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Melinda BelcherAs content design becomes entrenched as a UX design practice, leaders from the craft are beginning to move into design leadership positions.
Melinda Belcher’s ascent to her current design executive management role is an instructive and inspirational story of professional development, creative team leadership, and community building.
We talked about:
- her path to her current role as the head of design for the Freedom and Slate credit card portfolios at JPMorgan Chase
- her history of building content teams in a variety of contexts
- her practice of creating user guides for herself and team members
- the importance of modeling the behavior that you want to see in others
- the differences between content design practice in the New York area versus Silicon Valley
- how she brings creativity into her work in the tightly regulated financial services industry
- her take on the differences between leadership and management and between being in those roles versus being an individual contributor
- the process of her transition from individual contributor to team leader
- her professional pivot from brand and content-marketing content to product content
- a recent panel that she and her colleagues put together in NYC to discuss AI tools
- her prediction that AI will help content designers scale up their work
- how her community work and internal thought leadership helped her get her current designer leadership role
Melinda’s bio
Melinda Belcher likes to build content teams from the ground up. A certified Product Owner, she helped start IBM’s Tokyo Design Studio. A veteran of New York brand and design agencies, Melinda has also built out content teams at Interbrand, frog and Havas. Currently, Melinda heads up Design for the Freedom and Slate credit card portfolios within the Consumer and Community Bank at JPMorgan Chase. In 2018, Melinda co-founded UX Content Design NYC, New York City’s only product content meetup, with Selene De La Cruz. Along with the UXCD-NYC team, Melinda has organized content design meetups at Google, Condé Nast, Mastercard, Capital One, and more.
Connect with Melinda online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 171. Design leadership now is mostly folks who came up through interaction and visual design careers. Melinda Belcher is one of a growing number of design leaders emerging from the content world. The story of her professional development is truly inspirational, whether she’s talking about her proactive immersion into management theory and practice, her creative approach to leading teams, or her commitment to building community, whether in her own company or the broader content profession.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 171 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Melinda Belcher. Melinda’s the head of design for the Freedom and Slate credit card portfolios at JPMorgan Chase. Welcome, Melinda. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Melinda:
Yeah, so I’m currently the head of design, as you mentioned, for Freedom and Slate, which are two of our largest credit card portfolios within the consumer and community bank at JPMorgan Chase. I’ve been with JP for I think about two and a half years at the moment, and I’ve been in a design leadership role for about three months.
Larry:
Nice. And your path to that role is really curious to me. We’ve talked a tiny bit about it, but I would love it if you could just walk through because you have the kind of background that you could easily ended up in one of these principal senior-level content design roles or something like that, but you’re the head of a design department. I think people are going to be curious about how you got there.
Melinda:
Yeah, sure. So like you, I studied journalism in college and actually graduated with a degree in Spanish literature and linguistics. So super useful. Not super useful at the end of the day. So I went into nonprofit. I did a lot of teaching English as a foreign language, English as a second language. I moved into curriculum design and worked for the Girl Scouts of the USA, which is headquartered here in New York where I’ve been since 2001. And on the side, I started doing some freelance work designing websites. Working with a woman in my building sitting side by side next to a designer and figuring out what the website was going to say. Little did I know how lucky I was to have such a collaborative relationship with my design partners then. But that’s kind of how I moved into this work.
Melinda:
I was then hired by Interbrand to handle workshop design for them. I did a lot of brand messaging, frameworks, and trainings. I was their first creative writer, that was my title. And I did a lot of this work as part of larger redesign and rebrand efforts. So a lot of my work included explaining new logo concepts and nomenclature and things like that.
Melinda:
From there, I moved to what I would call design design, Frog Design and VSA probably most notably of the many agencies. I spent about a decade in consulting. And there I was able to design and test content-intensive product experiences. And that’s I think what kind of flipped the script for me. I designed and conducted a paper prototype of a disaster simulation for UNICEF, which was pretty cool. When I was working with IBM, I was sent to Tokyo to help start their design studio there. And our inaugural project was a sales enablement app for salespeople. So that work took me all over the world testing it with users and kind of iterating on their feedback.
