Vinish Garg: Bringing Product Sense to Content and Design – Episode 198

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Vinish Garg takes a holistic and pragmatic view of the role of content and other crafts in digital product design, using an approach he calls “product sense.”

Content strategy and design are just two of many practices that contribute to the success of any digital product. All digital practitioners justifiably take pride in their individual crafts, but Vinish encourages content, design, and other practitioners to favor product utility over their individual crafts.

We talked about:

• his current work as a content and design strategist
• the content and design conference he organizes in Chandigarh, India, and the product thinking he brings to it
• his take on the concept of “product thinking” in the context of content work
• how he collaborates with design and product partners
• the reverse engineering approach he takes to facilitating cross-functional collaboration
• the concept of “product sense” that he has developed, a neutral, non-practice-specific approach to digital product design
• how craft and practice managers can create incentives to support cross-disciplinary collaboration
• the crucial role in his work of promoting and facilitating conversations
• how focusing on high-level organizational and product goals
• the role of systems thinking in “product sense” thinking
• the importance of continuously learning and evolving your professional thinking
• the role of foundational skills like information architecture in content, design, and product work

Vinish’s bio

Vinish Garg is an independent products consultant who works with product teams on the intersection of UX and design leadership, content design and content strategy leadership, and sometimes product leadership and marketing roles. Vinish works with teams to establish the standards and foundational principles of how we work, and how our standards translate into customer onboarding design, the growth levers, the retention loops, and how our collective intelligence builds sustainable systems. Regardless of the role, Vinish often uses content and design as the foundation of their work.

Vinish owns an international conference in Chandigarh, since 2018 — Outcome Conference. They teach content design (with shades of content strategy, and UX and design practices) as part of the masters program in content strategy, in Graz University, Austria. Vinish has been active on Product Hunt since its early days (January 2014), and has spoken to hundreds of founders worldwide on product and design strategy, onboarding, marketing, and growth. Vinish loves civic design and civic tech, and loves to explore how our navigation and information findability patterns in the physical world have parallels in how we design digital experiences.

Connect with Vinish online

• LinkedIn
• VinishGarg.com (personal website)
• vhite (consultancy)
• Twitter
• Mastadon
• Medium
• Outcome Conference

Resources and references

• Product Sense—and the role of content and design
• Modern design and content systems are flawed
• Learning Organizations—System Thinking
• How content design and content strategy can support system thinking (and the other way around)
• The intersections in our work
• Peter Senge’s talk on system thinking in Aalto University
• The Fifth Discipline

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 198. A number of crafts have to come together to create any digital product. The need in this process to collaborate across functions is well known, as is the importance of being user- and customer-focused. But exactly how you manage the work is unique to every product practice. Vinish Garg brings a fresh approach to his work. His “product sense” method encourages content, design, and product practitioners to favor product utility over their individual crafts.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 198 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Vinish Garg. Vinish is a product consultant. He’s got a strong content background, hence, his appearance on this podcast, but he’s really focused on product lately and consults… it’s sort of the intersection of design, content and product. So welcome, Vinish. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re doing these days.

Vinish:
Thank you so much, Larry. I have been following your work for a while now, and I’m so happy that you thought of me of having me in the series. You have been doing some great work for this industry, not only for content, but for the holistic role of content in digital and technology work.

Vinish:
Of late, I’ve got a contract to work as a content and design strategist in a B2B2C mental health product. It’s not a full-time job, which means that it gives me enough time to spend on my other interests, which could be running a couple of courses and getting involved in community and of keeping an eye on some of the conferences that interests me.
I’ve got a son who is 12 years, who keeps an eye on what I’m doing in NeoBoards and Slack. So there are lots of stuff that I’m doing at home working across streams and projects and conference talks and slides. So that’s how sums up my current schedule matters.

Larry:
Yeah. One thing I want to revisit from that, I know you’re a busy guy, you’re everywhere online, but you also organize a conference. I think you did one last year, anyway. Can you talk a little bit about the conference you organize?

Vinish:
Well, yes. I started in 2019, and I thought of that there are not many design or content and design conferences happening in India. So I thought of to put together something based on my experience of traveling across for different events and conferences. So I took it as a product, to be honest. I mean, I was responsible for its marketability, curating the program and doing everything with the help of a couple of volunteers.

Vinish:
So the goal of conference is to build some education and voice of content and design’s role into digital world in Chandigarh where I am, and in India as a whole, and I call it a success, moderate success. I ran it for a couple of years, maybe three years, then there was pandemic. Then I had it last year. I could invite speakers traveling from outside India, from Bulgaria, Coca-Cola, from Microsoft, and couple of folks from our common contacts in content strategy industry, which is a fine way to give me enough confidence that was doing it pretty well.

