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Laurah MwirichiaLaurah Mwirichia is a product-writing enthusiast. She loves her work and wants you to jump into this burgeoning field, too.
Laurah applies her writing skills as a product writer at Square. She loves using words in her design practice there, and she enjoys her collaborations with her product and technical colleagues.
She’s gleaned a lot wisdom in her UX writing career and is eager to share it.
Laurah and I talked about:
- her path to her current role as a product writer at Square
- a look at the ideal and real versions of her job description
- the difference between writing output and overall work productivity
- the importance of collaboration in the product work
- how she learned the meaning of the UX and product term “strings”
- their current use of spreadsheets to manage strings and their evaluation of products like Ditto and Strings to more elegantly manage them
- how organization is half of your job as a UX writer
- her product writing toolkit (which is informed by her history in the startup world, where she was constantly exposed to new SaaS apps): Figma, Notion, Trello, Monday.com, Google Drive, Canva, and a little GitHub
- how she evaluates new tools
- her desire to help other writers make the transition into UX and product writing and tech in general
- the scope of her role at Square – she supports six products, half of which are consumer-facing and the other half internal tools
- the benefits of making friends with developers, designers, and other allied professions outside of work, and of networking and reading in the profession
- the importance for anyone in the modern workplace to build and develop your personal brand
- her desire to see more writers come to the field
Laurah’s Bio
Laurah Mwirichia is a product writer and user experience advocate who loves bringing together the ever-intersecting worlds of copy and design. After several years as a freelance and full-time writer in the NYC startup scene, she discovered her passion for UX writing and never looked back. Laurah is currently a UX writer at Square.
Connect with Laurah on Social Media
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast Intro Transcript
If you’re a copywriter or other creative who is uncertain about whether to pursue a career as a UX writer, Laurah Mwirichia says, “Come on in.” Product writing and UX writing are well-established roles now, and your writing and collaboration skills are in high demand. If you’re not already technically savvy, Laurah shares some tips on how to develop good relationships with software developers and the other folks you’ll work with on a digital product team. She also has some great tips on how to settle into your new UX writing role.
Interview Transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 76 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Laurah Mwirichia. Laurah is a product writer at Square. And I sure hope I pronounced your name correctly.
Laurah:
You did.
Larry:
But welcome, Laurah. Okay, good. Thank you. Welcome, and tell the folks a little bit more about your role at Square and how you came to be there.
Laurah:
Yeah. Hi everyone. I’m Laurah. I’m a product writer at Square, and my path to becoming a product writer was kind of very convoluted, as I’m sure many people’s paths are to getting to where we all are today. I initially started as a social worker, and that was the first part of my career. And after doing that for several years, moved to New York City, worked in freelance writing, worked in content marketing, became a content lead. But most of the companies I worked with were startups, mostly financial tech startups, but also ended up working full-time at a nonfinancial tech startup. And that’s kind of where I got a really good chance to dig deep into UX writing and what that meant to me. And so initially I’d learned about it before, trying to learn what UX was, what is product design, learning the principles. And obviously being a writer, I was like wow, wouldn’t it be super cool if we could just bring these principles into writing. And then I’ve discovered there was a whole thing. And I was like all right. This is cool. I have to become a UX writer. This has to be my next job.
Laurah:
And so when I started my job at a company called Aircall, when I signed up, I was like, “Hey, while I’m here, I’d really love to also explore product writing.” And they said, “Yeah, that sounds good. You’re welcome to try it.” And over my time there, about a year and eight months, I ended up learning a lot about product training. I was basically the only product writer there, and I was able to kind of chip in and consult and work on projects and different problems that the team was working on. And that’s kind of where I really got my start and my experience. And then of course, with the experience of being a writer already, was able to bring that into Square as a product writer. And that’s where I currently am.
Larry:
That’s great. I love that. We have this proliferation of job titles in this field right now. And I think product writer, it’s very closely related to UX writer, but UX writing is concerned strictly with it you’re kind of on a design team, whereas a product writer you’re on a product team. Lot of overlap between those. Depending on how the organization manages those activities, there’s a huge amount of overlap. But just tell me a little bit about what’s the scope of your job or a day-to-day look at it. What’s a typical day in the life of Laurah at Square as a product writer?
Laurah:
Sure. I mean, for me, there’s two things. There’s what I would like my job to be and then what my job actually is, which I think a lot of writers deal with. So when I signed up, I was like yeah, this is going to be great. I’m just going to be doing just UX writing, focused on products. That’s going to be it. But I think my second or third week, I was helping create a landing page for a product and writing the marketing copy of that, and then I was doing some emails. Then I was doing some notifications and editing and auditing some things, some mailers and things like that on top of helping to write copy for the product.
