Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | TuneIn | RSS
Matt HayesMatt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team.
The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization.
Among the secrets to their success: democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues.
We talked about:
- his work as a Staff Content Designer at LinkedIn
- the impact of the arrival of generative AI
- his take on place for AI in the content-design world
- the democratization of content guidance at LinkedIn
- how they triage content-guidance decision-making at LinkedIn
- how they communicate changes to their content-design guidance to design system staff and other users of the guidance
- an example of typical content design deliberation process
- his take on the differences between IC (individual contributor) roles and management roles, and the role of leadership in both
Matt’s bio
Matt Hayes works as a content designer, currently with LinkedIn where he has led content design for enterprise products, launched their content design guidelines, and kept Post-it Note in business. Previously he has led content design for Deloitte Digital, spoken at several design conferences, and written long-form editorial for outdoor industry publications. Matt enjoys helping product teams solve design problems, mostly through language, and has discussed European cycling with Pablo Escobar’s brother over lunch in Medellin.
Connect with Matt online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 176. The content design team at LinkedIn is small by industry standards, especially when you look at the number of products they support and the size of the overall organization. Matt Hayes and his colleagues have to be truly strategic to ensure that their content work makes the outsized contribution that it must. They do this by democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 176 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to welcome to the show Matt Hayes. Matt is a staff content designer at LinkedIn. Welcome, Matt. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to at LinkedIn these days.
Matt:
Hey, good morning, Larry. Thanks for having me on today. Man, yeah, LinkedIn right now, we are going full bore onto some AI projects. We’re trying to elevate the user experience in general. I’ve been working on the enterprise side mostly, and yeah, just really trying to help people, hire people, hire the best people as quick as possible, and yeah, that’s what we’re working on at LinkedIn right now.
Larry:
Now, we didn’t talk about it in our run-up to the show, but you mentioned AI and all of a sudden I’m like, “Oh, duh. It’s a thing these days.” What’s cooking with AI at LinkedIn, especially as it pertains to content design?
Matt:
Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting time because generative AI is very good at writing very mediocre words. So we have this big, I think across the tech space right now, there’s this big question of how is this going to change word generation basically. Is AI going to be able to do it all for us? Is it going to take over interface content jobs? Is it going to take over blog post writing jobs? Is it going to turn out the exact same thing for every topic and it’s going to be really see-through that it’s generated by AI and no one’s going to want to read it? Are we going to have, on social media sites, are we going to have bots creating posts and then bots writing a response to those bot-created posts and just a general devolution of human interaction? I’m not sure. I don’t have any of these answers, but it’s an exciting time for sure.
Larry:
I hadn’t thought about AI that way. We can all just go home and just watch the bots converse with one another and hopefully still draw a paycheck. Hey, but one of the things, we actually had a chance to work together a couple years ago on word stuff and one of the things that makes me optimistic about the future of humans in the loop in this AI-dominated world is that things like, I’ve not seen a chat agent, ChatGPT or any of the LLMs do, I mean, they’re good at mimicking word stuff, but I don’t see them being really good at the intellectual word nerdery that goes into things like the content design guidance that you provide at LinkedIn. Does AI figure into that at all for you or do you still see content design guidance as a pretty much human thing at this point?
Matt:
Well, I think that the decisions are still very much within the human realm, the way that a professional writer and especially a team of professional writers thinks about all the nuances of different word choices and how those will affect human emotion, thinking about where someone comes into an experience, where we want them to go, what their mental state is, and how we should communicate with them in that moment. I think those nuances at this point are beyond an AI platform. I do think that there’s a space for AI to help with some of the governance, and if we have certain guidelines that we’ve created, I think that there is certainly space for AI to read through all the copy and make sure that we have a consistent word choice for a certain button or something like that. But yeah, I see AI as more of a governance tool as opposed to a decision maker.
Larry:
Yeah, that makes a lot of-
Matt:
Or even a decision collaborator.
Larry:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, especially when you think about the subtleties that underlie the decision making, and I think a lot about what’s the right role for AI, and it’s usually in that sort of the grunt work, reading all the docs and make sure they line up with the guidance. But tell me about, I know you’ve got pretty well-developed content design guidance that you’ve created at LinkedIn, and it’s not just for you all in the content design team. And one of the themes of this podcast is democratization, and I know you’re big on that in your content guidance at LinkedIn. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Matt:
Yeah, sure. So our content design team at LinkedIn is relatively small based on the size of our design team and just the size, the breadth of product that we attempt to have an impact on. So our guidelines are not only for our team of writers, but we also just have to acknowledge that there are a lot of other people at LinkedIn that end up writing something that ends up on the interface, right? And so sometimes that’s a PMM (product marketing manager), frequently that’s designers, it can be engineering or maybe even a PM. One of the things that I like about the LinkedIn culture is that we’re all there to pitch in and so if a project just doesn’t have content design allocated to them, it’s just a reality that other people are going to have to write for that product.
