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Content Strategy Insights

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Interviews with content strategy experts: enterprise, UX, product, content design, content marketing, etc.

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Seattle, WA

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Interviews with content strategy experts: enterprise, UX, product, content design, content marketing, etc.

Language:

English

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2064287623


Episodes

Wojtek Aleksander: Inclusive Content Design in Poland – Episode 182

3/13/2024
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,

Duration:00:32:09

Barbara Blythe: Content Design Operations at Cisco – Episode 181

3/6/2024
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.

Duration:00:30:07

Nicole Michaelis: Thoughtful Content Design Leadership – Episode 180

2/27/2024
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,

Duration:00:36:40

Terry Roach: Building Ontology-Based Enterprise Operating Models – Episode 179

2/22/2024
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...

Duration:00:31:46

Anna Potapova & Arnaud Frattini: Content Design in China – Episode 178

2/14/2024
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.

Duration:00:35:12

Sophie Tahran: Org Design for Content-Design Orgs – Episode 177

1/31/2024
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,

Duration:00:28:32

Jorge Arango: Duly Noted – Episode 175

1/18/2024
Jorge Arango The promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We're beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been scarce. Jorge Arango's new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture your thoughts and nourish them in a personal knowledge garden from which you can harvest and share your unique insights. We talked about: the motivation for his new book, Duly Noted how his personal experience with note-taking, the emergence of the digital media, and his background as an information architect converged to inspire his interest in digital networked note-taking the challenge presented to note-takers by the huge variety of kinds of notes, and his taxonomy of types of notes some of the history of computers as tools to augment our cognitive capabilities his concept of the "personal knowledge garden" his take on Brian Eno's articulation of the differences between architecture and gardening the differences between thinking spaces and writing spaces the difference in mental models applied when moving between physical and digital note-taking media the rise of hypertext-based note-taking tools how your content-strategy skills around structured content help your note-taking and knowledge gardening Jorge's bio Jorge Arango is an information architect, author, and educator. For almost three decades, he has architected digital experiences and made the complex clear for organizations ranging from non-profits to Fortune 500 corporations. He is the author of Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes, Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places and co-author of Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond, the fourth edition of O'Reilly's celebrated Polar Bear book. In addition to his design consulting practice, Jorge hosts The Informed Life podcast, writes a blog, and teaches at the California College of the Arts. Connect with Jorge online LinkedIn jarango.com DulyNoted.fyi Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/E8ngDQ33K2c Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 175. Throughout our days, we are all taking note of things for a variety of reasons in a number of ways. A to-do list on your computer. A scribble in the margin of a book. A blog post idea in a Google doc. In his new book, Duly Noted, Jorge Arango sets out principles and practices to create a digital note-taking regimen and then shows you how to connect and cultivate your notes in a personal knowledge garden where you can gather your thoughts and harvest insights. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 175 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Jorge Arango. Jorge is an independent information architect. He's an author. He's an educator, and I asked him on the show today to talk about his new book, Duly Noted. So welcome, Jorge. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Jorge: Hey Larry, thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited to be here. And as you have noted, I have a new book called Duly Noted, and I'm excited about that. As you also mentioned, I'm an information architect. That's what I do for a living, and I have been doing that for a long time, and what gets me out of bed these days is the fact that we have access to all this information in the world, and those of us who work in this space have been part of making it possible for there to be more information in the world than there's ever been before. And that's a good thing, and it can also be a bad thing. I'm very focused on the good... Let's make it good. So that's what gets me motivated and we can talk more about what that means in the context of this book.

