Content Strategy Insights

David Connis A crucial skill for any content practitioner is the ability to sort out complex work environments and thrive within them. David Connis shows how a systems thinking mindset can help you cope with the upheaval of AI, the messy realities of content work, and other complex design challenges. He teaches a course on systems thinking for content designers but shows how any content or design practitioner can benefit from a systematic approach to their work. We talked about: his role as as a lead content designer on the design systems team at OutSystems how he discovered his innate focus on systems thinking in a Netflix documentary about chefs how a brief stint as a UX developer and his holistic approach to design work revealed the benefits of systems thinking the role of systems thinking in his growth and development as a content leader his observation that "work is weird" his approach to remote working and management the crucial role of facilitation in remote work how his personal growth and professional growth intersect the importance of being intentional in your approach to work and leadership his observation that "everything you do influences everything you do" how he links words and concepts and objects in his work and how they help digital products tell their story to the user his advice to systems thinking course at the UX Content Collective Dave's bio During a brief stint as a junior UX developer, Dave found that he loved the UX part more than the development part, so he took a job as a technical writer. From there, he discovered content design. Now, he’s a Lead Content Designer at OutSystems. Connect with Dave online LinkedIn Instagram Systems thinking resources Systems Thinking for UX Content workshop at UX Content Collective Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, Sheryl Cababa (interview) Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/XAgcKmOOZ3I Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 196. As everyone tries to cope with onslaught of AI and as content practitioners try to develop the right combination of strategy, design, and people skills, Dave Connis says we can all benefit from a systems thinking mindset. Whether you're connecting the words and concepts and objects in digital products or connecting the people who are building the product experience, a holistic view of your work can help everyone involved understand the ecosystem you share. Interview transcript Larry: Yeah. Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 196 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome to the show, Dave Connis. Dave is lead content designer at OutSystems. I believe you're based in Portugal, but you're in the US, right, Dave? Dave: Yes, that is accurate. Yep. Larry: Tell folks a little bit more about... Dave: There is an office in Boston, so it's kind of US-ey, but it's mainly Portugal. Larry: Nice. And as a lead content designer there, you do... Well, tell me a little bit about your role there, what kind of stuff you're working on and... Dave: Yeah, so I am on the design system team. So we're working on all sorts of patterns and lots of systems thinking, lots of components, design tokens. We're in the middle of redoing design tokens right now. I'm doing a lot of content pattern things, lots of content strategy, working with a bunch of cross-functional teams to get stuff done that is reusable and scalable and all the nice other cool, buzzy words that we like to talk about all the time. So it's always something different, always something new, and it's always a big challenge, so it's good time. Larry: Well, that's interesting. So I'm really curious now because I've worked on a few design systems and talked to a lot of people who do that. Well,

Timi Stoop-Alcala When the concept of "content" comes up it can be hard to get everyone aligned on exactly what you're talking about. At IKEA, Timi Stoop-Alcala focuses on the "what" of content via the practice of knowledge domain modeling both to deal with the complexity of content and to highlight its importance. Her knowledge-focused, human-centered approach has also elevated the role of content in the organization so that content is now recognized as a core competency. We talked about: her work as a principal content strategist at IKEA in their Content Center of Expertise her recent talk on "Falling in Love with the What," an introduction to knowledge domain modeling their attitude at IKEA that "content is the interface between our brands and our customers" the ubiquitous and varied forms that content takes and how she communicates the importance of this idea to her colleagues and stakeholders how she stealthily instills in her org the superpower of an ontological mindset through her use of knowledge domain modeling how the concept of world-building from world of role-playing games can help content creators and strategists how knowledge domain modeling in the context of a human-centered design practice cultivates empathy and helps in dealing with ambiguity and complexity the challenge of deciding where in a typical design development process to put knowledge domain modeling the interactions between content modeling and knowledge domain modeling the maxim that she includes at the end of every email: "Content starts and ends with people. It rises and falls with relationships." the enduring importance of seeing how content relates to real world objects and their relationships with each other Timi's bio Timi is Principal Content Strategist at IKEA where she strives to cultivate quality, innovation, and confidence in content using a broad set of human-centric design principles and systems thinking. The content maxim she lives by: “Content starts and ends with people; it rises and falls with relationships.” She’s a change leader and driving force in creating structural and semantic foundations to enable contextual content — essential components for enabling customer agency and responsible personalisation. She weaves the disciplines of knowledge domain and content modelling, taxonomies, game thinking, teaching, and AI conversation modelling in her work. Timi hails from the Philippines and now lives in The Netherlands. She swears that playing the tabletop RPG ‘Pathfinder’ is essential to becoming a good and happy content strategist. Connect with Timi online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/obaybjOz2T8 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 195. The word "content" can mean something different to everyone who utters it. The fact that content is ubiquitous and complex and can take different forms across its many varied delivery formats and uses doesn't really help people grasp its importance. At IKEA, Timi Stoop-Alcala helps here colleagues understand the scope and impact of content with a simple and succinct observation: "Content is the interface between our brands and our customers." Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 195 of The Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Timi:. Timi is a principal content strategist at IKEA. And welcome to the show, Timi. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days. Timi:: Hey, Larry. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so I'm Timi, and I am a principal content strategist at IKEA. And specifically, I am with the Content Center of Expertise in the Experience Design Group. And so my team and I, we're made up of content strategists and content designers and content writers. And yes, we focus a lot on making sure that we look at how ...