Matt:
So when we wrote the content design guidelines, it was acknowledging that that was a reality of our situation and so I wanted to write them in a way that allowed everyone, whether they were just excited to geek out on words or not, or maybe they just wanted to write quality content, it allowed them to raise the bar on their writing and do it in a way that was approachable for someone that wasn’t a professional writer.
Larry:
And then also I think part of your duties there are working in an enterprise setting, working on the design system and other sort of ways. It sounds like, is that a way to operationalize some of this democratization to throw a whole bunch of syllables in there?
Matt:
Yeah, maybe we can get some acronyms in there too or something, really get me following the sentence. Yeah, so my IC work on the enterprise products has been really helpful in writing these guidelines because I see the gaps. I will be writing copy and I’ll think, “I wonder if we have a standard for this,” or “This is a decision that I’ve made, but now I’m going to need to articulate why I made this decision to stakeholders, to cross-functional partners. It would be really great if there was a guideline that said, ‘This is how we do it at LinkedIn,'” and that would help me articulate that decision easier.
Matt:
So I think they do play off of each other really well because I am able to see, like I said, the gaps. Anything that we don’t have guidelines for will come up in my IC work, and then I’m able to go and bring that to the team and triage. We have a whole process for writing these guidelines. It’s not like, “Oh, on a Tuesday afternoon, Matt decided he needed this guideline so let’s write one.” There’s a whole triage process and team meetings and discussion and make sure that we’re creating high quality guidelines that not only work for one part of the product like enterprise say, but also for everyone else around the product.
Larry:
Yeah. As you talk about that, I’m curious about how you prioritize that queue. You said you have a triage process. How does that look? What gets elevated, I guess?
Matt:
Yeah, I’d say that there are two main priorities that we try and balance. One is how easy will it be to answer this question, and the other is, how important is it to answer this question? Because some questions are really simple and we can knock it out in, I don’t know, 10 minutes of discussion and we’re all in agreement. Maybe we don’t even need 10 minutes of discussion. Maybe I’ll just comment and say, “Hey, this is the guideline that I would recommend,” and everyone gives a thumbs up and we’re like, “Okay, cool.” And so I don’t see any reason for that to sit at the bottom of a list and it’s like, we could have just checked this off and moved forward and yeah, moved on to the next one.
Matt:
The other thing though is priority, or sorry, the other priority is how important it is. Is this something that will affect a really large amount of products that are user facing, that people are looking at? Is it something that would maybe have an accessibility element to it? Is it something that people, if they showed up on LinkedIn, might feel excluded if we have a certain word choice? So that would be something that we would prioritize highly because we want the best experience all over LinkedIn. And so if we can address those issues as quickly as possible, then those will rise to the top also. So it’s those two priorities that we’re trying to balance, and then obviously if it’s something really hard but rarely shows up in the interface or has a very low impact to people’s experience on the interface, then those will get pushed down.
Larry:
Yeah, you’re reminding me, I think the last time we saw each other was in person, was it confab like a year and a half ago? And there were back to back-to-back talks, I think by David Dylan Thomas and Dayana Kibilds on a cognitive load and emotional, I forget. Anyhow, that notion, and I remember having a number of conversations in the hallway there about that we spent a lot of time thinking about how to reduce the cognitive load and the emotional labor of our end users but we have spent traditionally less time internally, and the way you just described that prioritization process, it’s like, if it’s easy, we’re just going to do it. And there, we’re done thinking about it, cognitive load decreased. Is that part of the rationale for that method, do you think?
Matt:
Yeah, I think that with the size of our team, we spend a lot of, maybe not a lot, but we spend time helping non-content designers understand our work. So it’s really easy to be talking with a design leader or a PM or something like that and just say, “Hey, look, we have this content design guideline and it’s been signed off and this is what we’ve all agreed on.” So it’s really easy to just have that conversation and if it’s quantified in a guideline, then we just get to move on.
