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Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep and varied experience to her content design work.
Like all of us, she is pondering how to best use AI in her practice and wrestling with the impacts of layoffs and other change in the content and design professions.
Despite the current challenging business and labor environment, she’s hopeful for the future and offers encouragement to both current and future content designers.
We talked about:
- her current concerns and focus as a content design leader
- the broad-reaching impact of AI on content design, in particular how it can make our jobs more interesting
- her hope that AI may permit her and other human-centered designers to actually spend more time with the humans using the products she works on
- her explorations of the possibilities of AI helping with personalization
- her impressions of the benefits of AI in writing briefs and copy
- how they train AI models on glossaries, tone, and voice
- the paradoxical intersection of the ideas that transparency is crucial when working with AI but also that the boundary line about where to credit GPT for your work is fuzzy
- the unexpected impact of her post last year entitled Why I No Longer Believe in Content Design, which resulted in both support from other content-design leaders but also some criticism that felt unduly harsh and overlooked her deep and diverse professional background
- her encouragement for folks who are job hunting or looking to get into the content-design field
Nicole’s bio
Nicole Michaelis is the Content Design Lead at Wolt/Doordash and runs the Content Rookie pod. She’s into authentic leadership, questioning any best practice, and figuring out how to scale all the benefits of content design across large product orgs, while not losing focus on what really matters: the people who can benefit from the product. She lives in Sweden where she relaxes with all things #nature, pottery and running.
Connect with Nicole online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 180. The field of content design attracts professionals from a variety of backgrounds and brings them together in one of the most cohesive and generous communities that I’ve ever been a part of. As AI sucks the oxygen out of the room and companies discard content talent at an alarming rate, we need all of the camaraderie and generosity that we can muster. Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep professional experience to these challenging times.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode Number 180 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today. Welcome back to the show, Nicole Michaelis. Nicole is one of the best-known content leaders, I think, in the field. She works for a big product company. And welcome, Nicole. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Nicole:
Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me again. It’s been a while, I think. Definitely an episode under the hundreds, so I’m very excited to be back. Yeah, what am I up to these days? So I’m a content design leader at a big product company, like you said, and I generally reflect a lot. And I recently wrote an article about my content design focus areas for the year, because I think it’s really, really important to pick a couple of main focus points so you not get too scattered and too excited about too many different things. And actually, it’s also relatively new to me to be a lead. Originally, when I got this role, I was hired just as a staff content designer. And then after just a couple of weeks, my boss said, “Hey, you have what it takes to lead this discipline here.”
Nicole:
They promoted me to lead. And since then, I’ve been hiring and firing, and budgeting and planning for headcounts. And I also have the privilege and challenge that localization also reports into content design where I work, which also has come with a lot of learnings. So I decided to really try to focus specifically for content design this year on just a couple of things. The first one, of course, being AI. Everyone talks about it. And I’ve also been looking into things, thinking about things. We’ve had a lot of discussions about maybe getting tooling to support content design to help us scale the discipline, but we’ve also been looking into other things where AI can help us. Maybe it’s around generating better briefs. Maybe it’s around figuring out how we can localize things already in a Figma file without having to wait for a later localization step. So that’s definitely something that’s top of mind for me.
Nicole:
Then there’s a couple of other things that are related to process. I think we are in economic times where content design teams really need to look at how to best scale with a smaller amount of resources, and maybe even a smaller amount of people. So that’s definitely something I’m thinking about a lot. And then there were a couple of other points, but the one point I also want to call out here is that I’m very passionate about wanting to be a very thoughtful and authentic leader. And if you follow me anywhere on the internet, you can see that I write a lot. And I also have my podcast, Content Rookie, where I just share a lot of what I’m thinking, of what I’m feeling. And I definitely want my leadership style to be infused with that as well.
