Words. Ideas. Actions.

08 October 2023

Welp, I didn't think I was going to return to posting under this banner, but here we are. There are a few factors which have led me here, and I’ll name them in a bit. But I want to establish a few new ground rules that will make these next few entries more predictable, and less of a burden, so that we — yes, both you and I — can get more out of them. Hopefully. 

First, these won’t be daily. That was too much. And I’m too tied to this machine already, trying to line up my next full-time gig (if you need a seasoned content designer, please get in touch). Second, I want to make these next handful of posts focused on content design (or UX writing or content strategy, whichever term your employer has been using to try and portion out that tiny piece of users’ experience). But please know that there will most likely be some soccer or music or politics of — heaven forfend — Twitter references thrown in, because they have all defined me, (for good or for bad) and have definitely shaped who I am today. The last ground rule is that I reserve the right to undo or add to these ground rules at any moment, based on needs, mine or yours. So if you have an idea or response, please let me know. 

Now, on to the reasons we’re back here. I’ve been volunteering as a middle school math teacher on Tuesdays at my daughter’s school (have you read about our teacher shortage?) and during my lunch break, I listened to this recent conversation between Patrick Stafford and Kristina Halvorson live on LinkedIn while inhaling my lunch before 5th period started. They kept making one point over and over: We need to talk about our work. And not just where we’ve worked or the metrics we may have achieved. Sure, those are important, but we need to start sharing the intricacies and minutiae of how we do what we do. 

This got me to thinking’. I’ve been telling the same handful of stories over and over in job interviews and portfolio presentations, but I’ve only shared parts of them in my previous posts. So, another reason we’re back here is so I can write them all down. Not just for you, but for me, too. I hope that I can get enough detail out of my head and into these sentences to make the daunting task of interviewing a little less harrowing. 

The last reason I’m doing these again is I miss the community. When I was publishing daily posts, I really enjoyed getting reconnected to the voices I missed on Twitter. And I got to meet some smart people for the first time through LinkedIn. With the rise of BlueSky (I have invite codes, if you need one), and the start of Button just a few days away, I want to rekindle the deeper discussions some of my previous posts had garnered. With that in mind, here are a few ideas for upcoming topics: 

• Accessibility
• Conversation design
• Glossaries
• Office hours
• Reusable frameworks
• Templates

Now, I listed these alphabetically, but I don’t have any idea — yet — which one is coming next. We’ll find out together in a week. And if you have a desire to read more about some specifics about some of my past work, please let me know and I’ll add it to the agenda.

I hope you’ll climb back on for this ride. It should be more focused than our last trip. I’m looking forward to connecting with you again. Oh, and if you know of a senior-level UX writing or content design role, I know a guy who’s looking again.

See y’all next week?

24 March 2023

There’s this strange, liminal space that happens while looking for a new job. And I’m deep in it now. Offers are finally starting to come in. But so are replies to opportunities that I got excited about in the early stages of my search. Obviously, these are good — and privileged — problems to have, but I’m finding that I don’t really know how to approach finding the right decision. The idiom “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” keeps popping into my mind, and I feel like that logic is weighing heavily into my decision. And I just don’t know what to do.

Part of this decision paralysis is on account of my fear of making mistakes. But what really qualifies as a mistake in this instance? Let’s say I pick the “wrong” job. What does that even mean? Knowing that I’m really the only one making the judgment, I’m at a loss for how I’m even grading myself. I can compare pros and cons, but as the impending deadline of no more paychecks looms, isn’t the “right” choice the first offer you get? Again, I know what a luxury it is to have multiple offers, but that deadline also means that there were questions which went unasked during the interview process. And not knowing those answers may lead to regretting my decision. Which, I guess, then means I made the wrong one. Right?

I would love to be able to quiz my potential new managers more about how they think about career development and learn more about their management styles. All I hear in my head, however, is that ticking clock, counting down the seconds until I’m officially without income. I’ve been lucky to pursue new opportunities without this pressure in the past. But the job searches I remember most are the ones which came right down to the wire, and I had to balance my ability to negotiate with my need for a more immediate start date. If I look back at the summer of 2015 as an example, I had two offers to lead content strategy teams in hand when I finally got an offer from Twitter. It was the one I really wanted, but I know it stunted my career growth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of almost every piece of work I was part of there, but content strategy at Twitter was not a real discipline yet. There was no career ladder. No appreciation for the craft from other teams. No real understanding of what we did and how we could help. The three of us, at the time, helped establish all those things. And more. Those factors led to being years and years away from a promotion, however. And now, I think, I’m paying for that.