Laurah:
And so what I learned was yes, you come in, but the product team needs a lot more than just someone who’s focusing on the copy on the actual product. And whether for better or worse, there usually is only one writer there to do with it, and you end up kind of absorbing a lot of the other writing roles that really should be for maybe a copywriter or a marketing writer once you’re in the product team because you know a lot about the product. If you’re already working on the copy for the product, you’re already in the product reviews and things like that, when it comes time to market it, or when it comes time to write an email, you kind of have the upper hand because you’ve been working in it for so long.
Laurah:
And so I guess my day-to-day varies. I come in in the morning, and I’m like yeah, today I’m going to work on this product. And then by the middle of the day, I’ve gotten a bunch of Slack messages, and I’m already working on six or seven other things. And then I come back at the end of the day. I’m like oh, wow, look, I only did one line of copy on this entire product. And so there’s just kind of like the push and pull about your job as a product writer, but that’s kind of also finding that middle ground.
Larry:
I want to go to what you just said, that at the end of the day like oh great. There’s one line of copy. But there’s probably… You didn’t just sit there and stare at your keyboard all day. You were probably having conversations. Because I think a lot of writers feel that way, like oh my God, that’s all I got done. But if you could calmly look from outside and look back in and go oh my gosh, we got a lot of work done there. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Laurah:
Yeah, for sure, because it took me a while to get used to the fact that it’s okay that you’ve written one line or one paragraph or whatever because all the thought that goes into that one line or that bit of copy. So maybe you sat down and listened to calls from the designer and the PM interviewing customers. Maybe you’re just kind of reading through notes about things. Maybe you’re looking through what other people in the organization have written. What do our other products look like? So a lot of it is just kind of absorbing a lot of that research and that knowledge and then empathizing with our users, of course, thinking what would they want in this situation? What have they said that they want? What do they definitely not want? And then taking all of that and putting it into the framework of whatever content guidelines you’ve created for the org and making sure that everything you want to do fits into that.
Laurah:
And then for me, I like to run my stuff through Grammarly because I’m really bad at something like passive voice misuse. And so I’m like this is perfect. Now I know what I’m doing. And then Grammarly will be like no, this is too passive. And so then I’ll have to come back to the drawing board, and now that’s when you’re really refining the copy. But the entire process, that will take hours and hours and hours sometimes, depending on how big the project is. And so, yeah, you’re right. It’s tough to just see one line, but there’s a lot of work that went into it.
Larry:
No, I wasn’t being disingenuous, but you perfectly answered it the way I hoped you would. And I think it’s every writer’s… It’s like any task that is like oh, I could’ve done that, any design thing where you look at the Nike logo and go oh yeah, I could’ve done that.
Laurah:
Right.
Larry:
It’s like probably not. And the same thing, that’s just one artifact that was… I don’t know… God knows how many hundreds or thousands of hours of design work to get to that. And so if you end up with one line of good copy at the end of the day, it’s like yeah, it’s just a reflection of all that research that you did or consumed or customers you talked with or just reflecting and trying to empathize with them. So, yeah.
Laurah:
Absolutely.
Larry:
Yeah. But also and one of the things, when we first connected, we connected at the UX Writing Conference a few weeks ago, and I was really struck by how kind of effortless and seamless your collaboration with your colleagues at Square seems. I don’t know. Maybe you were smoothing it over for the presentation, but it sounded like a genuine, good relationship with the designers, developers, and other folks you work with. Can you talk a little bit about how you collaborate and how much of that’s unique to your role at Square and how much of it is just you bringing Laurah to the game?
Laurah:
Yeah, I’d probably say it’s a little bit of both. At least I’d like to think it’s a little bit of both, but I think one thing that’s really important to me when it comes to the collaboration is just how much you can learn from other people and how much that can make your job easier. And I think I’ve told you this before, the strings situation where, for everyone who doesn’t know, I was trying to conduct a content audit, and I was doing it manually. It was taking forever, line by line, every single screen. And finally I was like, I should email a developer. They probably have all this copy somewhere. And so I did. I emailed one of the developers, and she was like, “Yeah, I’ll just pull some strings for you.” And it was like, “What? What is this? What are you saying to me?”
Laurah:
And so she tells me, “Listen. Strings are just like the bits of copy that go into all of the stuff we’re creating. And so just little things like that. So I was able to take this information and go forward and ask other people, “I need this for this product. Can you pull it from me?” and was able to start building those relationships as well, based on things like mutual language. You should be able to understand how they talk, how I talk, and things like that. And so stuff like that can just get you really far in not only your career, but just day-to-day tasks. And so for me, absolutely investing in building good relationships at work is a must.
