Alli Mooney: Executive-level Content Design Leadership – Episode 160

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Content leaders are beginning to ascend the corporate org chart.

Alli Mooney is VP of Content Design at Mastercard, where she leads a team of content designers and guides big organization-change initiatives.

Like many content professionals, she began her career in publishing and journalism, but her path also included a stint in trend reporting, which lead to a variety of leadership roles at Google.

We talked about:

• her work as VP of Content Design at Mastercard
• her transition from publishing and journalism to trend reporting and how that led to her 11-year stint at Google
• her leadership style, which began developing at Google and which coalesced in her work with a leadership coach
• how to peer into the future by applying the mindset she adopted as Head of Trends and Insights at Google
• important lessons she learned in her journalism career: simplifying and storytelling
• how good storytelling skills help you be a better designer
• her advice about getting a seat at the table: be proactive, make sense, make it easy for people to say yes, and show your impact
• the dimensions by which she measures impact: efficiency, effectiveness and excellence
• ways to show the value of your content work, both quantitative and qualitative
• the importance of change management, especially working with people
• the stakeholder alignment work she did at Google to align different content practices around a new headless CMS implementation
• the importance of creating incentives that align OKRs and similar management mechanisms with the content work that needs to be done

Alli’s bio

Alli Mooney has spent her career working with words for companies including Google, Mastercard, Condé Nast, and Omnicom. Across product, marketing and editorial work, she’s aimed to cut through complexity and tell clear, compelling stories.

Alli’s built several content teams from the ground up. Currently as VP in Customer Experience and Design at Mastercard, she leads a growing Content Design team in the Foundry, Mastercard’s innovation arm that focuses on new product development. Prior to that, she spent over a decade at Google building first-ever content programs within business- and consumer-facing teams. She also has a diverse background in publishing, journalism, trend research and mobile marketing.

Alli is known to make good edits, bad puns, and acceptable excuses.

Connect with Alli online

• LinkedIn

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 160. Like many content designers, Alli Mooney began her career in journalism and publishing. Her unique path into the tech world included a stint in trend reporting and then to a role as the Head of Trends and Insights at Google. After 11 years at Google in a variety of leadership positions, she brought her design, leadership, and management skills to MasterCard, where she leads a large content design team and manages big organization-change initiatives.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 160 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to welcome to the show Alli Mooney. Alli is VP of Content Design at MasterCard where she leads content and CX teams. Welcome, Alli, tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to.

Alli:
Hi. Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. So I joined MasterCard maybe a year and a half ago at this point to, as you said, lead a content design team. We work within the innovation group called the Foundry at MasterCard. So we do content design for new and emerging products in the payment space.

Larry:
Oh, interesting. So innovation, I mean, we all hope to be innovating, but in the payment space, that’s something that I’ve had a couple of guests recently talking about trust in financial products and things like that, and that’s a place where like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t innovate with my money.” Any interesting challenges coming up in that?

Alli:
Oh, where to start? Yeah. We are always looking at how we can be empathetic towards how people feel about money and payments and very sensitive. So the empathy skill in design comes in really handy there because money is a sensitive topic. MasterCard’s products can be quite complex even if you are a payments expert. So our job really is to simplify and approach things – meet people where they are.

Larry:
Got it. Yeah and that’s a lot coming together in that, it’s like design on steroids in the sense that you have all the usual interaction stuff and all the technical backend stuff to consider, but also that super empathy that you have to put over the whole project. One of the reasons I want to jump real quickly to, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is you’re one of the most senior content people I’ve had the privilege to meet and I would love to hear the story of how you ended up as a vice president. Because I know there’s some ambitious folks listening to the podcast and maybe you can tell them how to get there.

Alli:
Well, I can share my story and my trajectory. So I started out in publishing, you and I both went to the Radcliffe/Columbia Publishing Course. So from there, I wanted to get into publishing and journalism. Didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but just gravitated that way. So I started on publishing at Random House, went from book marketing to magazine editorial at Details magazine, rest in peace. For your younger listeners, Details was a men’s magazine back when people use the term metrosexual. So I was doing a Devil Wears Prada type job there, and I really just saw the writing on the wall for magazines. At the time I was living in New York and had friends doing really exciting things in the tech startup space. So I just got more interested in that and made the leap from journalism to trend reporting, which was very transferable.

