Per Axbom
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UX podcast episode 304.

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James Royal-Lawson
You’re listening to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden.

Per Axbom
Helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge for over a decade.

James Royal-Lawson
We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson, and Per Axbom. We have listeners in countries and territories all over the world from Morocco to Croatia.

Per Axbom
And joining us today is the brilliant Natalie Marie Dunbar author of From Solo to Scaled – Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice. And I have to say it’s an extremely actionable book, immediately useful from the first chapter.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s like get the plug in right away at the beginning there. Per is like, buy this book, I love it. Anyway, Natalie is a UX focused content strategist, with a unique blend of skills. As a journalist, content writer, and user experience researcher. On top of all this, there is an apparent fascination with buildings. Your book, Natalie, it mentions “building” in the subtitle and subsequently then makes use of plans construction, nuts, bolts, groundwork and foundations. And so you make some clever use of building metaphors throughout the book. Tell us a little bit more about the story behind that.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
First, thank you so much for inviting me to join you today. And yes, I have had a fascination with buildings and construction for as long as I can remember. I think probably growing up as a as a kid in New York, and being adjacent to New York City and just, you know, being– watching high rises go up, you know, throughout my childhood, just always has fascinated me. I had an early career in building management, commercial building management, and ended up working with our construction administrator on tenant improvements within the building that we were managing. And to better understand some of the terms that were being, you know, used and bandied about just some basic construction ideas, I found a book called Why Buildings Stand Up. And that book has stayed with me throughout so many careers, including the one that I’m in now.

And so when I started thinking about building a content strategy practice, and I talk about this in the book, I would often hear, you know, directors and others talk about standing up a practice. And that immediately made me think of standing up a building. And then when I started thinking about the content strategy practice blueprint is what I call it, which are the five elements that basically the book, you know, that’s that’s the, the meat of the book, the steps and processes that you can take to build a content strategy practice. Well, it all seems to make sense: blueprints, construction, standing up a practice. And so here we are.

Per Axbom
And for me, that makes it not just metaphors, it makes it so tangible, knowing you have that background, and using all these phrases. That’s all I’m thinking about as you go through the chapters, which is– it’s a new experience for me, actually. And it seems so well structured, it works for everything. Really.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Thank you. I was hoping that, that I could find the balance of not having too much construction metaphor, but just enough. I had an excellent editor, Marta, who helped me and would reel me in when it’s like, okay, you’re going a little bit deep on the construction, so let’s pull back and let’s get the content strategy in there. And it was awesome. It was a really excellent experience.

James Royal-Lawson
I guess the sign is there is when your editor kind of comes on to zoom meetings, wearing a yellow hardhat, you know you’ve probably push them too far.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Exactly, exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
The blueprint, though, that you mentioned that is the cornerstone of the book and ties in excellent of course with the building metaphors. And yet five components is what you list, and Per alluded already this, this, it feels very practical when you read in the book and the blueprint laying out very early on, I suppose helps that. Just the first one, making the business case. I think too often, maybe we as designers were irrespective of which part of design we’re working with, i think we actually take business cases for granted sometimes, we know, we just want to get on with producing, instead of really thinking about why. So, dive in. Tell us a little bit about the first part of the blueprint.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Yeah, I think, I think for content strategy, and depending on where you where you work, content design, I think for content folks, we are more often in a position of having to make the business case for why content is an asset to the business. And why this additional process, if you will, should be implemented in order to create and support experiences, digital experiences that are useful and usable. It’s not just about the copy, it’s not just about writing nice words. I’ve been in positions as a content strategist, where I’ve never written a word at all, I would come up with a strategy and a plan. You know, after looking at, you know, current state content, usually it is a kickoff that’s either going to be a redesign, or it could be uh– why can I think of what the word a uh, you know, moving over to a different platform. Migration, there it is. Or, you know, any, any number of things. And if we wait until the end, to consider content, what ends up happening is you have this beautifully designed digital experience, but content, that is an absolute must a because of regulation or whatever doesn’t fit. So you break the design, and it’s two weeks before launch, and why didn’t we think of this before.

