closest thing to workplace utopia I have seen in e-commerce.

The takeaway

Getting both stakeholders and programmers fully on board is, honestly, the closest thing to a sure win there is in this work. Convince stakeholders with proof: build it small by hand, measure it against a control, and make the scaled version their obvious self-interested choice. Convince programmers by being honest that the work is front-loaded, showing how it eliminates the endless fire drills, planning well enough that they never re-code finished work, and framing the result as a line on their resume and a protected bonus. Do that and you do not get compliance. You get collaborators, and the build that follows is the one worth shipping.

The next Insight goes deeper on the executive side of this: the specific conversation you need with your stakeholder sponsor before the project starts, the one that protects the work through its invisible first quarter.