Vinish:
But conferences are sometimes not financially viable model as a product, particularly when I was eyeing the goal to build the content and design-wise in India. So I had put together it on a kind of hold to restructure and redesign it on some other model maybe next year or in a couple of years.

Larry:
Cool.

Vinish:
So that was an interesting experience for me.

Larry:
Yeah, and that’s kind of a classic product experience because you said you’d approached it as a product, and then you’ve kind of you validated the idea, you did it, you got some feedback and you’re currently reevaluating, it sounds like.

Larry:
But that’s the reason I really wanted to talk today is about you have this pretty well-developed notion of product thinking, like you do a lot of product work yourself and you’re thoughtful about it and generous about like how do product people work. And content people, we’re adjacent to the design and research and product folks and engineering folks a lot. Tell me a little bit about, I guess, what’s your top-level view of like how do product people think about things differently from content people?

Vinish:
Well, I think we are new to this technology probably product sense or product thinking. But in any case, when we were working as content strategists or maybe tech writers 15 years ago, we were in, in our cases, talking about our user manuals and content help centers as a product, as an independent product. So when we are doing technical content, it was not at all about on the content. We were trying to build some usability guidelines, some findability search experience and so many things. I mean, there was always some element of product sense or product thinking into our technical content or content strategy work.

Vinish:
But that doesn’t mean that content strategy and product thinking are same. There are lots of other notions and sub-practices within product thinking that might be new to content strategists in different ways. For example, product viability, product marketability, product metrics so there are… But we all learn it at work by practice.

Vinish:
For me, the job of content strategist is to, or our design engineer or a designer, is to make or enable the product for whatever their goals are so we are essentially support functions. In fact, I do not see content as a function itself or a design as a function. We are all working together as support functions for each other just to enable the ultimate bottom line that an organization has, whether it’s a for-profit or a nonprofit.

Vinish:
So I’ll give you an example. Many years ago, it often happened that a client would reach out to me to do a white paper or to do a series of blog posts or whatever content ideas they have in their mind for the organization. So in our early discussion, we could quickly figure out that it’s not only the content that makes my job deliverable to them. I need to have some idea and some control and some discussion with the team to have that structure in place, how the content is planned for the right hierarchy of information for the layout, for the experience on the screen, which gave me a kind of foot inside their design teams and product teams, which was not always welcome, to be honest, because they saw me as a content strategist whose job was to plan and write content.

Vinish:
So that’s how I figured it out, and I thought of getting into my job on the intersection of content and design because you enable content to make sense for the organization, for whatever their goals are, only if you work closely with the designers, which also meant that you work closely with and find ways to work closely with the product teams or the engineer roles.

Vinish:
So that’s how I saw my role evolving from, even if they call me content strategist, I rarely care for that title. I mean, a lot of education and advocacy was involved in the whole cycle that, look, my work may not make the best sense for your goals, for whatever goals you are hiring me unless we work collaborately, we work closely with each other and see ourselves supporting each other, rather than seeing each other as an independent unit or function in whatever model we are working on, whether it’s a contract, whether whatever it is. So I mean-

Larry:
That’s super. Yeah.

Vinish:
… important thing is you need to think about what makes a product work, regardless of your role. So I don’t care if I’m reporting to a product marketer or a product manager. That is secondary to me. My job is to make everybody in the team or across the team understand that how we can collectively work together for our own skills, whatever our unified and individual and independent goals are. So I mean, the challenge has been the incentives, how the team’s incentives are designed. So that gave me, that helped me take a seat, foot back and think about it, that why is it that the design teams or the product teams are kind of not always welcoming content people getting really involved at the structure or architecture level.

Larry:
Yep. That’s really- I got to say, that’s super interesting because everything you’re just saying, there’s just ideas popping up like popcorn in my head as you were talking. But that notion that content or design or product or none of those are really in your product thinking, you don’t… And you mentioned the word sense in there. We’ll talk a minute about your “product sense” post on LinkedIn. But that notion of like that it’s not so much about the function as about supporting the product, but I’m curious how like to the extent that as you’re collaborating on these kinds of projects, people are really devoted to their crafts like research or design and content and product management and engineering. How do you reconcile those? How do you help people? Because it makes perfect sense what you just said, but I’m just there must be some details in how you actually get people to adopt that kind of thinking and work more collaboratively.