Larry:
And that example you just gave, I love that because I’m glad you found a kind developer. And it sounds like there’s good people at Square to help you with that because I’ve known a lot of crusty, old programming guys who would’ve said, “It’s called a string.” There’s other ways that could’ve unfolded.
Laurah:
Absolutely.
Larry:
But just that insight that strings are this sort of way of articulating what all that content in a product or maybe about a product is, how do you manage that? It would be pretty inefficient to have to go to a developer every time you have a question about a string and how to get them… Are there ways… Do you use any kind of tool to manage the strings that you work with?
Laurah:
Right now, we’re able to just put it all in Excel and work with it from there. And Excel is great because you can fiddle around with it really, really easily. There’s ways to manipulate everything that’s on there. So that’s what I’m using. But right now there’s actually a product we’re looking at called Strings, and it’s still in beta, I believe. And so we’re still looking at perhaps using that. And what it does is basically pull all of the copy from your product, and you can edit it right in there. And then what it does is it will shoot a little message to GitHub, a full request to the developers, and they can approve it, decline it, send it back, whatever. And what it basically means is that you can just instantly update the code-
Larry:
Interesting.
Laurah:
Yourself. So these are things we’re really looking forward to, and hopefully they happen soon, but not yet. So right now, just good old Excel.
Larry:
Yep. No, and I’ve seen everything from… Remember I have a buddy who’s a UX writer at Alaska Airlines, and he showed me his system, which was just like this huge long text file with… Anyhow, yeah, but it was very organized. It wasn’t just a text file. It was like this sort of well-organized, but list of possible strings. And then the ones that made the cut were bolded, and yeah, there was this whole thing about that. I’ve heard of Ditto. It’s a plugin for Figma, I believe.
Laurah:
Yeah, similar. Yeah, I think they’re pretty similar. I think they are two companies, Ditto and Strings, that are kind of working on this, that I know of. I’m sure there’s definitely way more, but Ditto I think was at the UX Writers Conference as well.
Larry:
Yeah, I think that’s where I heard about that. And a lot of the chatter on Twitter and in social media in general, I gather there’s lots of initiatives out there. I’m sure that Adobe is doing something, and everybody has their ways of doing that. But I think the way you’re doing, from what I gather, is probably the most typical, some kind of a spreadsheet or Airtable or Excel or a Google Sheets, somewhere.
Laurah:
Yeah. That’s what the rest of the UX writers here use as well. And the big thing is organization as a UX writer is half your job. I mean, most of the time, you’re just trying to put things where people can find them, can find them easily. And that just eats up so much time as well. So you’re not always writing. You’re organizing your writing as well.
Larry:
Well, tell me more about that because, well, a quick aside on that. When I met you at the UX Writing Conference, one of the things that came up in the Q and A after your presentation was, “Wow, how’d you do your slides?” And you had just done them in Canva. And I’m like, of course, that would be the way to do slides nowadays. And then you also shared a little bio page, I think, in Notion. So you have the cool new tool set, Notion and Canva. But anyway, tell me more about the toolkit that you operate with. So you have the spreadsheet for managing strings. And what else do you use?
Laurah:
Yeah, sure. I’d just like to say that I blame a little bit of this on my time in the startup world, which you get exposed to so many really cool and innovative products that are coming out, so many SAS products. And so I was always really willing and eager to try all of them. I actually didn’t like Notion when I first started using it, but now I’m a huge fan.
Laurah:
So like I said, so Notion is a really great way to just build an easily navigable, shareable website. And it’s not like a full website, but you can link people to it really easily so if you need anything like that. I use Trello to organize my things into boards. I create my own sprints that way and put like okay, so this is going to be for project A, B, C, and all their projects listed out that are just copy-related. I use monday.com to organize stuff with my team. And some of these are free. Trello is free. Notion is free. I don’t know about monday.com, but I think it might be free for just an individual. And so those are the biggest things I would say I use on a day-to-day basis. And then, of course, Google Drive. Naturally, that’s absolutely important. Canva. I don’t play around in GitHub often or really ever. It’s very intimidating to me. I’m sure I can’t break anything, but I always worry. So I sometimes take a peek, but that’s for the developers.
Larry:
That’s the beauty of GitHub, that whole pull request thing will save people like us because I’m the same way. I just cross my fingers and hope that what I’ve done doesn’t break something. And yeah.