That’s where content strategy comes in. But that’s also where we have to make the case with our cross functional teammates, departmental partners, that may be like marketing or legal, other areas of compliance, and leadership, that content strategy and content should be considered very early in the process, we needed a seat at the table with our visual design partners, and other partners, including engineering and others, so that we all have the same understanding of what it’s going to take to launch or, you know, release whatever thing it is that we’re building. And I should say, too, that all of the steps that come after making the business case, still ladder up to support that. So you’re constantly, at each stage, reminding your partners and leadership of why this is important. Why content strategy is important.

Per Axbom
Yeah, it kinda reminds me of it seems like, as designers, we once upon a time had to really fight for our existence, it was quite a lonely role. And we had to argue for why we were needed on teams and why we perhaps needed more people as well. But it seems that content experts have also– are having this struggle constantly as well, in that they’re coming, why is it that we are so, when we are consuming content, it’s so obvious that the content is the most important thing, because that’s what I’m looking for, but when we’re building stuff, it seems that a lot of people forget about how important the content is. What’s the key issue here?

Natalie Marie Dunbar
I think the key issue is advocacy, from sponsors and other partners within an organisation or agency who recognise that there is a need to think strategically about content, that again, it’s more than just you know about grammar, and style and voice and tone, those things are all very important. But if you’re not tracking content from the start of any initiative, you’re going to find that maybe there’s content that’s, that’s outdated content that’s redundant. Content that in large enterprises, you’ll have, it’s not quite duplicative in that it’s exactly the same word for word. But you may have two different parts of an organisation creating the same types of content. But they’re not talking to each other.

And so now you’ve got this redundancy. And it doesn’t make dollars or sense for the business. Because money’s being spent on having these two things created. Now, sometimes that’s necessary. In the case of say, healthcare content or something, you may need to approach a topic that is on one end for, let’s say, the insured, the customer, whereas on the other side, you may need to have similar content that meets a compliance need. Still content strategy aims to bring those together, and see if any of that is reusable to either side, and if there’s a more economical way, more sensible and strategic way to approach creating content like that, so that it’s, that it’s not seen as duplicative by crawlers, because that’s a whole nother story, and, yeah, exactly, and then also that, you know, we’re using resources in a, in a smart way for creating that type of content.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, cuz with that particular example, you’ve got, you’ve you’re having to collaborate with specialists in medical text, who have to write the texts in a way, which actually really does do the job of describing them in the medical way they have to, and then you’ve got compliance or insurance who legal has to basically make sure you’re writing it. So you’re, you are marshalling two, at least two specialist groups and collaborating with them. I guess this kind of brings us to another point in the blueprint about how important it is to build relationships with these different groups and cross functional teams.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Absolutely. I think, out of all of the, the components in the blueprint, that theme kind of runs throughout. I’ve seen practices fail, because there wasn’t a conversation about or an alignment about what content strategy is, what value it brings, what people understand about it. And what I tried to in the book is it’s, it’s, it’s less about, hey, I’m a content strategist. And I’m going to come in and I’m going to save the day and here’s how I’m going to do it. It’s more about what do you understand about content strategy? What are some content related or possible content related pain points that you’ve experienced as a developer, as a visual designer, as a researcher, whoever you are in that cross functional team, as a marketer even. And I say that because there are organisations that have content folks in UX and content folks in marketing. And we want the experience for our users to be seamless. They don’t need to know that there’s two different teams doing things. It’s not that one seamless experience. But in order to do that, building those strong relationships is absolutely key. And it’s also key to the longevity of the practice. So that, that second component of the blueprint, to me, is crucial.

