Designing Connected Content - a 2019 update

With digital content published across more channels than ever before, how can you make yours easy to find, use, and share? Is your content ready for the next wave of content platforms and devices?

It has been almost 2 years since Carrie Hane published the Designing Connected Content book together with Mike Atherton. In our recent member conference call, Carrie shared learnings from after the book went to print.

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Data up and data down

Product managers have been called ‘the CEO of the product’ by Ben Horowitz. While you may agree or disagree with that statement, product managers, like CEOs, make decisions that have a long term impact. Even after you moved to another job years ago, the decisions you made back then are likely to still affect the product and its users today.

With that daunting thought in mind, no wonder product managers like to use whatever data they can get their hands on to substantiate their decisions!

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Building a Content Contributor Community

When you have a lot of content contributors - people creating content and adding that content to digital channels - you need a way to keep them all on the same (metaphorical) page. When they’re all in different departments and different countries, with different skill levels, working on separate but interconnected sites, in multiple languages, things can devolve into chaos pretty quickly.

Alignment will bring a consistent voice to every web page and every channel, and keep quality standards higher for writing, imagery, and other content, but finding a how-to guide has been hard. This is my attempt to create one

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How to Make Remote Working Successful

Remote working is on the rise for a number of reasons and has been for a while. Today it has become quite common that some companies are shutting down offices (or never opening any in the first place) and relying entirely or almost entirely on remote working.

While there’s no doubt that remote working can be very successful and is enabling whole new forms of organization, there are undoubtedly aspects that may be new to traditional, co-located companies, which they will need to consider.

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3 points on ethical ... and not so ethical AI

There is a perception that AI is somehow neutral and free of bias, but that is certainly not the case. AI is dependent on data, and data is full of biases. There is a saying in the programming world that if you feed a computer garbage, you will get garbage out. So, if we are not thoughtful about the input, AI can reflect both sexism, racism, ageism and all kinds of other isms (none of them being idealism). 

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Digital Burnout – Flexible working is not all flat whites and short days

Digital stress, however, is different. There is no natural end to the stress cycle as per hazards or threats in the environment. The stress keeps building, albeit initially at lower levels than the stress of a significant danger. But it builds and does not end. This can lead to physical and psychological health impacts: burnout. And it can be hard to recognise the signs until it’s too late.

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The Missing Links in Modern Marketing - Points of Conversion and Interpretation of Data

We have talked about being data-driven for years now, but for most of us, there is still a long way to go. Especially social media have given us easy access to a lot of different metrics. The issue is that almost all of these are volume-based:

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The Challenges of Efficient Roadmapping

Roadmaps. And those problems that we seem to face again and again when creating them. I haven’t met a single product manager - including myself - who has not gotten a paw stuck in the countless traps that are luring just around the corner when setting out as a visionary. Luckily, there are ways to avoid those traps, if we keep aware of the forces - time pressure, expectations and investors - that will influence our decision making.

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The rise - and upcoming fall of employee experience

It seems to me, that many organizations have jumped too quickly on this new buzzword and consultants and analysts alike have now found a new pot of gold after the GDPR rainbow. Don’t take my word for it, see Forrester on The Employee Experience Playbook for 2019. As one of our members said at a peer group meeting: Upon reading it, I felt like the ship had sailed and we were too late.

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Moving from anecdotes to data through shared services

We worked closely with one museum, who continuously chose their lowest performing type of exhibition to be set up again. I think they were perhaps too passionate and too close to the project. It’s not really surprising that we see this in the art and culture industry, but I know that this challenge goes beyond our industry.   

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