Melinda:
I also at that time started dabbling a bit with personalization and I led a taxonomy development program for Salesforce. And from there I moved on to MasterCard where I was their first content design hire and I built the team that Alli Mooney leads today.
Larry:
Oh, I just had Alli on a few episodes ago.
Melinda:
I know.
Larry:
That’s funny. I assumed you knew each other, but that’s funny that I didn’t even… Sorry for not making that connection. Well, that’s interesting. So that pathway especially… Tell me a little bit more about that personalization role at Salesforce and the taxonomy work associated with that because that’s one of those places where a lot of content people often go like, “Oh, I’m really information architect, platform architect kind of stuff.” Was that sort of what happened there?
Melinda:
Yeah. I mean, so I was basically running a program with that one. So I hired a taxonomist and we were sort of both learning as we went, doing all the interviews together and talking to people and sort of creating the ontology together and then adapting that ontology for the way that AEM was structured at the time. So yeah, it was a journey. I learned a lot. I honestly, I didn’t know so much about it as I do now.
Larry:
I don’t think any of us had a school to go to back in the day to learn those things. I think that’s a very common way to learn it all. Well, tell me, you mentioned that project, you built a little team there, hired a taxonomist and got things together. I know we’ve talked a fair amount in the past about your team-building. It seems like that’s a favorite activity of yours. Am I correct to infer that?
Melinda:
It is, yeah. I mean, this is the first role I’ve had where I’ve inherited a team, frankly, at Chase. I’ve built every team that I’ve been on for the most part. And for example, Selene De La Cruz, who you know, was my first hire at MasterCard. And I really find a lot of benefit for everyone in kind of a servant leadership role. I really think that coaching is something I feel strongly about given my years in teaching. I think that explaining things to people and bringing them along and understanding too how they want to stretch and where they want to stretch and what they want to learn, what they want to do with their skillset is really important. And building a team of complementary skillsets and complementary personalities and people who are going to be able to lean on each other and get along can make a very resilient team.
Melinda:
I also think it’s important to think about internally how you function. So my team at the moment, we have a team working agreement and we used Julie Zhuo’s, what is it? She did a guide to you management style (The Making of a Manager), and then she also did a guide to working with me. And you can find all these things on the internet. So we did…
Larry:
I’ll link to that in the show notes, but yeah.
Melinda:
User guides. I’ll send it to you. Yeah, these user guides. And so we created, my team, all these user guides for ourselves. This is who I am, this is how I work, this is how I might annoy you. These are the things that I need in order to get my work done well. And then kind of creating those agreements based on everyone’s essential user guides and knowing these are the things we have in common. These are the places where we differ. This is how we need to start communicating with one another and making time for the connection, that kind of connection, those kinds of discussions, retrospectives, for example, to build resilience within a team. This is how something happened, it wasn’t ideal. What can we do next? How can we do this better moving forward?
Melinda:
And I think that education of the team itself is really important as well as education of stakeholders and the other people that you’re working with in order to understand this is how we work, this is our engagement model, this is who we are. I think that there’s a big push now to say, “You don’t have to educate your stakeholders. People should know by now what content design is and they should be able to respect that.” But that’s just not the case in a lot of enterprise environments specifically. So I think that being able to make time to create the space for internal thought leadership and internal education is very important.
Larry:
That’s really… And I can see it naturally emerging from the way you operate as you build a team that it’s sort of like the expansion of that coaching and education that you’re doing with the team itself. Does it just sort of ripple out from there to the stakeholders you work with?
Melinda:
I think so. I think it’s really important to model the behavior that you want to see in others. So we talked about this before. When we’re starting something, we’re doing product discovery, we’re doing concept testing, we try to get everybody in, everybody in the pool. We’re doing product discovery, let’s set up interviews with our tech partners, with our legal partners. Let’s start to understand some of the constraints that we might face and what the possible workarounds might be. So that way then when they are looking at the first version of a prototype and you’re doing a feature walk with them, they’ve seen it before, they’ve talked to you about this element before, so they understand and have a little context for the questions that you might be asking. It’s not fresh to them.
