Content Strategy Interviews

Michael Priestley Twenty years ago at IBM, the company's commitment to user-focused content led to the decision to develop a standard way of structuring content so that it could be used in multiple channels. Michael Priestley was uniquely positioned to lead the effort to create the corporate standard that became DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. We talked about: his current role as Principal Information Architect and Taxonomist at avalara.com the DITA origin story how his IA and writing backgrounds and familiarity with XML the concept, task, and reference information typing at the core of the DITA standard how the notion of specialization led to the addition of "Darwin" to the information typing architecture they had developed the role of XSLT in the development of the DITA standard how their focus at IBM on user needs - specifically the need for modular content organized around topics delivered in multiple formats - resulted in a standard that also permitted content to be re

Rafaela Ellensburg Serving personalized content about thousands of products to millions of people requires a sophisticated content operation. At Albert Heijn, the big grocery store chain in the Netherlands, Rafaëla Ellensburg established a content engineering practice that lets the company deliver personalize-able omnichannel content at scale. In the process, she also created a content engineering practice guild, positioned content within the company as an important enterprise asset, and began developing the semantic practices that will take their content operations into the future. We talked about: her work as a content engineering consultant at Albert Heijn, the big Netherlands grocery store chain how the quick growth of digital communication during the pandemic exposed the need to make their content operation more efficient how she repositioned content at Albert Heijn to be perceived as an important enterprise asset the need for holistic thinking when working with omnichannel content the imp

Pavel Samsonov Pavel Samsonov is a UX product designer with a deep appreciation of content. His content-first approach to design is driven by his observation that navigating digital experiences is about accessing content, not clicking buttons. Pavel has also cultivated a deep awareness of the semantic environments that he and his colleagues navigate and he uses that awareness to align and motivate stakeholders. We talked about: his design work at Amazon Web Services working on products for cloud clients his content-first approach to design his observation that the web is simply made up of containers for forms and forms to input the content his take on the "semantic environment" in organizations the five working backwards questions they use at Amazon how he uses workshops to get executives and other stakeholders to "entertain different views of the world" his take on the difference between validation and research the benefits he sees in working with low-fidelity deliverables the "synthes

Jeffrey MacIntyre Scalable content personalization systems create huge value for businesses. Like most valuable endeavors, they're really hard to do well. Jeffrey MacIntyre orchestrates the activities - terminology and taxonomy work, metadata strategy, information architecture, and more - that help businesses build content operations that deliver the customer-focused experiences that consumers expect. We talked about: two trends he sees that are driving content strategy for customer experience: product thinking and the need for better IA in large enterprises the opportunity that better IA affords to build a competitive moat around your business how structured, semantically meaningful content and enriched metadata enable better personalization his take on the "personalization gap" his prediction that something like the Hippocratic oath will emerge in the near future to address ethical issues around AI the importance of a cross-functionally and collaboratively generated controlled vocabulary h

Shannon Leahy Content design jobs have become scarcer as the digital world adjusts to the post-pandemic tech economy. Shannon Leahy does her best to make sure that her content colleagues discover the jobs that are available, scouring the internet for job listings and sharing them in her social media feeds. But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to her contributions to the field. She's also a long-time meetup organizer and an avid and generous participant in the content design community. We talked about: her take on the current state of the content design job market the wide range of industries beyond tech that offer content job opportunities - like sports, energy, transportation, manufacturing, and logistics how to sift through job listings to find opportunities that might be labeled differently than content folks might think about them how her algorithm-breaking job-search alerts reveal employment patterns that might have otherwise gone undiscovered the importance of community pa

John Williams The rise of omnichannel content strategy and the emergence of new technical capabilities like cloud computing, API-delivered microservices, and headless software platforms have created entire new content ecosystems. John Williams explores these new systems and modern content and experience architectures on his "Going Headless with John" YouTube channel and in his work as CTO at Amplience, a headless-CMS company. We talked about: his YouTube channel, Going Headless with John, and his role at Amplience, a headless CMS company the rationale behind the MACH alliance and the elements of the acronym Microservices API first Cloud native Headless the ability to scale and to implement version control that a multi-tenant architecture permits how decoupled architectures let companies choose "best of breed" software solutions his take on the differences between the concepts of "headless," "MACH architecture," and "composability" how to help content authors work in (non-WYSIWYG) de

