Melanie Seibert: Managing Content Design Teams – Episode 214

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Few people have advanced the craft and management of content design as much as Melanie Seibert. She’s been designing content experiences and managing design teams for more than 25 years. She recently captured the best of her insights in a new book, “Managing Content Design Teams.”

We talked about:

• her work as a content design manager at PayPal and her new book, “Managing Content Design Teams”
• her history of building content design teams
• how the arrival of gen AI may be shifting the focus in the design world from visual design to content design and language
• her many experiences on content-first design teams
• the unique aspects of managing content design teams and helping them cope with the unique professional challenges they face
• how her work reveals and amplifies the unique and important contributions of content design to digital products and experiences
• the lessons learned from the story of how Citibank lost half a billion dollars due to poor content design
• the three main ways she sees the arrival of generative AI affecting content design:
  1. designing products that include AI
  2. the use of AI in content design workflows
  3. ensuring the ability of LLMs to discover product information
• her approach to managing content design teams, in particular her focus on a service and support mindset
• her hope that UX and product leaders listen more closely content designers to learn how they can better support them

Melanie’s bio

Melanie Seibert has worked in tech for over 25 years, including several years managing content and design teams. She built two content design teams from scratch and designed content for companies including Synchrony Bank, Indeed, and PayPal.

Today, she manages a team of content designers who work on PayPal’s websites, and she lives in Virginia.

Connect with Melanie online

• LinkedIn
• Managing Content Design Teams book

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 214. Content design is typically practiced within large teams of visual designers, engineers, and product managers, not all of whom fully appreciate the value of language skills. Melanie Seibert is a pioneering content design leader who has elevated the craft at companies like Indeed and PayPal. She recently captured insights from her 25-year career advocating for the craft and supporting content designers in her book, “Managing Content Design Teams.”

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 214 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show, Melanie Seibert. I’m reviving the show. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been on hiatus for, I don’t know, six or eight months now while I’ve focused on my knowledge graph podcast. But when I learned that Melanie had written a book and that it had been eight years since I last had her on the show, I was like, okay, we got to get her in here. And Melanie’s currently, she’s a UX content design manager at PayPal. She just wrote the book or recently wrote the book, Managing Content Design Teams. So welcome, Melanie. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Melanie:
Thank you. It’s great to see you again. Yes, I work at PayPal now, managing an amazing team of content designers who work on the websites there. We work on paypal.com and Venmo.com. In my career, I had founded and led a couple of content design teams. So one at an agency was a team of five, including me. And then one during my time at Indeed for the enterprise business unit there, which was a team of 12, including myself. And I noticed a lot of things. I learned a lot. I made some mistakes and it gave me a lot of ideas and ways of working that I really preferred. Things that I saw working, things I saw that didn’t work. And so I wanted to get those things out of my head and put it in a book. And so I did. So I wrote this book down and a friend of mine, good friend, edited it for me.

Melanie:
Shout out to Jen Mediano. She’s an amazing editor. And yeah, I self-published it last August and it’s out there. It’s called Managing Content Design Teams. And it’s all of my ideas and a lot of my experiences with managing content design teams. So hopefully other people don’t have to make the same mistakes I did.

Larry:
That’s right. Well, that’s why I do this podcast, is to prevent that from happening. And one of the things we were talking about before we went on the air was like, there’s so many ways we could come into this topic. But one of the things that’s happening right now, people have heard of AI, I’m going to guess at this point and the way it’s disrupting a lot of things and really changing a huge amount of the craft and the practice of content design. But one of the implications of it is this increasing need for cross-disciplinary collaboration, communication, just more and different stakeholders and peers to work with. Can you talk a little bit, did that figure into the genesis of the book?

Melanie:
Yeah, it did. I actually started writing the book before AI and LLMs were such a huge thing like they are now, but yes, it definitely figured in. It’s really interesting because I have a case study in the book from my friend, Rebecca Nguyen, who works at Indeed and works on a LLM based product there. And she’s collaborating, like you mentioned with engineers, product. She’s essentially functioning as a design lead, UX design lead, as a content designer. So as more of these sort of language-based products, language-based models are being incorporated into digital experiences, and I hope that we are going to see more content designers functioning in a lead design role. But yeah, it really highlights something that I think has been going on for a while, which is something that I’ve seen in the industry is a focus on visual design, which is really important and can move the needle for business and can generate revenue.