Duration:00:34:50

Peter Compo: The Emergent Approach to Strategy – Episode 174

1/10/2024
Peter Compo Peter Compo says that "the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy." He's talking about the tendency of executives and managers to draft plans that present lists of goals and include a bullet point for every possible stakeholder in their purview. Peter points out that true strategy involves tough trade-offs and lots of collaboration. His pragmatic approach lets strategic objectives emerge organically, includes a variety of stakeholders, and applies adaptive thinking to address tough questions that have no obvious answer. We talked about: the origins of his book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Execution how the "number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy" the reasons that real strategy always involves trade-offs and even pain how to help teams and people cope with the pain of inevitable loss the difference between granularizing the goals you're hoping to succeed into a list and formulating a true strategy how to deal with the bottlenecks that impede your path to achieving a strategic goal a fantastic analogy showing how emergent strategy is like solving a jigsaw puzzle that doesn't have a picture on the box top how emergent strategy "has nothing to do with organizational hierarchy" and can come from anywhere in an organization how an emergent-strategy practice facilitates stakeholder alignment the foundation of his work in complex adaptive systems how the concept of adaptation forms the foundation of not only strategy, but also innovation, creativity, and org change how creativity and innovation and making change require a different kind of discipline than we normally apply to business processes Peter's bio Peter Compo is a corporate business veteran, scientist, and musician who spent twenty-five years at E. I. DuPont in diverse leadership positions, including director of corporate integrated business planning. Peter’s broad view of strategy and innovation began developing during his graduate research. In addition to his studies, his musical background led him to recognize common adaptive patterns in science and the arts, the same patterns he then also found in business and technology at DuPont. He left DuPont to work full time on developing a comprehensive theory of strategy and innovation based on complex adaptive systems and incorporate the theory into practice. Peter comes from a multi-generational family of musicians in the New York City metropolitan area, where he was born and raised. He currently lives in Arden, Delaware. Connect with Peter online EmergentApproach.com LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/3fc9WlUlaFU Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 174. If you're aiming to create truly strategic guidance for your business efforts, you'll have to address some painful trade-offs. In his book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy, Peter Compo shares a pragmatic theory of strategy and sets out the skills you'll need to formulate a broadly inclusive and genuinely strategic strategy. I think content and UX strategy nerds will really appreciate his design-minded approach and the book's themes of emergence and adaptation. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 174 of The Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show, Peter Campo. Peter is a 25-year veteran serving in a variety of leadership roles at DuPont, the big chemical, and they do other stuff too, but the big company, the big enterprise, DuPont. More to the point, and the reason I invited him on the show today is he wrote a book called The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Execution. So welcome Peter. Tell the folks a little bit more about your book and how your work led you to write it. Peter: Thanks. Yeah, good to be here.

Duration:00:33:03

Relly Annett-Baker: Stalwart Advocate for UX Content – Episode 173

1/3/2024
Relly Annett-Baker Relly Annett-Baker recently said in a LinkedIn post, "The words are an expression of the solution, the last 20%, but we also need to do the 80% that comes before to know wtf to write. " UX writers and content designers spend a lot of their time, arguably too much of it, explaining this core aspect of their work to their colleagues and collaborators. While she sometimes bristles at the need to constantly defend and describe her team's work, Relly also realizes that that is, in fact, the most important part of her job. We talked about: her roles as the head of UX content strategy for Google's corporate engineering group her take on how requests for "wordsmithing" can diminish or ignore the many other design and stakeholder-wrangling skills that content practitioners bring to the table her identification of the unconscious bias that underlies this dynamic, a concept she calls "soft sizing" how she deals with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously resenting the need for constant explanation of her work and realizing that that is in fact the core of the job the importance of tailoring your messaging about your work for the audience you're addressing her observation that prompt engineering is really just UX writing, that is, structured writing designed to result in a good outcome how prompt engineering and LLM fine tuning can benefit from insights from the practice of conversation design how the "uncanny valley" phenomenon manifests in content design for AI a quick overview of content crafts at Google what UX writers and content designers can learn from conversation designers the importance always tying your content-design work to business outcomes and goals Relly's bio A content strategist for too many years, Relly is the Head of UX Content Strategy for Google Corporate Engineering. She spends her days leading her fantastic content team, writing content strategy docs, overseeing content delivery, and petting the office Dooglers. She’s very good at saying “it depends” to stakeholders. Outside of work, Relly lives in Brighton, England with her husband and a collection of animals and teenagers. Relly recently finished a Masters in Crime Writing at Cambridge University, and she writes murder mysteries for children. She’s never yet turned a content-doubter into a fictional corpse, but there’s still time. Connect with Relly online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/7AowpqkCZ9I Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 173. Pretty much anyone in any kind of content role has had to deal with colleagues who misunderstand, diminish, and sometimes even disparage, our work. In her role as the head of UX content strategy for Google's corporate engineering group, Relly Annett-Baker has had many opportunities to help her collaborators understand that the words that we use to express complex concepts are just a small part of the work that we do as content designers and UX writers. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 173 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Relly Annett-Baker. Relly is the head of UX content strategy for Google corporate engineering. Relly, that sounds like a really amazing job. Tell us a little bit about, well, first of all, welcome. And tell us what you do as a head of UX content strategy. Relly: Yeah. So Corporate Engineering is an organization within Google that really builds the internal tools. It's kind of like engineering the things that Google needs to be Google. So everything from performance management, procurement tools, legal stuff, kind of everything in between. And so the portfolio is pretty big. My team is smaller, but I manage a team of around 20 writers, user experience writers and user docs writers. So we work on those products and tools.

