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Rachel McConnellIn Rachel McConnell’s world, if content strategy is the engine, then content operations is the oil that keeps it running smoothly.
Rachel leads one of the biggest content operations in the world, a team of 100 content designers and editors at BT, a large communications services company in the UK.
Her team is a mix of content professionals from both UX and publishing backgrounds who work across a variety of products. This gives her plenty of opportunities to optimize their internal systems and plenty of ideas for both formal training programs and informal knowledge sharing.
As her team increases its capabilities and design maturity, they also help raise the digital maturity of the whole company.
Rachel’s bio
Rachel McConnell is a content designer, strategist and consultant who’s used to building and leading content teams. She’s worked with brands such as Deliveroo, M&S, John Lewis and Virgin Holidays and also trains UX professionals in UX writing. She’s currently content strategist at BT and was the content strategy lead for Clearleft. Rachel is the author of “Why You Need A Content Team.”
Follow Rachel online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 93. Rachel McConnell leads a big team of content designers and editors at BT, the huge British communications services company. Her content operations include about 100 folks, spanning UX practice, editorial publishing, and content management. She focuses on creating and optimizing efficient business systems and helps her team members execute on BT’s content strategy with regular trainings as well as structured opportunities for team members to learn from each other.
Interview transcript
Larry Swanson:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 93 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Rachel McConnell. Rachel is a content design manager at BT, and a lot of our listeners are in the U.S. and BT would be like the British version of Cox or Xfinity or any of those big… What is it, like phone, internet? Whatever the batch of services that you provide.
Rachel McConnell:
Yeah, telecoms and broadband. Yeah. Cable, that kind of thing.
Larry:
All that kind of stuff. Welcome, Rachel. Tell the folks a little bit more about what being a content design manager entails.
Rachel:
Thanks, Larry. Yeah. Hi, everybody. I am a content design manager at BT. That means I’m responsible for the content designers within a specific alliance. My alliance, which is a group of triads and squads, they have a particular focus on capability. My role is I specialize in content operations, which means I’m essentially responsible for looking at how the whole of the content team is operating from always a working point of view and also from a process point of view, capability point of view, and helping improve how everybody’s working and how they’re delivering work essentially and improving efficiency and effectivity.
Larry:
Right, and that implies a large organization. How many folks are you… How many content designers do you have there?
Rachel:
Our team is quite big. I’m pretty sure it might be one of the largest content design teams in the UK actually. We have about 99, 100 content people. About 60% of that is content designers and the other 30% are content editors. They’re more like traditional content managers working within the content management system.
Larry:
Great. Content design is one of those fields where… In content strategy in general it seems like everybody comes from some kind of publishing or media background, but in content design you’re as likely to have design-oriented people as you are editorial folks. Are there different considerations when you’re managing a hybrid team like that?
Rachel:
Yeah, definitely. There’s a real sort of divide, I guess, between their skill areas. I would say content designers are more aligned to UX designers in terms of how they think and how they work and their methodologies, whereas the content editors are much more technical. So they’re configuring things in the content management system. They’re looking after the quality. They’re looking after the little details that when they build, make sure that content is findable and accessible. They come at it through different directions, I guess, but their skills complement each other.
Larry:
Interesting. It’s almost that, I’m probably grossly oversimplifying here, but it sounds like the design folks would be like the designers and the editors would be more like the implementation folks who are actually getting the content into the system.
Rachel:
Yeah, exactly. If you want to sort of draw a line down the middle, you’d have, yeah, people doing the design and then people doing the implementation and publishing.
Larry:
Well, that’s one of the many reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because of that unique role that you occupy there. Because I think most places it’s one or the other, like you’re on a content design team and just doing UX-ey stuff, or you’re just on an editorially driven content production thing. You have background in both, right? Is this the first time you’ve put them together like this?
Rachel:
Yeah, I think so. I worked in consultancy with a design consultancy for a while and I was actually doing, I guess, a similar role where I was going into companies, looking at how their teams were operating, seeing where the opportunities were to improve, whether that was ways of working, whether that was processes, whether it was capability. I had a taste for it, I think, in my previous role and then this is the first time where I’m really bringing that together, but also working quite closely with the product design teams within their squads and getting close to the work they’re doing as well. It’s kind of wrapping it all up, I guess, into one in-house role.
Larry:
Right. It’s like the leadership roles I see, like in content design you see the… Well, not in so much leadership but the operational stuff. There’s design ops over there and then there’s content ops over on the editorial side, and you’re sort of a hybrid. For you, as the manager and the analyst, figuring out how to do all of this better, are there new things that you’re doing or new practices that are emerging out of all this?