Laurah:
Absolutely. Another thing I love using is on Figma, which is where we do all of our design stuff, I have my own Figma board that’s just called Laurah’s sandbox. And all the different projects are in there in pages. And I can just play around with them as much as I want, and no one else can see them. And then when I’m ready to start actually working on copy that other people want to see and give feedback on, I can just kind of jump back. So don’t be afraid to kind of build your own boards on Figma as well and start playing around on there.
Larry:
That’s great. And another one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is when we were talking during your presentation, and we chatted a little bit after, you just jump right into this stuff too. Like you mentioned Notion and how I kind of had a similar thing that I didn’t quite get it at first, and I’ve slowly kind of dived into it. But it seems like you dive in way quicker, both into the tools like this. Can you tell a little bit about kind of your tool adoption process? How did you pick Monday over Asana or Basecamp?
Laurah:
Yeah, I mean, I think for me, first of all, it’s like I want really, really badly for the tool to be helpful. And I think that’s probably just not probably that good, but I do want the tool to be useful and definitely give it a chance, keep trying it as much as I can. But for example, how we picked Monday over Asana or anything like that, we’re designers, and so we honestly picked the one that we thought could do the job and look the best doing it. And that sounds really, really shallow, but then it’s really not because that’s basically all of our jobs, is to make things look good, make them accessible, make them really easy to understand. And so for us, a design tool also had to be able to do that. So things like Notion, things like Trello, when I pick those tools, I’m like is their UX good? The UX writing in Trello I think is great. I think it’s really hilarious to add a little dog that tells you jokes and things. And so for me, it’s those little things, those little touches that I’m like yes, I want to use your tool because it speaks to me rather than something that’s just cold, but does the job. Yeah, so that’s how we pick them.
Larry:
No, I love that. I just love getting inside of other people’s heads about their process and how those things come together. Another thing that happened, we had sort of a chat between the conference and now about sort of, I mean, your approach is evident just in all the things we’ve talked about to this point, but it seems like you have an almost explicit mission to inspire other people to get into design or UX writing or product writing. Is that actually part of your agenda? I mean-
Laurah:
Yeah. No, absolutely. For me, it’s always been a little bit odd for me that people who are writers have a huge background in writing really struggle or are really hesitant to transition into a different form of writing. For me, I just think if the basics are there, if you know how to do the job, if you know how to write, you’re already a better writer than most people, then you’re more than halfway there. This is just adding things to your toolkit. Me as a UX writer doesn’t mean I can’t still do marketing copy anymore. It doesn’t mean I still can’t build a landing page anymore. You don’t forget what you know how to write. It’s just adding new things.
Laurah:
And so what I see UX writing as, or product training or whatever we’re calling it, is just a new skill set to add to your already existing toolkit, which is the ability to write. And so I’m a huge champion for people getting into this field for a lot of reasons. One, I think it’s so important that we get writers in tech. Tech is really, really struggling for forgetting writers. And I don’t know why. Probably because the writers are a little scared to get into the tech, but they need this. They absolutely need us, and they’re willing to pay us. They’re willing to listen to us. And that’s something that we should really not take for granted and open ourselves up to that and show our importance in the field.
Larry:
Yeah, and thanks for being that way, for being matter of fact about it, because I think there are a lot of writers who, like you just alluded to, have trouble making that transition. But a lot of people are doing it now. And so I really appreciate that you are so matter of fact about it and just like hey, if you can write and there’s this other way of doing it, this other context, great. Come on over. Let’s try it out. And I wanted to ask you. Something you said just a minute ago reminded me that I wanted to ask earlier, how many products do you work on? I know Square must have a lot of different internal products. Are you working on one thing at a time? Or do you support multiple products at Square? How does that work?
Laurah:
Yeah, I mean, ideally I’d love to only work on one or two things, but right now I’m working on I think six different products, three of them which are seller-facing products, so actual things that our customers are using and whatever, but the others are more backend things, emails, processes, dashboards, things like that. And so to me, I feel like that is a lot of things for any writer at all to be working on. I think people really do their best work, especially for me as a writer when you’re really focused on one thing and you hone in on that and you get really good at writing that because you become faster. You’re a much faster writer and you can churn out more things if you’re really focused on one or two, maybe even three things. But when you’re spread out, it gets really hard to compartmentalize every single day, every hour of your day.
