Uplifting content design craft

Problem

• When I joined Shopify, it became clear that content design was not equally understood across all parts of the organization. This resulted in underutilized resources, time wasted on product team education, unclear expectations from management, and low morale and a sense of isolation within the content design community.

• After experiencing this first-hand, I developed two goals. The first was to educate my product teams and leadership about the value of content design to create a “seat at the table” for content designers, empowering us to do our best work and drive more impact.

• My second goal was to set a benchmark for and improve the wellness of the content design community, scaling the impact I was able to have on my product teams.

My role

• Assumed positive intent from my product teams, accepting that exclusion and misunderstanding of my craft was not intentional. My mission was establish content design as a valued part of any team through education and inserting myself without waiting for an invitation.

• Created and recorded presentations with specific iterations for each product area I supported, sharing both high-level and detail-specific content work. I showcased what I could do, but more specifically, how I could be strategically invaluable for each product team. I clarified that content design joined product design under the umbrella of UX.

• Empowered other crafts to understand the power of content, scaling the impact we could have as a product team. I held weekly office hours and led “lunch and learn” sessions on topics including, using Chat GPT to streamline your design process and managing localization. As a request from engineering leadership, I also created a persuasive writing guide to level-up developers’ technical design documents.

• Joined and refocused company-wide content design working group. When I joined, the group was focused on band-aid solutions, like conducting one-off surveys without actioning on results. I shifted the focus to improving community wellness by consistently engaging content designers and taking action.

• Owned planning, execution, and reporting on first-ever Wellness Week: a week of retrospectives and community-building activities for content designers, facilitated in Figjam, to learn what was going well and where we could improve. Received feedback that process was cathartic and impactful; shared results with content leadership team, giving them clear insights for instituting change.

Outcomes

• Wellness Week became a quarterly community ritual and my work resulted in more face-time with content design leadership, impacting the rework of content design competencies, and creating more clarity for product designers managing content designers.

• I directly contributed to establishing a stronger sense of community and support, especially for folks working on isolated teams. I received the following feedback from a more senior member of the working group: “I wanted to personally thank you for all of your efforts supporting the content wellness and community work. You truly were a shining star that helped out a great deal. So much appreciated and I know it helped folks in the craft here.”

• I created a powerful shift in product teams’ understanding of content design, paving the way for future content designers to focus on building great products instead of justifying their existence.