Beth Dunn: Cultivating Content Design – Episode 99

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Beth Dunn is the author of Cultivating Content Design, a book that shows content leaders how to create the kind of successful content design program she has built at HubSpot.

The secret to Beth’s approach is communication. First, she listens intently to her colleagues and stakeholders. Then she invites them to workshops and other activities where they co-discover content concerns and figure out together how to address them.

The key to Beth’s success is her pragmatic approach. She always focuses on the issue at hand and always works with what she finds, not with “best practices” or other off-the-shelf solutions.

We talked about:

• her career path at HubSpot, including the day that she learned from her new boss that she was a UX writer
• her layers model of content design – surface, structure, and strategy/scope – and how her articulation of them helps her communicate with colleagues
• the pragmatic nature and thrifty approach that drives her work
• her approach to organizational change, include a lot of “Tom Sawyer-ing”
• her “find your five” workshops
• how she scales her content design work
• how unhelpful it can be to compare what you’re doing with what other organizations are doing
• how her coaching practice influences her content design work
• what she thinks we need to do as a profession to mature (hint: it might have to with content itself)

Beth’s bio

Beth Dunn is a content and communications leader, speaker, author, and coach. She pioneered the content design practice at HubSpot, then developed and led the global HubSpot content design team. Her workshops, classes, exercises, and guides have helped scores of leaders, practitioners, and teams design better content, confidently and at scale. Beth Dunn lives on Cape Cod in her hometown with a charming husband and some quality cats.

Connect with Beth on social media

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 99. Many professions, including content strategy, worry about not having a seat at the table when it comes to influencing business decisions. Beth Dunn’s solution to this is simple: Build your own table. This stance exemplifies Beth’s scrappy, pragmatic approach to content work. She invites her colleagues to the table, listens to them, and then co-creates with them tailor-made content programs that grow and scale with the organization.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 99 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Beth Dunn. Beth does content and communications at HubSpot, but more importantly, to me anyway for this podcast, she just wrote a book called Cultivating Content Design. So welcome Beth, tell the folks a little bit more about your work there at HubSpot and how you came to write your book.

Beth:
Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me on here. So, it’s so thrilling. So I’m a long time HubSpotter. I was one of those people that started off when it was like a really small band of weirdos. And now it’s just a large band of weirdos, which is great. So I started there in January, 2010, and kind of started off as the person who would annoy the engineers and say, could you please make the wording on the screen make more sense.

Beth:
I was in a customer service role, but in a room full of, I think there were 50 people at the time, I immediately sort of stood out as the one who was harassing people and saying, can we make this more clear, it would be more clear to the customers. And that just sort of evolved over time into an official role as a UX writer. We actually ended up hiring our first director of design, who was Joshua Porter, who people might know as Bokardo on Twitter. And he was kind of one of the first popularizers of the idea of microcopy as a science and UX writing as a thing. So he kind of sat me down on my first day and said, what is it that you do with your time. I told him, and he was like, “Oh, you’re my UX writer.” I had never heard the term before.

Beth:
So it kind of grew from there, and then I ended up growing the team and we switched it to content design, we can talk about that. And from there, I sort of started having this idea for this book, I started talking about it at conferences and things, and it just sort of evolved from there. There seemed to be a need for it, so I put it out there.

Larry:
You’re like the perfect microcosm of this whole phenomenon, because like being told, oh “great, you’re my UX writer, that’s kind of a common ritual in this whole thing, we never figured out ourselves, somebody always tells us it seems like. And then the growth and the evolution of that into a content design practice. But then the other thing that you really bring to this I think and that is an ongoing concern to everybody in this is like, we’re all like, damn it, we can’t get our seat at the table. And you have this great approach that’s grown out of this long experience in this where you’re like, that’s the wrong way to look at it. You’ve got to build your own table. Tell us more about that.