Per Axbom
You also said, you said pain points. And to me, that reminds me of what you said in the book about making customer journey maps. Because that’s something we have as a practice in UX, and we rarely apply it to our own work. But you you describe it so well in the book, how you actually apply that tool to make your processes much easier to understand, but also to identify specifically the pain points to understand who do I need to talk to, and how do I get their voices to be heard.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Yeah, that that was a process that led to actually the third component and creating frameworks and tools to build with. You know, what I found in my practice building experience is that if I could use tools that my visual and UX design partners were familiar with to kind of turn it as a lens onto content strategy to help them understand this is what the practice brings to the table, this is the value that the practice will add, you know, there were a lot of aha moments, because we’re using a tool and speaking a language and taking an approach that is, that is very familiar to those partners. And I’m not an expert in any of those things. But for the times that I’ve had to participate in journey mapping, participate in service exercises and things of that nature, my brain is always thinking, Oh, how can we drill down into content strategy and design, and use this tool to help people understand what it is that we do. And that seems to resonate with, with a lot of people. Folks who have read the book that are not content strategists who may still be responsible for standing up a team or bringing strategists or content designers, UX writers onto their teams have said,oOh, that helps me to understand how to lay this out for leadership or whatever.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. I got it straight away. Just reading, oh, yeah, of course, that’s how I do it.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
That makes me very happy.

James Royal-Lawson
The third one, when we’re going through them like that, the third one, that that was the big one, while you’re now talking about the tools and the usefulness, I agree with Per, yeah, you can see, I don’t want to have another silo. So the, the way that you can use these tools to speak the language of the other teams and organisations involved in what you’re doing is wonderful. But just the creating frameworks, and creating tools to build with, which is point three in the blueprints. I took a breath at this point. Because it felt, this one felt like the big one. I mean, I mean, I’m not that (inaudible), so it’s really kind of small details, but here is when I really just stopped and thought, okay, oh. Because we started talking in the book now about process frameworks, and end to end, and repeatable, and tools, and evaluation. There was there was a lot of stuff which experience says these are not small tasks in a lot of organisations.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Exactly. That chapter, probably, I want to say that I wrote that chapter first. Because I kind of wrote out of order. At the suggestion of my editor, she’s like, take either the one that you think you can knock out, or the one that you think is going to be like, you know, the meatiest one. And that one, I think, what was, what was difficult, throughout the whole book actually, was balancing, how to build a practice with how to do content strategy, the book is not about how to do content strategy. But it does rely on frameworks and tools that are used to do what I call project level content strategy or practice work.

So project by project, client by client, depending on where you work. But that framework, the process framework, that was when I stood up my first practice at an agency, that was a game changer. That was the process that, it was a little painful at first, because I had walked into an agency where I was brought on to focus on a specific project with a long standing client in healthcare. And the creative director knew that we really needed some content strategy help with this project. We had an established UX lead and an established visual designer and an IA working, information architecture or architect, working on this project, but they– there was a feeling that the content definitely needed some attention.

So what happened was I kind of cruised in like, hey, you know, where are the personas? And, you know, where’s this thing? And where’s that thing and I was kind of stepping on toes inadvertently. And what we realised after going back and forth for like two weeks and not really getting anywhere, was that we needed to get in the room and figure out what our process was going to be. And that is where the process framework, at least the the earliest version of that was born. Out of the need to not only get alignment about what the practice, what content strategy was as a discipline, because I was the first one that they had ever hired and brought into the agency. They had folks that worked on social media campaigns and things like that, but not someone that was UX focused.

And so understanding where those handoffs happen, understanding how long those phases take all of those things, we literally whiteboard, markers, Post-It notes, the whole nine yards, and it took probably a few weeks to really nail that down while the clock is ticking because we’ve got something that we have to deliver for our client, but it really set the tone. Once we had the process laid down, everybody knew what they wanted, what they needed to do, how long it should take, or how long it would take and yeah, we were off to the races, so to speak. And because of that, the agency leadership was like, hey, we have this other project with this other client that we might need.

And yeah, the rest is history. We brought on a lot of clients, and were able to not only you know, we, it was an advertising agency with a very healthy digital experience team as a part of that. So we would have, you know, a fully integrated campaign, sometimes with the client that included all of the, you know, TV commercials, radio ads, billboards, bus, kiosk, artwork, the whole bit, and there would be a digital experience as well. So our work could actually impact all of those deliverables. But it made it so much easier for us to know what we needed to do and when and even to be able to articulate to our clients, this is about how long these processes will take. And whether you know, determining whether or not timelines were were realistic, and whether we could do the work that needed to be done within within the timeframe that was given.