Duration:00:31:35

Jason Barnard: Conversations with Google’s Knowledge Graph – Episode 172

12/21/2023
Jason Barnard Like many digital practices, search engine optimization is becoming more conversational. Not long ago, SEOs had to make their best educated guesses about what was working to get their websites to rank better. Now, by focusing on both feeding information to and gleaning feedback from Google's knowledge graph, Jason Barnard helps companies craft content strategies and messaging architectures that keep their brand prominent in Google's search results. We talked about: his diverse background as an economist, musician, cartoon dog, and brand-SERPs expert how he got interested in Google's knowledge graph how Google can identify the author of an article, even without a byline how your content helps Google understand what your business is about how he uses Google's understanding of a business to plan content that can clarify that understanding his observation that "SEO is just packaging content you should be creating anyway, packaging it for Google" the importance of well-structured, consistent content the challenges of aligning human communication quirks with Google's machine-precise evaluation of web content the reliance of Google's new Search Generative Experience on their knowledge graph Jason's bio Jason Barnard is the CEO of Kalicube. Jason is also an entrepreneur, author and digital marketer who specialises in Brand SERP optimisation and Knowledge Panel management. Jason uses the pseudonym "The Brand SERP Guy" for his professional work. Connect with Jason online Kalicube LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/8uAg0pjGEj4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 172. Practitioners of search engine optimization are famous for their fealty to Google. Nowadays, though, what used to be a guessing game with SEO's trying to divine what Google wants to know about a website can now be more of a conversation between a brand's messaging and content teams and Google's knowledge graph and search engine. Jason Barnard knows more than anyone about the content strategies and messaging architectures behind these advanced search-marketing practices. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 172 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Jason Barnard. Jason is the founder and CEO at Kalicube. But Jason, Google knows you by some other names as well. Can you tell us a little... Well, first of all, welcome and tell the folks what Google thinks you are. Jason: Yeah, Google's had a lot of different opinions about me and thank you for, A, inviting me and, B, asking me that incredibly delightful question to start. My career in the past was a musician. I was a professional musician for years. Before that, I had an economics degree with statistical analysis and I was going to be an economist, that didn't happen. And I joined a rock band playing double bass, punk folk music. And then I became a cartoon blue dog called Bua with a hugely successful website and a TV series that was aired around the world. And then I tried to become a digital marketer and I pitched to clients and clients would seem incredibly interested and then they wouldn't sign, and I couldn't figure out why they weren't signing. Jason: And then one day, one of my clients who actually became a client said, "Well, we searched your name after you left the office and it said at the top Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog. And we think that's funny, but most people probably wouldn't want to give their digital marketing strategy to a cartoon blue dog." At which point I thought Google is a child. It hasn't understood what I'm trying to project to my audience, I need to educate that child so it understands the cartoon blue dog is now in the past, and that today I'm a digital marketer and I want to be represented primarily as a digital marketer.

Duration:00:32:00

Melinda Belcher: Inspirational Design Leadership – Episode 171

12/11/2023
Melinda Belcher As content design becomes entrenched as a UX design practice, leaders from the craft are beginning to move into design leadership positions. Melinda Belcher's ascent to her current design executive management role is an instructive and inspirational story of professional development, creative team leadership, and community building. We talked about: her path to her current role as the head of design for the Freedom and Slate credit card portfolios at JPMorgan Chase her history of building content teams in a variety of contexts her practice of creating user guides for herself and team members the importance of modeling the behavior that you want to see in others the differences between content design practice in the New York area versus Silicon Valley how she brings creativity into her work in the tightly regulated financial services industry her take on the differences between leadership and management and between being in those roles versus being an individual contributor the process of her transition from individual contributor to team leader her professional pivot from brand and content-marketing content to product content a recent panel that she and her colleagues put together in NYC to discuss AI tools her prediction that AI will help content designers scale up their work how her community work and internal thought leadership helped her get her current designer leadership role Melinda's bio Melinda Belcher likes to build content teams from the ground up. A certified Product Owner, she helped start IBM’s Tokyo Design Studio. A veteran of New York brand and design agencies, Melinda has also built out content teams at Interbrand, frog and Havas. Currently, Melinda heads up Design for the Freedom and Slate credit card portfolios within the Consumer and Community Bank at JPMorgan Chase. In 2018, Melinda co-founded UX Content Design NYC, New York City’s only product content meetup, with Selene De La Cruz. Along with the UXCD-NYC team, Melinda has organized content design meetups at Google, Condé Nast, Mastercard, Capital One, and more. Connect with Melinda online MelindaRocks.com LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/8heWrEMBCeY Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 171. Design leadership now is mostly folks who came up through interaction and visual design careers. Melinda Belcher is one of a growing number of design leaders emerging from the content world. The story of her professional development is truly inspirational, whether she's talking about her proactive immersion into management theory and practice, her creative approach to leading teams, or her commitment to building community, whether in her own company or the broader content profession. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 171 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Melinda Belcher. Melinda's the head of design for the Freedom and Slate credit card portfolios at JPMorgan Chase. Welcome, Melinda. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Melinda: Yeah, so I'm currently the head of design, as you mentioned, for Freedom and Slate, which are two of our largest credit card portfolios within the consumer and community bank at JPMorgan Chase. I've been with JP for I think about two and a half years at the moment, and I've been in a design leadership role for about three months. Larry: Nice. And your path to that role is really curious to me. We've talked a tiny bit about it, but I would love it if you could just walk through because you have the kind of background that you could easily ended up in one of these principal senior-level content design roles or something like that, but you're the head of a design department. I think people are going to be curious about how you got there...

