By Janus Boye
Content design is often the overlooked key to product success. Teams ship features at pace, design systems mature, AI enters the workflow, and yet the product still feels confusing or harder to use than it should. Often the issue is not visual quality but content decisions, language, structure, and flow being treated as something to polish at the end rather than design work from the start.
Melanie Seibert’s book Managing Content Design Teams tackles this challenge directly. The book was published in August 2025 and we celebrated it with a friendly member call, bringing together product, UX, and content leaders to reflect on how organisations can build and lead content design teams.
Melanie is a content design manager at PayPal, working remotely from Charlottesville, Virginia. She has managed three teams and established two from scratch, first in an agency setting and later in-house at Indeed. The book, with a foreword by Rachel McConnell, draws on these experiences and is written primarily for product leaders, product managers, and UX directors.
At roughly 140 pages, it is concise by design. With a background in UX writing, Melanie is used to crafting language that must work in tight spaces and high-stakes contexts. That sensibility shapes the book’s direct and practical style. The result is a focused, practical guide to organisational structure, influence, and leadership.
Why content design teams matter
One of the most striking parts of the book, and of our discussion, is the story of Citibank’s accidental transfer of nearly 900 million dollars in 2020. The error was described as human failure. Melanie’s analysis points to something deeper: the system required specific fields to be completed to prevent the principal from being transferred externally, yet this was not made sufficiently clear in the interface.
The lesson extends beyond banking. In Managing Content Design Teams, Melanie writes that
“a digital product is worthless if it looks good, but no one can understand what they’re supposed to do with it.”
That sentence captures the book’s core argument. If users cannot understand the product, visual polish does not compensate.
Many organisations still operate with what she calls a visual-first mindset. Engineering builds the product. Visual design improves the interface. Content expertise is added later, often framed as refinement rather than strategy. In that model, content designers are specialists who fix wording instead of shaping meaning.
The book challenges this structure. Digital products are systems of communication. Treating content as secondary increases risk and reduces value.
From specialist to strategic partner
The book grounds its argument in evidence. At Indeed, Melanie surveyed 61 product managers, designers, and researchers about the impact of embedding content designers in teams. Sixty-nine percent reported delivering much higher quality solutions when working with a content designer.
She also references broader case studies: content changes that significantly increased traffic, improvements in public service task completion, substantial usability gains, and measurable revenue impact from removing unnecessary friction.
The point is not that content design guarantees success. It is that language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes behaviour. When content designers are involved early, they influence research, structure, and decisions. They are not polishing microcopy. They are helping define how the product communicates.
A recurring theme in the book is that hiring a content designer should shift ownership of the user experience from one individual to a design team that includes visual design, content design, and research. That shift affects influence and accountability in ways that are often underestimated.
Common mistakes when building content design teams
One of the book’s strengths is its candour about management mistakes. Melanie describes assuming that hiring talented content designers would be enough. Without preparing the surrounding team, it was not.
In one case, a new hire was excluded from key meetings because expectations had not been clarified. The design process remained unchanged. Content was still treated as a late-stage task.
The book is clear: recognising the need for content design is only the first step. Leaders must define how workflows will change, when content designers will be involved, and how responsibility will be shared. Without this groundwork, the role risks becoming that of approver or “content police”.
For leaders stepping into new or evolving roles, these chapters are particularly practical. They focus on process, expectation-setting, and organisational clarity rather than abstract advocacy.
Setting content design teams up for success
Leadership support is another central theme. When building teams at Indeed, Melanie secured backing from directors and vice presidents. That sponsorship enabled structural change rather than isolated wins.
The book also encourages leaders to use internal evidence. In most organisations, product content already exists. Analysing performance, identifying friction, and presenting data can strengthen the case for a more integrated model.
The emphasis remains consistent: content design succeeds when it is embedded in process and decision-making, not layered on top at the end.
Content design and the rise of AI
The final section of the book touches on AI. AI-based products are semantic. They generate and interpret language. Designing for them may involve shaping prompts, training models, and testing outputs for clarity and risk.
Although this section is brief, it signals an important direction. If products increasingly communicate through generated language, organisations need people who understand language deeply and can shape meaning responsibly.
Content design, in this context, becomes more central rather than less.
Why this book matters now
Content design remains unevenly adopted across industries and regions. Many teams are overstretched, and expectations continue to rise. AI may help with backlogs, but it does not replace the need for clear structure and shared understanding.
Managing Content Design Teams offers a grounded framework for building and leading content design teams responsibly. It does not present content design as a trend. It explains how to structure it so that it contributes meaningfully to product outcomes.
For product leaders who want clarity rather than slogans, Melanie Seibert’s book provides a thoughtful and practical starting point.
Learn more about content design
You can find quite a few posts about the topic in this blog. Here’s just a few to continue your learning journey:
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