Beth:
Sure. It’s gratifying that you see it as a kind of a new and remarkable thing. It really just happened organically for me. I, like many, many people started off with really just sort of being grateful that people were asking me to do that sort of final stage proofreading to begin with. When UX writing wasn’t even a thing, I was just glad that I got to be the final gatekeeper when I did to stop there from being something out there embarrassing or with a typo in it or something like that. And then, you started being aware of this deeper work that you could do. And like many people, I started harassing people and saying, you should invite me earlier, why wasn’t I at the beginning, whatever. The first thing I did was I developed this model, the layers model based on the layers model of UX. I would show that to people, and to give them an idea of the deeper work that content really should do.

Beth:
And they sort of get it intellectually, but they don’t get it until you actually show it to them in action. And so, yeah, I just started realizing I needed to turn it on its head. I needed to turn the traditional way of trying to advocate for a seat at the strategic table, an invitation to the earliest possible meeting. I just needed to go about that in completely the opposite way.

Larry:
Yep. And I love the way you do that because that’s, the entry point into that is that like, and I’m assuming, I’m just going to assume that those early conversations where you’re annoying the engineers were probably about those top level things, about like, wow, we said that one way here and now you’re saying it that way there, or that’s grammatically incorrect, or whatever the issue is. So you have that insight that you’re always starting at the top, that seems like where all of us start, is that surface layer. And then tell me a little bit more about how you get people, well, first of all, tell us about the layers and how you articulate them, and then how you get people to go deeper with you.

Beth:
Sure. Okay, so the layers model, and I took the seven layers of UX model, everybody’s familiar with, and I simplified that down. I started looking at that and saying, what role does content play in each one of these layers. For those of us in the field, there’s a very clear role for a content person to play in each one of those layers, and I started by sort of just mapping an activity, a content activity and artifacts and things like that to each one of the layers. And when I would show that to stakeholders, it was a lot, it was just complicated. They didn’t really get it. So I ended up streamlining and simplifying it into three different layers, that surface at the top, structure in the middle, and strategy and scope at the bottom layer because everybody likes alliteration and consonants. So everything starts with an S, very simple, straightforward.

Beth:
And what it does is it gives people, the people who don’t get it yet, the clarity of like, oh, surface is just the surface. And they thought that was all I was there for. So when you’re telling people, why don’t you invite me to a kick off meeting, why don’t you invite me to whatever, why don’t you let me help out with research, discovery and articulating the problem, they literally don’t know what you would have to offer at that stage because all they think is, well, there’s nothing for you to proofread yet, there’s no copy for you to wordsmith. It’s just like all these little confused question marks like in a cartoon over their heads. So if you show them that graphic and kind of say, here are the ways in which I can engage with a project at each level, then they sort of start to get it intellectually.

Larry:
Yeah. That’s I think the big contribution your book is going to make, is that it stitches together like, oh, great, you could sit down and have a 10 minute conversation with anybody about this and they would, oh, well, that makes perfect sense. And then it never happens in the organization.

Beth:
And they once again forget to invite you because they haven’t quite gotten it into their bones yet. And so, the process that I spell out in the book is a way of actually kind of getting it into their muscle memory about the role that content can play deeper and deeper and deeper. So yeah, when I talk about flipping it on its head, what I’m doing is just taking what you said was a very pragmatic approach, which is people are already happy to work with you in the surface layer. So start with those people who really like working with you on the surface layer. And the next time they ask you for help, just give them what they want but take them a little bit deeper. And I do this in the form of a workshop, a very structured workshop, that kind of answers certain questions, helps them get better at some of their most common problems in the surface layer, everybody has their little ticks, one team that you work with will love to put comma splices everywhere, but another team will just have too casual a tone.

Beth:
So if you just get them better at one thing that will cut down your call rate, like your support rep, it’ll cut down your call rate from them from like 20%. And then you just give them like, oh, and if you also did something a little bit deeper, you start to dip into the structure stuff, expose them to some of the usability stuff you could help them with or expose them to some of the learnability or accessibility stuff that you could help them with. You really start to see their eyes light up and they’re there with you. And if you tie it to the metrics that matter to them and you can show them that they’re getting an improvement in a metric that they live and die by, like revenue, like something really business meaningful, then they see the impact that content can have on the work that they do.