Nicole:
And when I first became a lead, I actually struggled finding leadership resources for content designers. I know we have a lot of great content design leaders already out there, and I connected with a lot of them and had great conversations. But I realized that in my role specifically for this product company, where I’m responsible for the part of it that is international, so technically not US-based, it comes with a lot of challenges that I have to think about that maybe content design leaders that are mostly working in English and the US market don’t have to think about. So I really also want to make sure that I can potentially create resources for other content designers looking to get into leadership. That was a very long-winded intro. I hope I covered the most important-
Larry:
No, that’s great. And I love that it wasn’t just a recantation now. Because the reason I invited, when you talked about thoughtful leadership, that’s why I asked you on this. We’ve known each other a long time, and you did this your last podcast episode. I was like, “I got to talk to her again about this.” Because I love that you have your own thing, your own voice, and your own platform. But anyhow, I always want to amplify you and get this stuff out there.
Larry:
But hey, I want to come back, because the first thing, AI, you mentioned that. I feel obligated. Let’s just get that out of the way. We have to talk about it. I’ve actually started a whole other podcast just about that. But when you talk about AI, you seem very pragmatic, curious. And a lot of people, I think there’s a conflation of some of the layoff stuff that’s going on with the arrival of AI. I don’t know if that’s correlation and causation thing there. But anyhow, regardless of that, you just mentioned a couple of use cases for AI. I think the first thing, that’s a generative AI, that’s the thing that’s taken over the world right now. So that idea of just creating content, but you mentioned creating better briefs or things like that. How else are you looking? Where do you see the leverage and the impact opportunities for AI in your little content design operation?
Nicole:
I mean, I think there is potential for AI to help with almost all parts of content design, honestly, including leadership. I just saw an article this morning about how… It was written in a bit of a scandalous way… Some leaders at a company admitted that they use ChatGPT to write all the performance reviews for their direct reports, and that’s technically not allowed, yada, yada, yada. But definitely, that discourse is happening. I think I want to start small. I also teach a lot on the side, and I’ve been teaching a lot of writing, not just content design, but also copywriting, creative writing, effective writing. And so many people come to me and they ask, “Nicole, I really don’t enjoy writing. I’m never happy with my writing. How do I become a better writer?” And I used to spend a lot of resources trying to motivate them, and just build their confidence, because that’s really what it’s about. You’ll become a better writer when you get more confident in how you write.
Nicole:
And I actually think generative AI is great at helping with that step of increasing and building your confidence in your writing, because there’s so exercises you can do. I would often ask students, “Hey, write one paragraph about something you did yesterday.” Or sometimes it’s a more specific question. And then pop that into ChatGPT or another AI, and ask you to just rewrite it in Hemingway’s voice. Or rewrite it in the voice of a 4-year-old, or just play with those different voices. And quickly they’re like, “Wow.” So the small little changes that you see when something that you originally wrote gets changed into another voice, that’s a really great exercise. And it makes people more aware of how they are writing, but also the things they like about their writing, versus what they don’t like about their writing. So I think on the smallest scale, I think it’s great for that, for people to just be less afraid of writing, of creating content and getting that out of the way.
Nicole:
And so to go into that second part of your question where you talked a little bit about “There’s been a lot of layoffs going on; is that connected to AI? Is that not connected to AI? Essentially, will the AI take our job?” I personally don’t think so. I think that AI actually has great, great potential to make us more effective at our jobs, to make our jobs easier. Honestly, I always say I would love for the AI to take my job, because I would like to spend more time doing other things that I find fun, like running or pottery. But of course, we live in capitalism, and we can’t actively want the AI to take our jobs, because we need to get paid.
Nicole:
But I do think there’s great potential for the AI to take away a lot of these repetitive tasks that we maybe don’t enjoy, so we can spend more of the time that we’re paid for on strategic thinking, general thinking, maybe even things like doing market research, spending more time with users. The things that are harder to do for an artificial intelligence that we should be spending more time on, but that are often down-prioritized due to monetary reasons.
