Sophie Tahran: Org Design for Content-Design Orgs – Episode 177

Content Strategy Insights

Sophie Tahran As 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 original research that she conducted to learn more about how other companies design and manage their content-design organizations. We talked about: her work as a design director at Condé Nast the evolution and growth of the content-design profession over the past 10 years her research on org design for content-design organizations the trends and models that emerged in her research one of the key findings of her research: the importance of have a community of craft the Condé Nast multi-brand design system how they incorporate content design into their design systems how difficult it remains to adequately staff content-design teams what she discovered in her research about industry ratios of content designers to product designers the benefits of "working at a place where everyone really understands the value of excellent writing as a craft" the differences between centralized, embedded, clustered, and other content-design organization practices Sophie's bio Sophie Tahran is a Director of Design at Condé Nast. After establishing content design as a discipline at The New Yorker, she built out a team of content designers across Vogue, Architectural Digest, Bon Appetit, and more publications before moving into design leadership. Connect with Sophie online LinkedIn SophieTahran.com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/DMLBSMZ6oB0 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 177. As the field of content design has grown and matured, the design of the organizations in which content designers' work has also become more complex and interesting. In her role as a design director at the big publisher Condé Nast, Sophie Tahran has had to figure out the best way to design her content-design organization to serve Condé Nast's many brands. Part of her process was conducting original research to discover how others had organized their content-design teams. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode number 177 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Sophie Tahran. Sophie is a design director at Condé Nast, the big magazine publisher based in New York. Well, I guess do you even say magazine publisher anymore? Anyhow, welcome Sophie. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Sophie: Yes, thanks so much, Larry. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, I am speaking to you live from New York City in Manhattan. This is Condé's New York US headquarters. We also have locations in London, India, really all over the world. But I have been here for coming up on five years, which is wild to think about, was the very first UX writer as we called ourselves when I first started here, focused on The New Yorker and have since built out the content design team, which I'm really, really excited about in terms of the work that we've been doing. And have lately been stepping into a bit more of a design leadership position. So I'm now looking at it and really helping push forward the product design work, including content design across really all of our brands. The New Yorker, Vogue, our Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, Vanity Fair, WIRED, the list goes on. Larry: That's such an impressive list. And I was a magazine journalism college magazine major in college, so in journalism school, so I'm totally envious of all those brands. But hey, I want to talk about, you just mentioned that you were the first, and you've grown this, you've grown the content design team,