Larry:
And that’s the human-centered, user-focused manifestation of enterprise work. It’s like these people who you work with are your customers.

Beth:
That’s exactly right. It’s user-centered organizational change basically. You’re designing it around what their needs are and what their view of the world is.

Larry:
You’re like a hyper communicator I think. One of the ways you do that, that you talk about in the book is like just a lot of communication. I don’t want to spoil the story, but a lot of the communication is really curating. It’s like, you’re just engaging people and then listening, and then spitting back what they say, correct me if I’m oversimplifying that. Tell me a little bit more about how that process of engagement and communication fits in all this.

Beth:
I think that you really hit on something that perhaps I wouldn’t have articulated exactly that way, but I think it’s really true that, I know that when I talk to other content people who are trying to scale what they do, and I kind of articulate this like, oh, workshops and maybe a newsletter, that sort of thing, it sounds like I’m really adding a lot of work to them. But actually in practice, the way that I do these things is exactly what you’re saying. You just kind of let people tell you what they already do and what their problems are, what their needs are, okay, and what content are you using today to address those needs. You just sort of tweak it a little bit and say, well, what if you did this.

Beth:
So you’re not really creating something net new all of the time. You’re just taking something that exists and kind of giving it a quarter turn, and then giving it back to them, just to demonstrate, it’s the difference between doing work and sort of demoing work, if you will.

Larry:
And that’s something that comes through throughout the book, is that sort of pragmatic, incremental approach. Is that something you consciously cultivated or just kind of emerged as like, oh, this is the way to do this?

Beth:
I think I’m just a very pragmatic person at heart. It’s funny because that’s a word that has sort of followed me throughout my career. I think that’s just in my bones. I was just actually talking to somebody the other day about where that might come from and I think it’s because I was raised, it was the phrase that I use, resource constrained. I was poor when I was a kid. It’s just another version of thrift. You just take what you have and see what you can build with that, and if what you have is a couple of people in your organization who get it and sort of get how to work with you, and a lot of people who are resistant, well, work with your assets and try to make the most of those assets that you can. Let those other people just ignore them for now and just try to build the people that are your assets, that are your potential champions, start working, investing heavily in them. It’s just thrift really.

Larry:
And that’s such a great balance to like, because so many of us, I mean, I certainly have done this a lot, you just get to like, gaah!, if people could just see all the benefits, all the stuff that we offer, when you come up with these grand plans or big things. You just described your background and the native facility you have with that, have you coached other people through that to become more pragmatic or can you help folks along with that?

Beth:
One of the analogies that seems to resonate with people is I think that a lot, especially people who work in content, whether we consider ourselves writers at heart or editors at heart or whatever, a lot of us followed a similar journey where we didn’t really invest in that. I know this is true for me, I didn’t really invest fully in that strength of myself for a really long time. I kind of thought it was a tool in my tool belt, but not central to who I was and what I could do in a role.

Beth:
And I spent a lot of time instead working on kind of filling in my deficiencies, like, oh, I’m terrible at math, I should get better at math. It took me a really embarrassingly long period of time to realize that I was only ever going to be at best mediocre, and that what I should do is play to my strengths, and if I’m pretty darn good with words, imagine if I invested in that, I could be really quite something remarkable. And it’s the same thing with organizational change. It’s like, if you invest in the things that are already kind of strong, and people seem to get that because we’ve all had that personal experience of something that is a strength of ours that we really probably should have started dropping a dime into that piggy bank a lot earlier.