There are a ton more nuances to that situation, and a pretty long story about the first job I took right after leaving Twitter where I only stayed for 29 days. For now, though, I have a lot of thinking to do. And options to consider. And, also, bills to pay. With less than ten of these posts left scheduled to be published, I assume I’ll have a decision before these end. At least I hope so.

See you tomorrow?

13 February 2023

I came across a couple of surveys on LinkedIn today (I’ve been spending more time than usual there, as you may imagine). Both surveys are for my fellow content strategists/UX writers/content designers/whatever we’re calling ourselves these days. The first one I want to share with you is a UX Content Salary Survey from Bobbie Wood, Founder and CEO of UX Content Collective. The survey covers the type of work you do, who you regularly collaborate with, and how you’re compensated. If you’re so inclined, please add your responses so we can get a better idea of where we are as a discipline and where we need to go.

The other survey is where I want to spend a little more time tonight. It’s from content designer and UX writer Jane Ruffino, who’s done one of these two years ago. I encourage you to fill it out, too, maybe even before finishing this post. I’ll wait.

Al’right, welcome back. I’m not going to post my answers to every question in the survey, but I did want to share a few of my responses from the end of the survey in the hopes that we can start a conversation about where content strategy stands in the product and design industry these days. The survey’s questions will be in bold, and my responses in italics, but I reserve the right to expand on my initial response now, with a few hours’ reflection.

If you could magically fix one aspect of your work, process, team, or organization tomorrow, what would you fix, and what impact would it have on your life and work? 
I would tie our metrics more directly to what users are actually experiencing, and hold leadership more accountable for helping us meaningfully move them in the right direction.

One of the aspects I’m finding more and more difficult to stomach is accountability. Especially in this era of “overhiring”. If we are truly trying to make our users’ lives better, why are our measurement tools so bad at capturing what’s really going on within the apps and experiences we’re creating? I understand there are business needs, and yes, obviously we should capture those metrics. But we should also be able to ascertain whether or not our customers are able to complete the tasks they are trying to do with the tools we are building for them.

Thinking now about the content discipline and community itself, what, in your opinion, are the two biggest challenges we're facing in 2023? 
1) Giving people the capacity to specialize in a part of the content discipline, so they don’t have to be the single source of all content-related needs
2) Harnessing AI as a tool, rather than a dreaded specter of career doom, so that we can shorten the content lifecycle, but still add the humanity and editorial rigor which makes good content more than serviceable, but instead, makes it great

The field of content strategy has grown so much since the first time I saw Kristina Halvorson utter that phrase during the “Queens of Content” talk at Adaptive Path in 2008. Today, you can specialize in microcopy or metadata or information architecture or design systems or content governance or so, so many other hats some of us are trying to wear simultaneously everyday. Especially if you’re in a small org as a single practitioner. To quote Torrey Podmajersky, “Everything is content.” And because that’s true, we need to be ready to service all of it, and embrace emerging new tools to help us with that, whether that’s Figma or large language models or something new that has yet to be invented. 

Finally, since there will be a lot of people interviewing and hiring this year, what do you think is most broken about recruiting for the kind of work we do?
There is not a lack of diversity in the people who are passionate about this work, but there is a lot of gatekeeping preventing underrepresented voices the ability to make important decisions in what the products we use every day say and do. When hiring starts to better look like our user bases, we’ll better address the needs of everyone, not just those considered “normal”.

This may eventually get its own post here, but we need to better reflect the diversity of our users in our staffing. That’s easier said than done, I’ve discovered. Mainly because this effort doesn’t stop at hiring. We have to look past people landing the role, and focus on keeping them, and valuing their viewpoints, so that the perspectives we lack are consistently making the decisions we need to be making for our users. All of them. This means we should be reimagining metrics. Rethinking incentives. And focusing on belonging. Without all of these, working hand-in-hand, the work we do to recruit and hire will be useless if we let these smart, talented, empathetic people walk out the door to find a place where they feel like they belong. 

You can use this last field to say whatever you want, about anything. 
One trend which is starting very slowly which I’d like to see gain more traction, much more quickly, is the ability for leaders in the content discipline to be welcomed more readily into the ranks of design leadership more broadly. As the discipline has matured, we’ve seen a wonderful set of leaders emerge, but their progress seems constrained to solely leading content teams. The thinking, priorities, and experience these emerging leaders can bring to a larger design team, complete with designers, researchers, content strategists, UX writers, and design operations groups, are similar enough to offer another rung on the career ladder for content design leaders. I hope we see more of them leading design organizations in 2023 and beyond. 

