The Content Strategy Podcast

Kristina Halvorson chats to Sara Wachter-Boettcher about the challenges content professionals face in the workplace. They discuss the need for validation, the importance of setting goals within your control and explain the window of tolerance. Sara also introduces a new workshop series, the Manager's Playbook, which focuses on improving relationships and communication in the workplace.

Kristina Halvorson interviews Rob MacFie and Nikki Godley from Wise about their work in scaling content and design across the organization. They cover the challenges of rapid growth and the need to create a clear mission and principles for the team. Rob and Nikki explain the process of developing a career map and discuss the importance of creating pay parity across disciplines. The chat reveals how storytelling has played a role in communicating impact and creating influence to build a user-centred culture. It's jam packed with advice and examples.

Kristina Halvorson interviews Trisha Causley and Maria Hofstetter, both content designers at Shopify. They discuss the role of large language models (LLMs) in AI, the importance of prompts and instructions in guiding LLMs, and the potential career paths for content designers in the AI field. There's practical advice and examples, bringing clarity and valuable discussion to an ever important topic for those working in content and UX.

In this episode, Kristina Halvorson interviews Jeff Eaton, a partner at Autogram. They share the challenges organizations face in content production and management and discuss the importance of observability in assessing content quality and effectiveness. The conversation leads to the key roles needed in content strategy and to the importance of starting with small pilot projects to gather data and build confidence before implementing large-scale changes. Plus, Kristina and Jeff find time to chat about the role of storytelling in strategy and the need to articulate a theory of change.

Kristina Halvorson interviews Erica Jorgensen, a content designer and author of the book "Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX." They discuss the role of content designers in organizations and the need to demonstrate the value of content. Erica emphasizes the need to use data and analytics to measure the impact of content work and provides insights and advice on documenting content patterns, collaborating with stakeholders, and leveraging data to drive business impact. She also shares her thoughts on the future of content strategy and the importance of content designers taking on leadership roles within organizations.

Kristina Halvorson and Meghan Casey, two of the field's most experienced practitioners, interview each other for the Content Strategy Podcast. They discuss the importance of collaboration and fostering curiosity, effective listening and common points of friction within an organization. The chat also covers the challenges of working with non-content leaders, the current state of the content strategy field and advice and insights to help leaders evolve their content process maturity.

Kaysie Garza, Content Design Lead at Hotjar, discusses the role of content design within the organization and its collaboration with other teams. Kaysie delves into communicating research effectively, a collaborative approach to naming and offers advice for hiring content designers. The conversation delves into the structure of user experiences at Hotjar, with a focus on enterprise level customer journeys and the evolving nature of these journeys based on strategic research.

Mark McCormick, a retired content strategy and customer experience leader. He joins Kristina on the Content Strategy Podcast where they discuss the importance of content strategy and its evolution over the years. Mark shares his insights on the roles and processes of content strategists and emphasizes the need for content strategists to see themselves as leaders. They also cover the white paper Mark wrote on content strategy and its major sections, as well as discussing content as a strategic asset and advantage and enterprise content strategy.

Morgan Marie Quinn is a Content Design leader at Google where she oversees content teams across Bard and Google Assistant. Morgan joins Kristina to talk about all things large language models (LLMs) and generative AI. From defining LLMs, accuracy, vulnerabilities and governance, this episode has it all direct from someone at the forefront of this new era for content design.

Keri Maijala has been in the user experience space for more than 20 years. Currently leading a content design team at LinkedIn, Keri has a wealth of knowledge and experience which she shares in her chat with Kristina. No topic was off limits as they chatted about content skill sets and roles, the evolution of content and UX terminology, the invisible work of content design and connecting the dots between business goals and content design.

Aladrian Goods leads the content design team at Intuit. Aladrian has lots of experience and advice for aligning content with other disciplines, connecting the dots between teams and getting people to experience the value of content design. As if that's not enough reason to listen in, Aladrian also has plenty to share about the role of content in generative AI and how the field of content design is evolving. A must listen? You bet.