Larry:
Yep. And I love the way you just described that because this really is organizational change. And also, just back to your background, one thing that occurred to me as I was reading the book and then as you talk about your background, because I kind of come from scrappy lower middle-class roots myself, and I was thinking about Tom Sawyer, the Mark Twain story, I assume everybody knows this, but Tom Sawyer, just kind of recruiting all the kids to paint the fence with him. Is that the right metaphor for …

Beth:
There’s a lot of Tom Sawyer-ing in this book too. Yeah, absolutely. Because one of the first moves, of course, is that you run a content workshop that sort of, and specifically for these people who are already engaged, like working with you, see the value of that, you try and get a few of them to do some of that surface work for you. You can train some sympathetic people to do a better job of checking the style guide or running it through something like Grammarly or Hemingway. I think one of the major turning points for me was when I realized that I was spending 90% of my time fixing the same five mistakes. It was either exclamation marks or commas or it was all wicked surface stuff. And it was literally the same five things. And so I put together a workshop that informed people about how to handle these five common things.

Beth:
And that one workshop, when I started getting a critical mass of, I would just do it on small teams, maybe eight to 15 people at a time. Once I hit a critical mass of teams, I’d run that with, I suddenly found the weight on my shoulders was really, really remarkably lifted. I was getting so many fewer requests for that kind of surface help, and that was when I was able to start digging deeper into deeper work. So, that’s why I’ve focused on find your five. I think most of us are spending 80 to 90% of our time on five things that if we just Tom Sawyered it, taught it to other people and said, if you just move the paint brush up and down like this, it goes really well. And then we can do deeper work, we can do stuff that is a better use of our brain power and our time and our skills.

Larry:
I want you to talk a little bit about more of the find your five, because I’ve had the benefit of reading the book so I know what you’re talking about, but if you could just talk a little bit about that because I think that’s a brilliant methodology to bring focus to this work.

Beth:
Sure. And again, this sort of evolved organically. The way that I recommend people start these workshops is start off by people who raise their hand and send you something. Hey, could you just, it always starts with that, hey, could you just take a look at this and just kind of do your thing, wave your magic wand at it. It’s really common that it’s some other team that we don’t technically work for inside of our organizations like a sales team wants us to take a look at their email that they send out to leads or marketing team. Just take a look at our landing page, it’s not quite converting the way we want it to. So, the next time somebody asks you for that, you can say, I would love to help you with that, but why don’t I do it for your whole team? And you offer them a workshop.

Beth:
And so, the way that I develop this workshop for teams that say yes to that offer is I say, all right, you wanted me to look at your landing page, send me five versions of that landing page that you’re having trouble with. That’s a good number, I like five. So they send me five. That can be loose. Sometimes people send me 20 and that’s fine. And you just kind of go through those and you look for the patterns, you look for those five things, and every team has these things that if they just did these five things better, differently, more according to your voice tone, style guide, whatever, and that’s for a surface workshop, there are other workshops for structure and for scope, they just did these five things differently, they would be 80% better. They would see a market change. And so, you just look for those patterns.

Beth:
Anybody sends you five types of the same piece of content, you’re going to be able to find five things right away that go, okay, do this differently, instead of approaching tone in that way, do it this way, don’t use commas like that, trim down your exclamation mark usage. We all know these things. You don’t have to be shy about repeating your information for different teams too, it’s going to be the same across some teams. So that’s it, it’s find your five. What’s amazing is that when you deliver those workshops to people and kind of teach them those five things, they’re thrilled. A lot of this comes as news to non-content people, like oh, I didn’t know that using exclamation points like that meant I was shouting at people. I didn’t know that saying, hey, so-and-so came off as unforgivably informal in this different market that we do business in. They just don’t know. So I found that people were really grateful for that, and that made them hungry for more.

Larry:
That’s one of the things that I really appreciated about the book is because so many of us in the content profession, I mean, everybody’s doing their best to get out of the fishbowl, but we’re still swimming in that water that we’ve just known our whole careers. And you’re so good at imparting that to other people, that’s great. I want to follow up on something you just said about, one of your methodologies in the workshop is you talk to one person, you go, hey, bring the team along with you. So that’s a brilliant way of starting to scale this word, but the whole last chapter of your book is about scaling this work at a higher level. Talk a little bit more about that.