James Royal-Lawson
And also the clarity about who needs to be involved in the building, this alignment is one thing, but then you’ve got the clarity that that gives you.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Exactly. We had our developers that– everything that we built within that agency was on Drupal. So we had our Drupal developers in the room, we had our project and product managers in the room, we had visual, like I said, the research was done by myself and the UX lead within the agency, which was great because I had that experience. So we would do both research with users and customers, we would also do stakeholder interviews. So we, everything across the board, from kickoff to completion, anybody that was involved in that process, even if they just touched something for a week, we had them in the room.

Per Axbom
Wow. What I love about that story as well as is how it began with a struggle that began with something that felt I’m failing here, and there had to be so many components to bring that back on track. I mean, you had to recognise it was failing, and perhaps why and you also needed to have that safe space where you could actually bring that up and feel comfortable saying that this isn’t working, we need to do something different. And somebody who actually did listen to that, and was– wanted to do something different that, that speaks to almost the different steps of your book, we’re also talking about, you needed to recognise tension and compression, where you were being spread thin, and had pushback, and you needed that safe space to actually be sustainable and recognise where you could get back on track.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Yep, that was, that experience was pivotal, pivotal in my career, for sure, because I was really nervous about whether or not it was gonna work. I was, I was brought in as a contractor for that particular project. And, you know, I, I will admit, with no shame that I– there were days when I was on the train home going, oh, they’re gonna figure it out that I have no idea what I’m doing. It all made sense on paper, or in pixels, but actually trying to implement it was– I literally had to go into the creative director’s office one day and say, You know what? We need to talk. I don’t know if this is working. I don’t know. This is what, I what I envision happening, I am getting pushback from folks who I didn’t mean to step on their toes, but apparently I have. How do I, how do I fix this?

And they saw the value in what the discipline could bring, not only to that particular project, but they were looking further down the road. Which I didn’t realise at the time, I thought it was just going to be, I was going to be in, do this one project that was done and I actually ended up, as work started to slow down, I left and took another assignment, because I was contracting at the time and got a call back for a huge project that they had brought on a government client, a US government client, and they were like not only do we want you to come back, we want to bring you on full time. And that was great because then we could continue the work that we had started while I was there. So there was like a, maybe a two month period and then I was back and yeah, just, you know, running, running with the process and continuing, we created the framework, but now I could really like cement things and we could see if this is going to be a repeatable, repeatable process that was going to work. And it did.

James Royal-Lawson
But it also sounds like that was the–that’s very much connected to the fourth point of the blueprint with the, the sizing and scaling, because there’s someone else picked up on that strategic aspect of looking what’s ahead looking what’s coming and kind of picked it up for you and said, look, you know, we can, we can move, we can roll this out and do this again, or we can repeat it. And right, that’s exactly right. And picking up from from the fourth point there resizing the practice to meet client or predict demand, being ahead of the curve reading the room, booking was further down the road.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
That was exactly right, we did have that. While I was there for the first engagement, there was a second client that we were able to pitch content strategy to and they agreed to have us come in not only did we help them by creating a content strategy, we also kind of embedded in their team and helped them with the writing and because we were working with a marketing team, and they weren’t as familiar. But yes, out of that, right sizing the practice to meet the demands, was a key pivot in the relationship that I had with that agency while I was there. And then when I went on to build a practice at a larger enterprise to meet project demand. Yeah, that part of that right sizing and just knowing when is the time to scale was was key.

James Royal-Lawson
One thing I did during the research before we talk to you today, I saw a review that Carolyn Jarrett did of the book, who we’ve talked to before on the podcast, she’s another Rosenfeld author, and she, she said in that review that this is a book that you can, you can pivot and reuse for for many different aspects of the design world we live in not just content strategists. And I have to, I have to admit, after looking through the book now that I think she’s completely right, I said to Per this morning, I think you could– you have an excellent list of the structural alignment, you have a wonderful list of the– you mentioned a lot of them now in the, when we talked earlier about the icebreaker bit when you’re talking about visual designers or UX designers research and so on. I said to Per you could switch out one of those for content designers in the book. And yeah, it’s some bits won’t make sense, but a lot of that you’d be just going, oh, yeah, this is how I build.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
I’m really excited about that. There was a moment when I was writing where I was like, should we change the title? Because it– but, but I was trying to not get too excited and not get ahead of myself, but I’ve had so many people bring that point back to me and say, you know, I’m a, you know, I’m a user researcher, but I’ve been looking through the book, and I feel like, you know, I could use this to help, you know, sell our practice, or so on and so forth. I think that’s kind of one of the hidden gifts of having written this and literally from just, from scratch, from my brain, trying to organise and think through how did I make this work at the agency? And then how did I go and scale this at the next organisation where I build a practice.

