How we structure our content strategy team

Or: embedded or distributed? A love story

Illustration by the amazing Shopify illustration team, as always

The Shopify product content team is two years old. Two! If this team was a human they could probably talk or walk or something by now. But, you know, not very well. They’d have that teetering toddler walk and poor sentence structure. They’d still cry for weird reasons.

Whatever my expectations of a two year old human, my expectations of my two year old team are pretty damn high. I can’t tell people we’re “just starting out” or “still trying to establish our role”. We’re here, we exist. We have almost 15 (!) product content strategists across four offices. When we started this team, I was pretty sure we’d have made it by now.

But wait, what does “made it” mean?

The problem(s)

By the end of 2016, it didn’t feel like we’d made it much of anywhere. Here are the problems we were facing:

Spread too thin

Every content strategist was dividing their time between 3, 4, 5… 10 projects. Every project had its own dedicated team of designers, developers, and product managers thinking only about that single problem. Except the poor content strategist trying frantically to prioritize their time, maintain context, and make the right content decisions.

This led to a stressed out content team, and less-than-ideal content solutions. There was no time to iterate, measure, improve. Everything was last minute, everything was missing (valuable) context that the rest of the project team had. Context-switching is hard and annoying, especially when you’re the only one that has to.

Strategy vs. tactics

And what’s worse, it was almost impossible for the team to deliver on the strategy part of being a content strategist. Turns out you need time, space, and a ton of information to make good strategic decisions (who knew). Our content strategists were spending almost all of their time on tactical interface copywriting, because they weren’t around for the structural, hierarchical, and strategic decisions on their projects. Because of the aforementioned million other things on the go.

Hurry up and wait

That sucked for the content team, but it really really sucked for our project teams. They needed content help, but instead they had to wait around for hours, days, or worse until their content strategist had time for their project. Then they had to spend a bunch of time filling in their content pal on all the progress they’d missed. Not efficient. Not effective. Not fun for anyone.

What’s content strategy again?

The other somewhat-insidious effect: everyone in the company built a different definition of content strategy, and a different understanding of/relationship with the content team. We all had different baseline skills, different approaches, and, to be honest, differing abilities to multitask and prioritize. We weren’t providing a consistent experience or offering consistent value to our project teams.

When people asked “what does your team do?”, we had a hard time answering, because, well… it depends. That made the advocacy and education parts of building a new team even more challenging. Nothing definitely doesn’t work like an inconsistent message.

The solution (maybe)

Caveat: we just started. I have no idea if it’ll work. I’ll update with results.

Embedded single-project content strategists

As of January, (almost) all of our content strategists are embedded on a single project. We worked with our product managers to identify the highest priority projects that most need dedicated content expertise.

Pros:

• Most of the problems I just mentioned no longer exist. We have more time to gain context, get strategically involved, and work on skill-building.
• We prioritize our work with our project teams, and they know exactly what they can depend on us for.
• Content strategists are much more relaxed and have mostly lost their stress-induced eye twitches.

Cons: Oh hey, look at all those completely unsupported projects we have now.

Content systems team

Enter the new content systems team (it needs a better name). This team will be responsible for:

• Offering ad-hoc tactical copywriting help for unsupported teams without a dedicated content strategist.
• Conducting ongoing maintenance and cleanup: we still have a bunch of content and UX debt all over the product that needs cleaning up.
• Establishing and maintaining content standards and patterns.
• Building automated testing and tools (like our content style checker) that lets us ship better content faster.

18F is doing something similar. Their documentation is great.

Pros:

• On-ramp for newbies and juniors: instead of dumping new hires on a big high-pressure project, they can spend time getting to know the product with ad-hoc support. It also gives us space for entry-level roles, because getting into content strategy is weird and hard.
• Different strokes for different folks: some people on our team don’t like working on a single problem for a long time. Hey man that’s okay we have a team for that now!
• Dedicated to the backlog: it’s hard to make time to fix existing features and debt. There are so many new shiny things to build! Having a dedicated team means it actually happens.

Cons:

• Unsupported project teams still don’t get strategic support. We’re helping them with their surface-level copywriting decisions, but what about everything before that?

Content education and skill-building

That’s why education and skill building are still so important for us. If we can’t help teams as much as we wish we could, we need to make sure they have the skills they need to do great work themselves.

We’ll be offering content and IA skill-building workshops across all our offices, and “guest-starring” with project teams to help them pilot new processes (and teach them how to do it themselves).

We expect that designers without a dedicated content strategist will:

• Do the strategy, scope, structure, and hierarchy work to make good content decisions (with their awesome new content strategy skills of course).
• Actively work to develop their content and IA skills (so as to make those good decisions).
• Write their own first draft content, and put in the time to think about messaging, content structure, and user needs before they talk to us.

Reasonable expectations of a product designer? I sure think so. Content is design and design is content, after all.

This structure isn’t for every team—it only became possible with scale. It’s only now that we can reasonably-ish cover our highest priority projects. Some offices still have content strategy teams of one that have to juggle too many projects (sorry Nic).

It’ll get better, but in the meantime this is my 2017 mantra: say no to more stuff. Do fewer projects better. Build everyone else’s skills.

Further reading

If you’re thinking about your team structure, here are some things that helped us:

• Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner’s amazing book Org Design for Design Orgs
• Steven Sinofsky’s “Functional vs. Unit Organizations”
• Stanley Wood’s “Design Doesn’t Scale” (lots of good stuff out there about Spotify’s design team structure)

Shameless plug: If you’re a product content strategist and this team structure sounds hella fun (which, I mean, what could possibly be more fun) you should probably just come work with us.

And thanks as always to my fantastic team for helping me with this post. And with everything in life. ❤