I didn’t set out to become a GovTech operator. I stumbled into it, got punched in the face by reality, and then realized I loved the challenge.
GovTech forces you to grow fast. You learn to lead across slow cycles, build products that matter, navigate politics without losing your mind, and celebrate tiny wins that eventually turn into big ones.
These lessons shaped every version of me as a leader. And if sharing them helps shortcut even one of yours, that’s the whole point.
Here are the 10 hardest lessons I learned building in GovTech, and how they can actually make your company stronger.
1. Slow cycles don’t just hurt your forecast. They change how you lead.
One of the first things you learn in GovTech is that momentum doesn’t look like momentum. A deal can be alive and well even if you’ve heard nothing for three weeks. Someone is probably routing your legal docs through a SharePoint folder last updated during the Obama administration.
Early on, that silence feels like failure. The team starts wondering, “Are we doing something wrong?”
The answer is usually no. This is just how government buys.
The leaders who thrive don’t wait for big moments… they create small ones. One of the smartest things we ever did was build a monthly “momentum map” to highlight everything that did move: approvals, stakeholder outreach, legal steps completed, and budget confirmations. Suddenly, people saw progress that had been invisible before.
A mid-sized county once went dark on us for nearly two months. We were convinced the deal was dead. Then they resurfaced with a fully executed contract and a cheerful “Thanks for your patience!”
Nothing had gone wrong. Their finance office was just short-staffed. But those eight weeks could’ve tanked morale if we didn’t keep the team anchored to real progress.
💡 Heuristic:
If you don’t manufacture momentum internally, the silence will do it for you.
Framework: The Momentum Map
Document monthly micro-wins:
Approvals
Stakeholder alignments
RFP or legal milestones
Budget confirmations
Integration pre-work
Purpose: Keep the team confident and aligned during long cycles.
How to implement:
Create a shared doc updated monthly.
Add sections for approvals, stakeholder wins, legal progress, budget confirmations, and risk removals.
Have each rep or PM add 3-5 micro-wins per deal.
Review as a team so everyone sees motion.
Best practice:
Tie every micro-win to forward motion in procurement. If it can’t be tied to motion, it’s noise.
✅ Tactical Rule:
If a deal hasn’t moved in 45 days, focus on process signals, not pipeline fear.
2. Mission-driven work elevates your team, but it also amplifies pressure.
Working in public safety and emergency management isn’t like selling a CRM. When your system touches evacuations, alerts, or communications during emergencies, it's not “just software." The mission is real.
The upside? People show up for this work with purpose. They care. They go the extra mile because they know the stakes.
The downside? Caring too much without guardrails leads to burnout faster than people realize.
I remember an engineer who took a late-night outage personally, even though the root cause was a regional telecom failure and had nothing to do with us. That’s the emotional tax of mission-driven work. Great people blame themselves for things nobody could control.
Your job as a leader is to normalize the pressure without romanticizing it. Mission gives meaning, but it also means you need to protect your team from the psychological hangover that comes after a major incident.
💡Heuristic:
Mission multiplies meaning and stress: lead with both in mind.
Framework: The Two-Load Model
Every teammate carries:
Operational work
Emotional weight from the impact of that work
Recognize and manage both.
Purpose: Make mission pressure visible and manageable.
How to implement:
Ask managers to check in on operational load (tasks) and emotional load (stress from stakes).
Include both in 1:1s… literally ask, “What’s the emotional load on this project?”
Rotate high-intensity responsibilities to avoid burnout pockets.
Best practice:
Never let the same person own the “highest-stake” projects back-to-back.
✅ Tactical Rule:
Treat emotional fatigue like tech debt, address it early, or it compounds quietly.
3. Champions get you interest. Coalitions get you contracts.
One of the funniest myths in GovTech is that you “just need a great champion.”
Sure. That gets you into the building. It doesn’t get you through procurement.
In one city, our champion was a rockstar. Loved us. Sold the vision internally. Gathered requirements.
And then the legal team stepped in, found a 2017 policy we violated, and the deal went cold.
Champion wasn’t the problem. The coalition was incomplete.
That’s when it clicked: you’re not selling to a person… you’re selling to a system. And systems have way more veto players than decision makers.
The best salespeople build relationships with procurement, IT, legal, grant managers, and political staff. Yes, it’s extra work. But every person you ignore is someone who could kill your deal without ever speaking to you.
💡 Heuristic:
If you haven’t mapped the quiet veto players, you haven’t mapped the deal.
Framework: The 4-C Model
Champion
Critic (skeptic who needs attention)
Checker (procurement/legal)
Chair (political or executive authority)
Purpose: Ensure you’ve mapped the real decision ecosystem.