And you know, I’m going to cheat a little bit, getting to that last step of how do I define success at a practice level, because we’re all so used to get KPIs and OKRs and this kind of thing at the project level. But now we’re talking about practice level, are we hitting our goals? are we hitting our milestones, taking some of those collective some of those individual measures of success from our project work, and then applying it, you know, in an aggregate to the practice. Are we redefining or reestablishing or creating voice and tone and style guides? Are we, you know, tracking our success and the number of partners throughout an organisation that we’re working with, you know, maybe we work with, you know, one or two teams who might see the value of content strategy, but you know, year over year that’s increasing. So many ways to look at how we can, can measure success and continue to scale. You know, once we’ve right sized, and then deciding, you know, do we want to stay where we are? Are we good? Or do we want to build, you know, bring on more resources because we’re successful. And then maintaining the process.

Per Axbom
I had several aha moments, I have to say, I had several, several aha moments during that chapter of measuring success, where you said, essentially, that Office Hours could be a measure of success. And I was like, oh, and when he went through his like, of course, because it’s all about, am I, am I helping these practitioners, the content designers in the product market, am I helping them use the guidelines and frameworks in our practice to do better work. And I can measure that by how much they actually talk to us and the conversations that happen. It’s like, uh, this is this is what we want to hear. This is what I’ve been looking for, other ways, not just, not just the bottom line that people keep talking about, but the actual benefits for people.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
That’s exactly right. And that was a, that was a point of, of differentiation, when we were– when I was outlining the book with Lou. And we had this conversation back and forth about is it the KPIs? Is it the measures that were normally use? And I was, well, that’s, that’s a discussion that happens at the project level. I want to look at how we can take this practice that we’ve built, and see if it’s doing as a practice what it’s supposed to do what we said it would do. And how do we do that? And that’s one of the ways. Office hours are, yeah, the more you have, the more successful you are, then the more demand you have. It’s like, okay, so now, do we have enough resources? Or, you know, it’s a good again, a good problem to have,

Per Axbom
As you can tell, we can’t recommend the book enough.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Thank you.

Per Axbom
Thank you so much, Natalie, for joining us.

Natalie Marie Dunbar
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Per Axbom
For me, the book itself is sort of like a testament to how well Natalie does content strategy, because it’s almost like it’s a blueprint for any nonfiction book, I’m going to actually if I write a book, and nonfiction book in the future, I’m going to pull ideas from this. And it’s also, also it’s useful for any type of like advisory and creative practice in the way that it’s structured, because her having the building analogy, and her being so well versed and having worked with buildings makes it so believable, and it makes it also tangible and understandable for anyone, I think. Yeah, I’m really impressed.

James Royal-Lawson
And I love that too, and we say that multiple times, I think, definitely in the beginning of the interview, of how applicable this can be, to all the work we do, I think and content– even though it’s content strategy, even Natalie herself said, we did discuss about changing the title of the book. I mean, we you can change it yourself through your interpretation. You don’t need it to be exchanged formally. And it’s really, really, really useful. And I love the building analogy. I mean, me and you have, we’ve, we’ve come across that analogy, here and there over many, many years, and always seem to go back to it because, I’m going to I suppose excuse the pun here about this, it’s such a solid foundation to build examples on, you know, the history of building goes back, you know, 1000s and 1000s of years, it’s so much tried and tested stuff about what you need to do, how it works and what you can learn from that. And, and our fledgling industry, you know, can lean on it an awful lot.