Deborah Carver Deborah Carver sees direct connections between her academic study of literature and composition and her work as a content strategist, content marketer, and SEO. She also sees similarities between AI engineers and content professionals, both of whom endeavor to create meaning with language. We talked about: her work as a consultant and the creator of The Content Technologist her discovery of Google's knowledge graph in 2013 and how it helped her SEO work how her background in literature and mass communication made SEO work come naturally to her how grade-school sentence diagramming prepared her to understand entities, natural language processing (NLP), and other tech concepts the similarities she sees between LLM engineers and content professionals, both making meaning with language, just coming from different directions how her study of information science, library science, linguistics, and other academic disciplines informs her semantic work her data-driven approach to keywor

Tuija Riekkinen Tuija Riekkinen brings a unique perspective to scaling both content and design operations, as well as other digital initiatives. She has applied her holistic and pragmatic enterprise product management skills at organizations like IKEA, where she has worked on both their design system and content management system. Tuija is a persuasive advocate of keeping design and content concerns separate to enable "creativity at scale." We talked about: her work as a digital product leader at IKEA where she has led teams working on both design systems and content management systems her unique holistic approach to managing diverse, agile teams how she aligns a variety of stakeholders around language the similarities she sees between design systems and content management systems how design systems and content systems differ her hypothesis that "good content management enables creativity in scale" how she educates stakeholders about the benefits of managing decoupled, semantically meaningf

Michael Haggerty-Villa Michael Haggerty-Villa's work with content and designs systems spans the history of these practices. From his work at eBay on one of the earliest design systems up until today, he has been at the forefront of both content strategy leadership and design system innovation. This conversation focuses on design systems, but it was inevitable that Michael's content strategy wisdom would shine through, too. We talked about: his work as the Director of Content Strategy at Teradata the scope of the design system documentation at Teradata how he triangulates on the truthiness of the complex content ecosystem the structured-content infrastructure that he works with his preference to bridges silos, not bust them the style council he convenes to help align stakeholders on language and other topics the differences in content needs in design systems for B2C companies vs. B2B the tooling he uses to manage, and the scope of, the Teradata design system how they establish standards a

Gladys Diandoki Gladys Diandoki brings a strong research mindset and a consistent focus on strategy to her content work. Her approach yields both solid design results and an increased appreciation for content design among her colleagues and clients. It's not only her clients who benefit from her work. Gladys is also an active leader in the field, speaking regularly at conferences, writing, and hosting gatherings like the "Beyond The Cover" book club. We talked about: her content design work with the French government and her teaching at the Gobelins design school and Sorbonne University her early career in broadcast and magazine journalism and how lessons learned then manifest in her content design work her transition from the media world to UX design how content strategy work is integrated into her content design work her approach for getting stakeholders to see the real problems they are facing the content design book she wrote for the French market her designer-first professional identity

Wojtek Aleksander Wojtek Aleksander is a business-focused, inclusive content designer based in Poland. Working in a profession in which English-language educational materials dominate, he addressed the need for Polish-language content guidance by writing "UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products." One big challenge he faces when crafting inclusive content in Polish is working with the language's strongly gendered and inflected grammar. We talked about: his 20+ -year career in content strategy his book, "UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products" (currently available only in Polish) his take on the design and content professions in Poland the importance of inclusion when designing content for Polish-language experiences and the challenges presented by the gendered and inflected nature of the language how he teaches plain language, inclusivity, voice and tone, and other content-design principles in his workshops and classes the recurring theme of the need to "unlearn" b

Barbara Blythe Most enterprises and software companies now have design systems, and many have content operations and/or design operations teams. At Cisco, Barbara Blythe works on the content design operations team. She focuses on sharing content guidance across the products she serves, enabling not only content designers but also their UX design and engineering partners to efficiently create consistent product content. We talked about: her content design ops work at Cisco how content design ops differs from content ops their cross-functional approach to empowering designers and engineers, as well as content folks, to use the content design system her involvement in the design of new bots to govern voice and tone and style her thoughts on how AI might affect content design ops some of the benefits, beyond consistency and the efficiency, of using a content design system how systems like hers permit content designers to focus more on content strategy and other work that may be more impactful th

Nicole Michaelis Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep and varied experience to her content design work. Like all of us, she is pondering how to best use AI in her practice and wrestling with the impacts of layoffs and other change in the content and design professions. Despite the current challenging business and labor environment, she's hopeful for the future and offers encouragement to both current and future content designers. We talked about: her current concerns and focus as a content design leader the broad-reaching impact of AI on content design, in particular how it can make our jobs more interesting her hope that AI may permit her and other human-centered designers to actually spend more time with the humans using the products she works on her explorations of the possibilities of AI helping with personalization her impressions of the benefits of AI in writing briefs and copy how they train AI models on glossaries, tone, and voice the paradoxical intersecti