How to implement:
Identify one person for each C: Champion, Critic, Checker, Chair.
Write down what each cares about (risk, budget, optics, workload).
Build a contact plan to proactively engage each one.
If you can’t identify a “Critic,” assume someone is quietly playing that role.
Best practice:
Don’t try to convert the critic. Neutralize their objections through the champion or checker.
✅ Tactical Rule:
If your champion can’t walk you through the approval gauntlet, your deal is still a coin toss.
4. Big logos are seductive… and that’s why they ruin startups.
Every founder wants the big city or big state logo for their pitch deck.
But here’s the truth: the wrong large customer can consume half your engineering capacity and set your roadmap back a year.
We once had a major metro agency ready to sign. Huge opportunity, career-making logo. But their demands were so custom-heavy and their integration stack so ancient that we realized we'd be rebuilding half our product for one customer. Walking away felt insane at the time.
It also saved us.
Smaller agencies often give you speed, feedback loops, and early adoption. When early, that may be the smarter play. A bad yes will hurt you faster than a missed yes ever will.
💡 Heuristic:
A customer is only strategic if they accelerate your company, not absorb it.
Framework: The Capacity Fit Test
Before you celebrate:
How much customization will they demand?
What’s their integration maturity?
How many internal teams need to be involved?
Would this slow down your roadmap?
Purpose: Decide whether a customer’s demands align with your stage.
How to implement:
Before committing, score the customer 1-5 on customization, integrations, cross-department complexity, and support intensity.
Total >12 = red flag.
Discuss the score with product and engineering before promising anything.
Best practice:
If the customer wants three or more custom workflows, treat it like an enterprise deal, not early-stage traction.
✅ Tactical Rule:
If one customer could consume >20% of your org, the deal is misaligned.
5. Adoption wins contracts. Features win demos.
A weak product dies fast. A strong product without adoption dies slow. Guess which one hurts more.
In commercial SaaS, you push new features and measure “engagement.” In GovTech, you’re often replacing workflows that haven't changed in decades. Adoption is less about sleek UX and more about training, onboarding, and political support.
We rolled out a solution once where the champion loved it, leadership loved it, everyone “supported” the initiative.
But because we didn’t create depth across departments early, the whole thing hinged on one coordinator. She left the agency. Renewal risk tripled overnight.
💡 Heuristic:
Shallow adoption is a single point of failure disguised as success.
Framework: The 4-Week Adoption Sprint
Ensure within 30 days:
multi-team usage
recurring workflows
two backup admins
visible value tied to agency outcomes
Purpose: Drive early adoption so renewal isn’t fragile.
How to implement:
Week 1: Train core team + backups
Week 2: Launch recurring workflows
Week 3: Expand to adjacent teams
Week 4: Document usage patterns and outcomes
Best practice:
Schedule every training session before kickoff. Don’t let agencies “circle back.”
✅ Tactical Rule:
If adoption doesn’t spread to at least 3 teams in 90 days, renewal risk is high.
6. Inaction is your real competitor, not vendors.
Most GovTech companies spend too much energy studying competitors.
But most deals aren’t lost to a logo. They’re lost to inertia.
An agency once told us, “We love it… but we’re going to push this to next fiscal because we have three other priorities.”
Nothing about our product changed.
The agency just didn’t have the capacity to take on the change, and the status quo was easier, even if our solution was better.
The real job in GovTech sales is not selling the dream… it’s lowering the psychological cost of change.
💡 Heuristic:
If the pain of change feels greater than the pain of the status quo, nothing moves.
Framework: The Friction Audit
Assess:
workflow friction
training friction
political friction
IT friction
Then remove one friction point before each sales meeting.
Purpose: Lower the cost of change so deals move.
How to implement:
List the four friction buckets: workflow, training, political, IT.
Identify one friction point per bucket you can remove or minimize.
Address one friction point before every meeting.
Communicate reductions clearly (“We removed X step for you…”).
Best practice:
Never pretend friction doesn’t exist. Acknowledge it and show a path through it.
✅ Tactical Rule:
If an agency can’t articulate the cost of doing nothing, expect nothing to happen.
7. Internal misalignment kills velocity way faster than external blockers.
GovTech already moves slowly. Internal chaos makes it unbearable.
Sales wants everything now.
Product wants clarity.
Engineering wants fewer surprises and more time.
CS wants time to breathe and fires doused.
Leadership wants progress yesterday.
If you don’t define who owns what, everyone will end up owning nothing.