Alli:
And this was at the time, I think early Facebook days, when mobile was just taking off. So I was really looking at the youth space, youth and mobile. And I became part of a founding team of a new agency called Mobile Behavior at Omnicom. And I did a lot of writing on youth, mobile and startups. So it was really leaning on my journalism background there. And I also wrote for Ad Age and PSFK, a trend site. So that really helped me build up my profile and carve out a niche for myself. And so I became a vice president there at Fleischman and Hillard and then Omnicom. And then Google came calling and I took on a new role there as Head of Trends and Insights, kind of parlaying the work I’d done in tech and trends and thought leadership. And that was within the marketing org. So I kind of went from journalism into marketing, which I know is a common story.

Alli:
But at Google I launched a publication and then a content platform called Think With Google, and that’s still around. So I was the editor-in-chief of that and I got to do some fun data journalism there using Google Trends. And then over the course of 11 years, I held three other roles at Google, went from brand marketing, working on the relaunch of our corporate site, and that was the first time actually I got to work with a design team and brought in a content strategist. And I took a UX writing bootcamp at Google and learned a ton about the discipline there. Then I went to Waze where I built a brand editorial practice. And that encompassed a lot of things from brand voice and narrative to website content strategy for another website relaunch and UX writing. So it was really fun there to collaborate with both product designers and creative folks.

Alli:
Went from there to people operations, which is essentially HR but much more buttoned up environment, and led a global team that spanned content strategy and brand editorial, and that was much more about management. So we launched the first centralized HR site for employees at Google, and that was content management, knowledge management, change management, stakeholder management. It was a lot of management. It actually led me to get certified in change management because I saw that the success of our initiatives were really centered around getting people to change their behaviors both internally and externally. But also in that role I worked closely with design and engineering teams and it helped me realize that I wanted to get more involved on the design side, and that’s how I landed at MasterCard.

Alli:
The woman that hired me, Cindy Chastain, had the vision to invest in content and really recognized what my breadth of expert variance could bring to the work. I think there was a lot that I could transfer, but it was my first time working directly on a design team. But I think so many people in content have worked in many different disciplines that I would say don’t let, experience can come in many forms and fashions and can actually make you better at a role by bringing a new perspective and bringing a breadth of experience.

Larry:
As you described that part of it, that leadership where it’s your first time working with designers, but obviously you’ve been successful there and you’re doing it. It kind of reminds me of that truism or the fact that leadership and management are different from practice and that maybe it doesn’t matter who you’re working with if you have those leadership and management skills. Does that resonate?

Alli:
Oh, totally. I’m constantly having to remind myself that what got me here won’t get me there. And the other things that I try to remind myself of are stepping back and getting on the balcony and empowering the team, sharing the what but not the how. And I can’t say I’ve nailed these things, but I’m constantly trying to remind myself that my job is really to step back and empower people and get things done through others.

Larry:
I’ve heard a lot of managers say very similar things. And you’re reminding me, I worked in publishing in New York back in the day and I had in my job at the time, I had a similar, for me, I was in college textbook publishing, I had this little mantra in my head, schedule, length, permissions. Those are the three things that always wrecked stuff. And sounds like you have a similar kind of list there. God, I can’t believe I remember that all these years later. Well, one of the things, you mentioned your tenure, you were at Google for 11 years, that’s quite the tenure, and you did a lot of different things there. Is that where you really cultivated your leadership skills, do you think?

Alli:
Yes, for sure. I took on increasing leadership responsibilities when I was there and I’ve managed larger teams and smaller teams. And I’ve failed a lot along the way, I would say. So it really was a process of growing and it’s actually something that I look for when I hire is a growth mindset. Because I really had to embrace a growth mindset to be successful. I think growing up, I had much more of a fixed mindset, here’s what I need to do to be successful and if I fail it was the end of the world. But I really had to break myself of that. And so the happiest people I see at work are those that have a growth mindset and really take on feedback and take it seriously but not personally. So I’ll say that.

Alli:
And growing into a leader, it’s interesting. I think the biggest leap I made was when I was on the people operations team, that’s the largest team I managed. I worked with a coach who you’ve had on the podcast named Donna Lichaw. And I found her through her work on a book called The User’s Journey that really inspired how I approach content, really applying storytelling and story architecture to content strategy and design. So I started working with her through that lens, but then she actually became a leadership coach, as you know, and I worked with her as a leadership coach. So now I see everything as a story. I see everything as storytelling. It’s impacted not just the work, but how I lead people, my interpersonal relationships, how I present to stakeholders, how I advise people and how we communicate to users. So that was a big shift for me. And also just getting feedback from the team that was really hard to hear, but really evolved my approach.