Rachel:
Yeah. I have one foot in the content team and I have one foot in the design ops team, so I work really closely with the design ops managers as well. They’re learning from me and I’m learning from them, but we do quite a lot together. There’s things that I’m working on them with collectively, things that will benefit both the content team and also the entire design team. Things like how we map peoples’ skills and assess skill gaps, things like meeting frequency and how we reduce some of that meetings and reviews and show and tell. There’s lots of things where there’s overlap between design ops and content ops that we tend to work on together, which is quite interesting actually, and then it gives the role a bit of a broader scope.
Larry:
Were those separate and established practices before you got there? I know those are both kind of new-ish disciplines on their own, and now you’re already mushing them up into this new thing. That’s kind of cool.
Rachel:
Yeah. They did have design ops, but it was very small and recently formed teams, so I joined right at the beginning really. Since I joined, we’ve also brought in research ops, and again, we work very closely together so research ops, design ops and content ops. A lot of the things we’re doing cover the whole of the design team. Yeah, it’s been quite good because we’ve all come in relatively new into these roles so we’re molding the shape of design ops practice as a whole, as we go along, which is actually quite interesting.
Larry:
Nice. For folks who are new, because I think a lot of folks may not even have heard of that term yet, how would you define the scope and just define design ops?
Rachel:
I suppose I always think about it as we are the people that allow the overall strategy to be implemented. I think I described it in one of my blog posts as if the strategies, the engine, we’re the oil that keeps the engine moving. We’re kind of there to remove blockers and barriers that prevent people from delivering on the strategy. It might be something like ways of working. It might be processes. It might be systems. It might be procuring new tools. It might be doing more mentoring and coaching it. It covers a whole realm of things really. Recruitment. We get involved everywhere, I guess, where we might be needed. We sort of parachute in and identify where we’re needed and where those opportunities are.
Larry:
Got it. Hey, I want to mention, and I need to preface this next question with, we all know, everybody in this field knows that it’s mostly about people, a lot about process, a little bit about tools. But we talked earlier about, before in our prep call for this, about on the editorial side you use Adobe Experience Manager, but you have like six instances of it installed around the organization.
Rachel:
Yeah.
Larry:
I’m curious, is there an analogous tools infrastructure on the design ops side?
Rachel:
I don’t think they have anything where it’s so extremely different. We use things like Figma as design tools and Mural and things like that. I think the problem of multiple instances and versions is probably unique to content management. We also have the added complexity of different brands. Say, within BT we have different brands and they’ve all started at different times or been brought into the BT fold at different times and again, they might be slightly different versions, like one of our brands has a slightly different content management system.
Rachel:
I suppose that is a challenge unique to content, and it is an interesting one because if people move from squad to squad, they then have to almost relearn everything they knew. Forget everything you know about this. This is configured completely differently. Yeah, that’s probably a bit of a unique challenge to content, I would say.
Larry:
No, and that’s interesting, what you just described, for any huge organization. You’re constantly acquiring smaller companies or other stuff and having to integrate. Is that how you ended up with all those different tools on the content side?
Rachel:
Yeah. I think with big, large organizations you can often have different tech platforms as well. Your legacy platforms can sometimes determine how that content is managed and where it sits. Again, that’s an added complexity. I think with these large organizations, one thing you can always be certain of is that there will be things changing constantly, like platform updates or people moving or re-org, so it definitely keeps people on their toes.
Rachel:
I’ve actually tried to establish a bit of a working group for all the content editors who work on Adobe Experience Manager. They can actually get together and learn from each other and talk. We’ve got developers that have embedded within that team as well, so they can talk to each other about the functionality or the things that one bit might have that the other bit hasn’t. How can they learn from each other and how can they almost broaden the scope of what they know about the system?
Larry:
I’m wondering now if the whole rationale for your job is driven by that, the fact that you have this ongoing need, and that’s never going to change your stuff. That’s just going to keep being a thing that changes the main thing we can count on nowadays. Is that a huge part of your job, is just accounting for here’s this other whole new system, or here’s this whole new business practice like content design?
Rachel:
Ideally, yeah, I think it would be. Actually, one of the things I’m looking at is more looking at how data comes into the content management system and whether there’s more work that can be done to take some of the manual work away, like how much of that could be automated. Then I think, yeah, I think going forward that would definitely be something that would fall within the remit of content ops would be looking at is this the right platform for us going forward, what’s our long term strategy for content management and that kind of thing, in terms of platforms and processes. It’s really tricky to get your head around because, again, every squad has a slightly different process, from handoff from content design to production and how things go live. Some things are built in-house, some things have offshore development teams. Again, just joining all the dots and understanding how that all fits together is almost like a whole job in itself.