Terry Roach Terry Roach helps enterprises build a "web of connectedness" that helps them understand what's happening across the span of their business Built on an ontological understanding of business that is expressed in a knowledge graph, his methods and technology help enterprises develop a holistic understanding that can be expressed as an operating manual that all stakeholders can consult. We talked about: his work as the founder and chief product officer at Capsifi how they do business enterprise modeling how business modeling helps businesses develop a holistic understanding and dynamic representation of their enterprise his definition of an enterprise ontology: "a conceptualization of a business, a common, universal model" the importance of enterprises having an operating model the role of a knowledge graph a framework that he uses which grew out of his academic work that accounts for business capabilities and value streams and tracks customer journeys how he measures the success o

Anna Potapova & Arnaud Frattini With more than a billion internet users and half of all global e-commerce transactions, digital business in China is huge. Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini work in content roles at Alibaba, the biggest online merchant in China. Lately they have been looking beyond their desks, trying to connect with their peers at other companies and to develop a broader understanding of content practice in the country. They've shared some of their discoveries in an article on content design in China, and they're building a new community to share practice ideas with other content strategists and designers. We talked about: their work as content designers for the AliExpress app at Alibaba the fast-paced and competitive business environment in which they work a foundational difference in the information density preferences of Chinese consumers how they localize their content-design content how content design is organized and managed at Alibaba the new content-design community me

Sophie Tahran As the field of content design grows and matures, so too do the organizations in which content designers practice. At Condé Nast – the publisher of iconic brands like The New Yorker, WIRED, and Vogue – Sophie Tahran has built content-design orgs from one-person units to company-spanning teams. Her latest work has been informed by original research that she conducted to learn more about how other companies design and manage their content-design organizations. We talked about: her work as a design director at Condé Nast the evolution and growth of the content-design profession over the past 10 years her research on org design for content-design organizations the trends and models that emerged in her research one of the key findings of her research: the importance of have a community of craft the Condé Nast multi-brand design system how they incorporate content design into their design systems how difficult it remains to adequately staff content-design teams what she discover

Matt Hayes Matt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team. The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization. Among the secrets to their success: democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues. We talked about: his work as a Staff Content Designer at LinkedIn the impact of the arrival of generative AI his take on place for AI in the content-design world the democratization of content guidance at LinkedIn how they triage content-guidance decision-making at LinkedIn how they communicate changes to their content-design guidance to design system staff and other users of the guidance an example of typical content design deliberation process his take on the differences between IC (individual contributor) roles and manag

Jorge Arango The promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We're beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been sparse. Jorge Arango's new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture your thoughts and nourish them in a personal knowledge garden from which you can harvest and share your unique insights. Through February 15, 2024, use the code ContentPod to get a 20% discount when you order the book at the Rosenfeld Media website. We talked about: the motivation for his new book, Duly Noted how his personal experience with note-taking, the emergence of the digital media, and his background as an information architect converged to inspire his interest in digital networked note-taking the challenge presented to note-takers by the huge variety of kinds of notes, and his taxonomy of types of notes some of the history of computers as tools t

Peter Compo Peter Compo says that "the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy." He's talking about the tendency of executives and managers to draft plans that present lists of goals and include a bullet point for every possible stakeholder in their purview. Peter points out that true strategy involves tough trade-offs and lots of collaboration. His pragmatic approach lets strategic objectives emerge organically, includes a variety of stakeholders, and applies adaptive thinking to address tough questions that have no obvious answer. We talked about: the origins of his book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Execution how the "number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy" the reasons that real strategy always involves trade-offs and even pain how to help teams and people cope with the pain of inevitable loss the difference between granularizing the goals you're hoping to succeed into a list and formulating a true strategy how to dea

Relly Annett-Baker Relly Annett-Baker recently said in a LinkedIn post, "The words are an expression of the solution, the last 20%, but we also need to do the 80% that comes before to know wtf to write. " UX writers and content designers spend a lot of their time, arguably too much of it, explaining this core aspect of their work to their colleagues and collaborators. While she sometimes bristles at the need to constantly defend and describe her team's work, Relly also realizes that that is, in fact, the most important part of her job. We talked about: her roles as the head of UX content strategy for Google's corporate engineering group her take on how requests for "wordsmithing" can diminish or ignore the many other design and stakeholder-wrangling skills that content practitioners bring to the table her identification of the unconscious bias that underlies this dynamic, a concept she calls "soft sizing" how she deals with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously resenting the need for constan