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Kate ThomasKate Thomas is leading the transformation of marketing content at PayPal from hand-crafted web pages to structured content stored in a headless CMS.
Like many organizational-transformation projects, this one has highlighted both the benefits of structuring content and the challenges of getting content authors to work in new ways.
We talked about:
- the migration of the PayPal marketing content from hand-crafted web pages to structured content managed in a headless CMS
- her prior work at PayPal modeling their legal content
- how they structured their content and ascribed meaning to it with metadata
- the main benefits of structuring content, foremost among them speed to market, the ability to scale, and to more efficient content localization
- her first foray into structured content when she worked on a developer portal
- how the governance issues she dealt with in content roles in higher education and government, as well as the governance processes she saw in agency roles, led to her interest in structured content
- the operational transition from hand-building pages to the new structured-content operation and governance framework
- the importance of the authoring experience in a new system like this
- the role of content modeling in her work to structure the content
- how their new structured-content model let them create new pages about business practices in Ukraine in just a few days
Kate’s bio
Kate Thomas is a content architect at PayPal. She has led content teams in Australia, the UK and the US, delivering workable, scalable content solutions for government, universities and global brands over a 20+ year career slaying the content dragon.
Connect with Kate online
- PayPal jobs page (work with Kate!)
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 117. The benefits of structured content are now well known: improved consistency, the ability to scale, quicker content delivery, more governable content operations, efficient localization of content for other countries and cultures. But even the most progressive and successful companies are still working to fully adopt this important content practice. In this interview, Kate Thomas shares insights that she has gleaned as they’ve structured the marketing content at PayPal.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 117 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really happy today to have with us, Kate Thomas. Kate is a content architect at PayPal, and she’s working on some really interesting structured content and CMS work there. So welcome, Kate. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Kate:
Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. Yes, at PayPal we’ve been working for the past couple of years on moving all the marketing content on paypal.com from hand coded, handcrafted pages into a structured content framework delivered in a headless CMS.
Larry:
Nice. And so have you been involved from the very start with that? Is it kind of your baby, this project, or?
Kate:
Kind of my baby in the sense that I was asked to work on it and I thought, well, that’s now my baby. It’s someone else bigger baby, but I’m the midwife, I suppose, of the content model in a way. So we had new management come in and head up paypal.com. When you look at paypal.com, there’s lots of things going on. So when I’m talking about it, all I’m talking about is the marketing content. So on paypal.com you can also get help content, you can get legal content and there’s a whole lot of campaign pages that you know exist but they’re sort of outside of the core marketing pages. So the first thing is to qualify we’re talking about the core content that we deliver in marketing.
Kate:
And management change, sort of the person in charge of .com changed in mid 2020, got some consultants in to advise on how can we do this better? Because it was sort of at that time and a lot of the site now still actually it’s standalone pages. Someone in PayPal needs something up on the site so they go directly to the web operations team, sort of web ops, and say, “Hey, scrum team, can you build this?” And they build it in code, based on some vague like content types and templates, but not content types and templates structured in any way. And page gets built, job done. So there’s no, “We should take this site down now. We should remove this page it’s out of date.” Or someone’s got a page that’s similar, but no one knows that it’s there.
Kate:
So this wasn’t an ideal way to manage the site because of course PayPal we’re in gosh, 200 markets I think, something like that. I can confirm that and get it back to you.
Larry:
Wow.
Kate:
And hundreds, not hundreds, dozens of languages. So every time an engineer had to build this in one language, they had to then essentially copy and paste for, you know, for the rest. For the languages. So not particularly scalable. So we had some advice about, you know, let’s build, deliver .com in a headless CMS. I had been working in another part of PayPal and one of the things I’d done was start to model the legal content. The legal department had come to us 18 months before and said, “Hey, can we deliver our site more efficiently?” So I’d done a content model for that, for the main legal agreement, the user agreement that, you know, something like 320 million people have signed because that’s the number of PayPal customers there are. And I’m pretty sure no one has ever read it, but after modeling it, I can tell you, I have read all of it. So I’ve done that work and then was asked to come over and help and do similar for the .com marketing content.
