Jonathon Colman: Content Champion – Episode 51

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Jonathon Colman knows how to build content teams and integrate them into big digital programs. He deftly navigates the challenges that come with creating complex products in fast-growing organizations, always championing the best content practices.

Jonathon’s career arc mirrors the growth of content strategy and content design. He started out as a technical writer and webmaster. He was a content marketing pioneer. He worked in both SEO and UX at REI. Recently, he has practiced and managed strategy and design work at Facebook and Intercom. Wherever he’s been, Jonathon has always been at the forefront of the content profession.

Jonathon and I talked about:

• his background as a technical writer, Peace Corps volunteer, webmaster, content marketer, SEO, inbound marketer, information architect, UX designer, content strategist, and content designer with IBM, the Nature Conservancy and other nonprofits, REI, Facebook, and Intercom
• the relationship between brand and customer service at REI and how that helps build trust and respect and makes activities like SEO easier
• the growth of the field of content strategy, especially Kristina Halvorson‘s work at Brain Traffic and her Confab content strategy conference
• how the team at Intercom practices content design – the liberating benefits of having co-founders there with a design background
• the long history of content design at Intercom
• their focus at Intercom on concept design – and how it drives content design and interaction design there
• the diverse backgrounds of content strategists and designers at Intercom, coming from marketing, tech writing, design, information architecture, etc.
• how systems thinking, in particular Donella Meadows’ book Thinking in Systems, inspires him and his team
• how focusing on ability and organizational obstacles over job titles can help break down the barriers to the practice of content strategy and content design
• how content professionals need to “get a lot better at introducing ourselves and talking about what we do”
• how his work at Facebook shaped his approach to managing content work
• how focusing content teams’ efforts on one or two products, as opposed to ten or more, yields better results
• the troublesome dynamics behind widely spread content teams and the benefits of focusing content strategy and design teams on one or two products
• the importance of gaining the trust of other leaders to get content teams embedded in projects
• the difference between “dusting the content” and being an impactful contributor to better products
• how a “product ecosystem” approach can help other leaders understand the profound contributions that content people can make
• how the successes that he and Ella Mei Yon Harris had on their teams at Facebook drove 5x staff growth in just one year
• a good way to think about the lessons he has learned: “do less, better” (for more on this, check out this Intercom podcast)

Jonathon’s Bio

Jonathon Colman (@jcolman) leads the global content design team at Intercom. He’s a Webby Award-winning content designer and a keynote speaker who’s appeared at over 80 events in 8 countries on 5 continents.

Previously, Jonathon led UX content strategy for Facebook’s Platform and Marketplace teams. Prior to that, he was REI’s principal user experience architect, managed global digital marketing for The Nature Conservancy, and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer for 2 years in Burkina Faso, West Africa. He completed a master’s degree in Information Management at the University of Washington’s Information School in 2013.

Jonathon’s worked on the web since 1994 and is grumpy that it’s not done yet.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

If you follow the content strategy profession, you’ve probably encountered Jonathon Colman at some point. He’s a frequent keynote speaker and regularly shares his insights on social media. We had a great conversation about his career and the evolution of the fields of content strategy and content design. But I want to start this episode with an offer that Jonathon made after we had finished recording the main interview. Here’s what he said when I asked him about his role in recruiting and helping speakers for Confab, the big content strategy conference.

So, this is a really big deal. Confab, Brain Traffic, Kristina, her whole team, they’ve done a great job of promoting this. What they really value for Confab is bringing new voices, diverse voices, to the event. That means people who might be first time speakers, underrepresented minorities. I want to do everything I can to help support that. So if you perhaps are a first time speaker, or haven’t spoken much in the past or are struggling with something in putting together that speaking proposal, I would love to help. I’ve already mentioned this on Twitter, but if you just reach out to me directly, say on Twitter, or LinkedIn or my website, wherever you feel best doing it, doesn’t matter to me, I would love to volunteer to do everything I can to support you putting together your proposal, because I would love to come see you at Confab next year.