Vinish:
Well, I generally take the reverse engineering approach. So if our goal is to convert customers, for example, from a SaaS pricing page, then how do you do that? How do you design a SaaS pricing page? If the marketers are designing it, do they have their design sense? And if their designers are designing it, do they have the content sense? And if they do not, it will hurt the conversions goals or it may hurt the onboarding or maybe the account activation time. It may hurt so many parameters and metrics that the content and the product team, maybe design team and marketers have defined as independent functions.

Vinish:
So my job is to bring all of them together and to make them understand that every customer’s onboarding and every conversion is an opportunity for us collectively. And if a customer struggles to fill a form on the sign-up page, on a SaaS pricing page, then it’s a missed opportunity not only for the marketers or designers, we start collective failure.
So that helps me build those conversations that if I am advising something or my associate has a proposal to optimize our SaaS pricing page, sign-up form, for example, it is for everybody’s common mutual benefit and for our common goal, and it’s not tied to any specific function or role or scale. That’s how I can go about it.

Larry:
Right, and it’s all about advancing the customer on their journey to the next thing and meeting your business goals. It’s like classic strategy, balancing those needs as you go. That’s really interesting.

Larry:
I want to get to the specific notion of product sense that you articulated and a lot of what you’ve talked about fits into that. But can you talk specifically about… One of the things I love about that is that it’s sort of like that’s how you get your professional judgment, your gut instincts into the picture, but not just in like a freewheeling way, but in a sort of professional way. Can you talk a little bit about product sense and how that fits into this whole product thinking?

Vinish:
Well, yes, I learned it by a lot of practice. So I would often see that if my team is designing a form, how will they fill the same form? If my team is designing a dashboard, then how much sense it makes to us as designers? So often I would see that somebody in our own organization is struggling to make sense of their dashboard offer form.

Vinish:
So when I say product sense, it means to get into that, get into a neutral perspective, and put our titles and roles aside, and see if we can use that product. Can we make it more usable? So we can make it more usable by making the message clear, by designing it, by the layout, by the structure of information, by positioning it better on the landing pages, for example. We learn it by practice, and I’ve learned a lot from the industry, including yourself, as I said.

Vinish:
I mean, many years ago I started following content and design experts, and then recently product leadership also, who I would follow their writings and talks and interviews and I followed… I mean, Shopify’s Polaris was one of the first design system that I started following, I think it was in 2015, and then the design system by government of UK and many others. So you learn from what are the best practices, what kind of best work is happening around you in the industry, why Slack’s UX writing or UX copy is being discussed as a case study in the product teams so there has to be some merit.

Vinish:
So it’s always best to learn from whatever better or best is happening around you in digital products that we use. Why Stripe is better than, let’s say, Product A or B? Are they selling it better or is the experience better? If the experience is better, then we need to reverse engineer that, why Stripe is better on what kind of criteria. Is it about the timing of message? Is it about the clarity in organization? And then you need to drill it down deeper and then figure it out.

Vinish:
So that’s how you get into that mode that you are not a designer, you’re not a content strategist. You are just a contributor to a product for the product metrics, and your skills are only a means to apply your learnings to make the product work. It could be as simple as designing a signup form, or it could be as complicated as designing a dashboard. That is secondary.

Larry:
Yeah, yeah. I love that… You mentioned earlier the notion of incentives, and now I’m going back to that craft thing of like how managers in each craft can help people stay aligned. Because, again, everything you’re saying makes perfect sense, but there’s often incentives to like when you’re adopting best practices, too. That’s a whole other podcast, at least the way I think about it. But that notion of it’s sort of subsuming your craft to the greater good of the product. That’s basically the idea, right?

Vinish:
Right. Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah.

Vinish:
I mean, I don’t know. I mean, have not worked in big corporations for last 14 years now, but I have some sense of the kind of constraints that content and design teams might have in addition to certain privileges, too, of course. But I often see the discussions that content teams or design teams have their own KPIs against which their work is evaluated. We generally see some discussions where… I mean, we talk about curiosity, how product leadership encourages asking questions in the teams. It could be for the design system documentation, for instance, or it could be usability criteria during discovery sessions.

Vinish:
So there has to be something in our incentives that gives more positive energy to the content strategist, to content practitioners that, okay, it’s okay to ask question. That there is no turf war. It’s okay to step into that designer’s shoe and propose something that might make sense. It’s okay to sit with marketers or with the revenue team to talk about the metrics, which are important for the business even if it is not my job.

Vinish:
So if the organizations can have some kind of incentive systems to encourage people to talk about a certain area, which may not be their primary responsibilities at work that can help them. Of course, they can define some boundaries. They already might have some boundaries in practice. But I think, I get a feeling that people are hesitant for different reasons to open up and ask difficult questions at their work. It could be about security, it could be about reluctance, it could be that they’re not… I don’t know. I mean, it’s complicated, to be honest.