Melanie:
If you have a highly polished, visually polished product, that’s a good thing. But I’ve kind of seen a focus on that at times to the detriment of content. And you’ll see UX teams with folks who focus on visuals, maybe the ratio is like 20 to one visual to content experts. And I was just noticing I don’t think that works very well. If you talk to the content designers who work in those organizations, even for traditional digital apps and websites and web apps, if you talk to folks who work on those teams, the content designers are stretched, they’re run ragged, the products have issues. And that was part of my motivation for writing this was to let UX and product leaders know like, “Hey, there’s a skillset here. There’s a discipline of content design that can really help you ship much higher quality digital products.” Now with the shift to LLMs, we’re really seeing even more of a hyper focus on the language aspect of the experience.

Melanie:
And so I’m hoping that UX and product leaders and executive leaders and tech companies are coming to realize the importance of the linguistic aspect of the design, the language design versus strictly focusing on visual.

Larry:
Yeah. As you’re talking about that, you’re reminding me of one of the things I’ve discovered, I used to do a podcast on content and AI. And I talked to Rebecca, and I talked to Laura Costantino at Google. I had 40 guests on that show. But one of the things that struck me after that series of conversations was that there’s this kind of abstraction thing that content people are better at because images, not to criticize it, like you said, it’s really important, but that’s like a literal final end artifact to look at. There’s a lot of abstraction that goes into this work and that only increases with the arrival of AI that you’re not only abstracting out … I’ve done a lot of content modeling and trying to figure out how to separate the content from its presentation in those situations. It’s almost like we’re going one more meta level out from that in designing language systems. Does that make sense?

Melanie:
Yeah. Designing the language system to ensure that … Are you thinking of the knowledge graph and the data, that the facts underlying it are accurate? So it’s pulling out and presenting accurate content. I mean, that’s really important.

Larry:
Yeah, there’s both that, but also just abstracting out the practice part of it. Taking what we know, and this does come out of my work in the knowledge graph world, this a huge part of the knowledge management and knowledge engineering world is capturing tacit knowledge and putting it in systems so that you can do stuff with it. And it seems like I know … I talked to a few people on that podcast about that, and I don’t know that any people are actually implementing this yet, but it kind of takes … We’re important, impactful people as content designers, but I think it could take us up a notch to get a one level of abstraction higher where you’re designing the systems that create the language, which is what the language, the generative AI is doing. I don’t know anybody that’s actually … I might be dreaming here, but it seems like content people would be well suited to that kind of work.

Melanie:
Yeah, no, I don’t think you’re totally dreaming. I have seen some conversations online where folks are looking for someone to do something like that. And I think, yeah, content designer, I think is a perfect skillset for setting up a scalable language system where you’re automating content design to some degree. I don’t know where the balance is between having the human touch. How much can you automate before you start seeing a deterioration in quality where you need a human sort of QAing and making sure that the system is actually tuned right and working well. So maybe it’s becoming more of a systems thinking, systems design type of skillset that’s in demand, but I think that would be super fascinating.

Larry:
Yeah, we could have a whole other conversation about that because you’re reminding me of a few things not right now, like the notion of a human in the loop, which is pretty well established across AI practice. But I want to focus on the book because I was so enamored of the book when I heard about it and read it. And there’s many people and you mentioned them. I think Rachel wrote The Forward for your book. Rachel McConnell has written about this, but I really like your perspective on this because I mean, you were first on the podcast eight years ago, and even at that point, you were already an established leader in the field. And one of the things that I can’t remember if we’ve talked about it explicitly then, but it’s come up many times in the podcast since, is this notion of content-first design, and this kind of goes right back to what we were just talking about.

Larry:
It’s like rather than visuals and the portrayal of the information on the page, what’s the information thing that needs to happen here and how do you impart that information? And that’s typically content, right?

Melanie:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I have been really lucky to work in a couple of content-first design processes. Now, my team now, funny enough, I wrote this book and then moved to manage this web team that does work content-first. So that was a really pleasant surprise because I wasn’t aware of too many teams working this way. But back when I was at an agency, I actually had a chance to work on a couple of projects and we had a content first design process. One was a client project for a bank and another one was actually for a network of EV charging network for electric cars. So those were both amazing. Some of the best times in my career where we were able to work as full partners with content design, UX design with more of a visual focus and research. And we generated the content first and we worked on the content.