Matt:
So yeah, not only does it use our cognitive load of making the decision, but it just becomes so much quicker to articulate why that decision was made and move forward. And I think it’s also important for anyone with a design system to acknowledge that it’s a living document. So it’s not like we go into these conversations and we’re like, “Look, it’s a guideline. There’s no questioning it at this point. This is how it has to be. It’s etched in stone.” So if there is pushback, if this is a unique situation, whatever, we’re there to discuss and debate the nuances. But in general, it makes for more efficient communication not only within our team, but also externally when we can say, “Here’s a vetted guideline, this is what we would recommend, unless there’s strong objection to it.”
Larry:
And the way you just said that, I’m reminded of a number of situations I’ve been in where people just want a decision. They almost don’t care what it is, just that the decision is made. So there’s that, but there’s also what you just talked about, the dynamic that things can change over time and there’s legitimate reasons no matter how well-thought-out the original decision was that you might revisit things. How does that show up in the design system? Is it just in documentation or do you do additional communication with the designers and the other folks you’re reaching out to?
Matt:
Yeah, we have done changes to our content design guidelines and we’ve announced them. We were doing it on an annual basis. I think that there’s a line to walk there where there should be some reverence for your guidelines, and also there should be an acknowledgement that they’re able to change, right? So we didn’t want to just be changing these ad hoc, like, “Oh, we saw this other situation, maybe we should change that guideline,” and if that happened and if we started publicizing that, I was concerned that it would just degrade the reliability of our guidelines. And so I wanted to create a cadence for when we would do updates, but make it on a longer timescale so that they, like I said, have some reverence. They’re like, “Oh, this is a guideline. This is how we do it, and if it’s going to change, it takes a long time for that to happen.”
Larry:
Yeah. Now that I think about it, you’ve mentioned a couple of times in this conversation sort of the culture at LinkedIn and how folks operate, but I’m wondering if there’s also, in addition to that, principles from the C-suite or from the other leadership just saying, “Yeah, we’re about X, Y, and Z,” and if that kind of executive guidance informs things at all.
Matt:
I mean, I think any sort of executive presence and guidance informs the culture. I wouldn’t say that we’ve had… I don’t think that that’s weighed into our content design guidelines or the way that we’ve debated them or moved through them much, at least not consciously.
Larry:
Yeah, no, just curious. And hey, the foundation of all that, and I want to return to the word nerdery part of this because it’s just a thing for content designers in general, but the way that manifests day to day, whatever the occasion to visit or revisit a guidance decision, can you walk through an example or two maybe of some particularly sticky or interesting cases where the word choice was maybe a lot of deliberation or maybe even not a lot, but something that was, but also something that maybe had an impact where you immediately saw like, “Oh, yes, that’s definitely a better way of saying that.”
Matt:
Yeah. Let’s see. So we had a discussion about our call to action that lets you… I’m trying to find a way to say this without giving away the decision, but that lets you expand content, that lets you see or view something else, say. So yeah, I think part of the challenge being a content designer at LinkedIn is that, given how long the product has been around, our team is fairly new. I know this happens to a lot of teams on a lot of products. This isn’t unique, but it means that there’s just a lot of legacy content there, and there’s button text that has just been there forever and it’s there because someone wrote a button text one day and just moved on with their life. And then for the next five years, everyone just copied that button and it ended up everywhere. And this was before there was a priority, maybe even before a priority on design, definitely before a priority on content design.
Matt:
So yeah, anyway, we got real deep in the weeds talking about whether that expansion call to action should be “see more,” “view more,” or “show more.” So this was, yeah, we had a lot of debate within the team, these are also all visual words, and so we brought in our accessibility team, our accessibility representative on design, Jeff Zundel, he was super helpful helping us think through that, thinking about whether or not saying a word like see was going to make people feel like their modality of interacting with LinkedIn wasn’t being valued. And that was actually a really interesting part of the conversation because that was something that we were concerned about but through talks with accessibility and research, actual research findings, we found that that wasn’t something that we need to be overly concerned about. So that was cool.
Matt:
And then we also thought about, I see something, I view something, but you show me something. So different people are speaking on each of those. We thought about who is speaking on the LinkedIn interface, how we want to maintain that structure. So yeah, it was such a simple little thing. It was just in our CTAs forever. Oh, another thing that we thought about also I should mention is the character count. On a social media feed, every single character of the interface means something because it leads to truncation of user content. And so just that one extra letter of see being three characters or view and show being four characters was something that we had to debate with the feed team and say, we were advocating for show. We said, “We think this is a better experience and more consistent and just maintains the brand on the interface better.” But then we had other people that were like, “But if we can get one more character of user generated content on the feed instead of truncating at that point,” they saw value there.