Melinda:
And what you’re doing then is kind of co-creating with folks rather than socializing the work that you’ve already done. And I think that that’s really important because later when they may have a question about something or they’re working on something that should probably involve content or design, they’ll reach out to you and say, “Hey, let me bring you in on this early. I really appreciated being a part of your process. Why don’t you come and be a part of mine?”
Larry:
Yeah. So even at the highest level, this style in which you tackle a project, that notion of co-creation versus discovery and then building it and then evangelizing it or whatever, that’s great. Is that sort of ensconced in your… It sounds like you have a master plan for how you build a team and run an operation. Is that part of it or is that an accurate way to think about it?
Melinda:
I mean, I like to say we make the best decisions we can with the information that we have. And I think that my journalism background has led me to quickly gather and process information in order to make those decisions. And so when I am building a team, that is something, I move very fast and I understand what needs to happen and who needs to be there. And I try to get the right people in place.
Melinda:
And I think because I run a UX content design meetup here in New York City, co-founded that with Selene, also worked with Alli to put that on at MasterCard a few months ago, that really helps with pipeline and connection, just knowing people and being a part of the community. Also being a part of the community writ large I think is helpful for understanding who’s looking for work. If I post a job on LinkedIn, I get a million pings. So that creates an automatic level of interest that you might not see, which has been really helpful.
Larry:
Right. And I love that… I was mentioning earlier, it feels like things ripple out and it’s rippling out outside of your organization and out into the broader profession as well. Tell me a little… Because I just love that stuff. I helped organize the Content Strategy Seattle meetup for a long time and do a lot of other things like that. Tell me a little bit about how that… Because you started that if I recall correctly, right?
Melinda:
I did, yeah. And it was largely because I wanted to give my team more practice in doing public speaking. And I went to my manager at the time, Karen Pascoe, who has design at Wells Fargo. She’s amazing. And I said, “I want to do this. I want to put on a meetup and I know we need to do some hiring and I think that it’ll be really helpful for us in creating a pipeline for that.” And she said, “Okay.”
Melinda:
So we did a Pecha Kucha, which is 30 seconds, 30 slides. And I made all of my team do it. We got a few volunteers. I think Sophie Tehran was one of them who I think you’ve interviewed, quite a few other folks that I’m forgetting right now. But it was awesome. It was so much fun. And I think that was kind of the beginning of like, “Oh, let’s keep doing this, let’s keep doing this.” And we started to make more friends in the content community in New York, which was also I think just so great to know who the people are that you can call on if you’re trying to hire somebody or that you can text if you have a question.
Larry:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m thinking of the New York landscape too. It’s interesting, it’s not the opposite of Silicon Valley, but it’s much more finance and publishing and media and less the tech side of things. Do you think that gives a different quality, character to the content design community in the New York area?
Melinda:
Oh, I think so. We did an event maybe last year, it was a panel discussion, I love a panel discussion, around dealing with your legal partners in particular with financial content. It was very well-attended. I think it sold out within a week. Because yeah, this is something that’s very real for us. We are certainly in a vertical or verticals that are less design mature, so our challenges are a bit different than folks who live in San Francisco. If you’re working for Lyft or something like that, then you have different challenges. I don’t think that those people don’t have challenges, but our challenges are more around education, they’re around design maturity, they’re around getting a foot in the door. So we’re kind of still where maybe some other folks were 10 years ago.
Larry:
Yeah, that’s really interesting to me because there’s a different kinds of maturity it seems like in those who like the digital, native, first tech startups have a whole different thing, whereas you probably… Do you feel like you came to the game with a little more because a New York City financial institution, that’s probably as governed and well-managed an entity as you’re going to find. Does that change how you operate? When you talk to people at Button or Confab, at Stripe or PayPal or Lyft, do you see a difference in how you operate versus how they do?