Larry:
It sounds like that’s a core part of your growth mindset. You mentioned both the willingness to listen and take feedback. And how did you say that? Take it seriously, but not personally.

Alli:
Yeah, I stole that from Hillary Clinton.

Larry:
Oh, okay. It sounded like it had a canonical source somewhere back behind it maybe. Part of this journey too, I’m really curious, we’re in a time right now, we’re recording this in sort of the late summer of 2023, which is a really fraught time for a lot of content people because of the rise of AI and generative stuff and also just changes in the tech world. There’s been a lot of cutting back, especially around content roles. And I wonder, in your role in, was it trends and forecasting at Google, I forget the exact title, but do you still have your crystal ball? Do you still have methods for peering into the future and maybe, if not reassuring people, at least kind of alerting to people what we might be looking at in the near and far term?

Alli:
Oh, don’t I wish I had that crystal ball. I had to turn it in with my badge at Google. But if I were to think back into my methods, I do employ them today to some degree. Really, and it’s a lot of the journalism pieces. It’s about talking to experts, talking to people smarter than me. We recently hosted an event for the UX Content Design NYC meetup group, founded by I think folks you’ve had on the podcast, and we hosted it at MasterCard. And the topic was, I moderated a panel on AI and content design, which is the big looming question right now. And I really came out of that, having listened to all these smart people talk about it and their experience with it, that AI is not the enemy. It can really be a tool and it can help us do much more strategic work.

Alli:
It has the potential to do the mundane so we can focus our time on the human stuff, the stuff we know we need to do to grow as a discipline and get out of the weeds and really get a seat at the table. So I’ll say talk to experts and also look around and see what the startups are doing because they’re looking to fill the gaps. They’re likely to grow and be acquired by bigger companies. That was also a little shorthand trick I would always use is look at the innovation, look at the startups, look at what especially the young tech people are doing.

Larry:
Interesting. So we should all be reading TechCrunch and the startup journals. Yeah, no, that makes sense because I’d never thought of that as a crystal ball, but I think you’re right that there are clear problems that need to be solved. And there may be one in every hundred of those startups will succeed, but just looking at the patterns you can figure out what might be going on. Yeah, that’s great.

Larry:
The other thing in your career path that was interesting, and I love the way you phrased it as a publishing survivor because I think that’s the story of a lot of people in content design and content strategy these days. So how much of that is just great gratitude that you survived and how much are lessons from Details and your journalism career that maybe are still applicable?

Alli:
Yeah, yeah. Publishing was a bumpy road and it’s gotten even bumpier, but I learned so much. And I will say one thing I take with me is just simplifying, and that’s something that I’ve really carried through my career. I would say there’s two things, simplifying and storytelling. So simplifying, making really complex things easy to understand, dare I say, interesting and compelling. Things I find myself saying over and over again at every place I’ve worked is business people are people too, we don’t need to talk to them in jargon. And MasterCard’s a B2B2C company, so we’re often talking to customers. I think something I learned in journalism, everyone needs an editor, and that is what I tell my team and tell people. Getting a review, it’s not a sign of weakness.

Alli:
I also tell people, or try to live by, use every word you need and not one more. So an argument for brevity, but also something I’ve learned from listening to and reading writers and their advice. And speaking of brief, write a brief please, is something we’re always asking our stakeholders. In a pitch meeting, you need to have a clear sense of what you’re doing, and that’s the chance to gather all the goals, all the complexity, all the nuances, and really force people to think through what do you want people to think, feel and do. So getting that clarity upfront has been really helpful. Just like in journalism, you would refine a pitch.

Larry:
Yeah. You’re reminding me, I have another friend in New York, a guy who works at, was at Morgan Stanley for many years [Eric Best, who appeared on the podcast in 2019], and he was a journalist and he went on to become one of those high-powered analyst guys. And he said, “It’s all just storytelling, just like journalism.” And you’re saying the same thing applies here.

Alli:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah, it sounds like it’s a lot of us, not me, not lament or regret, but just sort of like, “Wow, I wish I could have got here quicker, but maybe journalism was just a fine way to do this.”