Kate:
So that’s through the rest of 2020, so Q3 into Q4. I looked at the content and as with any project like this, the most important piece is the content itself. So what does the content need to do? What are its characteristics? I can’t obviously build a model unless I know the full context of the content. So what identified the fields that we’ll need in the content model. I also hired a taxonomist, a contract taxonomist, just to help us because I realized, and I had hugely supportive management, the new head of the head of paypal.com, many of your listeners will know her, Lucy Hyde. She’d been at PayPal for some time, but she’d moved across into this role. So I just went to Lucy. I said, “Hey, I think we have an opportunity here to sort of fix this properly.” There’d always been a great investment in the presentation of content, how it looked beautiful, images, but almost none in the semantic layer or the metadata of the content. So I said, “If we’re doing the headless CMS, let’s get a taxonomist involved and so we can start to build that layer underneath as well.”
Larry:
You know-
Kate:
So we went into-
Larry:
Yeah, I was going to say that, you know, when we talked before we went on the air we thought, yeah, we should set out kind of exactly what structured content is before we get going. But you just did it. I mean, I didn’t ask the question, but you kind of did it anyway. Because you set out all the, you know, the need to structure it. It just kills me that people are still hand building webpages in the 21st century, but you know, that need to like systematize the page building and all the management that goes with that. But then you added in the last piece there, the hiring the taxonomist and ascribing the semantic meaning to the content. Tell me about how, and I have my thoughts about this, but I’m curious how those two work together for you, how the structure of the content and the metadata, the taxonomies, and other stuff that describe it, how those work together.
Kate:
Well at the moment, how it will work is I’ve defined the model and identified the content types we need. We’ve got a bunch of content types. We know what kind of content they’re delivering and we’ve got a taxonomy for those, for that content. We’ll be using a third party to knit these two things together at the end. And what this means for us is that we have really a source of truth that we’ve never had before for all of our content. We can track and manage it more easily. We also long term can then do more with that content. At the moment, the taxonomy is pretty straightforward and basic, and it’s really delivering internal benefits for us so we have a better sense of what we’ve got and some SEO benefits as well, obviously, because we’re being far more kind of thorough and consistent with our language and what we’re calling things, and we’ve worked very closely with the SEO team on that.
Larry:
When you mentioned SEO, I think all of a sudden I’m wondering like, that is the classic use case for structured, especially marketing content, you know, to better do that. But there must be other cases, like you also mentioned, alluded anyway, earlier to like the kind of operational, not exactly optimized thing about hand building webpages. Can you run through sort of the list of reasons you moved to structured content?
Kate:
Well, mostly because we want to scale as a business. I mean, PayPal is already hugely successful, but there’s plenty of people, plenty of companies rather, nipping at our heels. So the business brains at PayPal want to stay cutting edge and want to continue to be at the forefront of these things, which we cannot do if it takes us 30 to 35 days to publish a page, which it does in the old way, because the brief has to go to someone, scrum team has to build it by hand. It’s like tedious QA, you know, so we could not continue with that. So speed to market was the main reason why we moved to structured content, but also because localization, as I said, we’re in multiple languages and there were some services that we did have third party localization services, but not many programmatically really at all. So it was a copy and paste exercise. So also not scalable.
Kate:
So they’re the really the biggest reasons and long term, we’re not realizing the benefit of this yet, but the metadata that we apply to the content will serve us well for ongoing management of the content, particularly internally because PayPal is a massive organization. Something like 25,000 people work there, all in different teams and all sort of with their own perhaps variety of what it is, what product they’re building. So the very fact of having a taxonomic definition of our products with all the variables of that sort of locked down somewhere from which people draw that rather than write it themselves. I mean, that will really be incredibly helpful for us to sort of help keep our house in order.