If you’d like to take advantage of Jonathon’s generous offer, I’ve included links to the online profiles that Jonathon mentions in the show notes.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 51 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Jonathon Colman. Jonathon is currently a senior designer/content designer at Intercom in Dublin, Ireland. And I want to have Jonathon tell you a little bit more about his background because he, his career I think is almost a microcosm of the whole discipline of content strategy and content design. Welcome Jonathon, and tell us a little bit about how you got where you are today.

Jonathon:
Hey Larry, it’s good to be here. Great to see you again. Yeah, so I’m a senior design manager here at Intercom and I’ve been here in Dublin, Ireland. I moved here from Seattle last December. Been here about eight months or so. And yeah, like you said, I’ve done lots of different things. I look young because I’ve always got this baseball hat on, but I’m in my forties and I’ve been a practicing in some area of content since the mid to late 90s. I started off as a technical writer, writing software manuals for IBM. And again, my apologies to everyone for those typos. I’m really sorry about it. Wish I could go back and fix it. But no, actually I don’t. Started out as a tech writer, worked for two years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, doing public health education and infrastructure and capacity building, things like that.

Jonathon:
And when I came back, I worked for about a decade in environmental conservation nonprofits. Really doing anything anyone would teach me or let me do. Sometimes things they wouldn’t let me do and I did them anyways. That was in the period where you may remember Web 2.0 took off. I started getting these nonprofits involved in very early forms of content marketing that would drive traffic to their websites or help them otherwise support their missions. During that period also, I went from being what we used to call a webmaster, I’m making air quotes here – who sort of did everything from technical stuff, to coding and production and server stuff, more towards doing front end design and production and then later on, marketing. And so it was that period that I began to get really interested in SEO and in what people were starting to call inbound marketing.

Jonathon:
And I moved to Seattle, ended up joining REI, the outdoor consumer equipment cooperative and I focused solely on SEO for them for four years. We did a lot of SEO, content marketing, started all those programs and got them off the ground and it was there that I had the opportunity to work with Samantha Starmer who’s a leader in the field of information architecture and she had this brilliant idea that you could take a marketing discipline like SEO and you could have it sit with a group of people doing UX. And because of that, you would get better SEO but you would also get more effective UX because things would be more relevant.

Jonathon:
That idea was well ahead of its time and it helped shape, not just the practice at REI, but I’d argue it had industry impact, especially in retail where there’s just so much opportunity for SEO with things like product taxonomy, navigation filters, all of that. By being exposed to all these UX people and information architects, I became very interested in that field and I joined the Master’s degree program at the University of Washington iSchool. Really had a strong focus on information architecture there and switched into a UX, principal UX architect role at REI, in my last year there. And then transitioned to join Facebook’s content strategy team, where I was both an individual contributor content strategist as well as a content strategy manager for almost six years and then joined Intercom just this last winter and here we are today.

Larry:
Nice. Yeah, there’s so much in there. One little thing I do want to follow up and when you were talking about that the way SEO has evolved, there’s this concern with satisfying user intent. That’s kind of the top level thing that’s there. And that’s sort of like emerged as the last two or three years is kind of a common and broad understanding of that. But you were doing that what, 10 years ago? You were essentially integrating, doing the things that need to happen to make that, to implement that. You really did pioneer things I think, at REI.

Jonathon:
REI has the benefit of, first of all, they’ve always cared about really providing great customer service and they’ve done that with this very just personal and authentic brand voice. And if you are an REI customer, if you’ve even just ever set foot in one of their stores, you already know that. They never took shortcuts online so they never bought links they never did any black hat stuff. And because of that they always had this very positive trust and reputation and quality.

Jonathon:
And the thing that most SEOs won’t tell you about working for a beloved brand like REI, is that a lot of the hard work is already done for you. It’s a little easier to succeed because people like you naturally, and of course they’re doing things like building links to you and engaging with you. That doesn’t come for free. You have to earn that trust and respect. But in our SEO and our content marketing efforts, we never did anything to violate that. We always just tried to build more engagement and just more trust and respect on top of what we already had. It’s a lot harder in an organization that doesn’t have that sort of foundation to build on. Yeah, so I think we had a leg up there and it just made the work easier.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s so, and just in the way that you were structured in a business and a management side, you were jumping ahead to content design even though you didn’t call it that. Or do you, I’m trying to, when I look back, the brilliant hiring managers at Intercom said, “God, this guy is doing exactly what we need to do.” I wonder if they perceived you as having been doing it for 10 or 15 years.

