Content Strategy for a Team of One
S o you’re a solo content wanderer in a tech wilderness of designers, developers, and product managers who might not know you exist. Or that they need you. I hear you. I’ve been you.
As the first content strategist at Shopify Plus, I spent more than a year and a half building and promoting the content practice in Waterloo, Canada. When I first arrived, unreviewed content still “shipped” through the cracks. Content recommendations were often deemed out of scope. Onboarding narratives, feedback alerts, and helpful error messages were mostly absent from prototypes.
Sound familiar? Despair not — there is a way forward.
Here’s what I’ve learned on the ground and now share with you, content comrade: High-impact strategies to grow your team’s content culture. Spoiler: It’s all about building relationships, finding allies, and saying no to the right things.
Soft skills are social currency. Because content strategy is often the minority discipline, the onus is on you to reach out. How can colleagues ask for content help if they don’t know your Slack handle? Or that office hours are every second Tuesday? Be brave and make first contact.
The weightier your content design and information architecture (IA) recommendations, the stronger the bridge of relationship you’ll need to build.
You might be the first (or last) content strategist of someone’s career, so it’s up to you to represent. Remove obstacles and provide clarity with sound rationale for every recommendation you make.
Explain your content decisions without being defensive — consider it as training others to think like a content strategist. Share your content explorations and thought process, not just the end result, in the same way that designers explore and share multiple solutions.
Work towards building good content habits in your colleagues, not just hard-and-fast content rules. Ask content-first questions so often that you start to hear them repeated back to you:
Solicit and accept feedback from others to improve the quality and clarity of your content. And when giving feedback, frame your critique as curiosity:
When I present my rationale, I don’t just explain what but also how — and I keep an open mind, since compromise is more important than being right. Because in the end, the shared goal is to improve the work, right?
Make sure you’re in the room when product decisions are being made. If a decision impacts content negatively or inadvertently (as they often do), follow up and create an awareness that you’re also a stakeholder.
Thanks to your people skills (point #1) and proven track record (point #2), your involvement won’t be out of the blue. If someone is new to the project, introduce yourself and ask how you can help.
You should also attend product demos to catch verbose writing, incorrect punctuation, robotic or vague error messages, and style guide inconsistencies. Then you are there to offer your help!
Make sure to set realistic expectations of your involvement. Content design informs product design the way a content model informs a data model, so the earlier you get involved, the better. But if proper content modeling would, say, take all year, and five projects are shipping content weekly, focus instead on what’s closest to users.
Figure out where you’ll have the most impact, and always be strategic with your yes or no.
You know you’re making inroads when the lack of content awareness turns into an overload of content requests. If you’re distributed across multiple projects, identifying low-effort, high-impact work is key to protecting your mind-space and time.
(*Content clinics are office hours held every few weeks, where I provide user interface (UI) content, IA direction, and content hierarchy feedback to teams without embedded content strategists.)
Once I determine that I don’t have the “brainwidth” to provide the support needed, I direct people to content resources like Polaris, our style guide, and to content strategists in other offices.
Don’t have the luxury of backup content strategists? Marissa Phillips from Airbnb outlines helpful ways to turn “no” into “no, but…” because directing people to content resources is how we promote content while still maintaining our sanity:
— Marissa Phillips from “Building and supporting your content strategy team,” Confab 2018
Find a balance between push and yield, resist and relent. If you compromise in the negotiables, people are more willing to listen when you fight for the non-negotiables. If you feel like you’re fighting for every UI label or badge, then maybe the issue goes deeper than the content design layer. Or maybe you need better allies.
Find the influencer on your project team and work closely with them. You’re probably on more than one project and can’t be at every planning session, so you’ll need a content ally to stand in for you sometimes.
Schedule weekly chats with your new friend (usually the lead designer) to keep yourself in the loop, provide content feedback, and model content-first thinking. Before you know it, your buddy will defend your content choices when you’re not in the room. They will have your back and champion your discipline.
Your impact widens exponentially as you share your knowledge beyond the individual to the group.
Multiplying content thinking across teams is how content cultures are born.
Advocating for content when you’re in the room — and getting others to advocate for content when you’re not in the room — is where you start to see exponential impact.
Every interface is a conversation with a user. The experience breaks down when the questions someone brings to the task aren’t answered clearly — whether through the design, the hierarchy of information, or the words used. Just as content is the mediator of that conversation, as a content strategist you are uniquely equipped as the mediator of communication gaps for both the design and the team.
Your skills of organizing and communicating information can bring clarity and unblock other disciplines.
Your role becomes that of interpreter: translating machine language for a human audience, filtering what people need to know and when, deciding what is unnecessary information, prioritizing the most important message, and saying it all in short, simple words.
Your ability to ask questions and articulate the answers on behalf of others leads to better communication on product teams.
If you’re reading this, it’s time to call in the cavalry, lone ranger. Contrary to everything I just said, you might need to push back on supporting side projects for a period of time to let others feel the need for another you. Then gather and hire a team of content strategists around you — so you can focus on the real work of crafting clear, useful, and functional content.
To quote many a colleague, “Words are hard.”
Yes, my friend, but words are also your superpower.
If you feel the call to battle, come and help another content warrior out. Check out our careers page or hit me up in LinkedIn.
For more on Shopify’s product content team, read Alaine Mackenzie’s article “How we structure our content strategy team.”
For an in-depth look at how content strategists help teams build better products, read Biz Sanford’s article “Product content at each stage of a project.”
Content Strategy for a Team of One
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