Per Axbom
Yeah. Granted, and it’s about people as well, because you need people to be inside the buildings, yes, building society.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, think about the whole– yeah, I mean, you’ve got, you’ve got a little bit of a conflict, I guess, though, with how– the pace of change that we come across and talk about all the time, things go so fast, and with buildings, it can’t go too fast, because it can only go so fast, because you need to construct something, there is a, there is a degree of, of in-built, you know, this force time has to pass, we’re building ,you can’t just do it in one day, or one week or a sprint. And, you know, this helps you I think, not necessarily slow things down, but it helps you be I suppose, in control of your processing control of your thoughts in control of the of the momentum.

Per Axbom
Yeah. I like that. What you’re saying now in that it has, it actually has to be sustainable. That’s kind of why it works more slowly. And so if you’re interested in building something sustainable, then yes, you have to think about all these aspects. And yes, something I also learned that I had never heard of before was this thing called a punch list, which she also ends her chapters with, like a punch list or a snag list. This is a document created in the final stages of a construction project to provide a list of items that must be addressed before construction is considered complete and payment is issued. Yeah, so by ending each chapter with, with a punch list, she tells us, this is what you need to understand before heading on to the next one. But it’s also for me, it, it made me realise how many times I would have wanted to have a punch list, just for things like accessibility, things I want to be in place before I actually consider something to be done.

James Royal-Lawson
I was actually, I was thinking about this during our lunchtime walk today about the punch list or, or rather, you know, the whole thing about what’s the, what’s the minimum, that you know, all your, all the people or the groups, teams, silos involved, what’s the minimum they need to have understood or agreed on or, you know, have worked with for us to go, move forward. It’s because that we have all these checklists, templates, you know, blueprints, all these different frameworks of working with us. But there’s kind of, these are– somewhere in all of this, these this kind of minimum of, you know, we’ve got to have got this sorted, you’ve got to have understood this, we’ve got to get buy-in from these stakeholders, they’ve got to understand how and why I’m working with this whether it’s content strategy, or design or research or whatever. And, you know, I do wonder if there is, if there is that list out there somewhere, or if we’ve not kind of made it yet or made it communicatable in the right, exactly.

Per Axbom
I’m also really appreciative of her her chapter on retooling, which is one of the steps. I don’t know how many there were steps, but–

James Royal-Lawson
Five. Five components to the blueprint.

Per Axbom
Yeah and so with retooling, it’s like acknowledging that you, your toolset has to be different for different projects. And this is like sort of something we struggle with when we talk about best practices, and finding the process that always works for everything. And that, no, there’s no process that works for everything. There’s no tool that works for everything, it depends on the context. And so you always need to be revising and reequipping and modifying and reorganising to make sure that you are using the best tools for what you’re trying to accomplish.

James Royal-Lawson
Helping people change in order to adapt as organisations change, I think she writes in that chapter. And scaffolding as well, I mean, that, that’s a different chapter in the book, but retooling and, and creating scaffolding to have sustainable organisations is, is an excellent use of building analogies.

Per Axbom
So as you can hear lots of praise from us for this book. Well done, Natalie.

James Royal-Lawson
And I am going to spontaneously think of a, of an episode or two, and it’s the building analogy that’s going to drive this spontaneous suggestion and one of them of course, is, and we’ve recommend this a few times, the elevator episode. Because there we get into people, you know, well, movement of people within spaces within buildings and so on and and also the lead times the complexity of of a time of doing this kind of design work. And uhm–

Per Axbom
That’s episode 188: Designing elevators.

James Royal-Lawson
It was originally, but we repeated it more recently.

Per Axbom
There’s another episode of the same content. (inaudible)

James Royal-Lawson
Another episode that I’d recommend is Digital Places with uh–

James Royal-Lawson
Jorge Arango.Spanish is not my (inaudible) thing. Which was episode 202, which you weren’t part of Per. It was me and Lisa Welshman talking about digital places and there as well we get into architecture and oh, and make a few analogies. So that’s what is.

Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving. See you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
My friend got crushed by a pile of books.

Per Axbom
Your friend got crushed by a pile of books?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, but he’s only got hisshelf to blame.