Hilary MarshOrganizations of all types and sizes struggle with presenting their content so that it both makes sense to readers and aligns with the organization's intentions.Hilary Marsh introduced the concept of the "digital council" to address this issue. Councils can take many forms, depending on the nature of the organization, but the intent alw…

Cruce SaundersContent is a precious business asset and should be treated as such in enterprise accounting.Cruce Saunders has been making the case for content as a financial asset for many years, arguing that much of it should be accounted for like the durable machinery that powers a factory, not like an ephemeral one-time business expense.He still …

Michael PriestleyTwenty-four years ago at IBM, the company's commitment to user-focused content led to the decision to develop a standard way of structuring content so that it could be used in multiple channels.Michael Priestley was uniquely positioned to guide the team that created the technical approach to the corporate standard that would ultima…

Rafaela EllensburgServing personalized content about thousands of products to millions of people requires a sophisticated content operation.At Albert Heijn, the big grocery store chain in the Netherlands, Rafaëla Ellensburg established a content engineering practice that lets the company deliver personalize-able omnichannel content at scale.In the …

Pavel SamsonovPavel Samsonov is a UX product designer with a deep appreciation of content.His content-first approach to design is driven by his observation that navigating digital experiences is about accessing content, not clicking buttons.Pavel has also cultivated a deep awareness of the semantic environments that he and his colleagues navigate a…

Jeffrey MacIntyreScalable content personalization systems create huge value for businesses. Like most valuable endeavors, they're really hard to do well.Jeffrey MacIntyre orchestrates the activities - terminology and taxonomy work, metadata strategy, information architecture, and more - that help businesses build content operations that deliver the…

Shannon LeahyContent design jobs have become scarcer as the digital world adjusts to the post-pandemic tech economy.Shannon Leahy does her best to make sure that her content colleagues discover the jobs that are available, scouring the internet for job listings and sharing them in her social media feeds.But that's just the tip of the iceberg when i…

John WilliamsThe rise of omnichannel content strategy and the emergence of new technical capabilities like cloud computing, API-delivered microservices, and headless software platforms have created entire new content ecosystems.John Williams explores these new systems and modern content and experience architectures on his "Going Headless with John"…

Deborah CarverDeborah Carver sees direct connections between her academic study of literature and composition and her work as a content strategist, content marketer, and SEO.She also sees similarities between AI engineers and content professionals, both of whom endeavor to create meaning with language.We talked about: her work as a consultant and t…

Tuija RiekkinenTuija Riekkinen brings a unique perspective to scaling both content and design operations, as well as other digital initiatives.She has applied her holistic and pragmatic enterprise product management skills at organizations like IKEA, where she has worked on both their design system and content management system.Tuija is a persuasiv…

Michael Haggerty-VillaMichael Haggerty-Villa's work with content and designs systems spans the history of these practices. From his work at eBay on one of the earliest design systems up until today, he has been at the forefront of both content strategy leadership and design system innovation.This conversation focuses on design systems, but it was i…

Gladys DiandokiGladys Diandoki brings a strong research mindset and a consistent focus on strategy to her content work. Her approach yields both solid design results and an increased appreciation for content design among her colleagues and clients.It's not only her clients who benefit from her work. Gladys is also an active leader in the field, spe…

Wojtek AleksanderWojtek Aleksander is a business-focused, inclusive content designer based in Poland.Working in a profession in which English-language educational materials dominate, he addressed the need for Polish-language content guidance by writing "UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products."One big challenge he faces when crafting …

Barbara BlytheMost enterprises and software companies now have design systems, and many have content operations and/or design operations teams.At Cisco, Barbara Blythe works on the content design operations team. She focuses on sharing content guidance across the products she serves, enabling not only content designers but also their UX design and …

Nicole MichaelisNicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep and varied experience to her content design work.Like all of us, she is pondering how to best use AI in her practice and wrestling with the impacts of layoffs and other change in the content and design professions.Despite the current challenging business and labor enviro…

Terry RoachTerry Roach helps enterprises build a "web of connectedness" that helps them understand what's happening across the span of their businessBuilt on an ontological understanding of business that is expressed in a knowledge graph, his methods and technology help enterprises develop a holistic understanding that can be expressed as an operat…