Nicole:
Because I do think that eventually, the AIs will be good enough to do a lot of the micro-copywriting that a lot of us UX writers and content designers are still brought on for. And I think that’s good news. So for me, in terms of looking into AI tooling now this year, that’s something I’m focusing on, right? I’m talking to Writer, Acrolinx, and other tooling to figure out, how can we use AI to help us scale microcopy requests? Because it’s really important for us. And specifically, since localization is also part of my team, how can we scale that maybe even across, well, we have over 25 markets, to make sure it’s translated properly, and we can really have that quality assurance all the way back to the English content design that we’re doing? Yeah. I hope that answers the question a little.
Larry:
Yeah, it does. Well, there’s a lot in there, too. Two of the things you mentioned in there triggered things in my mind is one, the notion that this is a business. We’re stuck in capitalism. I mean, there is a creator economy out there. You could become a running or a pottery influencer and do that, but that’s actually a viable thing now. But I think we all love this work too much to do that kind of thing.
Nicole:
Yeah, exactly.
Larry:
But the other thing about that, you mentioned the people stuff. And I think that’s where as AI comes along, I think so much of the fuss coming out of Silicon Valley is just about this imaginary artificial general intelligence that’s almost here that’s going to replace people. And I think there are two things you just said about. One, it’s just another kind of computer, another kind of tooling that can help us and give us more time to do more human stuff.
Nicole:
Yeah.
Larry:
And also, I think keeping people at the forefront, and I think we would all identify as human-centered designers. And I worry that a lot of the AI fuss is getting people AI-focused designers. It’s like, “No.” It’s still people that we’re serving.
Nicole:
Exactly. And that’s exactly the thing, because design is supposed to be human-centered. But when I think back, and over the course of my career, both in-house and as a consultant, I worked with so many, even of the most designed-for companies out there, but the amount of time I actually get to spend with the people, with the users, with people we’re designing for has been very, very limited. Because there has been so much to do with writing microcopy, writing briefs, connecting with stakeholders, keeping everyone up-to-date, showing that impact, documenting. And all of those things are, of course, important.
Nicole:
But here, I definitely think the AI can support us, so we can maybe spend more time with the people we’re actually designing for. And for me, I think that’s key to then the good design, well, of the now, and specifically of the future where then maybe we are going to have more content, because everyone can create halfway decent copy and halfway decent microcopy. But then to really stand out, I think it really comes back to connecting very, very clearly with the people who we actually want to use our products, and really, really nailing what they want to read, to see, to click in that moment.
Larry:
Yeah, no. As you’re saying that, you’re reminding me that I just had a little shudder of the anticipation of the flood of content that’s already starting, and it’s going to just keep coming. And I think about Gerry McGovern and his top task analysis, and the fact that so much of his work has resulted in 90% of the content on a website going away. But that just gets back to, I think, I don’t know about you, friend, but I feel like content strategy is still this foundational thing that underlies or should underlie almost everything we do. And one of those foundational things is balancing user needs and business goals. And it’s like, do users really need all that stuff? But at the same time, when you think about things like personalization or customized recommendation engines and things like that, maybe we do need infinitely more content to address very specific micro…
Nicole:
I think so. And I specifically think it’s interesting, because personalization specifically, or very specifically to what an audience is looking for is something we’re very actively looking into in my current position. And one of the things that has been limiting us is resources, right? Because I don’t have the time with my small content design team to create tone and voice guidelines for 12 different hypothetical audiences. So here, this is definitely an opportunity for if we could get an AI to help us create these faster, to help us test these faster, to help us scale these guidelines specifically then, because that’s often where a large chunk of the work then also happens. I think that would be a great benefit, and we could actually significantly improve the project experience with very specific personalization. I still think when companies talk about personalization these days, it’s still so tied to just, “Oh, when do we show which ad?” Or where maybe we move a button here and there, but still very few companies are very good at personalizing, for example, the look and feel, the tone and voice.
Nicole:
And this, I think, is something that I’m very excited about, and where I definitely think with AI, we can finally get there. And then maybe, I don’t know, if I’m on a certain diet, let’s say I am on keto, or in my case, I’m gluten intolerant, and I log into my food delivery app, it is actually already tailored to me in terms of what it shows me, in terms of the language, in terms of all of those things. And it’s not just another filter I can tap at the top, but it’s like the whole experience is just tailored to that. That’s something I’d love to see. And I think that definitely, AI is the way that we can get there in terms of resourcing.