Larry:
Now I’m wondering how those… You said there’s about 60 content designers and 40 of the other content folks. Are they working on the same thing or are those divided up by kind of product design-ey kind of content versus informational web content? Is that a distinction?
Rachel:
They tend to be divided up between part of the customer journey. But then we do have sections of the business that are quite unique. We have a whole section called BT Sport and they’re much more looking at video and editorial content. I would say what they do is more traditional editorial content, which is around promoting a lot of the events like live sport events that we have. Then we also have a help team who, again, are purely focused on looking after our help center, our forums, our communities. Again, they’re more about community management and more editorial content, whereas everybody else is really working on what I would call content design, UX writing. We have a lot of sales and service journeys. There is a bit of a divide, but then the content editors and content designers will work very closely within squads. There’ll be a content designer and a content editor who have buddied up and working on exactly the same part of the journey together.
Larry:
Got it. I’m starting to see this as the latest manifestation of… I think it shows the success that we’re having in integrating content because ultimately the end user doesn’t care about all this stuff that’s going on in the background. You just want to make sure that they get the right stuff at the right time in the context that they’re in. But there is so much happening in the background, like the way you just described that.
Rachel:
Absolutely.
Larry:
I didn’t know BT does, do they actually do sports programming or just air somebody else’s?
Rachel:
Yeah. We have a whole sports channel, BT Sports, which is huge in the UK. We run lots of live events through that, not just on domestic cable platforms, but for pubs and big event venues and things like that. That’s a huge, huge area of our business. Yeah, no there’s loads. It brings a lot of variety to the content roles. I think that’s one of the great things about a big organization with a big content team is if you wanted to, you could be doing six months of product content and then think actually maybe I’d like to move more towards editorial. So you do have opportunities to move around and learn about different areas of business when you’re in a big company. I guess that’s one of the luxuries of big organizations.
Larry:
Oh, it must. This isn’t a recruiting thing for BT, but it sounds like a great place to work. Wow, I really love what they’re doing over there or over there or that kind of programming. There’s opportunities for folks there.
Rachel:
Yeah. We’ve built really strong community of practice. I mean, I guess you have to with a team that size. We run what’s called a content collective, so we have monthly meetups with the whole of the content team and people do show and tells or they talk about things or we have external speakers in. There’s a really nice, strong community of practice there and it makes it much more collaborative in terms of people learning from each other and in terms of peoples’ personal development, because they can go, “Oh, well, I’ve seen that you’re doing that over here. Well, we can learn from that because we’re working on a similar thing.” Or, “Would you like to come to our career?” So there’s lots of sharing and learning that happens within our content community.
Rachel:
I think that’s important when you’ve got mixed capability levels and mixed levels of maturity, because you want people to learn from each other and not be just working in their little silos with their head down. It’s very easy for us to do that, but it doesn’t help people increase their skills, and also just learn about how to more widely share their work. We tend to be not that great as content people at going, “Look at this work we’ve done. It’s great.” You know, so we’re trying to encourage a bit more of that and people actually shouting about their successes.
Larry:
A community of practice, and you have a big enough one that it’s probably super interesting. It’s like some interesting meet up or something, it sounds like to me. But you also mentioned that varying levels of maturity and capabilities across this. Do you have more formal management-ey ways of raising maturity levels or aligning things across these different capabilities?
Rachel:
Yeah. Actually one of the projects I’ve been working on is I’ve been putting together a really comprehensive content design training program. So nine modules, all in all three workshops covering not just content design skills itself, not just the writing itself and the design and the methods, but actually going right from here’s how to work in an agile squad. Here’s what agile is. Here’s how you collaborate. Here’s how you extract your job stories from your research. Here’s how you understand more about your users and your business goals and how they align. Here’s how your content feeds up into your OKRs, here’s how to measure it. Really everything right from the foundations of content design, through to measurement and maintenance of content.