Duration:00:30:54

Scott Abel: Content Unification from The Content Wrangler – Episode 170

12/6/2023
Scott Abel Navigating the complex and multifaceted online media landscape can be a disjointed and disorienting experience. Scott Abel has a method for smoothing out online customers' experiences. His "content unification" approach benefits both the organizations that create content experiences and the customers who navigate them. We talked about: the origin of his personal brand, The Content Wrangler, and his content strategy evangelism for Heretto the concept of content unification examples of companies that are benefiting from a more unified approach to content the relationship between content unification and customer experience the results of his survey of research on API documentation, which shows that, like most human beings, developers don't always actually behave in the same way that they say that they do the two kinds of developers that researchers have identified: systematic developers and opportunistic developers the need for AI superpowers across the content spectrum how AI, in particular copilot agents, can help content practitioners across their workflows the importance of delivering at scale content for self-service environments Scott's bio Scott Abel is a Content Strategy Evangelist at Heretto, CEO of The Content Wrangler, and an expert in technical communication management and content strategy. He hosts webinars and conferences, writes for industry publications, authors books, mentors students, and speaks at events globally. Connect with Scott online The Content Wrangler blog The Content Wrangler webinars Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/mWw6yleHvVw Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 170. As the digital landscape has become more diverse and complex, online customers end up consuming all kinds of information, jumping from one location to another to piece together the answers they need. Scott Abel has thoughts about how to improve this situation, a concept that he calls "content unification." Unifying your content operations both improves your company's ability to create and deliver useful content experiences and smooths out your customers' journeys. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 170 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome back to the show Scott Abel. Scott is best known as The Content Wrangler. That's probably how you've heard about him online, but he also serves as a content strategy evangelist for a company called Heretto. So welcome, Scott. Tell the folks a little bit more about your wrangling and evangelism these days. Scott: Hey, thanks for having me on the show today. I appreciate it, Larry. Yeah, my name is Scott Abel and I serve as a content wrangler. And that really just means I'm a content strategist and I created a name for myself, a brand name about 20 years ago called The Content Wrangler. It just seemed like what I was trying to do at the time, wrangle content, or herd cats, or however you like to say it. Scott: But today, I also wear a second hat and I serve as a content strategy evangelist for a company known as Heretto. Heretto makes a component content management system, which is a type of advanced content management system that's designed to handle modular pieces of smaller granular content, and weave them together for you in meaningful ways using automation and other kinds of technology tricks. Larry: Yeah. And that sounds like, the reason I wanted to have you back on the show, we talked a few weeks ago about the notion of content unification. That sounds like one tool in that kit. But tell me, I was really intrigued by just the term content unification. Tell me what you mean by that. Scott: Yeah. When I say content unification, I'm really just using dictionary definitions. And if you think about it, the opposite of unification could be anything from...

Duration:00:31:21

Dan Mall: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice – Episode 169

11/28/2023
Dan Mall The basics of building a design system are fairly simple. Ensconcing a system in an organization's culture so that it's actually adopted and used is a more complex undertaking. Dan Mall takes a content-first approach as he helps organizations evolve their design systems from projects to products and ultimately to firmly embedded practices that let teams deliver the efficiency and consistency benefits that such systems offer. We talked about: his Design System University an overview of the professional challenges that come with building and running a design system his new book Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice his addition to the conventional list of design-system benefits - in addition to efficiency and consistency - relief the tragically common story of how design systems can end up becoming "ghost towns and graveyards" how to ensconce good design-system ideas and practices in company culture how you can benefit by adopting a humble attitude toward design-system work how good design systems evolve from a project to a product and ultimately to a practice focus the importance of repetition in design system messaging strategy the crucial role of content in design systems how, when he teaches design-system process, he always starts with plain, unadorned text how design systems make it possible to quickly iterate on possible ways to present content to users how new technologies and practices like headless CMSs and microservices-based architectures work with design systems his thoughts on content orchestration and experience orchestration how AI fits into the design-system world the importance of having a vision for your design system, but to also appreciate and embrace detours and serendipity along with way Dan's bio Dan Mall is a husband, dad, teacher, creative director, designer, founder, and entrepreneur from Philly. He runs Design System University, where he creates, collects, and curates curriculum, content, and community to help enterprise teams design at scale. Previously, Dan ran design system consultancy SuperFriendly for over a decade. Dan writes about design systems, process, and leadership and other issues on his site danmall.com and in his weekly newsletter. Connect with Dan online Twitter Instagram Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/fxyQV8zKF4Q Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 169. The basic idea of a design system is simple enough to grasp and easy enough to prototype, but turning a collection of components and design guidance into a coherent system that people actually use - that's a whole other story. Dan Mall helps organizations embed design systems in their organizational culture so that designers, engineers, and product folks can efficiently and consistently deliver excellent experiences, always starting with content concerns at the forefront. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 169 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really excited today to have with us Dan Mall. Dan is like, if you google design systems, his name pretty much comes up, I think, and part of it, and what he does nowadays is he, he's the founder and runs the Design System University. So welcome, Dan. Tell the folks a little bit more about what's cooking there at Design System U. Dan: Yeah, awesome. Thank you, Larry. Thank you for having me. Design System U is a place where people can get support and content and community around designing at scale. That's something that I think a lot of us as designers and engineers and content folks and all those things, we just don't get training in that kind of stuff. Dan: And so I wanted to create something that allowed people to have some support and community and content and training to really work at scale when we make digital tools and we mak...