Jonathon:
Well, that’s a weird thing about content strategy, content design, your story, whatever we call these roles now is that. . . I think this industry’s really started to form with the publication of Kristina Halvorson’s book. But there’s several people will tell you, “Well, I was doing content strategy back in the 90s or potentially back in the 80s. Or I was working in publishing and I’ve been helping brands build their editorial processes or find their voice or all these things for decades.” Which is a completely legitimate thing, that’s very real.

Jonathon:
I just think in the past 10 years with a Kristina’s book, the community she’s built up at Brain Traffic and with Confab conference. That’s really where this, all these people, they always say about Confab is, “You’ll find your people there.” I think that’s what really, she created this home for people and we all sort of coalesced around it. I was certainly drawn into it by her book and that’s what inspired me to really want to take the next steps forward. Both in my education as an IA but also fundamentally joining the content strategy field when I joined Facebook.

Larry:
Yeah. Well hey, let’s just fast forward to the future to the present I mean. To right now. Tell me how you do content design at Intercom. What does the term mean? And how does it manifest in terms of how you guys operate?

Jonathon:
Yeah, so it’s pretty interesting. Intercom has the benefit of having two of our co-founders come from the world of design. And that was one of the things that really attracted me to Intercom because we’re not in this position of designers of any kind, having to fight for that seat at the table or have barriers to our success or have difficulty influencing the product development. Which kind of unlocks us and it lets us do a more than is ordinarily possible where teams are so stuck in this mode of fighting for visibility or not having the work recognized and that sort of ends up tying their hands in terms of what they can achieve.

Jonathon:
Content design has been part of a Intercom’s product development process for a really long time. Elizabeth McGuane at least now with Shopify, started the industry here or started the practice here, sorry. And hired the first IC [individual contributor] to work here. And really sort of set the tone for what content design can do. And something content design at Intercom has been really focused on because of that, is mapping out concepts. We often say here that content design is concept design. Which is to say that what we do more so than writing sentences, is building systems. And we always value a really strong system, much more than just trying to fiddle with the words on the surface.

Jonathon:
I sometimes think this is three dimensional content design where we talk a lot about UX writing and about getting the words right on the surface. Things with voice and tone and terminology and things like that. But if you get much deeper into the product, then you can start to figure out how should it be built? How should it work? What is the system that drives all those surface interactions and the words as well as all the buttons, the navigation and widgets and doodads and features and all that interaction design?

Larry:
Nice. Do most of the people on the team, because it’s really common for the content folks to come out of journalism or publishing or marketing, copywriting or something like that. But are there more folks who come out of design disciplines in your content design team? Or tell me about the pedigree, I guess, of your team.

Jonathon:
Yeah. Well, we have a lot of people who’ve been content designers for a while. There’s a person, actually two of us have come from technical writing originally. One of the hallmarks of content strategy or content design as an industry is that, we’re a big tent. We just love that people are excited about the things that we’re excited about. We’re happy to have people join us from marketing, tech writing, design, other industries, IA, what have you. It’s just that once you’re here, especially at Intercom where we have this really well built up discipline, we want to do what we can to help you learn and ramp up and be successful. And for us that means more than just writing the words on the surface. It also means defining the concepts and the system that powers them.

Larry:
Got it. You’re reminding, as you talk about that, I’ve seen, I feel like at least me, I feel like I’m kind of piecing together what’s going on in content design from what Sarah Richard says and some of what you said about how you operate really mirrors what she talks about. That she would say, “How to write something is an editorial assignment. Whereas how to get the point across is content design.” Or I’m also thinking when you talk about concept design, about Mike Atherton and Carrie Hane’s domain modeling that they talked about in Designing Connected Content. Those are just two things that occur to me. What other influences or influencers or people or inspiration do you take out there? Do those two references make sense?