Rachel:
The reason I’ve been putting that together is because, as with any big organization, you’re not necessarily going to get people that have come in from other companies, or even tech companies where they’ve done content design before. Actually some of our team members have moved in from other areas of the business or more traditional content roles, so we want to make sure everybody’s at exactly the same level when it comes to content design. We want to make sure that they’ve all learned to do things in a similar way, but also that they have the confidence to facilitate workshops or say, actually we need to do some empathy mapping here, or actually we need to do some proper journey mapping. Almost take the reins a little bit and lead some of the product managers and product designers through that methodology. I think that can be facilitation and having the confidence to run those things can be quite hard, so giving them a safe environment to practice all that stuff and really upskilling everybody at the same time.
Larry:
I’m really starting to see the cross-fertilization benefits there. To that, in the UX world, that’s routine. You run workshops all the time. You just live in whiteboards and post-its. But editorial people are more like, no, you get a manuscript and you run it through this process and do it. Are you finding an appreciation among the more conventional editorial folks for those things, and vice versa? Are there any things that they’re like… But a lot of designers aren’t really conversant in writing skills and that kind of thing. Is there a nice relationship between those?
Rachel:
Yeah, it’s really interesting to see actually, because what we’ve seen is we’ve seen it more of an organic thing. With people who have maybe not necessarily come from a content design background, I think it’s about that kind of drip feeding them little techniques that can help them. Like, “Oh, have you thought about empathy mapping? Or have you thought about running a conversational design workshop?” and actually getting to adopt some of those little techniques until they build up a bank of them, so they’ve got more and more at their fingertips. We’ve also launched a digital playbook within the design team where we’re putting all those tools and techniques into it and running lunch and learns so we can really say to people, “Okay, come along to this lunch and learn and we’ll teach you about how to do a proper journey map or how to use Figma.” Whatever it is, but we’re kind of just running those as drip feeding this through alongside that more formal training.
Rachel:
The product designers have really, I think, started to understand the value of content design. We’re really lucky because our ratio within our product teams is pretty much one-to-one and all of our product teams have designed content, but you’re really starting to see the effects of that, where product designer will say right early on, “I need your input on this or I need your help on this.” I’ve even had product designers coming to me and asking me to help them with content strategy or run a conversational design workshop for them. The value of content’s really starting to sink in, which is really good to see.
Larry:
Because the value, on the conventional side, we’ve got what, hundreds literally of content management systems we can choose from to implement that kind of thing. On the content design side, the tooling is more like there’s not established ways to sort out the content and sort it separately from the design and technical in the development platforms that it’s operating in. Do you have ways of, I’m thinking of imagining a product content management system. I know there’s a few nascent ones out there, Ditto and Frontitude and Strings, but a lot of people of your organizations of your size have been building their own thing or just have it built into the process. How do you do that there?
Rachel:
Yeah. We tend to co-design your Figma, so the product designer and the content designer will co-design in Figma. They might start off with a more rudimentary wire frame and then move into higher fidelity. I suppose that would be, and I have heard about good plugins where you can extract all that content from Figma directly into a content management system, which I guess is the holy grail. I think at the moment what happens is, yeah, Figma design gets passed on to, if it’s being built within the content management system, the Figma design gets passed on to the content editor who then has to manually enter all that content. I guess the ideal solution is something that’s clever enough to take that content from these designs and automate it. But yeah, we’re not quite there yet.
Rachel:
I think the co-design process works pretty well. I’d say in over 90% of cases is true collaboration between content and design. There’s always a rogue product designer that sticks in place holding a text and then passes it over the fence, but I think that’s probably quite few and far between these days.
Larry:
You said that co-design happens mostly in Figma. And I know that Figma, at least it’s kind of object-based or component-based so you can do something once and have it manifest in different places. That’s a start, but it’s not nothing like… I’ll get on with it because that’s a strong personal interest of mine these days. This ultimately comes back to something that sounds like you’re really good at there, which is this notion of aligning all of your content to the customer on their journey. Because they don’t care about all this stuff that we’re talking about. They just want to get their cable running or their phone or whatever it is they’re working with. Is that a constant awareness there? You as the operations person going, “Yes, these operations are important but it’s important for you as a practitioner to understand that the user doesn’t care.”
Rachel:
Yeah. I think that’s definitely always at the forefront of our minds. We try to, although we’ve got lots of things happening in the background, like putting content design systems together and design systems and all those things that will make the design quicker and more efficient, actually that’s good in a way because it allows us to then focus more on things like research. Then what that means is instead of spending loads of time putting things together in your Figma, actually you’re spending more time upfront doing your formative research and working out, as you say, what the customers really need and what they’re really looking for and less time on the finer details of a button label because it’s already predetermined. It’s definitely one of the things we’re aware of.