Duration:00:32:15

Jarno van Driel: Semantics, Accessibility, and SEO – Episode 168

11/21/2023
Jarno van Driel Jarno van Driel is a true pioneer on the semantic web. Even before you could add machine-readable semantic markup to webpages, he was discovering ways to help search engines understand what web pages were about. Much of that success grew out of his early focus on accessibility and usability. When semantic markup was introduced, he was among the first cadre of experts on RDFa, Microdata, schema.org, and other semantic practices, and he is to this day one of the most respected practitioners of this craft. We talked about: how he arrived at his work at the intersection of semantics, accessibility, and SEO his early introduction to the importance of accessibility in content work his surprise and curiosity about how his small primary school websites were outranking big commercial websites how now-common practices like on-page navigation helped his SEO efforts 20 years ago how he discovered semantic metadata by reading Drupal documentation the dearth of ontology guidance and syntax documentation in the early days of semantic markup how semantic markup started to take of with the introduction of Google's knowledge graph the small early communities that formed around semantic search how the arrival of Google's knowlege graph filled gaps the ability to disambiguate entities, especially in multilinqual contexts his take on the notion of the Semantic Web the evolution of his work over the past 10 year from getting rich search results to actually structuring meaningful websites how well-structured, properly marked-up webpages can deliver better results for a company, even when the page gets fewer visits the importance of focusing on messaging and content over technical markup if you want to be found on the web Jarno's bio Jarno van Driel is an international Structured Data and technical SEO consultant. He started his career in 1998, during the early years of the web as a print and web designer, Flash and 3D artist, frontend developer, and accessibility engineer. Jarno has continuously embraced new and challenging roles throughout his career to become a well-rounded digital professional. Jarno's activities can be categorized and classified in many different taxonomies and ontologies. Yet labeling Jarno's job title is a near impossible task because his activities overlap with a multitude of departments and specialists. An ambiguous state, because of which most simply know him as 'just Jarno', that structured-data fanboy from Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Jarno became fascinated with the 'semantic web' when he discovered something called 'semantic metadata' (2008). Semantic annotations piqued Jarno's interest because of his background in web accessibility, which is about expressing structure and meaning. Structured data markup takes things to a whole other level, making it the obvious path ahead. As an early adopter of linked open data, his work was mentioned in several W3C discussion groups. Mentions for which Jarno is very grateful because it would lead him to start publicly participating in schema.org (2013). Through this, Jarno met and learned from many of the pioneers who are at the forefront of the semantic technologies being used today. Connect with Jarno online LinkedIn Twitter Mastodon Bluesky Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ger2EZbg3g0 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 168. We all want our content to be found on the web. It's always been the case that that's easier said than done. Jarno van Driel discovered early on that focusing on accessibility and usability would give his clients better visibility in search results. When semantic markup was introduced so you could add metadata to HTML pages, he found that he could do even more to help search engines understand web content - and to help his clients get better business res...

Duration:00:29:18

Steve Portigal: Interviewing Users – Episode 167

11/15/2023
Steve Portigal To conduct a good research-focused interview, you need to cultivate a professional interviewing mindset. Steve Portigal has been doing this for years, and he has written a book to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews. Now in its second edition, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (available at a 20% discount through December 15 by applying the code ELLESS at checkout), covers interviewing techniques, of course, but also research best practices, how to document your work, and how to make sense of your discoveries. We talked about: his work at his UX research consultancy the elements of a good interviewing mindset checking your own world view at the door embracing how others see the world building rapport listening the difference between chatting and interviewing how to stay mindful as you transition from one mode of communication to another, and the need to consciously cultivate new rituals in the modern, non-stop Zoom world how to keep the business intent of your interviewing activities in mind, in particular the relationship between the business opportunity at hand and the research-question planning that best aligns with it how to kindly share with colleagues relevant new discoveries that emerge in your research work how to balance the amount of domain knowledge you bring to an interviewing project the importance of knowing and keeping in mind the scope and importance of documenting, analyzing, and synthesizing your interviews Steve's bio Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps organizations to build more mature user research practices. Based outside of San Francisco, he is principal of Portigal Consulting, and has conducted research with thoracic surgeons, families eating breakfast, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and real estate agents. His work has informed the development of professional audio gear, wine packaging, medical information systems, design systems, video-conferencing technology, and music streaming services. He is the author of three books: the classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights (now in a second edition) and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. He’s also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Connect with Steve online LinkedIn Portigal.com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/r4sYIXSEd0c Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 167. Talking with another person is the most natural thing in the world. But when you're interviewing someone for a business-focused research project you have to set aside many of your natural conversational instincts and adopt a professional interviewing mindset. Steve Portigal has been doing this for years. He's also written a book to help to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews and discover new opportunities and actionable insights. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 167 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Steve Portigal. Steve is probably the best known interviewing expert in our field, and he's a user research consultant in the Bay Area. Welcome, Steve. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Steve: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's nice to be here with you and get to talk to everybody. I run a research consulting practice. I've been doing that for a little more than 20 years, which is a long time, but been learning and learning and lots more to learn. And I learn through different kinds of work. I run research studies, I work with clients and help them learn things about their users and their customers and figure out what we're going to...