Hilary Marsh Organizations of all types and sizes struggle with presenting their content so that it both makes sense to readers and aligns with the organization's intentions. Hilary Marsh introduced the concept of the "digital council" to address this issue. Councils can take many forms, depending on the nature of the organization, but the intent always is to glue back together content that has been disconnected by organizational silos. We talked about: her background as a content strategy practitioner and community builder the focus of her practice on professional-association industry her assertion that "content is the way our work is manifested in the world" the urgent challenge of aligning an organization's content when it's created and shared by a variety of people and roles the three kinds of "glue" she sees that can reconnect disconnected content: taxonomy internal communications groups of people who come together to make decisions how content strategy is like conducting an orchestration her inclusion of content people at all levels in an organization in content strategy the framework she uses to help organization prioritize content initiatives how she sorts out the work of subject matter experts versus the work of content practitioners the role of internal communications in her content strategy work the quizzical looks she gets when she talks about content strategy as an HR practice the enduring value of an association content research study that she conducted several years ago with Carrie Hane and Dina Lewis the many ways in which a digital council can manifest in an organization Hilary's bio Hilary Marsh is president and chief strategist of Content Company, a content and digital strategy consultancy. She helps content-rich organizations get better results from their content by improving their practices (and their people, processes, and cultures). Content Company’s clients include Allstate, American Bar Association, American College of Cardiology, American Medical Association, Estée Lauder, Endocrine Society, Fulbright Teachers Exchange, Institute of Food Technologists, Intuit, NORC at the University of Chicago, Syracuse University, and Walgreens. Hilary has been a leading content strategy practitioner, mentor, and professor since 1999. She has taught at Kent State University, the University of Strasbourg, Society for Technical Communications, and University of Applied Sciences FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria. She also offers a public online content strategy course at Firehead training. Hilary has been published, quoted, and her work cited in major industry publications including Content Strategy for the Web, Content Strategy at Work, and reports from Prophet/Altimeter, and she is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences including Confab, the IA Conference, Lavacon, and the STC Summit, as well as numerous global meetups. Hilary is a co-author of a major study about content strategy adoption and maturity in associations. She leads the 1,700-member international content strategy community at content-strategy.com. Connect with Hilary online LinkedIn Twitter hilary at contentcompany dot biz Content-Strategy.com community Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/5vLIkn7K9WI Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 194. Even the smallest organization has several different people and business units communicating with its customers and members. Orchestrating a modern organization's content so that it makes sense to everyone who reads it and that it aligns to the organization's intent is an urgent challenge. Hilary Marsh introduced the idea of "content councils" to address this issue, to glue back together content disconnected by organizational silos. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone.

Cruce Saunders Content is a precious business asset and should be treated as such in enterprise accounting. Cruce Saunders has been making the case for content as a financial asset for many years, arguing that much of it should be accounted for like the durable machinery that powers a factory, not like an ephemeral one-time business expense. He still sees a lot of work ahead, but Cruce is more hopeful lately that coordinated efforts by content leaders can get content out of the expense category and into an asset category on the corporate balance sheet. We talked about: his work at [A], a consultancy that focuses on intelligent content supply chains for large enterprises the accounting principles that show why content should be viewed as an asset on a balance sheet, not an expense on a profit and loss statement the kinds of content that should be treated as enterprise assets: documentation, support content, durable marketing content, and other types of content that deliver value over the long term how to calculate the value of content assets and to track their performance how the absence of financial-industry standards make it difficult to capitalize some content assets the first step in showing the value of content: building an ROI framework the unique value of content models in transforming content from an expense item to a valuable asset the benefits of the service-oriented architectures that well-modeled content permits the need for content-industry leaders to come together around the goal of ensconcing content as an enterprise asset Cruce's bio Cruce Saunders is the Founder and principal at [A], simplea.com. [A] serves organizations utilizing headless, composable content and generative AI to craft next generation content supply chains and publishing architecture. Clients include complex enterprise publishers as well as growing mid-market companies. As a thought leader, Cruce hosts the Towards a Smarter World podcast and The Invisible World of Content YouTube series. He has been a keynote speaker around the world at conferences and an invited speaker at enterprises in the US, Europe, and Asia. Topics regularly discussed in these series and talks include AI, content intelligence, content operations, content engineering, personalization, governance, content structural and semantic standards, and enterprise transformation. Cruce also founded a product team that builds tools to support the content data modeling needs. This group has built the Schematica suite of tools for content interoperability, including CoreModels, RealContent, and ContentFlow. Connect with Cruce online LinkedIn [A] simplea.com Towards a Smarter World podcast The Invisible World of Content YouTube series Schematica Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/X2vUHxqpNXY Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 193. Anyone who works with content understands its value. But getting business executives and financial standards bodies to treat content like the valuable asset that it is has been a challenge. Cruce Saunders has advanced the idea of content as a precious business asset for years. There's still lots to do, but he's hopeful now that coordinated efforts by content leaders might get content out of the expense category and onto the corporate balance sheet, where it belongs. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 193 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Cruce Saunders. Cruce is the principal and founder at [A], which you can find at simplea.com. He also does this brilliant website (actually a podcast; I misspoke) called Towards a Smarter World. So welcome Cruce. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Cruce: Hey, Larry, it's great to be here. And it's amazing,