Rachel:
I think as the research ops team is gaining maturity as well, one of the things we’re looking to do and we’re doing at the moment is actually making sure that not just product designers, but content designers too, are being properly trained in research. So they’re not as reliant upon researchers to do that work. They can actually take on some of that themselves. So that’d be a real step forward.
Larry:
Yep. You mentioned so much of this is about the people and aligning the people on this. You’ve now mentioned three operations practices there: design ops, content ops and research ops. Do you have a community of practice around operations stuff?
Rachel:
There is broader communities of design ops. There’s only four of us in our team, so we do work pretty closely together, I think, and we work very closely with other capability teams within the business as well. We make sure that all our work aligns to the other capability teams. Essentially we’re all responsible for increasing the design maturity of the design team, but also just the digital maturity of the broader company and making sure that we are helping the rest of the business understand those sorts of techniques that we use within the design team so that they can start becoming much more user-centered and doing user-centered design more broadly.
Rachel:
I suppose we also do a lot of outreach about what’s happening within digital and design, which again is a great part of the job because we get to go out and showcase our practices. That’s always one of the things that we love doing, isn’t it?
Larry:
Exactly. Yeah, the dog and pony show. But how do you do that? You need to demonstrate that effectiveness. What are your metrics or measurements, or how do you gather the data that you need for those conversations about how wonderful we all are?
Rachel:
I think there’s always something that companies need to get better at. We have a really, really small data and analytics team and actually one of the gaps that we do have that we’re addressing for our content design training as well, is how we make content designers much more aware of those metrics. But also not just looking at data, but how do you then extract insights from that data and use that to inform future decisions? I think they’re all very good at coming up with hypothesis and I think they’re all very good at being able to understand what their OKRs are. I think the thing that a lot of the time teams are guilty of, and I’ve been in teams myself and admit this, is that you put that something live and then we don’t always measure it. We don’t always look back and say, how is this performing?
Rachel:
We’ll look at like the key metrics. We’ll look at the things we need to look at, but not the other bits. Actually sometimes when you look at those other bits of data, you get some really, really interesting things that you need to delve into a bit more. That provides a lot more opportunity for optimization. Probably to leverage the most from the experiences we’re creating, we need to get better at spotting those things and extracting more insights from them. I’d probably say there’s a gap in a lot of organizations in respect to that.
Larry:
Yeah. That’s a whole other episode because there’s so much. Just Google Analytics alone sends people down so many wrong rabbit holes, I think.
Rachel:
Yeah. There’s just so much in there and unless you know. I think with all these tools, you have to be looking for something specific. Otherwise you just look at all this data and it’s just absolutely overwhelming. If you’re not the sort of person that likes numbers or likes looking at data, then it’s just automatically, peoples’ brains switch off. I really think you need to know what you’re looking for to use tools like that. It’s the same with Adobe Analytics. You can cut it any way you want. You can get anything you need from it, but you just have to know how. Yeah, it can be very intimidating otherwise.
Larry:
I love it. Sounds like you’re doing a good job of removing the intimidation for your team. We’re coming up on, I can’t believe this. These things always go so quickly, Rachel. We’re already coming up close to time, but I want to give you one last chance. Is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind about content design or content ops or content leadership in general that you want to share with folks before we wrap up?
Rachel:
Yeah, I suppose so. For me, content ops is part of content leadership, but it’s a part that we often forget about because often leadership’s about managing people. It shouldn’t be about managing people, but often that swallows up the majority of peoples’ jobs. That whole people management side can swallow up the ability to have that broader look and be able to look more strategically at how teams are operating and the things that will help you deliver your strategy.
Rachel:
One of the things I want to be looking at next, I guess, is how I can help people more with that, whether it’s another book, whether it’s training. But yeah, I’d really like to just be able to get out there and help people look at those perhaps other elements of leadership that might be missing, particularly in the content world at the moment.
Larry:
I just want to put in a plug for you writing that book, because you’re doing such interesting work there that I would love to see this between two covers because then I wouldn’t have to do an eight-hour episode with you. I could just read the book. One last thing, Rachel. What’s the best place for people to stay in touch with you? Social media or just how our folks would like to connect with you?
Rachel:
Yeah, I’m on Twitter. My Twitter handle is minette_78, so M-I-N-E-T-T-E underscore 78. I’m also on Medium, Rachel McConnell, and LinkedIn. Just again, Rachel.McConnell I think, so just hook up with me any way you like.
Larry:
Great. I’ll put those in the show notes as well. Thanks so much, Rachel. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Rachel:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s been great. Really enjoyed it.
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