Jonathon:
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, if you haven’t read Sarah’s book or Mike and Carrie’s book, they’re brilliant books. You should go pick them up. You can find them at any of the best bookstores or even the mediocre ones because they’re that good. And some of the other things we go up to is, I’m going to pause here for a second because I can’t remember the title of this book. Hold on a second. Let me, is this the right book?

Jonathon:
Yes. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. That’s the right one. All right. Let me jump back into this. Some of the other things that we turn to for inspiration here are books that exist outside of either the content strategy, content design or information architecture, even the UX community. One of my favorite books is called Thinking in Systems and it’s by a Donella H. Meadows. And I think it’s so just intensely valuable and useful for content designers that I make sure every one of my team has bought a copy and I reimburse them for it.

Jonathon:
It’s simply the most helpful book I’ve read probably in the last decade. And what it does is help you understand all of those deeper forces and elements and objects, how they’re related, and how those relationships provide value for really anything or more than anything. Everything in the world, including the world itself. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s again called Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows.

Larry:
Well, I will order that as soon as we get off the air and I’ll put a link in the show notes for sure. Yeah, that sounds great. Well that’s, yeah, that’s super interesting how, well I think we all take inspiration from a lot of places. Right now I’m just starting, I’ve identified as a content strategist for two or three years now, and I’m just starting to read up on strategy. Which is, did you, well actually let me jump from that a little bit because when you were at Facebook, you were labeled a content strategist, but that role that you had when you meet people at Google who do content strategy and they’re called UX writers, but it’s almost line for line the same, there very similar jobs at those two places. How do you, do you see a sort of emerging codification of how we talk about what we do as a profession?

Jonathon:
Yeah. I worry less about the titles. I’m just not that concerned about it and more about, hey, no matter what you call yourself, do you have the ability to do what you do best? Do you have the ability to do that thing to the best of your ability? Meaning, are you unlocked? Is there anything blocking your progress? Is your organization getting in the way?

Jonathon:
Those are the kinds of barriers I want to help break down. If you call yourself content strategist, but you can do everything you love doing and are great at, fantastic you’ve literally won the lottery. There are many people who are struggling to get to that point. When people have their hands tied that way, when the organization gets in the way or puts up these barriers or makes people feel like they’re not valued or that the work that they’re doing is not impactful, that just results in worse products getting out into the world. And people feeling bad, and it just reduces the value in some of the impact of everything. I think we can do better than that. And I think that people who are set up well in their roles, like we are at Intercom, we actually have a responsibility to help the rest of the industry by sharing what we know and what we’ve learned along the way.

Larry:
Right. And I guess, and you’re less concerned. I’m sort of, I worry about titles and I’m a little bit of, I try to be an evangelist and a democratizer of the discipline. So I would love to have a codified, a controlled vocabulary, to talk to people about what we’re doing, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

Jonathon:
Yeah, I think we’re probably a ways out from that. That’s okay. But what I think it means is that as an industry, content strategists, content designers, UX writers and so on, we need to get a lot better at introducing ourselves and talking about what we do. In particular the value in the real world of what we do and focus less on our titles.

Larry:
Right. Because that’s, yeah, I think we all, it’s kind of like, you know what? When you see it, you get it. You get the benefits of involving content people earlier in projects or things like that. But yeah, it’s, we don’t have that guidebook yet to help us. Well, I guess kind of apropos of that, but also you mentioned before helping designers who feel like their hands are tied or dealing with organizational things about how to do your work. You’ve managed some, when you went to Facebook there was, that was not a very big content strategy team and when you left it was much larger. Tell me about kind of running this. Because that’s, it’s a little bit meta, but I think it’s super germane, but how do you manage content strategy and content design activities?

Jonathon:
Yeah, so when I joined Facebook, they were actually a decent sized team, larger than mine now certainly. I think I was their 17th person on the team, which probably sounds like a lot except for that now they have over 300 if I’m not mistaken. I haven’t been keeping up on that obviously since I left, but they’re massive team and they just do so much excellent UX work. Really highly impactful. But what I learned at Facebook has affected my management practice. And in particular there is a woman I hired at Facebook named Ella Mei Yon and what happened along the course of our careers together at Facebook is that we actually swapped roles and she became my manager and I became an individual contributor working on her team.