Michael Priestley Twenty-four 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 guide the team that created the technical approach to the corporate standard that would ultimately become DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, a few years later. 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-used in other ways how the need to organize content at the topic level both serves user needs and creates an optimal content-element size for re-use the three C's of DITA: content, collections (DITA maps), and classification (metadata) how the technical writing heritage at IBM facilitated the introduction of structured authoring there his happiness with the success of DITA to this point, and how the challenges going forward mostly involve people and the organizations they work in the wide range of content roles he held at IBM in his 24 years there his ongoing preoccupation with always staying connected and working with other writers and content disciplines Michael's bio Michael is the Principal Information Architect and Taxonomist for avalara.com, focused on the intersection of semantic content, user experience, and SEO at the enterprise scale. Michael has experience working with and across marketing, sales, training, documentation, and support content, coordinating requirements, and delivering common processes and standards. He was named an OASIS Distinguished Contributor for his development of the DITA content standard. Connect with Michael online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/1BGNQx1wcSU Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 192. If you've ever worked in or around support documentation or technical communication, you've probably come across the DITA standard for creating and managing structured content. Michael Priestley developed this standard during his long tenure at IBM. DITA - an acronym for Darwin Information Typing Architecture - arose from the need for Michael and his colleagues to help users of IBM products by sharing the same topical content across different channels. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 192 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am super delighted today to welcome to the show Michael Priestley. Michael is currently the Principal Information Architect and Taxonomist at avalara.com, the big tax software services company. But welcome to the show, Michael. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days. Michael: Sure. I'm reorganizing a website, which is my weirdly happy place. It's funny. I spent most of my career at IBM in a lot of different content-related roles, but the last thing I was doing there was working on their website. It was a challenging, large website. I came up with a number of strategies. Then I got the opportunity to potentially execute them in a different space with a different set of webpages and it was a really good opportunity. It's a really supportive team. They're excited. They support information architecture. They support thinking about content, got a great executive team,

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 importance of metadata in giving meaning to content how she semantically connects her content strategy work to broader company strategy their Content Engineering Guild, an org to connect content and engineering teams the broad scope of professional development for content folks at Albert Heijn how her study of Lean Six Sigma principles helped her improve content operations and workflows how she connects content engineering and semantics how metadata helps with content discovery for both end users and internal content authors and managers her advice to always keep in mind that content engineering is a holistic practice, imbued with meaning, and with lots of possible connections to be made Rafaëla's bio Rafaëla has 10+ years experience in e-commerce management, omnichannel content coordination, data-driven creative content marketing and analytics. In 2022, she established content engineering as a new functional expertise on the cutting edge of digital, data and tech within Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands. With her keen eye for detail, structure and strategic insight for profitable omnichannel commerce, she has helped organizations and teams grow and streamline their digital activities. Now, her mission is to realize the marketer's dream of enabling relevant omnichannel customer experiences in an operationally scalable way. Connect with Rafaëla online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM-SZj9m1_w Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 191. When you're managing the content for tens of thousands of grocery store products and serving millions of customers, each of whom expects a personalized shopping experience, you have to build a really good content system. At Albert Heijn, a big grocery story chain in the Netherlands, Rafaëla Ellensburg addressed this need by establishing a new content engineering practice, helping the company realize the dream of a truly scalable omnichannel content operation. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 191 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super extra delighted today to welcome to the show Rafaëla Ellensburg. Rafaëla is a content engineering consultant at Albert Heijn. If you've ever been to the Netherlands, you can't miss Albert Heijn. They're everywhere. It's like a grocery store and convenience store chain that's all over. So welcome Rafaëla. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Rafaëla: Yes, thank you very much, Larry. I'm very excited to be here. What I'm up to these days, as a content engineering consultant, I'm very much into the organization and structuring of content across the organization. So you can imagine being the biggest retailer in the Netherlands as Albert Heijn, we have a lot of content to share with our custo...

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 "synthesis process" that he uses to guide user research throughout the design and life of a product the importance of "working locally," starting small and focusing on influencing stakeholders close to you in the org Pavel's bio Pavel Samsonov is a New York-based UX leader exploring the applications of design as a decision-making framework for all areas of product development. He currently builds design practice and leads innovation engagements at AWS. His approach to product & design draws on his experience managing enterprise product teams at Bloomberg, design-driven rapid prototyping in the start-up world, traditional graphic design education, and an academic background in human-computer interaction. Connect with Pavel online LinkedIn BlueSky Medium Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/aXsY_4V0yO4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 190. When it comes to designing digital products, Pavel Samsonov takes a content-first approach, observing that navigating an interactive experience is about accessing content, not clicking a button. In addition to seeing content everywhere, he's deeply tuned in to the semantic environments that he and his colleagues navigate, and he uses that awareness, along with user research and workshops, to motivate stakeholders to entertain new ways of looking at the world. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 190 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Pavel Samsonov. Pavel's a design leader based in New York City, Brooklyn specifically. Welcome to the show, Pavel. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Pavel: Thanks Larry, it's great to be here. For the past couple of years I've been at Amazon Web Services, and I know what everyone's thinking. It's not really necessarily known for incredible UX design. So my role is a bit interesting. Pavel: I work with customers who are in the AWS Cloud, sort of as a consultant, helping them design new experiences in more efficient ways than they're used to. So we're effectively bringing a cloud native design culture to those customers, and it's combining a lot of the things Amazon is known for, like the working backwards process, with some of the design knowledge that I bring from my experience, both as a UX designer and also as a product manager, which was my role before doing this. Pavel: It's been really, really interesting, because unlike a lot of designers, we start really high up in the value chain. We're right there when the account managers are first talking to these customers about, "Well, you've done the what we call lift and shift. You've taken all your stuff, you've moved the existing apps into the cloud, and now what? What do you do next?" And by the time they're talking to me,