Melanie:
And I have a process for doing that in the book. Since then, I’ve learned about Object Oriented UX, which I think is a great approach to content modeling essentially, where you’re sketching out the conceptual underpinnings of your product first and you’re sort of mapping the concepts that you’re going to build the product on top of. And that gives you a really great infrastructure then to be able to write your content and eventually test your content. And once you have that, designers love having real content and real structures to be able to design with. So when we’ve been able to work that way, I saw really great results. It was fun. It was interesting. We delivered much higher quality, I felt, designs to our clients. So yeah, I just kind of became obsessed with working that way, but it’s uncommon, I would say, to find teams that actually do work content first, especially in the product world where you’re working on apps, whether it’s mobile apps or web apps.

Melanie:
For some reason, design mindsets are very rarely content first. And so that was one reason I wanted to write about that because I feel like it’s just a really powerful way of working with the team if you can actually work that way.

Larry:
Yeah. And as you’re talking about that, you’re reminding me that so much of how that happens is because we’re figuring out our expertise and how to best leverage those frameworks and things like that emerge. And that notion of that the content-first approach, it hearkens to that sort of advancing where the customer needs to be going, like advancing the intent and the purpose of these apps and all that stuff. And it sort of points to, that’s to me, more of a conceptual and wordy kind of thing than the more visual kind of things, but it also taps into the kind of expertise that content people have. It’s like narrative strategy and storytelling, but also kind of intent around educational or motivational or journey-advancing kind of intents. How much of your approach to management is specifically about managing those particular competencies? Or I guess I’m asking, is there something unique about managing content design people?

Melanie:
Yeah. To me, what’s unique about it … So I’m kind of looking at it from an operational organizational standpoint. What I mean is that content design is unique in that I view it as a vital design function within an organization, a tech company. I don’t know why my voice is doing this, sorry. And it’s so essential to being able to ship good products, but we have a lot of just headwinds in terms of staffing, resourcing. So that is kind of a unique thing. If you talk to content designers, you’ll hear a lot of the same things. If you talk to 10 content designers, probably nine of them are going to say they’re stretched too thin, there aren’t enough content designers, they’re having to run office hours. They don’t feel like they can work the way I described before where they’re a full partner in the design process and fully understanding the problems that they’re asked to solve.

Melanie:
And that leads to frustration, burnout, at least to this anxiety because it’s like, well, I signed off on a content solution, but I didn’t really understand what I was solving. So if it turns out to be wrong, then it’s going to be on me because I said this was my solution. So it’s not a great way to work. And so I think that the way content designers are set up in organization is kind of, I think unique and I hope unique. I had heard the similar stories from technical writers, and I’m hoping that designers and researchers don’t have the same problems, but I don’t know, maybe they do. But to me, in the content design world, that was sort of what I wanted to address and address this book to UX and product leaders to say, “Hey, in case you didn’t realize being able to design with language is actually a foundational design skill that your team needs and you need to have enough people who can do that if you don’t, you’re going to have problems with your product.” So…

Larry:
Yeah. Part of that, advancing our narrative with our colleagues and collaborators, I didn’t know there was an official origin story to this. It comes up in the consulting world all the time that a guy comes in to fix a ship or something and they taps it with a wrench and it works and he goes, “$10,000.” And they go, “What?” Anyhow, but I’ve heard that variations on that kind of version I just heard. I’ve heard millions of times over the years, but I didn’t know there was an actual origin story that which you include in the book. So thank you for that. But can you talk a little bit about how that’s germane to content design?

Melanie:
Yeah, the sort of tapping the hammer idea. Yeah, because I noticed as I was coaching people, these were very highly skilled content designers, but they didn’t have a conviction about how valuable their work was. And they would say, “Well, I don’t know what I actually contribute. I don’t know that it’s that valuable to the team.” And because sometimes the perception might be that it doesn’t take that long to design content. It’s not like we’re fiddling with a corner radius in Figma for eight hours a day or trying to get gradients just right or fonts or things like that.