Larry:
Yeah, no, the way you described that is like, well, I guess, you know, you clearly articulated the benefits. Did you do like a formal ROI analysis or anything like everything you said makes perfect sense and I don’t think you’d have any problem convincing any, certainly any content person and most managers, but did you have to sell this at all, I guess?
Kate:
The taxonomy?
Larry:
The taxonomy, well, not only the taxonomy, but also just the notion of structuring the content itself and all that. Because it’s not an insignificant investment, but it seems like you’ve articulated some really clear benefits.
Kate:
Yeah, no, I didn’t. Fortunately there were highly paid consultants who did that, so they saved me the trouble.
Larry:
Outsource it. Nice.
Kate:
I know it was sort of in inferred in the long PowerPoint deck of where it was like to justify a headless CMS. So headless CMS has to have content types. And so you have content types, you need structured content. So they did that job for me and they, you know, PayPal’s got smart people running it and they see the reasons why you would do that. I mean, we’re a tech company, right? So it takes a lot to convince, you know, a bunch of ex-engineers perhaps that, you know, building in code isn’t the right way to go. But you know, their business brain, as well as engineering brains, tell them that we have to sort of not deliver content in code, but we have to deliver it sort of far more smartly. So that’s what we are starting to do.
Larry:
You know, another thing we were talking about before we went on the air was your interest in governance and how that kind of led to your current role and like that last thing you were saying about the saving on ongoing maintenance of the content, and like, you know, I was thinking immediately of like, when do you retire old content? Or, you know, all those conventional governance and CMS and content operational kind of things. Can you talk a little bit about like how governance brought you this way? How your interest in governance, I guess. Yeah.
Kate:
Yeah. I used to appreciate it before I think I really understood structured content because I’d never worked, I mean, anyone who worked has worked in tech writing or anything like that would understand structured content. I’d never done that up until that point. In fact, that was the first thing I did at PayPal. I worked on the developer portal and worked on the content strategy for the dev docs site. So that was like my first foray to really big structured content. Oh, just lost my train thought. Just repeat the question.
Larry:
Just, well, just how governance that interest in governance led you towards, you know, implementing structured content programs.
Kate:
Okay. Yeah. Cause so structured content is essentially giving governance to content. You’re defining rules, you’re giving it boundaries, you’re giving it context. So these are the sorts of things that say what I am, and so like what I can be. Like, I might be this or I might be this, so I have to build something into a model, but when I used to work in, so before structured content, before content modeling, I was a huge fan of content governance because I started my content strategy and content management career in higher education building online learning systems for universities and then I moved from there into different roles in the Australian federal government and so my first kind of move into the web sort of in the late nineties and in the two thousands was in public sector institutions where governance is embedded.
Kate:
So for me, it was totally normal to have to think about the context of your content and the, who was going to approve it, why we have it, how long it was going to be there, who was going to pay for it, and how we’re going to resource it, which are all the things you think about in a governance framework. So I was very much all about governance. I started working sort of 10, 12 years ago, big digital agencies, which is all about marketing and making it happen and suddenly I was surrounded by people who could make pretty things and build amazing sites without thinking about any of the things that I just thought about kind of automatically if you like, because that’s how I’d started. And so I found myself, and big agencies have big clients, which is sort of the size of governments, you know, global multinationals as complex and as bureaucratic as government agencies so they have their own in-built governance processes and stuff. So it was quite useful.