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 his advocacy for up-skilling content design professionals with better taxonomy and metadata skills how "cowboy taxonomy" work fits in his practice his assertion that the best way to advance collaboration is a robust test and learn program how information structure provides a backstop for AI a shout-out to Marcia Bates for her insights about "berry picking" how good metadata can prevent the accumulation of "experience debt" the benefits of Leidy Klotz's notion of "subtraction" Jeffrey's bio A personalization optimist and information retrieval obsessive, Jeffrey MacIntyre is an independent consultant focused on "shovel-ready" solutions to personalized, automated, and simplified customer experiences. He writes Bucket List, a newsletter of tales from the trenches of his consultancy, Bucket Studio. He speaks widely on the IA for AI — the role of information science in shaping connected experiences — and runs Bucket Brigade, the only community for those who design such experiences. Connect with Jeffrey online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/krcZnNgnJFI Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 189. Crafting the personalized content experiences that consumers expect nowadays is not an easy job. To assemble those made-to-order interactions, you need to first align your internal teams on the terminology you use and organize it around a clear metadata strategy, and then you need to structure and categorize your content so that you can create engaging experiences at scale. Jeffrey MacIntyre specializes in orchestrating content operations like these. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 189 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Jeffrey MacIntyre. Jeffrey is an independent personalization consultant. He's well known in the industry as "the personalization optimist." He's the principal and founder at a studio, Bucket Studio, which is his agency. He also runs the Bucket Brigade community, which we might talk about a little bit in here. He's also a founding member of the Consortium for Personalization Professionals. So you're catching the theme of personalization here, but tell the folks a little bit more about what's going on these days, Jeffrey. Jeffrey: Yeah, absolutely, and thanks, Larry, for having me on - a big fan of the pod. So what's happening is we've got two interesting developments in my mind. We have the ascendancy and design circles of product thinking, so a lot of people wanting to really skillfully design and deliver really discreet user flows within a customer journey and do growth hacking along it and really measure and understand success, sense, and respond. That's trend one. And then trend two, particularly in the enterprise, but not alone, we have very large sprawling sites that are ripe...

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 participation in her career development and employment history how her participation in virtual communities during the pandemic jump-started her subsequent real-lie networking her assessment of the current tight job market and ideas about cope with it how to open yourself to discover opportunities that may not first occur to you how to get creative about repurposing your existing skills and aptitudes Shannon's bio Shannon has worked at the intersection of words, strategy, design, and people for more than 15 years. She is currently a senior content design manager at Capital One. Shannon calls Richmond, Virginia home, and organizes meetups for the content and UX communities. When she’s not exclaiming about error messages, you can find her snuggling up for movie night with her family and their dog Ginger Snap. Shannon’s favorite neutral is leopard print. Her superpower is asking questions...lots of questions. Connect with Shannon online LinkedIn Shannon-Leahy.com RVA Content Strategy meetup Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/WXlYVgzjli4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 188. As the pandemic-era hiring boom in the design and content worlds has quieted down, more and more really good content designers find themselves competing for fewer and fewer jobs. Shannon Leahy is here to help you navigate this fraught employment environment. She tirelessly scans content job listings and shares them on her social media accounts, and she's a reassuring presence in our field, regularly organizing events and always showing up in the content-design community. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 188 of The Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Shannon Leahy. Shannon's a senior content design manager at Capital One. She just returned there after a stint of a year or two at Adobe. And anyhow, welcome Shannon. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Shannon: Yeah. Hey, Larry. Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Just recently changed up the job situation, but other than that, keeping busy with two kids and a dog in Richmond, Virginia, in the US. I also run a meetup called RVA Content Strategy. You may have seen us with our food themed un-meetup series that we did in partnership with Jane Ruffino, and I've been joking with some folks. Had a little bit of a banner week. Just found out I have just the amazing privilege to be at Lead with Tempo this summer and at Button in the fall. So a lot is going on to say the least, and getting ready for some big milestones with the kids with school too. So yeah, big old word nerd and content nerd, but also really busy with family stuff too. Larry: Well, I feel really lucky to have your attention for a half hour.