We once lost six weeks on a deployment because three teams thought someone else had emailed IT about SSO configs. It wasn’t malice. It wasn’t incompetence. It was ambiguity.
💡 Heuristic:
If you don’t design your internal operating rhythm, it will design itself… poorly.
Framework: The RACI Reality Check
For every initiative:
Who decides?
Who executes?
Who supports?
Who informs?
Purpose: Reduce internal confusion and speed up execution.
How to implement:
For every new initiative, fill out a simple table: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed.
Share it across Sales, Product, Engineering, CS.
Revisit every 90 days. Roles drift in GovTech.
Best practice:
If two names appear under “Accountable,” you haven’t actually assigned accountability.
✅ Tactical Rule:
If two teams think they own a decision, nobody owns it.
8. Procurement timing isn’t a detail; it’s the tempo of your entire business.
You can have the best product and the best sales execution in the world, but nothing outruns a fiscal year, a council recess, or an election cycle.
Understanding procurement timing is the difference between a predictable business and a perpetual guessing game.
A city once approved our contract… but the final signature authority was on a two-week hiking trip. Not a joke. The deal slipped a quarter.
Great sales leaders don’t just sell into government; they sell into government timelines.
💡 Heuristic:
You don't control the tempo. You harmonize with it.
Framework: The Procurement Map
Tag each deal with:
fiscal window
political risk
routing path
likely bottlenecks
Purpose: Make deal timing predictable.
How to implement:
Track fiscal calendars for each agency.
Note when council/board meets.
Identify approval chain and signature authority early.
Align internal expectations to these timelines… not sales optimism.
Best practice:
Highlight “red zone windows” (holidays, elections, fiscal close) where deals rarely move.
✅ Tactical Rule:
If a deal isn’t tied to a budget window, you’re in next year’s pipeline.
If you want the deeper operations version of this, I break it down in the Procurement Lag Model here.
9. Trust compounds slower than revenue, but it pays bigger dividends.
Government doesn’t buy because your product is cool.
They buy when they believe:
you’ll deliver
you’ll support them
you’ll survive
you won’t embarrass them publicly
Trust is the currency of GovTech. And once you have it, everything gets easier. Sales cycles shorten, references increase, and agencies start pulling you into projects instead of pushing you away from them.
💡 Heuristic:
You’re not selling technology. You’re selling confidence.
Framework: The Trust Loop
Show up consistently with:
clarity
competence
calm
responsiveness
Purpose: Build trust faster and reduce deal risk.
How to implement:
Every interaction should deliver: clarity (what happens next), competence (proof you can do it), calm (no drama), responsiveness (fast answers).
Document commitments and follow up proactively.
Best practice:
Follow up before they ask. Government is overloaded; proactive communication is your differentiator.
✅ Tactical Rule:
Trust is built in months and lost in minutes. Guard it aggressively.
10. You can do everything right and still lose… and that’s fine.
Here’s the most freeing lesson:
GovTech outcomes are not entirely in your control. No matter how good your product, team, or pitch is, you will lose deals for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
A leadership change.
A budget freeze.
A procurement technicality.
A political headwind you never saw coming.
Once you accept that variance is part of the game, you stop taking losses personally and start focusing on motion, the thing you can control.
💡 Heuristic:
Detach from outcomes, double down on repeatable motions.
Framework: The Detachment Principle
Focus energy on:
influenceable stakeholders
repeatable process
predictable execution
coalition-building
strong documentation
Purpose: Stop wasting energy on factors you can’t control.
How to implement:
Break every pipeline into “controllable” vs “uncontrollable” variables.
Coach reps on actions, not outcomes.
Debrief losses on motions taken, not emotions felt.
Best practice:
If you can’t influence it within 30 days, it’s not worth emotional energy.
✅ Tactical Rule:
Judge your team on motion, not randomness disguised as outcomes.
Final Thought
I didn’t learn these lessons from books or mentors. I learned them from being in the room, fixing production issues at midnight, losing deals I thought were locked, and winning deals I never expected. GovTech has a way of humbling you and growing you at the same time. But once you understand the terrain, it stops feeling like chaos and starts feeling like a system you can work with. And when your product finally makes a difference, a real difference, it’s worth every slow cycle, every late night, every hard-earned lesson.
If sharing my hard-earned lessons helps shortcut even one of yours, then the bruises were worth it.
GovTech is not the easiest market. But it’s one of the most rewarding because once you learn these lessons, the entire landscape opens up. You stop guessing. You stop getting blindsided. You start building with intention, resilience, and leverage.
And best of all:
When your product makes a difference, it really makes a difference.