Melanie:
Immediately, it doesn’t seem as labor intensive as some other specialties like engineering or visual design. So I think that there’s almost an imposter syndrome there where I was hearing content designers unconvinced of their own value to the organization. But then when I looked at the product and their contribution to the product and how much that impacts the business, it was an outsized impact. So I felt like that story was really relevant because it’s like he bills the ship owner $10,000 for tapping a hammer and what is it? It’s like a penny for tapping and $9,999 for knowing where to tap or something. So it’s like you, the content designer, you know where to tap. You have the expertise that is what is bringing value, not necessarily the amount of sweat or time consumed by solving this problem, but the expertise that you bring to it is immensely valuable to the business, especially when you’re talking about a digital experience, which one of the points that I’m trying to make in the book is the digital experience is it delivers so much more value to the business or the organization as a vehicle for communication between the organization and the user than it does as let’s say a visual artifact or a code artifact, even though it is all those things and all those things are important. You need code, you need visuals, you need language, but the exchange of information, semantic information language is, I would say central. So I just really wanted to impress that on people and let them know this is really important.

Larry:
And I love, also you opened the book with an anecdote that shows the opposite. If you don’t have that expertise, can you talk a bit about that Citibank story? I love this story. If you show the value of content design.

Melanie:
Yeah, yeah. I don’t know if everyone knows this story. I mean, sometimes I worry that I tell this story too much because I feel like people know it. But yeah, so there’s an enterprise application called Oracle FlexCube. Citibank was using that application. Now I’ve forgotten what year it was. I want to say it was recent, 2020, 2021. It’s in the book, so I can go back and look. And you can look up the court case, all the details are there. But essentially, because this application was so outdated and poorly designed, three separate people whose job it was at Citibank to approve transactions, so this was their full-time job and they were supposed to be experts in this application, made a mistake that resulted in Citibank essentially losing $500 million and wrongly sending that money to creditors. Some of them didn’t want to give it back.

Melanie:
So they went to court and they ended up getting the money back eventually, but they were fined. The CEO resigned. I mean, there’s tons of articles about this online, so it was super embarrassing. It did damage to their credibility. I mean, I don’t know how to quantify that, but super damaging. And I think the most concerning, disturbing, and poignant thing about this story is the three individuals who were kind of caught in the middle. I don’t even use their names in the book because you can find their names, but it’s like they don’t deserve to be known in connection with a failure, which was really the failure of enterprise software, not a failure of an individual or three individuals. It’s like they were kind of the scapegoats for this problem. So that, I don’t know, as a UX person, the thought of hurting someone, the thought that somebody has to go home at the end of the day and know that they cost their employer $500 million and blame themselves when it was really my fault as the UX person or as the business that made the software, that really gets me.

Melanie:
And that’s why I do UX is because I want people to have a good experience. I want to make their lives their day better, their day easier. I don’t want to complicate it and make it worse. And so that story really just stood out to me. And that was a failure of content design. It was the content primarily that failed and did not tell them what they were doing. So I think that story is extremely powerful. I tell it all the time. And yeah, sorry if people are tired of hearing it, but it’s a classic story of the danger of bad content design.

Larry:
No, and it’s a good reminder, I think, of the importance of conveying the right information in the right moment in high stakes situations like that. And one thing I want to shift gears a little bit, we talked a little bit at the start about AI, but in managing content design teams like anybody managing any kind of team nowadays, you have to consider AI and the arrival of generative AI in particular. How is that manifesting or how does this affect your work as a content design manager and how do you frame things to address it?

Melanie:
Yeah, I’m noticing how AI is impacting our work, and I’ve seen it impacting in primarily three different ways so far. There may be others that emerge, but the first way that I see us working with AI as content designers is the way Rebecca works with it. So you have a business that wants to make a product that has AI or an LLM embedded in it. So since it has an LLM, you need a designer, a UX person who is, and preferably also engineers who are familiar with content and have an expertise in designing content-based experiences or language-based experiences. So that’s one area where you’re designing the product. Another is the … Sorry, I’m blanking. I’m thinking about the third one that I want to go to. But no, the second one is how AI is in our workflows. And everybody’s using ChatGPT, Cloud Perplexity, whatever your LLM of choice is.