Melinda:
I’ll put it this way because I think that this will be… We’re talking about building teams. I think what I look for when I build a team is someone who is comfortable working within constraints and creative enough to figure out how to make good work in spite of those constraints. I like people with a pharma background. I like people who have worked in education. I love people who’ve already been in finance. I think people who work in anything medical. You have this complex subject matter that you need to wrap your head around. You need to explain it in a very clear way. And you’re not going to be allowed to say a bunch of things and you’re going to have to work with legal a lot. So I like finding those types of people because I feel like they are going to automatically come to the table with the expectations of the role and the job that are important for me for them to understand.
Larry:
I’m loving this picture of just that setup, the opportunities that creates, because I think that generic idea of designers working within confines, it’s just you’re forced to be creative. But it sounds like it’s almost that dynamic on steroids in a tightly controlled, even regulated with lawyers looking over your shoulder at every turn. But to still be… Well, tell me, how do you inspire creativity? And because writers and content designers and strategists and all those and other designers want to have that, some kind of creative outlet, how do you balance that in that kind of atmosphere?
Melinda:
Yeah, again, I think this is around community events, working with each other, having time as a team to take a break and kind of take a step back and look at something different like that Pecha Kucha that I was talking about. I just felt like we needed it and I felt like we should do something that would connect us to other folks around us. And it did. It was great. It was something that I think the team needed to bond and also remind themselves how good they are at what they do.
Melinda:
So design challenges, gamestorming, designing workshops is always fun. There’s plenty of ways to bring creativity into the workplace, even if the work itself might feel like it’s not as creative. I would say finding ways to make things happen, finding ways to be the water around the rocks is also super creative. And bringing people into that decision, collaborating around how to solve those problems can be super creative and super fun.
Larry:
I love that image of picturing those constraints as just, you’re just floating down the river and you come to a little bend in a rock and you just navigate your way around it and keep enjoying the scenery.
Larry:
As you talk about leadership, I’m curious, we talked a little bit before we went on the air about the difference between leadership and management and the difference between being in positions of management and leadership versus being an individual contributor. Can you talk a little bit about both how you manage that and how you help people manage the transition between the two?
Melinda:
Yeah, I mean, I think for a large part of one’s career, especially as an IC, you’re kind of focused on experience. I know what I’m doing. I know how to do this. I’ve done this. Or trying new things so that you can get more experience. Like that taxonomy project, I had not done one before and I got to lead that whole thing. I was like, “Wow, I’m learning a lot about taxonomy. How fun is this?” Doing a chatbot, for example. Finding ways to stretch yourself and learn new things, that’s kind of the first piece of anyone’s career, I think, or it should be.
Melinda:
And the second piece in my experience is kind of around influence and understanding how you leverage all that experience to then influence others and make the best work that you can. How do you empower your team to do the best that they can? How do you figure out how to get them to collaborate in the best way possible? How do you create those efficiencies around process? How do you connect the dots for the team in order to help them understand the larger picture? How do you move from this executional focus to this more strategic focus around influencing larger decisions that happen in your organization and surfacing issues that need to be solved versus being given problems to solve?
Larry:
Yeah, just as you’re talking about this, it occurs to me how big and complex an org like JPMorgan, even if you’re ensconced in a, again, a specific credit card product line. You’ve talked a lot about coaching and education and mentoring and modeling for people. Are there any things that have been particularly challenging about being in a… Because you’ve already mentioned the regulatory and legal constraints, and then I’m imagining scale might be an issue as well.
Melinda:
Yeah, it certainly is. And I think my role as a leader is to, like I said, connect the dots. Who’s doing what, where, and how do we become a part of that conversation? Because I don’t know everyone who’s going to be on the marketing team creating things because we have a million different marketing teams doing all kinds of different marketing. So having control over the 360 experience is not something that’s possible for me. But what I can do is understand who else is responsible for servicing emails, for example, or customer support around a certain feature that we’re designing and try to make sure that they have the information that they need to make the best decisions that they can in their role.
Melinda:
So it’s not about me controlling all of that or doing all of that, but making sure that we’re having the right connections and having the right conversations about content that’s being created on behalf of a product that I’m responsible for.
Larry:
Back to your journey into this and your professional development, getting to this point of being so clear about this, how did that go? How long a process was that to get to where… Because you’re clearly just completely comfortable with it now, but I’m going to guess maybe you weren’t like five years ago?
