Summary
Most content design leaders stretch their teams to cover many products at once, or sometimes 5-10 or more. This unintentionally causes the team to constantly switch context, drive less product impact, lag in their career development, earn less pay, and ultimately burn out and leave, only to repeat the cycle elsewhere. This as normal… but it shouldn’t be. I’ll show you how we redesigned content design to increase people’s focus and depth of work, multiply their product and business impact, and even accelerate their growth and compensation… all by working on just one product at a time.
Key Insights
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Failures often offer more valuable lessons than successes.
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Real user problems must be addressed, not just superficial features.
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Context switching negatively impacts designers' focus and effectiveness.
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Content designers should have the same expectations and accountability as product designers.
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Greater exposure to the product and team builds trust and collaboration.
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Creating clear priorities for content design work can elevate its impact on product success.
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Cutting out office hours allowed for deeper focus on priority projects.
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Equal pay for content and product designers can help bridge the gender pay gap in tech.
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Design ops can provide structure and support for content design teams.
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Resilience and hope are essential for growth after setbacks.
Notable Quotes
"Just because you can solve a hard technical problem doesn't mean you're solving a real problem for real people."
"I inadvertently buried the most important context about the how and the why."
"Just because most product content teams have always worked this way doesn't mean it's the best or the only way for them to work."
"When you're spread thin between teams, you'll likely have less context on what each of them are doing."
"Your ability to influence product roadmap strategy is wholly constrained."
"It's hard to stay motivated when you're under recognized, under promoted and under paid."
"Hope came from design ops."
"If content designers have deep focus, context, and the trust of their teams, they can work on problems deeply from the beginning."
"We can take a design approach to understanding problems, experimenting with solutions and making progress over time."
"Where there's life, there's hope."
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