Chris Baty joined Figma as their first ever UX writer. Now he is the Head of UX Writing, leading a team at the intersection of content, UX and product design. Chris talks to Kristina about growing the UX writing team at Figma, the business value of UX writing and using data to inform your work and decisions. He also accidentally founded National Novel Writing Month, which you likely know as NaNoWriMo and used to work at Dropbox. All of these experiences are connected and discussed in the latest episode of the Content Strategy Podcast.

Peter Merholz works with organizations of all sizes across different sectors. He sees first hand how they are unique and where they are similar when it comes to design, content and UX. Peter joins Kristina to discuss the intersection of these disciplines, their maturity and how they are perceived by leadership.

Kara DeFrias has written for Vice Presidents, was part of the California Covid Task Force for the first 100 days of the pandemic and has worked on the Super Bowl, Oscars and Emmys. And that's not the full list of accomplishments and career milestones. With so much experience, it was inevitable Kristina would invite Kara to the podcast. Plus they first became connected in quite extraordinary circumstances that forged a friendship of mutual respect and a shared love of Broadway.

Katherine Karaus knows what it takes to find your ideal job in content and UX and to know your own worth. Katherine shares lots of practical advice with Kristina Halvorson about competitive differentiation when job hunting, building and maintaining a strong personal brand and content and UX portfolios. They also cover salary negotiation, cover letters and elevator pitches. It's jam packed with tips to help you and your career.

Ann Rockley is known as the “mother” of content strategy.  She has an international reputation for establishing the field in content strategy. In her chat with Kristina, Ann shared some of her experience and advice from decades of experience in content including creating a methodology for content, ways of effectively communicating with people, content modeling, measuring content and so much more.

Are Halland is the inventor of the core model, a framework for working together to create better content for digital products and services. In this episode, Are shares the origins of the core model and describes the components of the model in detail, along with how it can be used. Along the way, Are and Kristina chat about getting alignment across an organization, how to stop jumping to solutions first and bringing research into content conversations and decision-making.

Noz Urbina has decades of experience in content. He's especially interested in omnichannel strategies and how the sum of the parts work together to support the user's journey. In his conversation with Kristina Halvorson, Noz covers personalization, delivering effective customer experiences, customer journey mapping, content in the pharma sector and some quick but thought-provoking opinions on content, AI and the Metaverse.

Joanne Ward believes a good content experience is critical to the customer experience. In her chat with Kristina, Jo talks about leading content strategy at scale as part of Salesforce's evolving content practice. They cover collaborating with other disciplines, advocacy, and the importance of technical writing. Across the entire conversation, there's a focus on creating task focused and user centered content.

Corey Vilhauer shares with Kristina Halvorson how he moved from being a marketing and ad copywriter into content strategy and leadership. They pack plenty of topics into the chat including how to communicate with clients, driving meaningful conversations about content and aligning around a shared language and understanding. They also reveal their passion projects.

Sarah Winters takes us from the beginnings of her career in content, through to the future plans for Content Design London. Along the way, Sarah and Kristina chat about content strategy, content design and related disciplines. They touch on codifying content design as a practice, industry definitions, ownership and measuring success of content strategy and the hierarchy of content roles within organizations.

David Dylan Thomas is a founder, author and speaker who is an expert on designing for cognitive bias. In his conversation with Kristina, David shares his experience and insights on patterns in representation, assumption audits, designing for bad outcomes and the need for meaningful conversations about bias.

Sarah Etter, Senior Manager of Content Design at Procore offers an abundance of practical advice based on years of experience as a content practitioner. From embedding content designers across an organization and ensuring a design system is content oriented to scaling content design. The chat also touches on writing globally and inclusively, demonstrating ROI for content design and establishing a content operations governance model. That's not even the full list of topics packed into this episode, all with examples and top tips.

Candi Williams is an experienced content leader who cares deeply about community, diversity and inclusivity. In her chat with Kristina, they talk about building and leading a content team, the importance of connecting with peers, the need for effective onboarding and examples of inclusive content projects.