Alli:
Yeah. And just to build on the storytelling point. I think even that has been really applicable to design because good stories have tension. Tension makes for a good story. So you need to anticipate the obstacles, foresee the challenges. So in a product that means that your benefits and features need to address why people would not use your product. In pitches or presentations, that means lead with the problem, lead with something that is going to resonate, hook people in, like, “Oh, I have this problem,” not some grand vision. Right? And also think about key moments. Stories are made up of moments, so we need to identify and write for those key moments and anticipate what people are going to be thinking and feeling. So that’s informed my approach as well when it comes to design.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s it. As you say that, a lot of what you’re talking about is things that you just pick up in the course of becoming a writer or a journalist or another kind of content expert. This episode will air about a month after this one, but I just today dropped an interview with Elizabeth McGuane, who just wrote the book Design by Definition. Which she’s one of the first people in our craft, I think, to just get out of the fishbowl and look back in and look at metaphor and storytelling and language and meaning and semantics and all that stuff and sort of tease it out. I hope there’s, and I think she would agree to that, I hope there’s more books that follow in that vein because you’re, Oh, you’re reaching for one. Excellent.

Alli:
Yeah. Well, Donna’s book, honestly, The User’s journey, I can highly recommend her new book, but also Design is Storytelling by Ellen Lupton was recommended to me by … and I’m a big fan of that one too.

Larry:
I don’t have that. Sorry, you just added to my library. Thank you. And I’ll put that in the show notes as well, so folks can find those. Hey, another thing, a minute ago you mentioned, I forget the context, but you said about getting the seat at the table. I know you’ve done that in the past, back in a prior role when you were, I think it was at Google when you were in marketing, having to jockey for a seat at the table. That’s still, it’s interesting, I think a lot of people in content design now feel like, “We don’t really have to jockey that much anymore, we’re kind of there,” but I think a lot of people are still looking. So any tips, advice, horror stories?

Alli:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, it totally depends on what organization you’re in and the design, the level of maturity of design and of content or of the discipline. So I think what I’ve learned across in my different experiences has been, I’ll boil it down to four things. Be proactive, contribute, call out the activities and deliverables that you are going to do in a project plan, step in, don’t wait to be called on. Ask to be invited to the meeting. Show up prepared with a perspective. So really you got to lean in. Hate to use the term, but you got to lean in. Make sense and I say that as in help everyone get to clarity. As word people, we’re really sensitive to things not being clear, and I found that content is where the cracks show.

Alli:
To have clear communication, you need a clear idea. And too often, we’re asked to write around unclear concepts or wonky design or technical constraints and write around things. So my advice there is expose the gaps, push for answers, expose the gaps that you see and push for answers, steer stakeholders towards alignment in meetings, at least disagree and commit, and really be the person who can add value by making sense. And also make it easy for people, this is the third one, make it easy for people to say yes. So be super clear in your process and communications. When you share your work, share it along with your underlying strategy and a solid rationale. And really importantly, and this is the trickiest one, show your impact.

Alli:
At Google, we thought about impact along a few dimensions, efficiency, effectiveness and excellence. Efficiency being, and I thought about this, the way I applied this to content is efficiency, how is content saving the organization time and money. Effectiveness, how is it helping users get things done. And excellence, how is content creating a better experience for people? So whatever you can do to quantify or show your impact along those areas is really valuable and it makes it easier for people to say yes when you ask for a headcount or money. And finally, identify advocates. So senior level people who believe in content and can sponsor the work or just content friendlies who see that work is better when content’s involved.

Larry:
Yep, find your allies. I love that second to last one, the showing impact. That’s something that we’ve, I did an episode with Kylie Hansen at Microsoft a few years ago, and people were so excited about that because she had actual numbers about the effectiveness of content design. She could demonstrate to her boss that things were X percent better when they had content design than when you didn’t. And that enabled her to grow her team quite a bit. And recently, Yael Ben-David published her book on The Business of UX Writing. And there’s been some other, but it seems surprisingly recent that we’ve taken a real strong interest in articulating and demonstrating the value of what we do. Can you go a little deeper on that? Because I love the three Es.

Alli:
Yeah.

Larry:
The effectiveness, efficiency and excellence. Are there any, I’m just trying to think of other specific ways to show the value of your work when you have to.