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) decoupled systems the importance of understanding the "why" in decoupled content authoring environments the benefits of adopting an iterative approach to implementing composable architectures John's bio John Williams is a highly experienced and innovative CTO with over 25 years of experience in the tech industry. He is passionate about leveraging technology to drive growth and innovation. His expertise lies in creating and executing technology strategies that deliver transformative results for businesses, and he has a proven track record of building high-performing teams that thrive in fast-paced and rapidly changing environments. Connect with John online LinkedIn Going Headless with John YouTube channel Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/IFoI1fh8420 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 187. The rise of omnichannel content strategy and composable commerce - along with the emergence of new tech practices like microservices and headless software platforms - has given rise to new content systems architectures. It's also inspired many new conversations around concepts like composability and decoupled-ness. John Williams explores these topics on his "Going Headless with John" YouTube channel and in his work as the CTO at a headless CMS company. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 187 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show, John Williams. John is the CTO at Amplience, a commerce-oriented, headless CMS. He's also the host of Going Headless with John, a YouTube channel that I really enjoy. So welcome John. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. John: Yeah. Well, we're actually working on... In Amplience we're working on a whole bunch of things around headless. We're doing a whole new release around our content form. We are doing a hell of a lot around AI and how we incorporate that into the MACH world, which is what we're talking about today, and how we keep consistent with our technology practices around MACH and headless, as well as incorporating new technology. John: So we're all pretty busy at the minute. We've got a really big release coming up, out in June at Shoptalk. For anyone who's going there, coming over and see me have a chat at the booth, we'll show you some really cool things. Larry: Cool. Yeah, and you've just hit on the... We're all infinitely busy these days trying to keep up with, not with just AI. But there's also the fundamental architectural stuff that we're dealing with in this new composable, MACH-ey, headless world. Larry: I guess one of the things I like to do in this podcast, it's all about democratizing practice and principles and what's going on out in the world. And one of the things I like about your YouTube channel is you're really good at ...

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 keyword research her take on the "call and response" nature of search how she balances her keyword research with customer and user research the ways that her study of poetry helps her discern user intent her early interest in natural language processing and AI and how it prepared her for the current tech environment Deborah's bio Deborah Carver is an independent consultant and the publisher of The Content Technologist, a resource for content professionals working in the age of algorithms. She spent the first part of her career working in traditional publishing, then transitioned to working on SEO and digital strategy full-time in 2013. Focused on organic content performance and authentic digital connection, Deborah helps clients navigate what makes “good content” findable, usable, informative, and delightful. She’s worked with businesses of all sizes, from Fortune 500 to independent startups and is an avid trendspotter, a deeply experienced website content analyst, and a massive music fan. Connect with Deborah online The Content Technologist LinkedIn Keyword School Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/S-NJaKI5XAQ Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 186. Many content professionals studied English in college. More than a few of them have worried about how they'd turn that knowledge into a career. Few have shown as well as Deborah Carver how the study of literature and composition connect with content strategy, content marketing, and SEO. Deborah sees direct links from her study of poetry and rhetoric to the skills she applies to give both her human customers and search engines the content they expect. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 186 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Deborah Carver. Deborah is an independent consultant and she's also the creator of The Content Technologist, a website and newsletter for folks interested in content and technology. Welcome, Deborah. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Deborah: Hi. Yeah, so I am an independent consultant. I largely help agencies and businesses with analytics and information architecture on large content focused websites. And I am currently working on a series of courses that are launching throughout the year that are based on helping people understand or helping businesses understand how they can be found on the internet and how they can measure that impact of their visibility, so yeah. Larry: Everybody wants to be found out there and that's notoriously difficult. And that's one of the things you're known for is your SEO chops, which is sort of how I... Well the way this conversation came about a month or so ago, you made this post on LinkedIn about, "Hey, what's in your knowledge graph?

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 meaningful content her approach to preemptively addressing budget issues around CMS-adoption decisions the importance of getting past page-construction thinking to permit content re-use for purposes like omnichannel delivery an example she uses - a recipe website - to show non-technical stakeholders the benefits of structured content how the benefits of moving from manual, page-level content thinking to future-proof structured content might actually make a four-day work week possible Tuija's bio Tuija is a digital product management professional with an extensive and multifaceted experience working with digital products. With a background in service and content design she has paved her way into leading and managing agile and cross-functional product teams - focusing on the user experience all the while adhering to the business objectives. She is known for being pragmatic and holistic in her approach. Connect with Tuija online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/cEh14jZh2P4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 185. Content operations work best when they can scale, when they can take full advantage of the best design and content practices. Traditional content workflows that rely on hand-built pages conflate design and content concerns. Teasing out these concerns and helping organizations build efficient, scale-able systems is Tuija Riekkinen's forte. Her work on both design systems and content systems gives her a unique perspective on these important elements of enterprise content architectures. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 185 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Tuija Riekkinen. I hope I got that right. It's a Finnish name, and I'm just a dumb American doing my best. But welcome. Tuija, she's a consultant. She's currently working in a capacity as a digital project management professional at IKEA where she's working on... Well, we'll talk about this. That's what the conversation's about. She's all about scale and getting out of your bubbles and omnichannel content. And anyhow, welcome to you. Tell the folks a little bit more about your work there. Tuija: Well, thank you, Larry, and thanks for having me. It's a great opportunity for me to be in your podcast. Yeah, so I am a digital product leader and I did work in that capacity for a digital design system for three years. And now I've shifted into a more content management related product. So what I'm doing is that I'm actually working quite closely with my team, so managing the roadmap, managing the priorities, and bringing the team on board in what we are aiming for, and also working with the stakeholders to really understand their view on things and assessing the maturity of how they see content management and then adapt our communication ...

