Teaching a CMS I’d never opened

The situation
Small content edits — a date, a headline, an image swap — were arriving as tickets and queuing behind real projects. Nobody had written down how the CMS worked, and the people who needed it most were the ones least likely to ask.

I filed the request myself. The purpose statement, written in August 2022, was: “The goal here is for new users to be comfortable making minor edits to the site which should alleviate minor Podio tasks that may bottleneck the bigger projects.”

I had learned Sitecore on the job about a year earlier and was not an expert in it. That was the awkward part, and it turned out to be the useful part: I could still remember exactly which bits were confusing, because I had been confused by them recently.

The second constraint was trust. If people believed they might break the live site, they would keep filing tickets no matter how good the documentation was.

I scoped the audience's job before teaching anything. Page one of the manual ends: “We are not asking you to make pages or layouts.” Naming what they were not responsible for was what made the rest readable.

I asked three colleagues to correct the curriculum before I built it. I posted a draft outline and tagged the Head of Marketing Operations, a developer and my lead: “Was there something else you mentioned in our meeting that I should cover?”

I delayed the session on purpose. Twice — from 12 September to 19th to 23rd: “Probably for the best as it appears there will be an additional team member for demand gen.” Better to teach five people once than four people twice.

I took the blame off the learner. The final section is headed Review common Sitecore bugs and mistakes to avoid, and opens with a single line, set large.

“If you make a mistake, blame Sitecore.”

Sitecore Overview, page 19 · October 2022
Seven specific failure modes follow, each with its cause and its workaround — the publish-dialog race condition, the modal that opens in the wrong place, media items that vanish from previews, the sticky nav that breaks on small screens with too much copy.

A 19-page designed manual, one layout held throughout — left column explains, right side carries an annotated screenshot with orange callouts and leader lines.
Two narrated screen recordings, roughly fourteen minutes total: Making Simple Edits and Uploading Images and Video.
Two live sessions, six weeks apart — one general, one for the product marketing team.
Account provisioning, including an IT ticket I raised myself when new users couldn't be created.
The recordings teach more than the manual admits. They walk a datasource-driven component — link, icon, theme, overlay behaviour, alignment — without ever using the phrase, and they end by verifying the change published, which is where most CMS training quietly stops. Accessibility is built into the sequence rather than bolted on: “All images should have alt text” sits inside the upload steps, in bold.

My lead filed the material into SharePoint as a standing company resource. Ten months later, in a signed performance review:

“Our Resident WP Trainer! Whenever I've met with someone new to the platform to review something they've done, they always talk about how great of an experience it was learning from you.”

Andres Mercedes, Digital Development & Publishing Lead · mid-year review, September 2023
The company left Sitecore the following year. The training is why the migration was survivable: the people who had to keep publishing through it already knew how.