Alli:
Yeah, this is a really big challenge. I mean, it’s when we’re thinking through, or I’m thinking through at Mastercard right now, is how might we, there’s a whole initiative called CX metrics that the team is working on to quantify how good a concept or a design is or how good delivery is and areas you need to improve. So within that context, I’m thinking about, all right, how might we introduce content measures, be it through A/B testing or before and after or through surveys and more qualitative. Honestly, it does often come down to qualitative.

Alli:
At Google, we were fortunate enough to be working on a site with an engineering team and we had a lot of resources, and it was easier there and more straightforward because it was one project with a lot of resources. So we were able to have surveys on the site. We were able to look at and quantify how much in our, that was a big centralization effort. So we were able to look at the inefficiencies of having things so decentralized and count. We have hundreds of sites right now. We have so many people working on this, spending X amount of hours. And in centralizing, we could show the savings and put a dollar sign around that. And then yeah, I think you can also look, UX researchers are your best friends here to also look at how is content helping users get things done, so they can come up with some great ideas.

Larry:
Literally, some of my best friends are UX researchers for that exact reason because I’m like, “How the heck can I figure out what’s going on here?” So yeah, they’re great. Hey, Alli, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up close to time already, but I want to make sure before we wrap up, is there anything last that’s come up in the conversation that you’d like to elaborate on or anything that’s just on your mind about leadership and content design?

Alli:
Yeah. Well, one thing I’ll mention is just the idea of change management and how much I’ve seen that support my work in content. At its core, I’ve learned that organizations don’t change, people change. So how can you get down to the individual level to help grow the discipline of content? So at an organizational level, how can you get champions on board and grow it within an organization. At an operational level, how can you make content simpler and more user-friendly to change? And doing that often means that people need to do their jobs differently. So there’s a lot of areas where change, for content to become fully integrated and embedded in how organizations work, a lot needs to change. And it really draws on our skills as content designers looking to affect behavior change. I’ll say that and I’ll also say you don’t need to be an expert in everything. I feel like sometimes I know enough to be dangerous and I hire experts. So breadth can be an asset.

Larry:
Right. I want to visit, I’d love to follow up just a little bit on the change management thing. Because I feel, and I usually don’t inject my own stuff into these interviews, but right now I’m exploring this new role or function or whatever you might call it within content of as we get increasingly decoupled in our content experiences, we’re losing WYSIWYG interfaces and having these really abstract content creation and design experiences, that’s almost entirely people change. Technology’s there, easy enough, any of the things I can imagine are technologically capable right now. Have you managed any initiatives like that, like implementing a headless CMS or new workflows and that kind of thing? Yeah.

Alli:
Yeah. That was very much the work in people operations at Google. We brought on a headless CMS, and that was around getting, and it was a big investment in operations that continued after I left. But the change management principles that were really helpful there were creating a group of champions. All the people that were on the ground doing the work separately in the little content islands, we brought them into a centralized group and created a shared vision and really heard their pain points and their unmet needs and built a community together. So they were part of the solution and were more likely to adopt in it and get on board and advocate for it. So I think that was really helpful, just getting to the individual level.

Larry:
Yeah, no, and again, this comes on every single episode of this podcast. It all comes down to people and individual people, and human behavior is what drives this whole thing.

Alli:
Yes. And the other thing I’ll mention is just incentives. The incentives need to be aligned or people aren’t going to do it. So in some organizations, that means getting an OKR in there that people need to meet. And so that means getting leadership bought in and getting OKR, and that means it’s their job, it’s how they’re measured.

Larry:
Ah, right. So managing up and down and sideways all at the same time.

Alli:
Yeah.

Larry:
Which is why you make the big bucks, I’m sure. Well, thanks so much, Alli. This is a super fun conversation. I might want to revisit the change thing at some point down the road because I have a feeling we’re going to probably have more change to talk about in a few years.

Alli:
And the other thing I didn’t get to mention but wanted to touch on was we’re building a content design system and there’s going to be a lot of change management that we need to do to introduce that. So it’s another topic, we can talk about it.

Larry:
Oh, I would love to. I talked to Kendal Spark a couple of years ago about some nascent efforts there, and I’m curious where that’s gone. Yeah. Cool. Well, great. Well, oh, hey, one very last thing, Alli. If folks want to follow you online or connect, what’s the best way to reach you?

Alli:
Yeah. LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the best.

Larry:
LinkedIn. Okay. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. Well, thank you so much, Alli. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Alli:
Same. Thanks for having me.