Anna Potapova & Arnaud FrattiniWith more than a billion internet users and half of all global e-commerce transactions, digital business in China is huge.Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini work in content roles at Alibaba, the biggest online merchant in China. Lately they have been looking beyond their desks, trying to connect with their peers at oth…

Sophie TahranAs the field of content design grows and matures, so too do the organizations in which content designers practice.At Condé Nast – the publisher of iconic brands like The New Yorker, WIRED, and Vogue – Sophie Tahran has built content-design orgs from one-person units to company-spanning teams.Her latest work has been informed by origina…

Matt HayesMatt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team.The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization.Among the secrets to their success: democratizating …

Jorge ArangoThe promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We're beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been scarce.Jorge Arango's new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture yo…

Peter CompoPeter Compo says that "the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy."He's talking about the tendency of executives and managers to draft plans that present lists of goals and include a bullet point for every possible stakeholder in their purview.Peter points out that true strategy involves tough trade-offs and lots …

Relly Annett-BakerRelly Annett-Baker recently said in a LinkedIn post, "The words are an expression of the solution, the last 20%, but we also need to do the 80% that comes before to know wtf to write. "UX writers and content designers spend a lot of their time, arguably too much of it, explaining this core aspect of their work to their colleagues …

Jason BarnardLike many digital practices, search engine optimization is becoming more conversational.Not long ago, SEOs had to make their best educated guesses about what was working to get their websites to rank better. Now, by focusing on both feeding information to and gleaning feedback from Google's knowledge graph, Jason Barnard helps companie…

Melinda BelcherAs content design becomes entrenched as a UX design practice, leaders from the craft are beginning to move into design leadership positions.Melinda Belcher's ascent to her current design executive management role is an instructive and inspirational story of professional development, creative team leadership, and community building.We…

Scott AbelNavigating the complex and multifaceted online media landscape can be a disjointed and disorienting experience.Scott Abel has a method for smoothing out online customers' experiences. His "content unification" approach benefits both the organizations that create content experiences and the customers who navigate them.We talked about: the …

Dan MallThe basics of building a design system are fairly simple. Ensconcing a system in an organization's culture so that it's actually adopted and used is a more complex undertaking.Dan Mall takes a content-first approach as he helps organizations evolve their design systems from projects to products and ultimately to firmly embedded practices th…

Jarno van DrielJarno van Driel is a true pioneer on the semantic web.Even before you could add machine-readable semantic markup to webpages, he was discovering ways to help search engines understand what web pages were about. Much of that success grew out of his early focus on accessibility and usability.When semantic markup was introduced, he was …

Steve PortigalTo conduct a good research-focused interview, you need to cultivate a professional interviewing mindset.Steve Portigal has been doing this for years, and he has written a book to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews.Now in its second edition, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (available a…

Michael ReidMichael Reid is a consultant who helps organizations with their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.A linguist by training, he is extremely attuned to the role of language in his work, which led to his explorations of the privilege given to English-language speakers in our modern, hyper-connected world.His discoveries can help con…

Lo EtheridgeThe arrival of decoupled content architectures and headless CMSs creates a new set of challenges for content modelers, authors, administrators, and others who work with content systems.Lo Etheridge does developer relations for Hygraph, a headless CMS company. Dev rel folks don't typically drive organizational change and stakeholder alig…

Sana RemekieThe emergence of modular web architectures and complex digital experiences has created a need for new content-management practices and for new enterprise tools.One of the most pressing new needs is the ability to orchestrate the assembly of content elements, which may come from a variety of sources and be used in a variety of distributi…

Katariina KariKnowledge graphs let people and computers work from the same body of facts to create uniquely informative and powerful experiences.Katariina Kari and her colleagues at IKEA use ontologies and knowledge graphs to drive applications like recommendation systems and to streamline back-end processes like image recognition.Katariina balance…

Jenny ScribaniAligning brand messaging for a variety of customer segments across a number of communications channels is a complex endeavor.Jenny Scribani has developed a messaging framework that streamlines the process of communicating brand messaging to colleagues across a variety of content practices, letting them focus on the task at hand.We tal…

Ann RockleyAnn Rockley first took the title of "content strategist" in 1989. Over the next 30 years she pioneered content management, intelligent content, and many other practices we now take for granted.Until recently few knew that she accomplished all of that while managing health challenges that would have sidelined most people.Ann now focuses o…