Laurah:
And this is, again, why I encourage more people to get into writing or more writers to transition into tech, is because we need you. We are drowning in work. We have way too much work. And we just need more people to come in and kind of help us out here. And so if you’re a writer out there and you’re like, “Well, I don’t know. I’m still..” If you’ve been writing for several years, just learn the basics, learn what you need to do, and then you’re probably good to go. And this is not at all to say that product writing is easy or UX writing is easy because that is not true. There’s absolutely a lot to learn, but you’re in a much better position to learn and learn quickly as a writer than someone who’s never written before. And so that’s my firm belief.
Larry:
No, that makes perfect sense. Do you have any tips for people who haven’t had experience working with designers or development, kind of coders, how to speak their language or kind of cultivate relationships with them? Because that seems really important to your success.
Laurah:
Yeah. I mean, make friends with them outside of work. One really good friend of mine is a designer, and another one is a developer. And so what makes it easy is that you can just kind of have these conversations much more casually and learn a lot of things that you can then take back to work and start building that vocabulary. Another thing is definitely be reading. Be reading on Medium. Medium is amazing. And I don’t just say that because they’re a Twitter-owned company, but they’re an amazing company, and you’re able to learn a lot from there and a lot from people who are already working in the field. So just find some really awesome people on Twitter. Follow them on Medium or find them on LinkedIn and follow them on Medium and just see how they’re talking, see how they’re communicating. Go to meetups. I wish we could still physically go, but now it’s even more accessible. Going to meetups is how you learn a lot of that. And a lot of it is you just absorb it. You know what I mean? No one can explain to you how to “talk and tech”, but it’s something that you have to learn if you’re going to be able to work in tech, and you only learn that, just like with languages, by being there.
Larry:
And like you said, right now, this just occurred to me that we have a unique opportunity. You don’t have to actually jump on the subway or jump in the car to get to the meetup. You can go anywhere. And if you’re a little bit introverted and don’t normally like meetups, this is a lot easier to lurk on a Zoom call or another virtual meetup. So maybe an easier time.
Laurah:
Totally. You can even, yeah, your screen can even be off and you’re mute. No has to see you, but obviously, yeah, try to be seen. But that networking bit is important and building the network and building your own brand. And I think this is a little bit of a holdover from my marketing days, but that is absolutely a huge part of who anyone is in the modern working world ,is learning to build your brand, not only externally, but also internally within where you work. Whether you’re introverted or extroverted, you can always be doing a little something extra, whether it’s sharing your knowledge or whatever it might be, just to kind of keep pushing along and motivating yourself to learn for as long as you’re going.
Larry:
Yep. No, I think you’re right. I think that’s one of the top capabilities that anybody needs nowadays, is that ability to form an impression in other people’s minds about oh, that’s what Laurah is about.
Laurah:
Yeah, absolutely.
Larry:
Laurah, I just noticed these always go so quickly. We’re already coming up close to time, but I always like to make sure before we do a little wrap-up part, is there anything last, anything that’s come up in this conversation or anything just about product writing or UX writing that you want to make sure we talk about today?
Laurah:
Yeah. I mean, I would just say just to reiterate, we really do want more people to be product writers. And a thing that I hear a lot is people are like, “Well, how is it? It’s going to be too hard working with a design team. Designers don’t respect us. Maybe product people don’t respect us. No one knows what we do.” And that’s false because they do know what you do, but you do have to also be willing and able to explain to people that don’t know what you do exactly what you do. And you do that by showing them. And so I would just encourage anyone that’s feeling a little bit maybe demotivated or whatever it might be that it’s okay. You have a huge, huge support group of UX writers around the world. And it’s a real profession, absolutely is, and has been around for a while now. And so just kind of get in there. Don’t be afraid to get your feet wet and show your worth.
Larry:
Great. Well, thanks so much. Yeah, that’s such a great… I just really appreciate your sort of enthusiasm and inspiration about that because it’s often presented as this tough nut to be cracked and this challenge that you got to overcome. You’re just like no, you’re a good writer. Just figure out how to fit in. And there’s plenty of demand for UX writing, and go get ’em. Yeah, I love that.
Laurah:
Absolutely. Yeah, go get ’em is absolutely right.
Larry:
Wait, and one last thing, Laurah, if folks want to follow you on social media or connect, what’s the best way to stay in touch with you?
Laurah:
Sure. For me, you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there. And Medium, some of my old writing is still there. Hopefully will start writing again soon. And then, of course, Twitter. It’s L-M-W-I-R-I-C-H. And that’s it. That’s where I’m at.
Larry:
Okay. And I’ll include those in the show notes as well.
Laurah:
Awesome.
Larry:
Great. Well, thanks so much, Laurah. I really appreciate the conversation. This was a lot of fun.
Laurah:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This was awesome.
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