Kate:
I quite enjoyed working at that level at agencies because you’re applying something really applicable and useful for these brands who know they can’t just spend, you know, 20, 30 million or pounds on a project without this tracking. And so I was able to bring that governance framework to that. And then, you know, through that really had my first exposure to the importance of being able to scale content across different, not only just devices and different formats and such but into different languages, which is obviously where I started thinking structured content. And so you start going, okay. So it was much easier to talk to clients using, I was always only about the governance, but in a way a structured content approach gives you the language to translate what has to happen to the content and how we’re going to treat the content and what job the content needs to do. You could use the language of governance, but structured content sort of saves you from having to talk at a very kind of individual level of that content, which is sort of impossible. Cause it-
Larry:
And I’m really curious, I’m curious now about like two of the things you mentioned like, I don’t know how long that stint you mentioned that you worked for a while in the developer portal at PayPal. So you’ve been exposed to that tech writing world and did they use like a DITA based component?
Kate:
No, they didn’t. They just used Markdown.
Larry:
Just Markdown. Yeah. So they’re the developer driven place, but regardless you got on top of the structured content there and then your interest in governance, those are like two things that were hardwired in your head having done them so much. Have you ever thought about how to do like a mind meld of that? Cause a lot of folks, like I’m lucky to have had a little bit of exposure to governance issues and stuff early on, but I still feel like I could use a mind meld from somebody like you about like, no, here’s how you just internalize thinking about, you know, structure and governance.
Kate:
I have not done that, but I think that would be useful. And in fact, at the moment where to bring it back to PayPal, the work we started in mid 2020, we launched in sort of June, I think 2021, our first CMS pages, which is hugely exciting. And we are continuing just to roll that out with different things. And as part of that, we are getting some advice on some governance frameworks. And so we’re looking as a company at developing that governance framework now. So I think that’s timely and it’s not really until our conversation that I sort of thought, oh yeah, yeah, structured content. They’re very, very tightly linked. And I think, you know, governance gets such a bad rap and obviously in a financial markets company, like I’m working with, we are so cognizant of regulations and rules.
Kate:
So we are totally sort of all over this. And so people tend to see governance as a restriction or something’s holding them back or something someone says you can’t do, which is kind of in a way, but for kind of good reason. So I think, you know, with our rollout that we’re doing in the CMS, we by necessity have to also roll out a governance framework because it is changing how content happens and we have to start thinking more purposefully about our content and what we’re doing. We can’t just do it. We can’t just ask our colleagues at PayPal who need to get content on the site. They’re used to going to someone, like I said, and just say, “Build this for me.” You know, we’re bots team, you can hand code this. We have to give them a path forward so they can still do what they need to do.
Kate:
But now they need to understand, ah, yeah, I need to do it for this country, but it’s going to translate out to these. There are implications of that. We have to account for the regulations, the differing regulations in those countries. One of the things that I’m really hopeful that the governance framework will capture that we are working on will be how we can do that thinking upstream. And I’ve just realized, Larry, where the perfect mind meld happens. It happens in the content model because when boom, the content model is source already. Because one of the things in the rollout that we’ve done so far for the past 12 months, we did it US first, US English first, and then we started roll out into different languages and different markets and everyone was operating as if it was the old way.
Kate:
So here’s something I want to do and where every market around the world always just did whatever they wanted so they could, you know. And so the first rollout was painful. The second rollout, we did a bit more streamlining upstream. So we did some of that alignment that was necessary. We did it before we hit the authoring and publishing stage. The third wave was slightly better, it’s been a great, great learning and really important lessons are going to feed into this sort of governance framework and we’ll capture it upstream. I happen to be in sort of a slightly unique position because I’m the only content architect working on .com. So I build all of the models that we need and because I’ve got a long history of doing sort of content strategy, but also being that person, being that content manager who has to make the interface in front of me work, I have to publish something on the site. I have to make sure it works.
Kate:
When I build all the models it’s with very much the author in mind because I want to make sure the author is supported because if the author is supported, they have a good authoring experience. We’ll have quality content. Because without a good authoring experience, we can’t have quality content. So as I said, I’m in a unique position to understand not only what the content needs and so therefore build the model, but I’m doing that with the experience of having been that person stuck in front of crummy CMS.