Melanie:
If you use an LLM, and I know some people choose not to because there are concerns with that. So whether or not you use AI in your actual work, so as content designers, if someone’s asking me for an error message, am I going to go to an LLM and try to come up with options and brainstorm solutions to that in partnership with an LLM? That’s another way it’s manifesting. And then the third way, which we had talked about is sort of discoverability. So how do we … And since I’m on a web team now, this is something we’ve been talking about is how do we ensure that our web content is understandable and discoverable to the bots, the LLMs that are looking at our content and serving up answers. So are they seeing the pricing on our products? If someone goes to Google and says, how much does it cost to use this specific product? Are they going to get a correct answer? If not, is there something in the way that we designed the content or the content structure on the page that is causing the LLM to misunderstand what we’re doing?

Melanie:
And I mentioned to you, there’s someone working on a book about this that I think is going to be really promising. His name is Tom Cranston from the UK. So keep an eye out for that. But I think this is going to be more of a focus, especially for people who work on content that is just sort of generally available on the web as opposed to behind an authentication layer. I think it’s going to be a big concern. So those are three things that we’re talking about, and we’re still figuring out how we’re doing all of those things. It’s still emerging, but we’re grappling with it right now.

Larry:
Yeah, no, everything is unfolding so quickly. And then the whole … I used to do SEO many years ago and I still follow it and trying to keep up with that stuff now. I don’t envy my old friends there at one bit. Hey, I want to talk about, I want to make sure we get to the point of the book, like managing content design teams, because that’s sort of the meat in the four through six, I think, chapters. Can you talk a little bit about all these things we talked … These are all sort of practice concerns, which is really the focus of this podcast, but management is a practice too. And I’m curious how you manage all of this, your approach.

Melanie:
Yeah, there’s a lot to management. I mean, in the book I talk about hiring, I talk about how to set the content designers on your team up for success, which is an area where I have had successes and failures as a manager where there were times when I would just put someone on a team and say, “Have fun.” And thinking, “Hey, they’re going to figure it out themselves and that doesn’t happen.” So it does help to set norms and expectations with the working team about how content designers need to work preferably as a full partner in the design, or if not, clarify exactly what do they have time for, what meetings should they be in, stuff like that. There’s a content design, like I mentioned, a content-first design process in the book. And there’s also a sprint plan that shows exactly what sort of my ideal content design process looks like and how it embeds into a UX design process with a designer and a researcher and a product manager, as well as engineering.

Melanie:
So how does the team work collaboratively together and how do they time their work so that everybody has a chance to contribute so that, for example, you’re not going into stakeholder reviews and the content designer has not seen the content that happens all the time, has happened a lot to me and way too many times and I would love for it to never happen again. So there’s a lot to managing. And then there’s the part where you just want to basically build trust on your team, be a good manager, over communicate, be transparent, support people. If somebody is struggling on your team, I’ve had folks struggle and they were brilliant people and it’s like, okay, well, maybe they’re not in the right role for them. Is there another role at the company that they could move to? And I’ve had people be successful at doing that.

Melanie:
So management encompasses a lot and encompasses, I think, a mindset and primarily the mindset that I think works is one of service and support. How do I support the team? How do I help them have a good experience at work? Because ultimately it’s about being a good human. And also as a consequence of that or as a side effect of that, they do better work and are more productive and that helps the business as well. So it’s kind of a win-win when you’re a good manager.

Larry:
No, I love that human focus, especially in the age of AI. That’s something that takes a hit now and then on that. But hey, Melanie, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time already, but is there anything last before we wrap up? Anything that you want to revisit from the conversation or just want to make sure that we share before we go?

Melanie:
I guess the idea mainly that just content design is a really important function on a UX team. Listen, I think that UX and product leaders, I would love it if they would listen to their content design teams in terms of what resources are they asking you for, what time are they asking you for and tools and things like that. And I think if you listen and if you allot the appropriate resources to content design, you will definitely see results in your product. You will see a higher quality product. I’m definitely convinced of that. So that’s the main idea that I want people to get out of this, and hopefully it benefits all the content design teams out there.

Larry:
No, I love that. It’s valuable work and deserves support, and I’m assuming that that results in better work across the board.

Melanie:
Yeah, exactly. That’s the

Larry:
Idea. Hey, one very last thing, Melanie, if folks want to follow you or connect online, what’s the best place to find you?

Melanie:
Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty responsive on there. The book is on Amazon. If they would like to read it, if they would like to review it, that would be amazing. Yeah, those are probably the best ways to find me.

Larry:
Excellent. Well, thanks so much, Melanie. It was great to reconnect and thanks so much for writing the book.

Melanie:
Yeah, thank you. It’s great to talk to you again.