Keri Maijala: Leading Content Design with Joy – Episode 150

Content Strategy Insights

Keri Maijala As the field of content design has matured, leaders have emerged to guide their teams as well as the profession as a whole. Both at LinkedIn, where she leads the content design team, and through her avid participation in the content community, Keri Maijala has helped shape the craft of content-design leadership. We talked about: her leadership of the content design team at LinkedIn her transition from an individual contributor (IC) role into leadership the huge differences between IC roles and management and how to structure your work to manage transitions between them how to deal with differing methods of measuring success and impact when collaborating across multiple functional areas her real-time untangling of the distinctions between leadership and management her thoughts on navigating a content-design job hunt the importance of her professional community her involvement with several content conferences the importance when you're in a leadership role of self-care for both yourself and your team Keri's bio Keri Maijala leads the Content Design team at LinkedIn. She’s been in the user experience space for more than 20 years, focusing on creating and organizing good, relevant content that uses human words for human people. Lately, she’s spending her professional time exploring how to best demonstrate the value of content design and what it means to be a leader. In her non-professional time, she’s hanging out with her husband and bald Pomeranian in Santa Cruz, CA, and trying to figure out how to sneak roller skates into Disneyland. Connect with Keri online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/g94g28zdD4c Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 150. The field of content strategy is famous for its epic gatherings and the thoughtful, generous, and friendly professionals who attend them. It's difficult to imagine a person who better exemplifies this community then Keri Maijala. Keri leads the content design team at LinkedIn, where she's known for her diligent advocacy for her team and for the craft of content design. It's hard work, and Keri always tackles it thoughtfully and with her trademark contagious joy. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 150 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super extra delighted today to welcome to the show Keri Majaila. Keri leads the content design team at LinkedIn. She also has the distinction of being one of the only two people to attend every single Confab Central over the course of its existence, which just wrapped up last month. So it was great to see you at Confab, and it's great to see you here, Keri. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing. Yeah. Keri: Yeah, it's so good to see you. Yeah, so what you said. I lead the content design team at LinkedIn. I've been at LinkedIn for a little over five years now. Over three of those have been in a leadership role. So yeah, I decided to make the move into leadership right before 2020, so I had that going for me. That was an interesting time to make that transition. But who knew? Larry: Who knew? Well, and that's interesting, because this has come up. Leadership has been a really dominant topic in content design discussion in the last couple years. I don't know where that came from. Maybe it's because of that. Keri: Us. Larry: Yeah. Yeah, okay, there's your answer. So tell me about that, and we've talked a little bit about that in the past, but just the ... Well, first of all, the transition from an individual contributor role into leadership. That's big. And- Keri: It is. It is, and I don't think people really understand how big it is. So I've been super interested in what it means to be a leader, and helping people transition from IC to leadership, and having a lot of conversations around it.