Words. Ideas. Actions.

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?

31 January 2023

I was listening to This Woman’s Work today, a great collection of essays on music, and about halfway through, a transcribed  interview between Kim Gordon and Yoshimi Yokota called “Music on the Internet Has No Context” popped up. I feel like their conversation is a continuation of some of the ideas I was trying to articulate after the SunnO))) shows earlier this month. So, I want to flush out a couple of ideas from earlier and build on some of the musical analogies I have already stretched — probably — too far.

In the interview, Yoshimi talks about the different ways she contributed to the bands she was part of, most notably Bordems. Although she discovered at a very early age that she had perfect pitch, Yoshimi basically rejected the formal musical training of her youth, preferring to feed off of the energy of the audience and her bandmates on any given night to come up with both what she played and how she played it. For some shows, she was even borrowing another drummer’s equipment, and admitted she wouldn’t even change the heights or positions of the kit. Instead, Yoshimi would use the creative restraints in front of her to work in her favor. It’s a version of an idea I’ve mentioned before about coming up with these posts, but I recently came across this Michale Cain interview which puts it even better: 

“Use the difficulty.”

Now, I understand this may be a leap, but all of this talk of adaptation seems not only to be timely for me, but also a reminder of how much I’ve learned since the first time I tried managing a team. Hoo, boy, was I a terrible manager that first time out. And I’m admitting it to you now for a couple of reasons:

1. Please, learn from my mistakes.

2. If your current manager is mirroring the errors of my ways, find a better manager.

I started running the production team at WFSU–FM after being a producer there for years. This was back in the days when we thought that proficiency in your role meant you could manage a team of people doing that same job. So, I took that mindset and ran with it, trying to get the rest of the team to work like me, make the choices I would make, and hold themselves to the same standards I held myself to. There was no room, in my mind, for doing things differently because I had been so successful doing them my way. Why on Earth would anyone want to do them differently? Seriously, looking back, I was a terrible manager. I feel like I still owe apologies to Ken, Danny, and Aimee (and maybe even that asshole, John) every day since. 

But let’s focus, shall we? Another management tactic I thought was important was to treat everyone the same. That way, there would be no question of favoritism or bias. Everyone got the same kind of direction, attention, and support. Consistency, the path to success! Do I have to tell you I lasted less than a year in that new role? Again, I was a terrible manager.

Thankfully, I have had great managers since then. Managers who I can not just emulate, but could learn from. It’s been a while since I’ve led a team, but I love thinking about doing it again, taking my experience on both good and bad teams, and crafting one where people are encouraged to explore their strengths and passions, while they’re coached and guided in the areas where they want or need some help. If I think about each team member as a part of a band featuring Yoshimi on drums, then we can all take the temperature of the room, assess our own strengths and talents, and put them all together to give the best damn show each and every day. 

As I look at my unwritten future, both musically and professionally, I can’t tell which I miss more, building a team to solve important user problems, or putting a band together to create something entirely new and unexpected. And if I mentioned either of those ideas to the high school junior in the Alf t-shirt playing guitar on the left in the image at the start of this post, he'd probably be a bit shocked. One thing’s for sure, though, I want to do more of both in 2023. If you want to help, please drop me a line.

See you tomorrow?