Larry:
And one of the things you just mentioned, for example, that personalization down to the UI experience, because you can feed a sketch into some of these like ChatGPT now, and it will give you HTML and CSS to render that as a web thing. So it’s not a big leap to picture GPT swarms or agents, swarms or whatever you call these new collections of GPTs that can put that kind of thing together. And the fact that you’re thinking about personalization, because I don’t think a lot of places are. And I think you’re right that almost everything I’ve seen is about personalization has been about marketing and advertising, not so much about user experience personalization. Have you seen examples of it? Are you looking around as you explore your personalization goals?
Nicole:
Yeah, I mean, I’ve not seen examples at a huge, huge scale yet, to be honest. And at least, the way we’re looking at it, for us, it’s one of the main bets. It’s a very, very big thing that goes across the entire company, and it’s a very slow project in that sense. But yeah, I mean, it’s challenging. For me, in the beginning when this whole personalization initiative kicked off, I was the only content designer involved in this, and it was very difficult to really get to the bottom of what are we building? Why are we building it? How are we building it? What are we benchmarking towards? Because there’s not that much you can benchmark towards yet. I mean, we’ve been working on this for months now, but I still feel like there’s still so much further we can go. We have a couple of kickoffs coming up soon where we’re going to talk more also about personalizing the product narrative based on what kind of person you are.
Nicole:
Because usually products, they have one product narrative, and then sometimes you have one for B2C and B2B, but it rarely goes beyond that. But we’re really rethinking, “Maybe the narrative should be different based on who you are.” So that’s something that together with a couple of designers, I’m very eager to explore more. And we already kicked that off a little bit in the last year. And this is definitely something now where AI can help me scale this, because I can write documentation much quicker. I’ve also started using AI for meeting notes. It’s actually so good at that. Saves so much time. It’s really nice. And then to really digest workshops. Also, we try to do a lot of workshops and collaborative work. No one wants to document a workshop after an eight-hour workshop day. You can use AI, and it’s actually really, really good at pulling out the main points, or even to-do listing, things like that. So it’s basically already started to make my day feel more personalized to me.
Larry:
Yeah, well, no, because as Naz Rubina says, we all have 10,000 interns now. They’re not super-bright, they’re just out of college, maybe out of high school, but they can do a lot of stuff. And if you give them the right guidance, you can get a lot of those details taken care of. One thing you just mentioned, because one of my goals in this podcast is, I try to talk to people across all kinds of content practice. And some of that product content personalization of a sort has been happening for decades in the technical support documentation world, with DITA-formatted componentized content management systems. I don’t know exactly, I think it’s a different thing in probably UX product design. But in that world, it’s like, Okay, you have this particular version of this product that was customized for your organization in this way, and there are systems that can do that.
Larry:
So just in terms of the technical implementation of that, I don’t know that it’s been done the exact way that we would need it in a content design context. But anyhow, I’m super-curious about the confluence of other practices now around this. And I think AI is bringing that in, because it can do so many different things. These are large learning models. They know a lot of stuff, and they can bring in a lot of other insight. And when you said, for example, writing briefs, have you compared your personally word-crafted brief versus what a generative AI agent can do?
Nicole:
Yeah, and I think the interesting part here is just for me… I say this in a lot of situations with a lot of different angles… My personal bias is so strong always. I think I write such good briefs. It’s controversial, but I’m very judgmental about other people’s briefs. I’m like, “How bad is this brief? Has no one talked you about to write a good brief? It’s not that hard.” But it’s so funny. Sometimes when I ask the AI to write a brief, I actually think they’re quite good. I think they’re potentially better than mine, because they’re a little bit more neutral.
