Melinda Belcher: Inspirational Design Leadership – Episode 171

Content Strategy Insights

Melinda Belcher As 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 talked about: her path to her current role as the head of design for the Freedom and Slate credit card portfolios at JPMorgan Chase her history of building content teams in a variety of contexts her practice of creating user guides for herself and team members the importance of modeling the behavior that you want to see in others the differences between content design practice in the New York area versus Silicon Valley how she brings creativity into her work in the tightly regulated financial services industry her take on the differences between leadership and management and between being in those roles versus being an individual contributor the process of her transition from individual contributor to team leader her professional pivot from brand and content-marketing content to product content a recent panel that she and her colleagues put together in NYC to discuss AI tools her prediction that AI will help content designers scale up their work how her community work and internal thought leadership helped her get her current designer leadership role Melinda's bio Melinda Belcher likes to build content teams from the ground up. A certified Product Owner, she helped start IBM’s Tokyo Design Studio. A veteran of New York brand and design agencies, Melinda has also built out content teams at Interbrand, frog and Havas. Currently, Melinda heads up Design for the Freedom and Slate credit card portfolios within the Consumer and Community Bank at JPMorgan Chase. In 2018, Melinda co-founded UX Content Design NYC, New York City’s only product content meetup, with Selene De La Cruz. Along with the UXCD-NYC team, Melinda has organized content design meetups at Google, Condé Nast, Mastercard, Capital One, and more. Connect with Melinda online MelindaRocks.com LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/8heWrEMBCeY Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 171. Design leadership now is mostly folks who came up through interaction and visual design careers. Melinda Belcher is one of a growing number of design leaders emerging from the content world. The story of her professional development is truly inspirational, whether she's talking about her proactive immersion into management theory and practice, her creative approach to leading teams, or her commitment to building community, whether in her own company or the broader content profession. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 171 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Melinda Belcher. Melinda's the head of design for the Freedom and Slate credit card portfolios at JPMorgan Chase. Welcome, Melinda. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Melinda: Yeah, so I'm currently the head of design, as you mentioned, for Freedom and Slate, which are two of our largest credit card portfolios within the consumer and community bank at JPMorgan Chase. I've been with JP for I think about two and a half years at the moment, and I've been in a design leadership role for about three months. Larry: Nice. And your path to that role is really curious to me. We've talked a tiny bit about it, but I would love it if you could just walk through because you have the kind of background that you could easily ended up in one of these principal senior-level content design roles or something like that, but you're the head of a design department. I think people are going to be curious about how you got there...