This is another idea which should get its own focus here in the days to come. Looking back at the fact that content strategy has been around for more than a decade, and our leaders have risen to the tops of their discipline, we need to create a path for content design leaders to transition into design leaders. As I touched on in my initial answer, leadership skills are easily transferable. You set the vision. You translate the goals. You motivate staff. And you trust and empower your teams to get the work done. Whether you are leading a small group of writers or a large design organization, leading is leading. And we need to be ready to make that leap, creating opportunities for those who come after use to walk a similar path. My ask of any content design leaders reading this paragraph is to formalize a path for your people, from their first, entry-level job in your organization all the way up to running your org. Without a clear career trajectory, we’re going to keep bouncing from company to company, managing bigger and bigger content teams, but never breaking through to the design leadership roles which so many in our field are so ready to take on. And who we so desperately need.

See you tomorrow?

23 January 2023

This was an odd weekend, to put it mildly. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday trying to distract myself by playing games and building LEGO and strolling the neighborhood with my daughter. But I felt unmoored. Adrift in the unknown. On one hand, I suddenly had unlimited time and no boundaries. On the other hand, there was an almost deafening sound of the seconds ticking down until my last paycheck. These waves of uncertainty and anxiety kept crashing against the solid rocks of undistracted time with my family and the peels of joyous laughter which grew out of that foundation. 

Schools were out here today to celebrate the start of the Lunar New Year, and with that, the King Tides have returned to the Bay Area beaches. So we took that opportunity to plan a short road trip to the tide pools in Pacifica to see what we could see. Before we left, though, I wanted to send a note to my now-former manager at Google. Enough time had passed where I thought I could put what I needed into words. I sat down at this very keyboard and just started to vent. After about ten minutes of typing, I took a deep breath, glanced over what I had written, and deleted it all. And started again. This happened two more times. With each version, I got closer to what I really wanted to say: thank you.

See, when I started at Google in 2020, I was a Senior Content Strategist. But soon after my start date, my role, and the role of many others, transitioned to more of a project management one, shepherding the creation and revision of a number product-specific Google Help Center article (for me, it was App Ads and some of the video ad products) under the new moniker of Senior Content Project Lead. This was not the position I applied for. But I was going to learn it on the job. Luckily, not long after the job description changed, so did my manager. And I say “luckily” very advisedly.

Project management was not something high on my list of talents. And early on, it showed. But I was open about my concerns and needs with my new manager, Derek, and we immediately put together a plan where I could discover and build the skills I thought I was deficient in so that I could meet the new needs of the position and the evolving expectations of our stakeholders. I definitely was not done learning when my tenure unexpectedly ended on Friday, but thanks to Derek’s guidance, I felt like I was headed in the right direction. 

I included a lot of those ideas in my email to Derek, moments before we were going to hit the road to Pacifica. In what felt like just a handful of seconds after I hit “send” on my email to him, my phone rang. It was Derek. We talked for a while, sharing our surprise and lamenting what Google has lost, but then Derek made an offer which is not surprising if you know him, but definitely not what I had expected: a continuing, ongoing career dialogue, for as long as I wanted. 

But why am I telling you all this alongside that earlier digression about the tide pools? Well, one reason is I wanted to share my gratitude for Derek publicly. The other reason is a thought I had while navigating the rocks around the tide pools today. We were traipsing carefully on rarely exposed surfaces, some slippery, some pointy, and all fresh from a recently residing tide. As I watched my wife help my daughter plot her way across pool after pool, I realized that’s basically a large part of what great managers do. Like my wife for my daughter, Derek was there to take the trip with me. And even as we were coming up with the direction and destination for me to head toward, he was by my side, holding me up when I needed, letting me choose my own places to find my footing as we forged ahead. Together. Sometimes, there was the unexpected wave or a shakier-than-expected step, but we paused, reassessed, and moved forward, always keeping in mind where we thought we wanted to go, and whether that was still the right place to end up.

It all seems too convenient to come up with a career journey analogy blog post after taking some time in nature. But isn’t that the point of these posts in the first place? I live my life, I think about the day’s events, and then I try to squeeze some nugget of wisdom or a new idea out of them for myself. And maybe for you? In any case, I want to, again, say thank you, Derek. As I mentioned in my email earlier today, I was a better Googler and a better collaborator thanks to his efforts. And I’ll use all that I learned from you every day moving forward.

See you tomorrow?