When Your Biggest Enterprise Client Breaks Your Assumptions
"We need Twill to manage our global content operation," Nike's technical director explained during our initial scoping call. "Multiple regions, different languages, complex approval workflows, thousands of assets. But your CMS looks flexible, so it should handle our scale just fine, right?"
I looked at our feature list - modular architecture, flexible content types, scalable media handling - and confidently said yes. Twill was built to be adaptable. We'd designed it for exactly this kind of sophisticated use case.
Six months later, I was staring at a system architecture diagram that looked nothing like anything we'd ever built before, wondering if we were still making a CMS or if we'd accidentally become an enterprise software company.
The Assumptions We Didn't Know We Were Making
When we designed Twill's flexible architecture, we thought we were building for scale and complexity. We'd seen agency projects with hundreds of pages, multiple content types, and sophisticated editorial workflows. We felt confident about handling enterprise requirements.
But our idea of "enterprise scale" was adorably naive.
We assumed enterprise clients would need:
More content types (they actually needed fewer, but more sophisticated ones)
Larger teams (they actually needed smaller teams with more complex permissions)
More features (they actually needed fewer features that worked more reliably)
Complex content structures (they actually needed simpler structures with enterprise-grade governance)
Every assumption we'd made about scaling up proved to be wrong in interesting ways.
The Workflow That Broke Our Mental Model
Nike's content creation process looked nothing like what we'd experienced with smaller clients. A single product launch involved:
27 different stakeholder approvals across legal, marketing, regional teams, and brand guidelines
Content synchronization across 15 markets with different regulatory requirements
Asset versioning that needed to track not just what changed, but who approved each change and why
Publishing coordination that involved scheduling content across time zones with dependencies between markets
Compliance tracking that required audit trails for every content decision
Our "flexible approval workflows" feature had been designed for simple linear approval processes. Content creator → editor → publisher → live. Maybe with a branch for legal review on sensitive content.
Nike needed a workflow system that could handle parallel approvals, conditional dependencies, market-specific requirements, and rollback procedures that preserved audit trails. What we called "workflow flexibility" was actually workflow complexity that we'd never encountered.
The Scale Problem We Didn't Anticipate
The numbers were overwhelming, but not in the ways we'd expected:
50,000+ assets in active use (we'd tested with maybe 1,000)
300+ concurrent users across different time zones (we'd tested with 10-20)
15 different content publishing destinations (we'd assumed 1-2 websites)
12-month content approval cycles (we'd assumed days or weeks)
24/7 uptime requirements across global markets (we'd assumed business hours)
But the real challenge wasn't the raw numbers - it was the interdependencies. When Nike's Tokyo team scheduled a product announcement, it affected content planning in New York, compliance reviews in Amsterdam, and marketing campaigns in São Paulo.
Our system was built for independent content management. They needed orchestrated global content operations.
The Integration Reality
"Can Twill integrate with our existing systems?" had seemed like a straightforward technical question. We'd built APIs, supported webhooks, and designed for extensibility.
Then I saw their integration requirements list:
Global asset management system (DAM with petabytes of brand assets)
Enterprise resource planning (connecting product launches to inventory and sales systems)
Marketing automation platforms (coordinating content with campaign systems across regions)
Legal document management (ensuring compliance across different regulatory environments)
Analytics and performance tracking (measuring content effectiveness across markets and channels)
Translation management systems (coordinating multilingual content with professional translation services)
Each integration was technically feasible individually, but together they created a complexity web that our architecture wasn't designed to handle. We weren't just managing content - we were becoming the central nervous system for Nike's global digital presence.
The Permissions Nightmare
Our role-based permissions system had felt sophisticated when we designed it. Content creators, editors, publishers, administrators - clean categories with clear hierarchies.
Nike's permissions requirements broke that model completely:
Geographic restrictions: Tokyo editors could create content but only for Asian markets
Product category limitations: Footwear content managers couldn't access apparel systems
Time-based permissions: Campaign content was only editable during specific approval windows
Conditional access: Legal reviewers could only see content that had passed initial brand compliance
Audit requirements: Every permission change needed to be traceable for compliance reporting
We ended up building what was essentially a custom identity and access management system within our CMS, just to handle their permission complexity.
The Performance Assumptions That Failed
We'd optimized Twill for fast content creation and editing. Our performance testing focused on how quickly editors could build pages, upload assets, and publish content.
Nike's performance requirements were completely different:
Global CDN coordination: Content changes needed to propagate consistently across dozens of edge locations
High-availability failover: System downtime in any region could affect global campaign launches
Concurrent editing: Hundreds of users working on interdependent content simultaneously
Batch processing: Migrating thousands of legacy assets while maintaining system responsiveness
Real-time synchronization: Content changes in one market needed to notify dependent teams instantly
Our "fast CMS" was fast for individual interactions, but we'd never tested it as mission-critical infrastructure for a global operation that never sleeps.
The Mobile-First Reality Check
"Our content teams work globally and need mobile access," seemed like a straightforward responsive design requirement.
The reality was more complex:
Content creation on tablets during trade shows and events
Approval workflows happening during international flights with intermittent connectivity
Asset management from mobile devices in environments where laptops weren't practical
Real-time collaboration across teams using different devices and connection speeds
Offline capability for content review in locations with poor internet access
Our mobile-responsive admin interface became a full mobile-first content management platform with offline synchronization and touch-optimized editing workflows.
The Support Expectations Gap
We'd been providing community support through GitHub issues and Discord channels. Responsive, helpful, but ultimately best-effort support for an open source project.
Enterprise support meant:
24/7 technical availability across global time zones
Dedicated account management with understanding of their specific business context
Priority bug fixes with guaranteed response times
Custom feature development integrated into their deployment cycles
Training and documentation for their global teams
Disaster recovery planning and business continuity support
We weren't just providing a product anymore - we were providing enterprise-grade service infrastructure.
What We Actually Built
The Nike engagement transformed Twill from a flexible CMS into an enterprise content platform:
Advanced workflow engine that could handle complex, parallel approval processes
Enterprise integration architecture designed for mission-critical system dependencies
Granular permissions system with audit trails and compliance reporting
Global performance optimization with CDN coordination and failover systems
Mobile-first editing platform with offline capabilities
Enterprise support infrastructure with dedicated resources and SLA commitments
But the most important thing we built was a different understanding of what "enterprise-ready" actually means.
The Lesson About Enterprise Product Development
The Nike engagement taught me that enterprise clients don't just need more of what smaller clients need - they need fundamentally different approaches to the same problems.
Scale isn't just bigger numbers - it's qualitatively different challenges that require different architectural approaches.
Flexibility isn't just more configuration options - it's the ability to integrate into complex organizational systems and processes.
Enterprise requirements aren't just feature additions - they're constraints that affect every aspect of system design and operation.
Success metrics change completely - from "how fast can you build content?" to "how reliably can you coordinate global operations?"
The most valuable part of working with Nike wasn't the revenue or the prestigious client reference. It was discovering the gap between our assumptions about enterprise needs and the reality of enterprise operations.
This experience fundamentally changed how we approached product development. Instead of building features we thought enterprises would need, we started building infrastructure that could adapt to enterprise requirements we couldn't anticipate.
The best enterprise products aren't just scaled-up versions of simpler tools - they're designed from the ground up to handle the complexity, interdependency, and operational requirements that only become visible when you're actually running mission-critical systems at global scale.
Nike didn't just buy our CMS - they taught us what our CMS needed to become. The client that broke our assumptions became the client that made us build something truly enterprise-ready.