by Janus Boye
Great content doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It gets bogged down in teams, organizations, silos, and process.
Beth Dunn is a content leader, speaker, coach and author of the new book Cultivating Content Design. In the book, Beth helps you break the vacuum seal and bring unity and joy back to content. She gives you the power to fundamentally change your organization’s approach to great content—with the tools and team you already have.
In a recent member conference call, Beth talked about the new book and how it covers cementing your position as a strategic content leader, and the tough move it is to create a strong and respected content design practice. The book is all about the methods and mindset that it requires to scale a content practice.
Below are my notes from the call and further down, you can also find a recording of the Q&A-based conversation with Beth.
What is full-stack content design?
We opened the conversation talking about the term full-stack content design. As Beth said, this is inspired by the term ‘full-stack engineer’, which means that an engineer capable of managing all the tech layers, including the front-end, the back-end and security.
Rather than being a specialist in one of the areas, similarily a full-stack content designer is someone who can knowledgeably cover what Beth called the three layers of content:
Strategy and scope
Structure
Surface
According to Beth, content designers have a strong and active and powerful role to play at each layer. The book goes into great detail in terms of what you can expect of a content design at each layer and makes you rethink what you can get out of the content people you work with. She also stressed that this goes across content initiatives, whether it is outbound marketing or internal communication.
Content-first - an approach to building better experiences
Given her experience pioneering the content design practice at HubSpot, Beth spoke passionately about how thinking content-first will help you build better user flows and fundamentally better experiences.
To her, it’s about making sure that the person wearing the content hat is in the room at the important meetings and making sure to build content into the processes from the beginning.
Expanding further on the value of content-first, Beth reflected on her time at HubSpot. Back in the early days a decade ago, HubSpot was a much smaller firm and Beth would walk around to engineers and work with them to make content improvements. After hiring a chief designer, her title became UX Writer, and for a long time, Beth was the designated writer and content strategist for the whole product team.
Being a One Woman Show helped her see even more things that could be improved with better content. She found ways to complete certain repetitive tasks through automation, freeing her up to do more strategic work. One output of that effort was a light-hearted piece she wrote about overusing exclamation points in 2015 called Do You Really Need That Exclamation Point? The post even comes with a helpful flowchart, and is still widely quoted today.
She was actually able to offload some of her content style work to a bot that her friendly colleagues called BethBot. Gathercontent has documented this in a helpful piece called Anatomy of a content style guide.
Finally, to show how content design could work, Beth also hosted a series of internal workshops to socialise the value of content and she also started doing an internal newsletter to familiarize colleagues with the tone and voice of HubSpot.
Learn more about becoming a content leader
The new book on Cultivating Content Design takes you to the point where you are building a content team. Beth also highly recommended the 2018 book by Rachel McConnell titled Why you need a content team and how to build one. Rachel is currently content design manager at BT and continues to write and publish on scaling content teams and operations in innovative ways.
There was no slides in the talk, but you can lean back and enjoy the entire recording from the call