Larry:
Right.

Vinish:
Yes, leadership can at least make some steps. I mean, they can make some arrangements and make people more open to fresh ideas and speak to each other by shedding off their titles and roles, whatever they are.

Larry:
No, that’s the perfect answer to the question, just that notion of like how can leadership create incentives that make that and all the things you just rattled off. Like, well, you have permission to ask questions and explore beyond your boundaries and just that sort of level of permission and curiosity, as you mentioned.

Vinish:
Yeah. I’ll give you an example, a quick one. I was having a discussion with a design systems contributor around three months ago. Their criteria of design system success was adoption and faster shipping and delivery, which we all know who work in designing content system. I was thinking of doing a presentation on design system metrics, so content system metrics in a conference. It was Front Conference in Zurich 2024, which is canceled, unfortunately, a couple of weeks back.

Vinish:
So while preparing for that session, I learned, in fact, I have spoken about it in the past also in local events, that the way we look at design system metrics has been pretty defensive for a while. So when you say that adoption or faster shipping or maybe N number of man-hour saved or woman-hour, or human-hour saved by the success of design system, that doesn’t really guarantee product success. We are just trying to bring efficiency into their operations for your shipping, which is half the purpose.

Vinish:
So if you can find ways to set up some design system success criteria, which directly map with the product metrics, that’s the bottom line for the organization, it could be a better product. The design system could be a more useful and relevant and more meaningful product for the teams. But in that conversation, the massive came out that it’s not simply possible in the organization because that’s not encouraged in that culture for whatever reason.

Vinish:
So there are lots of examples and lots of, I mean, different reasons by which… That’s why I say, generally, many products in the world die because of lack of conversations.

Larry:
I’m sorry, say that again because it…

Vinish:
Many products in the world die because of lack of conversations.

Larry:
Ah.

Vinish:
I can say that.

Larry:
I’m not the one causing that problem. No, but I hear that. And how do you inspire and provoke and inspire conversation, or when can you tell that more conversation is needed?

Vinish:
Well, we reward them for conversations. Okay. So the way I look at the incentives, as we mentioned, we should design our incentive and rewards mechanisms, which encourages opening conversations. That depends on the organization size, whatever could be the incentive. It may not be monetary, of course. It could be in whichever way. It could be aligning or maybe guiding them by a career guide or career coach at work. It could be giving them a subscription to whatever they need at work.

Vinish:
It could be anything. That is secondary whatever the incentives are. The most important point is that we should encourage building those conversations where people are open and free to talk about the foundations and not only the delivery.

Larry:
Yeah. And I love that, the notion of foundations over delivery because that’s a thing you hear among designers and content and other people. Sometimes a criticism levied on product people is they’re just shipping features all the time. But it also seems like if you were involved in that, if your craft was informing that, it’d be a lot easier to understand why that feature is shipping.

Vinish:
So that’s why framing, I mean, we discussed Ha Pham, so they often talk about framing. I think as content strategists, not all of us, many of us are already doing a great job. But I think we can get better in framing, in pitching our bets and proposals and principle in product discussions.

Larry:
Interesting.

Vinish:
It can open new doors for more clear and more relevant or more useful conversations in the teams.

Larry:
Yeah. Again, do you have any good stories there? Because that notion of how you frame things, it seems like a lot of this, like as you go into these new, more… the cross-functional and sort of like not even cross-functional, but non-functional product supporting efforts, how do you frame your involvement, I guess? That’s kind of what you’re getting at, right?

Vinish:
Yeah. So I mean, as I said, I encourage everybody to move out of their functions so we are not designer versus marketer versus content strategists. We are all working towards, let’s say, reducing churn, for example. Let’s say the organization is experiencing 10% churn in last three months, why it is happening, so let’s work on that collectively.

Vinish:
When the customers are stopping to use a product or they are downgrading from a higher plan to a free plan, what could be the reasons? Let’s reverse engineer that. Is it about our promises that may not be accurate versus the product experience? Is it about the series of webinars where marketers are promising something, which may not be the case in the product itself? Is it about the changing behavior or the expectation in the customer’s journey, for example? Or it could be anything. Let’s do some analysis, and let’s sit collectively and figure it out.

Vinish:
When we are working towards that, in that mindset that our job is to reduce churn or our job is to increase retention, for example, then we are not really thinking as a designer or a content strategist.

Larry:
Exactly. So that’s the key to the framing is just the whole point of this conversation that reframing your work in the context of like what are we trying to accomplish as a business here? How are we trying to help our users? Yeah, that’s perfect.