Jonathon:
And then we later both grew along the management track together. And something that I learned from her that I want to pass onto other content strategy or content design managers is that for several years we sort of played the game of trying to stretch our teams across more and more products and more and more initiatives and products and everything. Trying to do more. We wanted to show people that we were great partners, we’re ready to work with them, and if they just let us get a foot in the door, we could do something valuable for them. And that was true. And I think when you look across the industry, you sort of see that most content design teams are multitaskers. They work across many, many product teams. I know content strategists, content designers who work across more than 10 teams at a time, which just blows my mind.

Jonathon:
What we learned at Facebook is that maybe, just maybe, this isn’t a great idea. And so what we chose to do is to have content strategists there work on just one or two teams at a time. And that’s something I’ve also brought to Intercom. And we do this because we tried to stretch ourselves across 10 or more teams a lot of times because content design, content strategy, these are emerging fields and most people don’t know about it or understand it. And so they don’t really have an idea of how to work with us. And that’s okay. It’s not their fault because we’re new. It’s our fault because we’re not explaining things clearly enough. At Facebook what I learned is that, we believe that impact is more deeply felt when content, content strategists or content designers can work on a one-to-one basis with product designers and product managers.

Jonathon:
And that’s really the only way to make magic happen. That’s how you get the best results. And I think we all know that, it’s just that historically content strategy teams have been afraid to take that leap because we know that if we don’t work with a particular team, probably the product is not going to be as good, bad things will go out the door. We’re worried about that as being content strategy’s fault rather than the organization’s fault. That means if we can step away from that fear, what we’ll get is that content designers and strategists will show up to those, just that one team or those one to two teams that they work with as being fully, fully dedicated and committed partners. And that means they can take part in all of the team’s rituals, they can go to all the stand-ups, the retrospectives, they can have impact on planning and the roadmaps and all of that.

Jonathon:
And so when content designers are present for those things, it’s easier for the team to understand what they do. Like you said earlier, you don’t understand it until you see it and when you see it and you understand its impact, it’s going to be more deeply felt and teams are going to begin trusting you. You’ll earn those relationships and teams will understand what you do best, how you do it best, why it matters. And when you’re a reliable partner like that and the team sees you working on solving their problems every single day, it’s going to be far more deeply felt and recognized than when you just talk with them for 15 minutes. Reliable partnerships like this unlock opportunity. That’s really the magic. That’s what we’re all trying to do.

Larry:
Yeah, and I think a lot of the people listening to this podcast, maybe content designers or strategists who are looking to kind of take that next leap in their career and get into a role like that. Because I’ve met so many people who, like you said, they support five or 10 different products or or initiatives. You’re like, oh my God, I can’t even imagine. Do you have any, this isn’t a career how-to thing, but it just occurs to me that I wonder if there are any, one or two job hack-ey kind of ideas that you might have about how to take it from where you’re paring it down. I assume this is probably like a, you go from 10 to five to two and all of a sudden you’re on one team and things are way better. Do you know people who’ve done that or can you describe how somebody might navigate that? That pathway?

Jonathon:
Yeah, absolutely. This is what we did at Facebook. Done it here at Intercom as well. The idea is what you have to do is as a content strategy or content design, UX writing, whatever you call yourself, as that manager leader, you need to show that your team will have more impact if they work in a different way. And in order to do that, you have to gain the trust of other leaders so that you can just have this conversation.

Jonathon:
The thing is, I think people who think that content strategy or content design is only those words on the surface, they don’t understand why you would do anything except for work across every single team and just sort of, my friend Amy Thibodeau at Shopify, she has this great way of talking about this. She calls it “dusting the content.” If all you’re doing is dusting the content, why couldn’t you work across all these different teams at the same time? The argument you have to make is that you can do better work, build better products that have better outcomes and results in impact to the world if you work more deeply. And then you have to show what that deeper work entails.