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 as documentation for new media formats like video are incorporated into the design system the importance of standards in communication and design guidance the requirements they're developing for their design system management tooling his preference for a "reliable starting point" over a "single source of truth" Michael's bio Michael Haggerty-Villa is the director of content strategy at Teradata and has also worked on the content design team at Blue Shield of California. He was one of the leaders who launched the Intuit Content Design System, and he has worked on design and systems for brands such as Compass, Disney, eBay, Mint, QuickBooks, and TurboTax. His articles about content in design systems have appeared in Content Science Review, UX Collective, and other sites. His content strategy clients include HPE Software, Kaiser Permanente, Yellowpages.com, and others. Just to make sure he has no free time, he’s also a father to three children and three cats. Connect with Michael online LinkedIn ADPList Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/Q0T4e0ofJVY Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 184. Many people trace the origin of design systems to the release of Google's Material Design in 2014. Almost a decade before that, Michael Haggerty-Villa was a lead content strategist in the Design Systems Group at eBay. He has since led content strategy and design systems initiatives at enterprises like Disney and Intuit. To this day, he remains at the forefront of practice where content strategy, information architecture, and design systems intersect. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 184 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Michael Haggerty-Villa. Michael is a legend, I think it's safe to say, in the content in design systems world. He is in my mind anyway, but he's currently the director of content strategy at Teradata, so welcome Michael. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to at Teradata and in the design system world. Michael: Hey Larry, thank you for having me and again, you're the legend and thank you for all you do about continuing to put out this information about content strategy and content design into the world because we need people like you and Paula Land and other advocates for our craft to be helping us. So thank you, first of all addressing the legend where the legend needs it. Michael: What I'm doing right now, in January, I just started as the director of content strategy at Teradata, a massive data analytics and data storage company, and we're in the process of doing a digital transformation, actually migrating a lot of our business to the cloud. And as we do that, we realize that we need to create better experiences for a slightly different market than we have usual...

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 the importance of framing and reframing her work in ways that illustrate the true benefits of her contributions the crucial role of information architecture and content structure in her way of working the importance of research and testing in the way she approaches her work and how they contribute to her consistent focus on strategy Gladys's bio Gladys Diandoki is a self-employed Content Designer who is based in Paris, France. She has worked with prominent companies such as Le Monde, the French government, Renault, Dailymotion, and Ornikar, among others. She is the author of a book titled "UX Writing, quand le contenu transforme l’expérience" (published by French editor Eyrolles) and is also a lecturer on topics like Content Design, Inclusion, and Accessibility at Les Gobelins and La Sorbonne. Prior to her work as a Content Designer, she worked in media relations for over ten years. During this time, she represented various well-known brands such as HP, Bose, Google, Box, Samsung, and Kickstarter. Connect with Gladys online Beyond The Cover book club GladysDiandoki.com LinkedIn Instagram Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/j1kLZKuCmik Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 183. It's an unfortunate truism that content designers spend an inordinate amount of their professional energy helping their colleagues and stakeholders understand the full range of benefits that they bring to product and design work. Few content professionals are as persuasive and authoritative in this work as Gladys Diandoki. Her constant focus on strategy and her ability to reframe design problems in pragmatic, user-focused ways lifts up the whole profession. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 183 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome to the show, Gladys Diandoki. Gladys is an independent content designer based in Paris, working mostly with the French government now, but she's done a lot of other stuff as well. Welcome to the show, Gladys. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're working on these days. Gladys: Hey, Larry. Well, thanks for having me in the podcast. So today, like you just mentioned, I'm working with the French government since a few months now, and that's really fun, to be honest. And I'm also teaching in Gobelins, which is a famous design school and Sorbonne as well. I'm teaching inclusion content design and with someone else, I'm also having a new class about accessibility for designers. Larry: Nice. So you're a real designer, but you come from, like many of us in this profession, from journalism, and I love how you talk about how that came to be because I think as we talked before we went on the air, it became, I think, clear to me that your core competency is curiosity.

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" basic grammar and usage concepts to design inclusive experiences in Polish his business and economic argument for inclusion, equity, and diversity the importance of speaking in the language and using the metrics that are relevant to your business-oriented collaborators how he ties content-design efforts to business outcomes the importance of teasing out content contributions from broader experience metrics Wojtek's bio Wojtek has been shaping the digital world for almost 25 years, giving it an increasingly human dimension. Whether he supports tech, banking, healthcare, or marketing, he erases the technological dryness of the services and products. His professional radar always pings when it spots inclusion and accessibility challenges. In his product career, Wojtek has worked in many specialties and at various levels, e.g., as an individual contributor or content team leader. In December 2023, he published the book “UX writing. The power of language in digital products” (in Polish). He is a philologist and IT expert by training. After hours, you will find him walking by the sea, reading a comic book, or looking for an authentic Korean restaurant. Connect with Wojtek online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/5u_i4d7httI Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 182. The profession of content design is notoriously generous and helpful, but most of the resources for practitioners in the field are in English. To support the large and growing content community in Poland, Wojtek Aleksander wrote his book - "UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products" - to address design issues unique to his country, in particular the challenges of crafting inclusive content in a language whose grammar is strongly gendered. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 182 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show, Wojtek Aleksander. Wojtek is a content designer and content strategist. He also does content strategy training and does a lot of stuff in the content world, including, he's just written a new book called UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products. Unfortunately, the book is only in Polish at this point, but we're hoping to see a translation one of these days. But welcome to the show, Wojtek. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days. Wojtek: Hello. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I'm talking to you from the north of Poland, from the shore of a cold Baltic Sea, the sea that is colder in summer than the Mediterranean in winter. As you said, I'm a content strategist working in the industry for a long time. My career, it stands over 20 years. I've supported different domains and brands, domains like healthcare, banking, application performance management,