Beth:
What tends to happen eventually once people start to see the deeper content work that you can do and the value that somebody like you can provide, which is different from what the people that you deputize to do the surface work can do, that’s amazing. They start to see the particular value that you bring with the deeper work, is they say, can we get some more like you. It finally actually starts to happen. Hey, can we get another you, can we get five more yous. And so that’s one way of scaling your work is by actually you get to hire and lead, be a part of a growing content team.

Beth:
Sometimes that’s not the way it works, and sometimes economics doesn’t let that work. Sometimes just the growth stage that your company is at doesn’t let that work. Who knows? And maybe that has nothing to do with how valued you are, whatever. So sometimes you have to scale your work in different ways. Sometimes you have to do these sort of more guerrilla marketing techniques. And then second would be something like just setting up a lunch and learn, where you invite outside speakers to just share what they know about doing content in their organization, those are hugely valuable. Maybe it’s a book club, maybe you all read a book and you talk about it. And this can be you and the other people that you’ve run the workshops with, other people who have said, this is kind of interesting or have been kind of deputized as the de facto content person in my part of my org. You just sort of start to gather your own little army of interested content people, whether or not they’re officially part of your team, you can make them part of your team.

Larry:
And you just mentioned a couple of the examples like the book club and things like that. There’s not a laundry list, but there’s a lot of good ideas in that chapter about different ways you could do that. And one of the things I think you do really well too is kind of highlight the bespoke nature of this, that this is going to unfold differently for everybody. There’s all these things you’ve mentioned, like budget and time and whatever it is. Again, that’s one of the things I feel like, the book, it’s not, it’s a how-to book, but a pretty high level how-to book. It’s sort of like here’s the approach you need to get this instilled. Have you seen, because I saw you talk about this at, what was that two or three years ago, it was one of the in-person Confabs, and I’m trying to remember like, these ideas have been out there for a little while. Do you have disciples and folks who have reported back success stories about …

Beth:
Yeah. There’s a handful of people that have kept in touch with me. Hopefully there’re even more people who have been too shy to sort of keep me in the loop. But I know a lot of people came up to me after that talk at Confab in particular and said that they were going to try, they were going to start the process, they were going to do these workshops. Maybe they were going to start a newsletter, a couple of them had even more creative ideas for what they were going to use as their karaoke machine as you’ll see in the book.

Beth:
I like to coach individuals too, I’m certified as a coach and as a leadership coach, and I specifically like working with people who are trying to scale their content practice and trying to kind of either move into the world of UX writing or grow into leadership in content and in UX and in tech in general. And so, those individuals that I’ve worked with, we often talk about this particular sort of methodology. I’ve seen it work at a lot of different organizations. And as you say, it’s quite bespoke in a way that it’s organic. I think bespoke gives the idea of like, oh, it has to be very sort of custom tailored. It’s more of a mindset of like, yeah, go with the flow, go with what’s going to be right for your organization.

Beth:
I think so many of us get really unnecessarily hung up by comparing with what other organizations are doing. I know that when I was growing the team, I would sometimes go, oh gosh, look at that other company, they have 30 content, what a dream that must be. We just compare ourselves. And it’s like, well, that’s not, nobody was going to write me a check to hire 30 people in one swoop. You got to have some steps in between here and there, you just got to work with what you got.

Larry:
There’s so much in there. I have a friend, a very snarky friend who’s convinced that places like the FANG, Facebook and Amazon and those guys, they can just throw people at problems, and they’re probably not doing it any better than you, they just have a lot more people. Anyhow, that’s an interesting dynamic, but I love that it always comes back to that pragmatic approach, work with what you got. And there’s plenty of different ideas about how you can do that.