Matt:
So a lot of collaboration and discussions around this one, I guess those three words, deciding on one of them, super fun as a content design team to be able to dig into that sort of stuff.
Larry:
Yeah, I’m thinking about that. And now I’m wondering just adjacent to that, have you and the rest of the design team ever articulated the voice? Who’s reading the feed? Are you reading? You kind of alluded to that in your answer. Is it you reading the feed that that’s what guides the language in it, or is the feed being read to you by LinkedIn? Does that make sense? Have you thought about what is the voice of the feed?
Matt:
Yeah, interesting. That was not part of the discussions, and I guess if I responded to that, it would just be my singular viewpoint. So no, that was not part of the discussion. I have my own opinion, but before debating further, I probably shouldn’t say that as a representative.
Larry:
Yeah, no, I won’t get you in hot water, but I’ve been thinking, I’ve spent a lot of time recently with conversation design folks and they’re always thinking about what the agent, does it have a persona or is it just this blank thing? They give more. And I think in that medium, in that channel, it’s more of an issue. I think a social media channel feed is kind of an established thing. I think just that fine-tuning around the language is probably where we’re at with that kind of thing.
Larry:
I want to talk a little bit too about, I know you’ve been, in the time I’ve known you, you’ve been in both IC roles, individual contributor roles and in leadership roles. And you seem to me from the outside, equally comfortable and capable in both. How do you navigate and negotiate that? And do you have a favorite, I guess?
Matt:
Yeah. So since we’re just on the topic of word nerdery, I would like to have a slight rephrase that question. I think that, so I’ve been in IC and I’ve been in management tracks, but I think that there’s space for leadership on both of those. I don’t think that management is the way that you have leadership necessarily. I think that elevating craft and digging into the really tough IC questions is also a way to be a leader, and hopefully there’s a space to be a leader to other ICs as an IC. As a senior IC, you can be the person that other ICs come to. And regardless of level, I would say, you can debate up and down the org chart. I don’t think that matters. You can be like, “Hey, I think X person has a great perspective on this thing,” or we have someone at LinkedIn that comes from a conversational design background, so lean on her for those inputs. I just think that there’s so many opportunities for leadership. And so I just wanted to geek out on that word choice for a moment.
Matt:
But with that in mind, yeah, I think that both of those tracks should inform each other, right? My IC work informs how I think about being a manager. I understand the day-to-day challenges, working with a cross-functional team that isn’t super familiar with working with a content designer and the challenges that that presents in terms of interpersonal dynamic, maybe processes, understanding of deliverables, everything like that. So then when I’ve been on the manager track, I’ve been able to say like, “Oh, okay, well, here’s some things that are really challenging to our IC, to our people doing IC work,” and try and address those from a management track.
Matt:
On the flip side, I can look at, as a manager, I’m like, “Okay, well these are the questions being asked and these are the things that other maybe design management or people on the management side are asking content design managers to weigh in on and to talk about,” and so then when I’m an IC, I try and make sure that my managers have the information that they need to be able to have those conversations in an efficient way. And so, yeah, I’m not saying that I’m perfect at, just because I have an understanding of this. I’m always trying to learn more, too. But I do think that being able to go from one track to the other throughout my career has been really valuable to both sides of it.
Larry:
Yeah, no, and I love having your perspective on that because this comes up all the time in conversation online about that, and I love also that you make the distinction between management and leadership. I think that’s super important.
Larry:
Hey, Matt, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time already, but before we wrap, is there anything last, is there anything that’s come up in the conversation that you want to circle back to or that’s just on your mind about content design that you want to make sure we talk about before we wrap?
Matt:
No, I don’t think there’s anything that’s been, that I’m super excited or that you haven’t asked about. Yeah, so-
Larry:
Wow.
Matt:
I really enjoyed this conversation.
Larry:
So I’ve achieved some kind of interviewing gold star or something, but no, that’s great. Well, that’s cool. And I think, like any meeting, I appreciate giving people a couple minutes back, but hey, there’s one last thing. What’s the best way if folks want to follow you or connect online, what’s the best way to connect?
Matt:
Yeah. Well, I work at LinkedIn so that would be the obvious way to connect with me. I’m on there, Matt Hayes, yeah, on LinkedIn. And I have some portfolio links and stuff like that on there too, if you want to go down the rabbit hole.
Larry:
Nice. Well, thanks so much, Matt. Super fun to catch up.
Matt:
Thank you, Larry. It’s been great talking with you again.
Leave a Reply