Duration:00:30:56

Michael Reid: English-Language Privilege – Episode 166

11/7/2023
Michael Reid Michael Reid is a consultant who helps organizations with their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. A linguist by training, he is extremely attuned to the role of language in his work, which led to his explorations of the privilege given to English-language speakers in our modern, hyper-connected world. His discoveries can help content professionals of all kinds identify and address the dynamics and biases that arise from the pivotal role that the English language plays in modern digital business. We talked about: his background in linguistics, interpreting, higher education, and the nonprofit world and how they led to his current work in DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) the concept of a "pivot language" - a language that serves as an intermediary between two other languages how business and social dynamics can turn a pivot language like English into a mechanism of privilege how English language privilege can affect the quality of localization how the dominance of English on the web affects the training data that the LLMs that inform AI agents like ChatGPT how actively working to disable the systems that privilege you can help you and your colleagues do better work his hope that you'll reflect on how we got to the current situation and think about how you can improve it Michael's bio Michael Reid (he) is a linguistic and cultural equity consultant, facilitator, linguist, writer, and educator in Athens, Greece with more than 24 years of experience. He leads workshops and consults for a broad variety of groups and stakeholders on diversity, cross-cultural communication, linguistic equality, and race issues, and has chaired and sat on the board of multiple organizations working for diversity and inclusion. He has working proficiency in six languages (English, Greek, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Portuguese), was born in the United States, and has studied there as well as France and Japan. Michael firmly believes that diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) work must be culturally responsive if it’s to be relevant to the audience at hand and, crucially, if it’s to adhere to the principles of equity and inclusion. Experiences of discrimination, injustice, and inequity are informed by the history, culture, and conditions of the people that experience them and the context in which they take place; we can’t ignore these factors and expect our DEIJ efforts to be effective. In fact, when we ignore these factors, we find ourselves in danger of reproducing the very same inequitable power structures we’re working to dismantle. Before moving into consulting and workshop facilitation full time, he worked in higher education as a language professor and director of international recruitment. He specializes in diversity issues in the US, European, and Asian, specifically Japanese, context, and is passionate about using his linguistic and cultural skills to facilitate communication and true understanding between different groups of people, across a wide variety of differences. Connect with Michael online: LinkedIn aliftoomega.com michael at aliftoomega dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/3d1VfpkyM1c Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 166. Most of the folks who listen to this show work on products and publications that reach audiences around the world. That global reach is one of the many benefits of the technical and social infrastructure that we call the World Wide Web. For a variety of reasons, the main language on the web is English, even when content is localized for different regions. Michael Reid has thought a lot about the privilege bestowed upon native English speakers in this situation. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 166 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast.

Duration:00:40:01

Matt Hayes: Enterprise-Scale Content Design at LinkedIn – Episode 176

11/5/2023
Matt Hayes Matt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team. The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization. Among the secrets to their success: democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues. We talked about: his work as a Staff Content Designer at LinkedIn the impact of the arrival of generative AI his take on place for AI in the content-design world the democratization of content guidance at LinkedIn how they triage content-guidance decision-making at LinkedIn how they communicate changes to their content-design guidance to design system staff and other users of the guidance an example of typical content design deliberation process his take on the differences between IC (individual contributor) roles and management roles, and the role of leadership in both Matt's bio Matt Hayes works as a content designer, currently with LinkedIn where he has led content design for enterprise products, launched their content design guidelines, and kept Post-it Note in business. Previously he has led content design for Deloitte Digital, spoken at several design conferences, and written long-form editorial for outdoor industry publications. Matt enjoys helping product teams solve design problems, mostly through language, and has discussed European cycling with Pablo Escobar’s brother over lunch in Medellin. Connect with Matt online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/VxzqeaDypPo Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 176. The content design team at LinkedIn is small by industry standards, especially when you look at the number of products they support and the size of the overall organization. Matt Hayes and his colleagues have to be truly strategic to ensure that their content work makes the outsized contribution that it must. They do this by democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 176 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Matt Hayes. Matt is a staff content designer at LinkedIn. Welcome, Matt. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to at LinkedIn these days. Matt: Hey, good morning, Larry. Thanks for having me on today. Man, yeah, LinkedIn right now, we are going full bore onto some AI projects. We're trying to elevate the user experience in general. I've been working on the enterprise side mostly, and yeah, just really trying to help people, hire people, hire the best people as quick as possible, and yeah, that's what we're working on at LinkedIn right now. Larry: Now, we didn't talk about it in our run-up to the show, but you mentioned AI and all of a sudden I'm like, "Oh, duh. It's a thing these days." What's cooking with AI at LinkedIn, especially as it pertains to content design? Matt: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting time because generative AI is very good at writing very mediocre words. So we have this big, I think across the tech space right now, there's this big question of how is this going to change word generation basically. Is AI going to be able to do it all for us? Is it going to take over interface content jobs? Is it going to take over blog post writing jobs? Is it going to turn out the exact same thing for every topic and it's going to be really see-through that it's generated by AI and no one's going to want to read it? Are we going to have, on social media sites, are we going to have bots creating posts and then bots writing a response to those bot-cr...