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 than surface-level UX writing some of the work she does to evangelize their content design system Cisco's federated model of integrating their many design systems how they share content practice lore across Cisco her advice for folks interested in creating a content design system Barbara's bio Barbara was a Classics professor for six years before transitioning from academia to tech. As a content designer specializing in content design ops and content design systems, she creates tools that help content designers, UX designers, and engineers create consistent product content more efficiently. She designed and built a content design system for Cisco’s CX Cloud and PX Cloud products, and she’s now expanding it and developing ways to use tools like AI integrations to make it even easier to use. Barbara lives in Virginia Beach, where she enjoys birdwatching, gardening, and growing shiitake mushrooms. Connect with Barbara online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/H-Aoqwmzux4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 181. Over the past decade or so, enterprises and startups have adopted design systems and built teams to scale their design operations. In a few places, those practices have come together in content-specific design operations. Barbara Blythe works on the content design ops team at Cisco. As in many modern enterprises, there are never enough content designers to serve all of their needs, so Barbara's operation focuses on empowering cross-functional partners to also work with content. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 181 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show, Barbara Blythe. Barbara is a senior content designer at Cisco, big hardware manufacturer you may have heard of, probably runs half the internet stuff you're doing every day. But welcome, Barbara. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Cisco. Barbara: Yeah. So thanks, Larry. It's great to be here. So at Cisco I'm working on CX Cloud and PX Cloud, which are SaaS products that give network administrators a unified view of their network assets along with insights and analytics. And I specialize in content design ops. So over the past about two years, I've been working on building a content design system and I can talk in a little bit more about what I mean by that because I think it means something a little different to everyone who's building them. Barbara: Now I'm really expanding it and trying to find ways to increase adoption and trying to find ways to use tools like say AI chatbot integrations to make it easier to use for people who might be, say, a little reticent to dive into a style guide or to sort of sift through documentation. What are some ways that we can make it easier to use these tools.

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 intersection of the ideas that transparency is crucial when working with AI but also that the boundary line about where to credit GPT for your work is fuzzy the unexpected impact of her post last year entitled Why I No Longer Believe in Content Design, which resulted in both support from other content-design leaders but also some criticism that felt unduly harsh and overlooked her deep and diverse professional background her encouragement for folks who are job hunting or looking to get into the content-design field Nicole's bio Nicole Michaelis is the Content Design Lead at Wolt/Doordash and runs the Content Rookie pod. She’s into authentic leadership, questioning any best practice, and figuring out how to scale all the benefits of content design across large product orgs, while not losing focus on what really matters: the people who can benefit from the product. She lives in Sweden where she relaxes with all things #nature, pottery and running. Connect with Nicole online Content Rookie podcast LinkedIn Medium Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/WJJDO5-03p8 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 180. The field of content design attracts professionals from a variety of backgrounds and brings them together in one of the most cohesive and generous communities that I've ever been a part of. As AI sucks the oxygen out of the room and companies discard content talent at an alarming rate, we need all of the camaraderie and generosity that we can muster. Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep professional experience to these challenging times. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode Number 180 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today. Welcome back to the show, Nicole Michaelis. Nicole is one of the best-known content leaders, I think, in the field. She works for a big product company. And welcome, Nicole. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Nicole: Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me again. It's been a while, I think. Definitely an episode under the hundreds, so I'm very excited to be back. Yeah, what am I up to these days? So I'm a content design leader at a big product company, like you said, and I generally reflect a lot. And I recently wrote an article about my content design focus areas for the year, because I think it's really, really important to pick a couple of main focus points so you not get too scattered and too excited about too many different things. And actually, it's also relatively new to me to be a lead. Originally, when I got this role, I was hired just as a staff content designer. And then after just a couple of weeks, my boss said, "Hey, you have what it takes to lead this discipline here." Nicole: They promoted me to lead. And since then, I've been hiring and firing,

