Tuija Riekkinen: Scaling Content and Design Operations – Episode 185

Content Strategy Insights

Tuija Riekkinen Tuija 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 persuasive advocate of keeping design and content concerns separate to enable "creativity at scale." We talked about: her work as a digital product leader at IKEA where she has led teams working on both design systems and content management systems her unique holistic approach to managing diverse, agile teams how she aligns a variety of stakeholders around language the similarities she sees between design systems and content management systems how design systems and content systems differ her hypothesis that "good content management enables creativity in scale" how she educates stakeholders about the benefits of managing decoupled, semantically meaningful content her approach to preemptively addressing budget issues around CMS-adoption decisions the importance of getting past page-construction thinking to permit content re-use for purposes like omnichannel delivery an example she uses - a recipe website - to show non-technical stakeholders the benefits of structured content how the benefits of moving from manual, page-level content thinking to future-proof structured content might actually make a four-day work week possible Tuija's bio Tuija is a digital product management professional with an extensive and multifaceted experience working with digital products. With a background in service and content design she has paved her way into leading and managing agile and cross-functional product teams - focusing on the user experience all the while adhering to the business objectives. She is known for being pragmatic and holistic in her approach. Connect with Tuija online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/cEh14jZh2P4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 185. Content operations work best when they can scale, when they can take full advantage of the best design and content practices. Traditional content workflows that rely on hand-built pages conflate design and content concerns. Teasing out these concerns and helping organizations build efficient, scale-able systems is Tuija Riekkinen's forte. Her work on both design systems and content systems gives her a unique perspective on these important elements of enterprise content architectures. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 185 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Tuija Riekkinen. I hope I got that right. It's a Finnish name, and I'm just a dumb American doing my best. But welcome. Tuija, she's a consultant. She's currently working in a capacity as a digital project management professional at IKEA where she's working on... Well, we'll talk about this. That's what the conversation's about. She's all about scale and getting out of your bubbles and omnichannel content. And anyhow, welcome to you. Tell the folks a little bit more about your work there. Tuija: Well, thank you, Larry, and thanks for having me. It's a great opportunity for me to be in your podcast. Yeah, so I am a digital product leader and I did work in that capacity for a digital design system for three years. And now I've shifted into a more content management related product. So what I'm doing is that I'm actually working quite closely with my team, so managing the roadmap, managing the priorities, and bringing the team on board in what we are aiming for, and also working with the stakeholders to really understand their view on things and assessing the maturity of how they see content management and then adapt our communication ...