Larry:
A lot of what we’re talking about, there’s two things, I’m just kind of fishing here for two things… It seems like systems thinking and organizational dynamics are both, which are to my mind closely related, and you are working mostly in smaller organizations, but you’re cognizant of what’s going on in bigger enterprises. Do you have a feel for like, because I’ve talked to a number of people lately about systems thinking per se, is that part of the product thinking mindset?

Vinish:
Yes, it is. So I watched Peter Senge’s talk on system thinking in Aalto University so the recording is available on YouTube. I think Peter spoke in Aalto University around in 2014 or ’15. So I read the book, The Fifth Discipline, which is my go-to reference whenever I have some confusion and so it’s an amazing book for anybody who works in digital or technology teams.

Vinish:
I mean, the way I already described how I think about products and product sense or product thinking or my role as content and design practitioner, it has a lot about learning and keeping ourselves evolving for whatever the goals are. So I mean, generally, if somebody says in an organization or the leader thinks that we have set of process and this is what we are going to follow because we have certain ways to work, we have certain belief system that this is how we work, so that kind of sends a signal that they may not be open to learn and evolve with the changing times. They may not be flexible enough.

Vinish:
So my understanding is that you should always be prepared to learn and evolve. And you may not put your learnings into practice. That’s understandable. There may be some constraints, some compliances, some processes that are very strongly baked into your technology, for example. Or there may be other constraints, which is fine. But getting to know the latest or the new practices for how you can elevate your product thinking, or your product metrics and how you see your product success can actually prepare you for something maybe down the line, maybe three months or six months down the line.

Vinish:
So system thinking helps you understand, as I said, when I think outside of the function, that is system thinking, how we are interconnected, how different subsystems in an organizations are interconnected. The foundation is on the intersection of different functions and not within the functions. So the foundation of content and the foundation of design is on the intersection of content and design, likewise for content marketing, design and marketing, sales and marketing.

Vinish:
So if we can serve ourselves as a support function for the intersection of content and design, we’ll invariably end up doing a better job as a content strategist, and same applies to everybody else. I think that’s the premise of system thinking, where you see different subsystems supporting each other on the intersection as it also-

Larry:
That’s perfect. I love that because that’s another back to framing. That’s a great reframing of the way… Like when I think of Donella Meadows’ book about with the tubs and stocks and flows and all that stuff, but thinking more about where the elements, the functions in a system intersect, that that’s where the real impact and action is. Yes. Short answer, yes, you totally answered my question.

Vinish:
Hey, but I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time finish, but before we wrap-
… I know, it always goes way too fast. I can’t control time. I’m sorry.

Larry:
But hey, before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you would like to revisit from the conversation, or just want to share before we wrap up?

Vinish:
Well, I think the way content and design practitioners see their work and put it into practice, there are two high-level approaches to that work, if I can say. One is about the foundation, which may not be shown in the immediate metrics against which you measure your success. The second part is the job for which you get paid for. So there is a trade-off, and the job is to learn how to balance these two.

Vinish:
The trick is to learn how to balance your keen eye on the foundations, which is, to an extent, is served by information architecture. That is the foundation of content design and the digital experiences. That’s how I see the role of IA, to be honest. And IA is very strongly serves as a foundation of system thinking also because when you design a system, IA serves as the foundation to architect their system for the intersections, for whatever our functions are.

Vinish:
So it’s important to keep an eye on the foundation and to keep an eye on the goals, but it’s also important to challenge the boundaries against which you work, if that helps you deliver better work. Then find out your own incentives and your own drive to work and challenge those boundaries, which is very important. Because our ultimate job is not measured by the success of content or success of design, but the success of product.

Larry:
That makes perfect sense. Thanks so much. Oh, and one very last thing. What’s the best way for folks to connect if they want to follow you or connect online?

Vinish:
Well, I’m quite active on LinkedIn and Twitter. I am on Mastodon also sometimes, and I’ll be happy to… I mean, if you have my email address, they can always write me an email. I’m not sure if you can figure it out, my email address from this podcast. And yeah, I’m pretty responsive on LinkedIn. I’m happy to reply to any contact outreach via LinkedIn or Twitter or maybe Mastodon also.

Larry:
Excellent. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. Well, thank you so much, Vinish.

Vinish:
Thanks, Larry. As I said, you are doing amazing work for our industry, holistically, not only for content, and I absolutely love your work, your thoughts. We are a small community who are very friendly and approachable for each other, and I hope you’ll carry on this work.

Larry:
Thanks so much.

Vinish:
Thank you. Thanks, Larry. Bye-bye.