Alli MooneyContent leaders are beginning to ascend the corporate org chart.Alli Mooney is VP of Content Design at Mastercard, where she leads a team of content designers and guides big organization-change initiatives.Like many content professionals, she began her career in publishing and journalism, but her path also included a stint in trend repor…

Ginny RedishThere are a lot of pioneers in the field of content strategy. One of them can make a strong case for being a true original.Ginny Redish was among the cadre of usability-testing professionals who founded the discipline of UX design.She was making government content usable, readable, and accessible decades before the famous GOV.UK makeove…

Elizabeth McGuaneContent designers are word nerds by nature. Like many other craftspeople who are passionately immersed in their work, they can forget to step back and fully articulate what we are doing.Elizabeth McGuane has addressed this issue for the craft of content design. Her new book, Design by Definition, sets out the linguistic, rhetorical…

Abby CovertAs the digital practices have grown and evolved over the past few decades, the job title "information architect" has become less common. That doesn't necessarily mean that the work isn't being done, but IA is now often in the province of a designer, content strategist, or other practitioner.Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign …

Stephanie LucasDesigning for trust is a team effort, and it's crucial to keep everyone aligned on such important work.At LinkedIn, the trust team has created a framework to guide that alignment. The RISE framework is built on an acronym that describes how LinkedIn wants its members to feel: respected, informed, safe, and empowered.We talked about: …

Selene De La CruzBefore you let a business manage your hard-earned money, you need to trust them.Selene De La Cruz and her colleagues at Robinhood have developed principles-backed practices that earn the trust of customers who use Robinhood's brokerages services.We talked about: her work on brokerage products at Robinhood how they tailor in-product…

Donna LichawCrafting your identity as a leader is a lot like creating your superhero persona. You need to be able to discover your authentic identity and pursue a clear mission, and to do that you need to understand your unique superpowers.In her new book The Leader's Journey, Donna Lichaw draws on her experience as an executive coach and shows how…

Hinrich von HaarenContent work is never done. Among the most common, and challenging, types of content work are big transformation projects that consolidate, reorganize, and re-conceptualize big web properties.Hinrich von Haaren has worked on many content transformation projects, including the famous GOV.UK website makeover in the early 2010s.His n…

Adam Lawrence: Facilitation Skills for Content Designers and StrategistsAs strategists and designers, we often facilitate gatherings of stakeholders with a variety of priorities and approaches.There can be a temptation in such groups to leap into action and start building solutions and creating content right away.A good facilitator like Adam Lawren…

Karen McGraneThe web has changed a lot over the past 25 years. Or maybe it hasn't.Enterprise content architectures are maturing and finally beginning to separate content from its presentation. But old-fashioned artifacts like PDF files still abound, and authors still expect WYSIWYG editing experiences.And when Karen McGrane reflects on her work at …

Keri MaijalaAs 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 leade…

Margo SternMargo Stern has landed desirable jobs at several prominent companies - places like Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Peleton.She has also built multiple content design teams in those same organizations.Now she's writing a book to share both her job-hunting expertise and her extensive content hiring experience.We talked about: her work as a …

Vidhika BansalHumans are notoriously fickle creatures, hard-wired to behave in unpredictable ways. This makes experience design work challenging for both managers and practitioners.Vidhika Bansal has led both UX research and content design teams. Her background in both the behavioral sciences and UX design gives her a unique toolkit for bridging th…

Michael AndrewsThe emergence of design systems has created new content strategy and content management needs and opportunities, especially with the advent of headless CMSs.As a long-time UX practitioner, content strategy evangelist, and content systems expert, Michael Andrews is uniquely qualified to talk about how to manage content in these new sy…

Paula LandPaula Land wrote the definitive guide to content audits and inventories almost ten years ago. A lot has changed since then.The new edition of "Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis" has been extensively updated to account for the evolution of auditing practice, including 100 pages of new content and a new emphasi…

Eileen WebbWhen your organization talks about "bringing your whole self to work," they're likely picturing an idealized version of you, not the complex human that you actually are.Eileen Webb helps people and teams build better relationships at work by connecting them with their actual authentic selves.Her approach isn't touchy-feely, summer-camp t…