Melinda:
Comfortable with leadership?
Larry:
With the leadership. The way you just described, you can rattle off what needs to happen. And there must’ve been some kind of learning curve before this. You didn’t just walk out of your last IC role and become a perfect manager day one. I’m going to guess, or maybe you did. I don’t know.
Melinda:
I was amazing. What are you talking about? But it was sneaky though because I was managing a team of nine freelancers when I was my first agency role. And I think it just kind of started to happen. And I think I approached it from more of a product management mentality to start, all right, this needs to be done by this time this deadline, whatever. And especially when you have, I think I was across nine different clients at the time. I had 10 folks working with me, all of them on something different. You kind of can’t do a lot more when you’re more than that, when you’re that busy.
Melinda:
But then as I started to assemble teams more myself and start to think about who was going to join the team, who was going to be there, I was like, “Oh, this is important. I need to hire not only for skillsets, but I have to make sure that these people can hang and talk to each other and that there’s a culture fit not just with the folks who are already here on this team, but with the organization writ large.” And that’s I think how I backed into it.
Melinda:
And then I started to do a lot of reading around management. I got a lot of coaching when I was at MasterCard. I have a coach now at JP, which is really lovely. And there’s so many fantastic books. Kim Scott I think is amazing. Radical Candor is one of my favorite books. Her podcast is awesome. I think so many ways that you can educate yourself around management. There’s so much content around it. So I think that that’s kind of how I got as comfortable as I am now.
Larry:
Nice. Hey, you said something just a minute ago, and you mentioned it earlier too, that notion of, you mentioned a pivot to product thinking, and I’m wondering what was the paradigm before product that you were pivoting away from or out of?
Melinda:
Yeah, more like branding, branding and marketing. So I did a lot of content marketing. I did the most interesting academy for Dos Equis, which was featured around helping people become more interesting. What else did I do? Oh, I did the donation redesign. Again, a lot of content marketing, hiring illustrators and photographers and doing video chats and things like that. So done a bunch of that type of work. And I think, when I look now at content leadership roles, a lot of them are just like that on steroids. They’re content marketing roles. Every head of content role is a marketing role. And I just don’t want to do that anymore. I want to make things, I want to see how people react to things. I just feel like that’s kind of where my heart is at the moment.
Larry:
And in that sense, I think you’re a little bit of a microcosm of the craft of content design in particular. It just kind of emerged the last three, four, or five years. And that’s all about product content and product over brand and marketing and technical content and other things like that.
Larry:
Yeah. Something else that we talked about before we went on the air, and I know you can’t talk too much about any specifics at JPMorgan Chase, but I know you hosted a meetup a while back about artificial intelligence and you were looking at some of the generative AI tools like Acrolinx and Writer and stuff. Can you talk a little bit about what led you to create that, put that meetup together and what were the discoveries you made there?
Melinda:
Yeah, I mean, I know Alli talked a little bit about it as well. I think we wanted to do a meetup, and AI has been very much on all of our minds I think as we’re starting to talk to vendors and bring folks in to help us to better scale our content teams with AI. And we wanted to make sure that we had a really good, balanced panel of different folks who are using different kinds of AI tools so that they could talk about their experiences and how AI has helped them. And if we could educate the larger audience around they’re not coming to take your job, they’re coming to make your job better.
Melinda:
I think we’re actually going to have more jobs, not less jobs because of AI and the way that it can help us to not just scale our teams and in-house a lot of work that we currently outsource, but I think it will help us to create new roles. I think everyone’s going to need someone to look after their content and train their AI and do all the whispering and the fine-tuning of those models. Someone’s going to have to do it. So you think about all these places that currently don’t have any roles for content, they’re going to need those going forward. That’s going to mean more jobs for more people, as far as I’m concerned.
Larry:
Yeah, that’s what it feels like. I can picture exactly what you just said unfolding. And I think… Because there’s a lot of concern right now that a lot of executives think they can just replace content people with AI agents, which I don’t think is true.
Melinda:
We’ll see how that goes.