Duration:00:28:07

Lo Etheridge: Human-Centered Federation for Headless CMSs – Episode 165

10/29/2023
Lo Etheridge The arrival of decoupled content architectures and headless CMSs creates a new set of challenges for content modelers, authors, administrators, and others who work with content systems. Lo Etheridge does developer relations for Hygraph, a headless CMS company. Dev rel folks don't typically drive organizational change and stakeholder alignment, but Lo's unique background in social work uniquely prepares them to help customers with the human side of content management. We talked about: Lo's work in senior developer relations at Hygraph, a headless-CMS company their background as a team manager in the social work field and transition into tech how creating content in siloed organizations can limit an organization's visibility of its content assets their description of the role of developer relations how their focus on people and human behavior naturally led to Lo's expansive view of a dev rel role how their work on a team supporting a large university's many WordPress websites led to Lo's approach to empowering content editors and authors the differences in content modeling practices as you move from monolithic CMSs and headless CMSs, in particular the human and organizational challenges that come with this transition how conflict-resolution practices from the social-work world can help align stakeholders in the CMS and content modeling world how conflict can be both a positive and negative dynamic and can even improve collaboration and facilitate change management the role of federation in decoupled architectures how eye-opening and humbling it is for Lo to watch someone use something that they built how decoupled architectures enable smaller, iterative changes and adjustments on the fly opportunities for bottom-up organization change that come with folks collaborating in decoupled systems Lo's encouragement for all involved in content management - developers, managers, editors, and administrators - to work together Lo's bio Lo Etheridge is a Senior Developer Relations Specialist at Hygraph. They focus on developer education around Headless CMS, JS-based frontend and API technologies as well as the dynamic cross-functional relationship between developers and content professionals. Previously, they were lead web developer/programmer analyst and developer relations specialist in private and public higher education sectors. Before transitioning into frontend engineering and digital communications, Lo was a community social worker and public health educator in the field of harm reduction. They are a huge fan of David Lynch, Wu-Tang Clan and plays the theremin! Lo is passionate about digital ethics, community building, transformative justice, collaborative learning, tinkering with the Raspberry Pi motherboard, and making experimental music. Connect with Lo online: Twitter lo dot etheridge at hygraph dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/L4wSDVrkGbc Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 165. The arrival of decoupled technical architectures in general, and in particular the fast-growing adoption headless CMSs, creates a whole new batch of people-management and organizational-change issues. You don't typically look to a software developer for help in such matters, but Lo Etheridge is not your typical developer. Their background in social work and conflict resolution lets Lo bring a unique and constructive perspective to these new challenges. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 165 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited to welcome to the show Lo Etheridge. Lo is a lead or senior developer relations person at Hygraph, which is a content federation CMS. Welcome Lo. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Hygraph. Lo: Great. Hi Larry, thanks for having me. Like Larry said,