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 of his work the challenges he has overcome in helping businesses develop a mental model of a business operating model his observation that the work to generate the operating model for any one business can almost always be used as a template for any business in its industry the extent of work that goes into the development of an enterprise ontology how his work as an enterprise solutions architect exposed him to the need for the work he currently does his belief that "the combination of knowledge graphs, enterprise ontologies, and AI can really bring the future and the potential to the enterprise." Terry's bio Terry Roach is the Founder of Capsifi and lead architect of the Jalapeno business modelling platform. He holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales where his 2011 thesis developed “The CAPSICUM Framework”, a semantic meta-model for the design of strategic business architecture. Connect with Terry online LinkedIn Capsifi Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/Y9LEciiNTQE Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 179. Any reasonably complicated product that you buy, like a car or a washing machine, comes with an operating manual, a comprehensive representation of the product that helps you understand and use it. Many enterprises operate without that kind of comprehensive understanding of their business. Terry Roach has developed a framework that helps organizations holistically and ontologically understand their business operation and all of its moving parts. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 179 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Terry Roach. Terry was the CEO, he's the founder and now chief product officer, at a company called Capsifi down in Sydney in Australia. Welcome to the show, Terry. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there and what Capsifi does. Terry: Hi, Larry. Thank you so much. I'm really pleased to have this opportunity to chat with you. Capsifi, we're a software business down in Australia, a startup about 10 years old now. Hard to call us still a startup. We do business enterprise modeling. We help organizations bring together all the fragmented information that explains how a business functions, tie it all together, and give them a live, interactive, dynamic representation of the business operation in such a way that there's a common conceptualization of what the business is, how it's performing, where there are opportunities to optimize, and really drive an innovation and transformation agenda for an organization. Larry: That's it, because every organization in the world seems to be in a perpetual state of adaptation and advancement and change and transformation. The way you just said that, it sounds like you're talking about capturing all the busin...

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. Here's a QR code if you'd like join their new Wechat community. 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 meetup that they are organizing the origins of their article about content design in China two major approaches to content design that they identified as they researched their article Anna's curiosity about - and her hot take on - whether consistency is truly important their take on the difference between user experience and customer experience the unique nature of branding and customer service in China an invitation to join their new content community Anna's bio Anna Potapova is the Content Strategy team leader at AliExpress (part of Alibaba Global Digital Commerce group). She changed team positioning from pure localization to Content Design, built a style guide and a system to maintain it, initiated the upgrade of internal writing and translation tools, and improved business metrics while reducing production and localization costs. She spoke at Button Conference and UX Evening @ Google. Previously she worked as a localization specialist, and hosted LocLunch Shanghai. In addition to her work, Anna writes a blog, teaches cross-cultural communication class at Alibaba new employees training, and mentors Content Designers at ADPList. She’s currently working on building a content community in China.” Arnaud's bio Arnaud is a content designer at Alibaba Group helping AliExpress expand into new markets. His role is to oversee product documentation and help strategize different content forms that best communicate with users and answer business needs. His expertise spans user research, localization, UX writing, customer acquisition and member retention. His passion lies in crafting stories for digital product, facilitating user interaction, engagement, and learning. Beyond his work, Arnaud enjoys sharing his experience on how to build a career in China, and works on building a content community there. Connect with Anna and Arnaud online Anna Potapova on LinkedIn Arnaud Frattini on LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM7mj8cEv6M Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 178. China is home to over a billion internet users, and half of all global e-commerce transactions happen there. Given these statistics, you might picture companies with huge design teams. But business works differently in China. Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini work together in content roles at Alibaba, the biggest online merchant in China. They're researching and writing about content strategy and design practice in China and building a new content community there. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 178 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Anna Potapova. Sorry, I'm doing my best to pronounce that. And Arnaud Frattini.

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 discovered in her research about industry ratios of content designers to product designers the benefits of "working at a place where everyone really understands the value of excellent writing as a craft" the differences between centralized, embedded, clustered, and other content-design organization practices Sophie's bio Sophie Tahran is a Director of Design at Condé Nast. After establishing content design as a discipline at The New Yorker, she built out a team of content designers across Vogue, Architectural Digest, Bon Appetit, and more publications before moving into design leadership. Connect with Sophie online LinkedIn SophieTahran.com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/DMLBSMZ6oB0 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 177. As the field of content design has grown and matured, the design of the organizations in which content designers' work has also become more complex and interesting. In her role as a design director at the big publisher Condé Nast, Sophie Tahran has had to figure out the best way to design her content-design organization to serve Condé Nast's many brands. Part of her process was conducting original research to discover how others had organized their content-design teams. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode number 177 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Sophie Tahran. Sophie is a design director at Condé Nast, the big magazine publisher based in New York. Well, I guess do you even say magazine publisher anymore? Anyhow, welcome Sophie. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Sophie: Yes, thanks so much, Larry. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, I am speaking to you live from New York City in Manhattan. This is Condé's New York US headquarters. We also have locations in London, India, really all over the world. But I have been here for coming up on five years, which is wild to think about, was the very first UX writer as we called ourselves when I first started here, focused on The New Yorker and have since built out the content design team, which I'm really, really excited about in terms of the work that we've been doing. And have lately been stepping into a bit more of a design leadership position. So I'm now looking at it and really helping push forward the product design work, including content design across really all of our brands. The New Yorker, Vogue, our Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, Vanity Fair, WIRED, the list goes on. Larry: That's such an impressive list. And I was a magazine journalism college magazine major in college, so in journalism school, so I'm totally envious of all those brands. But hey, I want to talk about, you just mentioned that you were the first, and you've grown this, you've grown the content design team,