Torrey Podmajersky is a UX Writer at Google and author of Strategic Writing for UX with plenty of experience in establishing a career in content and UX. Torrey talks to Kristina about getting hired into content and UX roles, what the UX practice at Google looks like, and how to demonstrate value and make an impact as a UX writer.

Cruce Saunders and the [A] team work with the largest and most complex enterprise content publishers. They know how complex content can be and have experience untangling the mess. Cruce brings his wisdom to the Content Strategy Podcast to talk about content transformation, unifying customer journeys through content, and establishing a true organization-wide shared vision around content. Plus his thoughts on the topic of evolving content roles and disciplines.

The language we choose is an important part of the user experiences we create. Vidhika Bansal, UX Manager at Intuit cares deeply about language for the audience and also when communicating internally. She talks to Kristina about connecting language to decision making, using language as a tool for acceptance and belonging and the importance of avoiding bias in data when making content-related decisions.

Establishing and growing a content design practice requires strong leadership and teamwork. Chelsea Larsson shares how she has grown such a practice at Zendesk and offers some tactics to help advocate for content designers. There's also an insight into the content design team structure at Zendesk and peer mentorship. And let's not forget the part of the chat which was all about bears.

As Program Manager at Brain Traffic, Tenessa Gemelke has reviewed thousands of conference talk proposals. In this episode of the Content Strategy Podcast, Tenessa offers her top tips for what to talk about and how to pitch it. There's also a potted history of Confab: The Content Strategy Conference and musings about the caring content community.

Gord Roberts loves website content strategy and instilling good practices for successful collaboration on content. As Manager of Web Content Strategy at the Bank of Canada, Gord shares his thoughts on connecting silos for unified content strategy and the relationship between content operations and design. Gord has experience leading a team through a pandemic, delivering crisis comms and making a case for content strategy.

Alexa Apallas was one of the first five content strategy leads at PayPal. Alexa talks to Kristina about her path into content and what it takes to advance to a content leadership role. Alexa also shares how content designers collaborate with product for a better customer experience, getting people to care about content and content success stories at PayPal.

Preston So shares his thoughts and advice for new ways of delivering content. He offers examples and insights into omni-channel content audits, thinking about audiences holistically and techniques for enabling content strategy whatever the channel and format.

With experience in technical writing, UX writing, content strategy and content design, John Collins shares his thoughts on maturing content disciplines. In his chat with Kristina John also talks about centralizing and scaling Atlassian's content practice, content titles versus content roles and demonstrating the value of content work.

When communicating about difficult topics, like death, using the right words, voice and tone is essential. Helen Lawson shares how she approaches this with empathy at Co-op Funeralcare to ensure clarity in their communication. Helen also gives an insight into leading on the change of language, building self-serve products and why avoiding euphemisms in content is necessary.

Erica Jorgensen offers an insight into content practices at Microsoft. From more content not being better, ensuring content is an asset and the relationship between content and brand. Erica's chat with Kristina covers using style guides to talk the same language across teams, the way that content works with research and testing and measuring content.

Jonathan McFadden moved into content strategy to solve problems and help people. He talks about using content strategy for change by advocating for underrepresented users, building designated spaces of inclusion and ultimately working towards an inclusive and diverse industry.

Jordan Craig has worked at Twitter for 18 months as the lead of their content design team. Jordan shares her experience of growing the team, managing Twitter's terminology, using AI for style guidance, finding a community and creating paths into content design.

When Andy Welfle joined Adobe four years ago he got to work founding and building their content design practice. He now manages a growing team and talks about the relationship between content design and UX writing, content as part of a design system and equitable terminology in tech.

Kristina welcomes Robert Mills of GatherContent to talk about his experience as head of content for GatherContent. He talks about what content ops is, not just in the context of his team's product but also as part of a larger conversation about the field of content strategy. Rob also shares how he handles content operations internally at GatherContent (how very meta).