Duration:00:31:45

Sana Remekie: Content Orchestration for the Composable Web – Episode 164

10/18/2023
Sana Remekie The emergence of modular web architectures and complex digital experiences has created a need for new content-management practices and for new enterprise tools. One of the most pressing new needs is the ability to orchestrate the assembly of content elements, which may come from a variety of sources and be used in a variety of distribution channels. Sana Remekie started her company, Conscia, to help large enterprises deal with these new challenges. We talked about: her work at Conscia, where she is the CEO and co-founder the rise of digital experience platforms (DXPs) and the subsequent arrival of "best of breed" headless and decoupled microservices and the ensuing need to unify and connect them how content presentation is managed in a complex, multi-sourced, composable stack the emergence of "digital experience composition" (DXC), a way to gather content from different systems for display on a web front-end Conscia's focus on digital experience orchestration (DXO) over DXP the unique needs for orchestration in large enterprises some of the organizational challenges in moving from monolithic legacy publishing systems to a composable architecture the need for education around these new ways of working with content opportunities in enterprise user experience design to address some of the problems introduced by decoupled systems the differences between content orchestration and experience orchestration Sana's bio Sana Remekie is the CEO of a Canadian startup, Conscia.ai, industry’s first Digital Experience Orchestration (DXO) platform. Her groundbreaking platform empowers businesses to seamlessly integrate composable technologies within their existing digital stacks, propelling their digital evolution. As a graduate of System Design Engineering, she has spent over 15 years of experience designing, architecting and selling data-centric solutions for some of the largest ecommerce brands. Sana has a proven track record of championing customer success by designing solutions that drive collaboration between Marketing and IT, in efforts to empower business users to be in control of the digital experience. She is a speaker, author and a technology thought leader in the fields of digital experience, ecommerce search and data management. She was listed in 'The 10 Most Influential Women in Technology' by Analytics Insight. Connect with Sana online: LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/K2TdrPO0eKA Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 164. To this point in the history of content management, most work has been done in systems where content authoring and the ultimate display of the content looked pretty similar. Now, with the arrival of decoupled systems that assemble content elements dynamically - often from a variety of sources - new practices are emerging to orchestrate these complex and abstract experiences. Sana Remekie started a company to help enterprises manage these new challenges. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone, welcome to episode number 164 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited today to welcome to the show, Sana Remekie. Sana is the CEO and co-founder at Conscia. Conscia is one of a new emerging brand of companies that helps us deal with this crazy new complex world we're in. So welcome, Sana. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Conscia. Sana: Thank you so much, Larry, for having me. Pleasure to be here. So Conscia actually comes from the word consciousness, that's kind of the origin of the name Conscia. And the reason why we named our company Conscia is that data and content in this complex landscape is coming from a whole bunch of different systems. And data and content is what constitutes knowledge at the end of the day. And knowledge is what you need to gain consciousness of what's really happen...

Duration:00:30:51

Katariina Kari: Knowledge Graph and Ontology Practice at IKEA – Episode 163

10/10/2023
Katariina Kari Knowledge graphs let people and computers work from the same body of facts to create uniquely informative and powerful experiences. Katariina Kari and her colleagues at IKEA use ontologies and knowledge graphs to drive applications like recommendation systems and to streamline back-end processes like image recognition. Katariina balances her engineering expertise with a deep appreciation for the humans who create and use AI applications like knowledge graphs. We talked about: her work on IKEA's knowledge graph, in particular how their ontology brings meaning to their data model how web standards like RDF and OWL undergird ontology and knowledge graph work the benefits of codifying domain knowledge in a way that permits it to be used in multiple applications, e.g., both IKEA's recommendation system and an internal image-recognition app their system to capture subject matter expert insight in the knowledge graph with intuitive authoring tooling for the SMEs the three-tiered view they take of knowledge graph construction at IKEA: the ontology layer, which includes hundreds of class and property definitions the categories layer, which includes thousands of controlled-vocabulary terms the product/instance layer, which includes tens of thousands of specific instances of products and media asssets her strong feelings about the "human in the loop" and the need for codified, human-validated facts when building AI applications, as well as thinking that is grounded in the humanities and social sciences the need to stay critical in your consumption of information about AI, especially the current hype around ChatGPT and other LLMs Katariina's bio Katariina Kari is the lead ontologist at Inter IKEA Systems B.V. Katariina holds both a Master of Science and a Master of Music and is specialised in the semantic web. At IKEA, she models the IKEA Knowledge Graph; a common vocabulary to offer customers compelling interior design solutions in the digital space. In her free time, Katariina advises institutions, such as chamber music festivals, in digitalisation, guiding the humanities to the digital age. Connect with Katariina online LinkedIn Instagram Twitter Blog posts and videos IKEA’s Knowledge Graph and Why It Has Three Layers The Art of Ontology Building, and Communicating, a Knowledge Graph in Zalando (video) Building The Fashion Knowledge Graph (video) Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/vu-wWUKm0YU Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 163. Large language models like ChatGPT are getting all the attention nowadays. But another AI technology - the knowledge graph - is helping enterprises apply knowledge and facts about their products and customers to deliver powerful content experiences. Katariina Kari and her colleagues at IKEA have developed a system the captures hundreds of years of subject matter expertise to drive customer recommendation systems and automate and streamline internal processes. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone, welcome to episode number 163 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Katariina Kari. Katariina is the lead ontologist at Inter IKEA Systems. So welcome Katariina. Tell the folks a little bit more about what being an ontologist at IKEA entails. Katariina: Hi Larry. Thank you for having me here in your podcast. That's a lot of episodes, I must say. So being a lead ontologist at Inter IKEA Systems means that I'm basically in charge for how we shape the knowledge graph. So we've committed to, and we've been doing that for the past two years, to build a knowledge graph for the purpose of IKEA. And to capture IKEA know-how about interior design and people's homes and furniture for the home, which we are selling in our big blue boxes in the potato field.

Duration:00:31:18