Larry:
Oh, you reminded me when Dean Barker was on I had talking about CMSs a while back and he said, “You know, the main reason I get business is because people hate their CMS.” You know? And to your focus on the authors, it’s like, yeah, maybe let’s start there. But it also kind of harkens to this notion that comes up all the time in these interviews that, you know, there’s a lot of technical stuff and content stuff here, but this is really a people thing. And so much of it is like, you know, and governance is all about helping people understand what they need to do. I’m curious, you talked about, I love your focus on authors, but before that you had said something about, I was inferring some rogue actors maybe in the first implementation of this, that people were still doing it the old way. Did you have to do any convincing, or?
Kate:
Oh well to be fair to them, I mean, we hadn’t done any education. I mean, things move at a crazy speed of light sometimes at PayPal. So our team was like plowing ahead building the CMS pages and then presented to other markets and said, “Hey, so now you’ve got to use these templates and do this.” Which was, you know, not an ideal sort of process. So we really think this is one of our lessons, but that’s sort of normal. It’s like we worked with stakeholders globally and it just took some time to educate and convince. I mean, all of their content and all of their pages are in the CMS. All of them pretty much follow the same rules and standards and guidelines, everything.
Larry:
A question about the content modeling, like when you had this huge bunch of existing marketing pages to work with, was that sort of the genesis of the model you just kind of start there and then structure it based on what’s there.
Kate:
Yeah. The content strategist who had worked on the first batch of pages that we did, I really worked closely with her. I took her content strategy. She had done a you know, this is the job of this, what job this is doing, because I mean she had to write all of the words and she’s highly experienced. So she wrote it in a structured way, which is, you know, Excel, of course this is structured, you know. But there was enough in there to… What has she done? Oh yeah. So she had worked very closely with the UX. We have a really big and strong UX department, design department. So she worked with her design partners. So they called this the reasons to believe, which were the three key points, the hero, all of these. So she got sort of the start of what I would end up naming as various content types. And so I started with that. I started with that and the published content. So I started with her strategy. So which was hugely necessary. I couldn’t have done what I did without having that context.
Larry:
That’s something that’s changed a lot over the last 20 years too. The engaging a UX person in a marketing website – that didn’t used to happen, at least in my experience, so.
Kate:
Yeah. Well we’re all about the journey and making sure people can get to do what they want. So the UX strategists and the content strategists worked hand in glove.
Larry:
Hey Kate, I can’t believe it. We’re already coming up close to time, but before we wrap up, I want to make sure, is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation you want to elaborate on or just anything that’s on your mind about structured content?
Kate:
Only to say I think we are hugely excited about what’s happening. There’s lots going on. I mean one really good example of the benefits of what we’re doing, a few weeks ago with all the horrific things going on in Ukraine, obviously we had to sort of change how PayPal operates in the Ukraine. So in something like three or four days, we managed to spin up, we took down the main Ukraine site and just put up a standalone page where we, and there’s huge machinations in the background to understand what can and can’t we do in Ukraine from a business perspective, but once that was established in sort of about three days we had a page up on the site. Done, published, live and available, and that was done in the CMS.
Kate:
So without the CMS, we would not have been able to do that. It would’ve taken like much, much longer. So that’s just to say hugely exciting stuff is happening and we’re seeing the benefits of it sort of already in that example, like I said, and we are always hiring. So we are definitely looking for more content strategists. And if anyone is interested in content architecture, I’m the only one come and join me.
Larry:
Okay. I’ll make sure I put a link to the PayPal jobs page in the show notes.
Larry:
Hey, and which is also the very last thing I’d like to get, Kate, what’s the best way for folks to stay connected and connect with you online or just stay in touch?
Kate:
I think LinkedIn, I don’t really do Twitter at all. So LinkedIn is best and hopefully you’ll have my link there.
Larry:
Yeah. I’ll include that in the show notes as well. Well, thanks so much Kate, super fun conversation. I really enjoyed this.
Kate:
Cool. Yeah, it was great talking with you. Thank you.
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