Larry:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. See how that works out. But something, oh, yeah, I took a note to myself. Sorry, I misplaced my note here. But basically the, oh, regarding artificial intelligence, you said something about the exact mechanism by which you might see more employment. I’m trying to picture, I can kind of see you mentioned fine-tuning and prompt engineering and all those specific skills that go into it, but have you seen other avenues for more opportunities for people? I’m thinking I have a friend in Amsterdam who just learned Python, so he can go up and actually get deeper into the agents. I don’t know how many content people are willing to do that. But do you see other things like that, other ways to get a little deeper into that stack of AI tooling?
Melinda:
Yeah, I mean, I think it will help us to demonstrate greater impact, frankly, because we’ll be able to have more scale through AI. And I think that will… More impact means more people understanding what content design is. So the path that UX has taken, most people know what UX is now. I think content strategy and the ability to look after and deploy AI will help. It’ll help us to show that we can do all of this work because we’re not forced to prioritize. So look at all these amazing things we can do and we’re able to unleash all of our power when we’re being able to scale.
Melinda:
I think also as far as job creation, like I said, people are going to need that work. People are going to need someone to come in and help them to figure out how do I deploy this? How do I train this? It takes forever. We’ve been training a model at JP and it has taken a very long time. It doesn’t just ingest your style guide and then spit out a bunch of content. You have to show it what to do and where to do it.
Melinda:
And so I think there’ll be a lot of work going forward too for data scientists or the people who are inclined in that way to train these models to personalize. Frankly, that’s the thing that I think is kind of missing is I want something that’s going to be able to come in and I can feed it a segment and I can say, “It’s this person, they’re doing this thing, they have this comfort level with whatever the subject matter is.” Take them on a journey that they’re going to be comfortable with and give them all the information they need and not any more than that. And if they want more, give them a pathway to go and find that information, but I want you to really curate this path for this particular person and what we know about them.
Larry:
Yeah, the way you just described that, that’s so much like a lot of product content work that’s going on now. It’s not hard to imagine the transition from what a lot of us do now into those kinds of roles. Maybe working a little more closely with engineers it sounds like. Do you think that’ll be a thing going forward?
Melinda:
I think it should be a thing going forward. I mean, I think we should all be working really closely with our engineers and having those conversations day to day.
Larry:
Yeah. Nice. Well, hey, Melinda, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up close to time already. But before we wrap, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation or just want to make sure we talk about before we wrap up?
Melinda:
I didn’t talk about sort of how I came in to a design role and how that happened. So that might be helpful.
Larry:
Yeah.
Melinda:
Right, because I have been in an executive position at MasterCard. I was promoted to vice president before I left there, and then came into an executive role at Chase. And I was kind of looking around and going like, “Well, what happens now? What do I do now?” There’s not a ton of folks at these levels in finance. There’s not a ton of folks who are… There’s not a chief content officer anywhere really who isn’t a marketing person. And I was approached by our chief design officer, Kaaren Hanson, who’s also amazing. And she said, “Hey, well, you were at MasterCard, right?” And I was like, “Right.” And she said, “But you know a lot about credit cards, huh?” It’s like, “I know enough to be dangerous. Yeah.” She was like, “We’ve got a role open. It’s a design role though, but I think you’d be good for it. I think that might be good for you.”
Melinda:
And that’s kind of how all of that happened. And I think that that’s another reason why focusing on internal education and building your community and building your influence and your network within an enterprise, especially one that’s as large as JP, can be very helpful because then people know who you are. When there’s a new opportunity, they reach out to you and they tell you about it. And I think that that’s kind of how a lot of my career opportunities happened for me, including this one.
Larry:
That’s super helpful. And it just bolsters everything you’ve said about the importance of the outreach and the thought leadership and that kind of thing. That’s awesome and I think a great lesson for folks to take home from this. One very last thing, Melinda, what’s the best way for folks to stay in touch if they want to follow you or connect online?
Melinda:
I’m a LinkedIn gal all day.
Larry:
All right. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. Thanks so much, Melinda. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Melinda:
Thank you.
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