Jonathon:
That’s where this Thinking in Systems book a really comes in handy because what it helps you do, when you understand systems thinking, you can actually map out a product ecosystem and not just the content. This isn’t just a content audit or a content model. It’s nothing like that. It’s the actual repositories of information. How different entities within that repository are linked. The value of linking them in those particular ways, what that does for your business maybe or for your customers or your users. And you design the product experience from the bottom up so that by the time you get to writing the words on the interface, you’ve already built up the system of concepts, all those entities, you know what they are and how they work. So rather than trying to do things from the top down or even just at the top only, you’ve actually engaged in building a product, not just in writing the words on the surface.

Jonathon:
If you can show other leaders the value of doing that and if you can get them to buy into just a, hey, let’s just try this once. This cycle or this quarter or whatever the time period is that matters to your company, let’s do a test with this one person on my team. Or maybe if I’m an army of one, maybe it’s just with me and I’m going to dedicate a lot of time to our highest priority initiative. Maybe that’s a particular product or some other line of work and I’m going to sit with that team. I’m going to do nothing else but work with that team and we’re going to limit the damage of, in case I’m wrong, by this being a really time limited thing. Maybe it’s just six weeks. But over those six weeks, if I can show you that I can have outsized impact, that I can help teams work faster and work better and achieve more, then that’s going to help make the case for me to do more of this in the future.

Jonathon:
And so little by little you’ll begin to win those arguments and you’ll be able to bring people from this very stretched-thin set-up to one where they’re deeply embedded and they’re working one-to-one with the product designer, product manager, researcher, analyst, and a group of engineers. And when they do that, the impact of content strategy and content design is going to be so much more deeply felt, it’s going to be far easier to have those conversations about, hey, you’ve seen how well this can work when it’s dedicated. Now let’s try increasing the head count of this team so that we don’t have all these other products or initiatives or projects that are uncovered by content strategy or content design.

Larry:
Have you ever blogged about that? And if you haven’t, I’m just going to say there’s a lot of people who would appreciate that.

Jonathon:
Yeah, you don’t say. One of the exciting things about Intercom is that we always encourage people to write and speak. So I have been writing more here. I do hope to get a post out about this. Just having this conversation with you, it’s far more likely, so yeah.

Larry:
Yeah. No because I think that everything you just said, it’s so, and there’s so much to it because every organization is different and I think it was, oh I remember is Jared Spool when I had him on the show, he talked about that everything is bespoke. That there’s principles and things and things that can guide our practice, but every organization, every situation you’re in, it’s going to be unique. And what you just said sounds like a really great approach to that. Yeah, I won’t push too hard on that. But anyhow, I notice we’re coming close to time Jonathon. I always like to give my guests a chance, before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything that we haven’t, I haven’t asked you about or that’s just on your mind about content strategy or content design that you would like to share with our folks before we wrap?

Jonathon:
Well, I think one last thing on this point around how to grow your team and how to get them down to focusing on just one to two things is that this isn’t just sort of a thought in my head. We did this over several years at Facebook. Again, Ella Mei Yon Harris and I, and we grew our content strategy team there by give or take, in my last year, my team grew by five times in a single year. And that’s because we were able to show that content strategists have far more impact and achieved far greater and more deeply felt outcomes by working in this way.

Jonathon:
And it took us a while to get there, to that point where we could make this argument and run these tests and show the impact. But that was time really well spent and it had this outsized impact. I would encourage people to try this in their organizations. It’s what I’m doing at Intercom at worked really well at Facebook and. give or take, the short version of this advice is do less, better. Work on fewer things, but with far more focus. And when you do that, teams will see what you do. They’ll understand it, they’ll recognize you and your impact and beyond all that, you’re just going to build better things. I would greatly encourage people to do that.

Larry:
I love that. Do less better. That’s perfect. That’s a great note to end on. Thanks so much Jonathon. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.

Jonathon:
Yeah, thank you so much Larry, and hope you continue to enjoy things in Seattle. Take care of that city for me. I really miss it. And come over to Ireland and say hi sometime.

Larry:
I definitely will. And I do want to say that every time your name comes up here in Seattle, people go, oh Jonathon. We miss you and you’re welcome to come back anytime. I understand there are some big tech companies here who could use your help. Just saying.

Jonathon:
I’m just some guy. Just some guy, that’s all.

Larry:
Okay. Thanks so much, Jonathon.

Jonathon:
Cheers. Have a great day.