As the UX operations lead at HubSpot, Beth Dunn applies a content strategy lens to the way she's helping lead the company's UX practice. In this episode, she and Kristina talk about how HubSpot defines UX operations and design, how she's working to advance the practice, and how teams can get aligned on terminology and goals.

Bram Wessel is a co-founder of Factor, a Seattle-based consultancy that brings user-centered design principles and practice to enterprise-scale information problems. In this episode, he breaks down the types of taxonomy problems many large orgs face, including problems with findability, site search, and navigation. Bram's work aims to cater to how customers think, applying user research to ensure everyone is speaking the same language through information.

Abby Covert, better known as Abby the IA, returns to the show for a repeat appearance to talk about information architecture, her influential book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, and life in the design world as a new mom (congratulations!). In this episode, she breaks down the steps to information architecture as outlined in her book, and shares some real-world stories of sensemaking from her readers.

Ryan Skinner is the principal marketing analyst at Forrester, where he advises enterprise clients on content marketing activities through a strategic lens. In this episode, he and Kristina talk about the blind spots marketers (or sometimes entire companies) have when it comes to the customer experience, specifically in creating content that ties back to both the user needs and business goals. Ryan offers advice for those tasked with shifting an organization to a more strategic approach to content as a business asset, including specific examples of things to start on first. Kristina also pitches an exciting new idea for podcast merch. (Okay, we'll tell you. It's a bobble head.)

Christine is the Service Director of Content Strategy and Operations at SiriusDecisions. In this week's podcast, she describes the Content Transformation Roadmap she uses to identify the strategy, people, processes, and technology needed to achieve these milestones. She also shares some thoughts on the definitions of “content marketing” and “content strategy” in B2B environments. (Kristina gets VERY excited.)

This week, Kristina discovers that user-centered SEO isn't just some magic you sprinkle on finished web copy right before hitting publish. After clashing on projects and stepping on each others' toes, Chris Corak (an SEO) and Rebekah Baggs (a content and UX strategist) found smarter ways to integrate their work and create helpful, relevant web experiences that are search-engine friendly, too.

Dana DiTomaso joins Kristina this week to stray only slightly from the topic of content strategy—this time diving into the world of marketing and measuring content performance. As president and partner at Kick Point, an Edmonton-based digital marketing agency, Dana works with clients to untangle their varied and sometimes disjointed marketing efforts. In this episode, she shares specific tools her team uses to analyze content consumption and build more data-based and customer-centric marketing strategies.

Mike Petroff and Aaron Baker have teamed up to create a custom editorial analytics dashboard called “Scoop,” which they use to serve the content teams at Harvard University and the online version of The Harvard Gazette. Their goal? To give power back to the content creators, using data to answer their questions and help make informed decisions about content. Instead of just number crunching, they're able to use data to tell a cohesive story about content performance and get to the questions that really matter, like “Is this content really working?” and “What do our users actually need?”

This week, Tina O'Shea (Director, Content Design & Strategy at QuickBooks) talks in depth about how content design went from being “just writing the words” to a key part of the QuickBooks product design process. She describes her team structure, and how she won executive support for their contributions to design. She also digs into how they created the QuickBooks voice and tone guide—and how they're making sure it's getting used across the global company. 

Author, publisher, conference organizer, and all-around renaissance man Lou Rosenfeld talks shop about writing the first book on IA, watching the evolution of design practices, and how he's helping to keep people at the forefront of their respective industries.

Cruce Saunders joins Kristina this week to talk about multi-channel content publishing at the enterprise level. He describes how enterprises are starting (or hopefully starting) to take a more holistic approach to their content and customer experiences, moving away from the “content center of excellence” approach present in so many large organizations. He also shares some thoughts on content marketing in general—what's working and what isn't.

Karen Cross is head of content design at Atlassian, an Australian-based company known for their suite of software development and collaboration tools like Trello and Jira. Karen's work to build a centralized content design team at Atlassian has unified their various product teams and finally brought writers and designers working together. The ultimate goal? More efficiency and better experiences for their customers. In this episode, Karen describes some of the tactics she's used to build this new team, and some of the challenges she's overcome along the way.