The difference(s) between product content strategy and web content strategy

I’ve been doing this thing called “content strategy” for a while now, always for web-focused agencies. But six months ago, I started working at a SaaS product company. I thought it would be pretty much the same thing. I mean, my job title is the same, right? Uh, no sir. My work is night-and-day different from what I was doing before.

Web content strategy is a pretty well-documented space these days, but the interwebs are surprisingly silent on product-focused content strategy. In my experience, while they require the same core skills and systems thinking, your day-to-day work and arsenal of tactics as a product content strategist are vastly different.

So if you’re considering a move to a product-focused content role (maybe at Shopify?), here’s what I’ve learned in my first six months as a web-turned-product content strategist:

Make friends with designers

If there’s anything that’s made me successful in my new role, it’s this. Designers are your best friends and your best advocates for the importance of content. Chances are, they’ve either been stuck doing this work themselves and they hate it, or they care deeply about the role of content in the user experience. Either way, I find they’re generally stoked to be working with you. You’ll find yourself collaborating with them a lot more closely throughout the design process.

Make sure you can speak designers’ language and understand their tools (Sketch, HTML and CSS, paper prototyping, etc.). The more you can help them balance the needs of their design system with your content, the happier they’ll be. Don’t look at them as clients that you need to placate. Look at them as collaborators that you can work with to create the best experience.

As Jonathon Colman says in his fantastic talk, “Build. Better. Content!”:

Content leads design. Design leads content. Both lead experience.

Say goodbye to documentation and deliverables

Ah yes, deliverables. My old agency friend. I was used to building spreadsheets that could make a grown man cry. So imagine my shock to discover that, at this particular product company at least, there were exactly zero fucks given about “process” or “documentation”, least of all “deliverables”. My beautiful spreadsheets! Unloved, unappreciated!

That left me with a dilemma: how do I get the same results, but without the same process, documentation, and deliverables?

So far I’ve learned to: shift focus to communication, not documentation. Talk (a lot). Build relationships. Establish talking points (Content! Content! Rah rah rah!) and repeat them ad nauseam to anyone who will listen. Repeat them ad nauseam to anyone who won’t listen, too. Focus relentlessly on the value to the customer. Back up everything with data.

Do more with fewer words

I spent the majority of time in web content strategy doing just that: strategy. My clients were left to implement it after our project was done. But on a product team, I easily spend half my time writing and editing. You need to be able to write really great, concise copy, really freakin’ quickly.

I also learned that web copy and interface copy are completely different beasts. No longer do I have the luxury of entire pages, paragraphs, or sentences. Most of the time you have to help people complete a task with just a few words. So brush up on those technical writing skills, folks. Prepare to kill all of your darlings; there’s no room for excess here.

Educate or perish

My team has four content strategists in a company of about 800 other people. Hundreds of these people ship content to our customers every day.

There’s no way we’ll ever be able to keep up. So education has become one of our most important priorities. As hard as it is for a team of control-freak writers to let go of the need to personally vet every word that goes out the door, the best thing we can do for the team as a whole is empower everyone to write their own great content.

Build a voice and tone guide and content style guide that doesn’t make non-writers want to poke out their eyeballs. Make it easy to access and update. Teach people to look up the answer themselves instead of relying on you.

We also run quick half-hour presentations across the company to help everyone learn our most important “content quick tips”. Next we’ll expand the program to create custom sessions for each major group to address their unique content needs.

Before long, they’ll be doing all our work for us, and we can kick back and relax with a celebratory beverage. Pretty sure that’s how it will work.

Win those hearts and minds

Coming in to a new project as an agency consultant is… kind of awesome, actually. You’re a) new/shiny, and b) expensive, so clients are generally pretty motivated to listen to you.

In-house at a product company? You have no god-given mandate. You just have a whole bunch of very smart people that already have a whole bunch of other priorities. You won’t win their trust, much less their time, just because you ask nicely.

Advocacy and education are key — you have to help people understand the benefit of your work in their terms, not yours. Only then will they be motivated to help you out by adhering to your style guide or changing headers to sentence case (again). This is true for web content as well, of course, but I’m finding it to be even more important in product.

So far, product content strategy has been a brand new, slightly terrifying challenge. But I’m learning oodles of new things every day, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I’ll keep writing about what I learn here — stay tuned for even more product content hijinks to come.