Larry:
One thing I want to come back to, you just mentioned your leadership and coaching work. And so much of our work is really, we think it’s about words, but it’s really about people. It’s about behavior change, about organizational change, as you mentioned earlier. There’s all this growing list of people, I didn’t know that you did coaching work. I know Tracy Playle and Sara Wachter-Boettcher and many others in the profession have gone that route. How did you end up doing that and how does that manifest in your work now?

Beth:
It’s so funny because I know I was just talking to Sarah Winters about this the other day too, I believe she’s going down that path as well. And we were both agreeing that the people that we work with, they come to us and say that what they need is some sort of a content strategy help. And then what you find out is that there’s this deeper layer, before they could even start with that, I’m not trying to put words in her mouth, this is me, before you can even get started with that, it’s this mindset change, it’s this organizational change piece, it’s how to get other people on board with the change that you want to see, how to change the way you see yourself.

Beth:
And that’s why I talk so much about that stuff in the book is because it really, and that’s why I started pursuing the coaching thing is because I found that this is what’s really keeping us back is ourselves and how we see, I’m not trying to blame the victim here, but there’s so much more it’s possible if we just sort of get a little bit of a shift of mindset and start to, yeah, I don’t know, take a more pragmatic approach. I think it’s really common to think about all the things that we don’t have and to feel victimized because of that. And that in itself is a trap.

Larry:
And it’s so easy to do that when there’s 100 engineers and 10 UX designers and you’re the lone content person. It’s completely understandable. But I love that so much of your book focuses on that mindset shift that needs to happen to just say, yup, that’s how things are, great, what are you going to do? Well, cool, hey Beth, we’re coming close to time. I’m always amazed at how quickly these conversations go and I’d love to keep going, but I do need to wrap up. I want to give you one last chance. Is there anything that’s come up in the conversation or just anything that’s on your mind about content design or content strategy in general that you want to make sure we get in before we wrap up?

Beth:
Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about, I’ll maybe put this out there as a topic for a future talk is like, I feel like we do in content, a lot of work sort of glomming on to other people’s practices and other people’s processes. And that the shift I think that we’re going to see and that we’re going to have to see in order to mature as a field is that we see content itself as a problem solving tool. Just like the last 10 years, the conversation has been about how design thinking is itself a problem-solving tool. It’s a mindset, it’s an approach that you can apply to anything.

Beth:
Well, the more I think about it, the more I think content, the content approach, the content mindset. I don’t know whether that framework is storytelling or what, but I think it’s something like that, that we’re only ever going to be sort of wordsmith and kind of like design but this way, like design but that way. Unless we figure out what that is, and I really think it’s there, content itself is a strategic problem-solving machinery.

Larry:
I 100% agree. And you’re reminding of a conversation I had with a UX friend about a year or two ago about. I was kind of expressing some jealousy about all, they’ve got a seat at the table, they’ve made some more professional headway I think than we have. She said, “You guys have to content strategy your content strategy the same way that we UX’ed our UX.” And I think that’s kind of what you’re doing here I think, right?

Beth:
Yeah, totally. TBD. But I think that’s my rallying cry is let’s start thinking about that. As a group, as an entity, as a global community, let’s start thinking about that.

Larry:
Absolutely. I’m on board. Let me know how I can help.

Beth:
Awesome.

Larry:
Well, cool. Hey, and one very last thing, Beth. What’s the best place that people want to follow you on social media or get in touch. What’s the best way to connect?

Beth:
Probably Twitter’s the best. It’s definitely the most memorable handle, I’m just BethDunn at Twitter, @BethDunn. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, I pretty much always accept connections from people who are in the field. And if you’re interested, I don’t do a whole lot of content stuff on Instagram, but I’m TheRealBethDunn on Instagram.

Larry:
Sweet. Okay, and I’ll put those in the show notes as well. Well, thanks so much, Beth. Really enjoyed the conversation and really appreciate the work you’re doing.

Beth:
Thank you so much.