Nicole:
And even when I write a brief, it’s actually really hard to not, for example, when you’re writing a user research brief, to go in with a very strong personal bias and then design the user test in a way that confirms your bias. But the AI can really help you neutralize all of that. So that’s definitely something that I’ve been using it for, and when I compare it to my briefs and the briefs of the AI. And even the briefs of others, where I think there’s a lot of learning there. So yeah, I definitely think so.
Larry:
Yeah. So you reminded me a couple of things as you was talking there. One of the earliest applications, they weren’t GPTs, but they were, I guess, probably NLP agents. But formulaic journalistic stuff has been done, like sports and financial reporting and things like that. There’ve been tools, AI assistance to do that kind of writing for 6, 8, 10 years. It’s been around a long time. And briefs are in that category, I guess I would say, of well, kind of formulaic, because they’re not to a strict template, I don’t think. But anyhow, I think that kind of gets at the kind of thing that AIs are good at.
What do you think they still need? Well, two things about that. The other thing that occurred to me there is they have to be trained. They’re learning models, and we are the people with the subject matter expertise to train them around writing stuff. Are you getting into that with your explorations of AI?
Nicole:
Yeah, we’re definitely thinking a lot about how to train the AI, specifically when it comes to things like learning our glossaries, tone, and voice. This is now specific to content design. I think the other challenge, of course, is well, safekeeping information. I mean, I think most companies are very aware of this, “Don’t input certain information into the AI.” Some companies don’t want you to use it at all, because they’re so afraid of what will happen. So I think that’s definitely something that we just need to still figure out as we work with it, “What can we input and how?” That’s definitely something.
Nicole:
Then the other thing just is I think it’s really important to be transparent about it. We spent a lot of time over recent months creating guidelines for how to use AI and how to label content that you’ve used AI for, because we want to be transparent there. But then also, I think about the fact before AI, the big shift maybe was Google or search engines, and we don’t label that we’ve used Google to help us understand how to do something or write something. So I do think eventually, this AI transparency will maybe also go away again. But I think in the beginning now, where companies are still it out, I think it’s also still really important to be transparent. I’m also still in a position where I want to be transparent. I want my team to know, “Hey, by the way, AI helped me write this. Just in case it’s total shit, they can’t blame me.” So it’s a little bit awesome.
Larry:
That’s good. You can delegate a lot of stuff to your AI.
Nicole:
Exactly.
Larry:
If it’s crappy, “It wasn’t me. It was a stupid machine.” Yeah, no, that’s great.
Nicole:
I was going to be like, “Who wrote this shitty error message? Oh, sorry. It was the AI.”
Larry:
It was the AI. I hadn’t even thought of that as the CYA GPT. Yeah, that’s too great. Oh, back to transparency. That’s one of the things just in general, just in product, content, you think of the work of everybody from all the work that folks Stephanie Lucas at LinkedIn and the work that Lisa Jennings Young did back when Twitter was a thing. So much of that trust that they work towards is around that notion of transparency. And like you just said, I love that insight that none of us say, “I researched this on Google.” That’s one level, but down to, “Yeah, but ChatGPT helped me draft this or write it.” Have you thought about that threshold of where you might want to attribute?
Nicole:
Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. I actually think it’s going to go away, because like you said, I specifically remember when I was younger and I started working, so many of the people that got impressed with my skills, I always felt got impressed with my skills because I was quick to have answers. But the reason I was quick to have answers is that I’ve always been very eager to learn. So I would just sit down and I would research stuff, and then I would practice it a little bit, and then I would have a good answer. And how much do I credit Google for giving me the resources, and how much credit do I get for actually sitting down and making that effort instead of asking my colleague to give me the answer?
Nicole:
So it’s a little bit there, because even when it comes to using the AI, you need to think about “How much do I credit the AI for producing something I can use, versus me actually learning and knowing how to prompt the AI to give me something useful?” So I think it’s actually very similar starting point. Yet with the AI, we’re much more aware of wanting to be transparent. So I don’t know. I think it’s a very interesting discourse, but my gut feeling tells me that transparency aspect is going to go away eventually, as we get really used to incorporating it.
Larry:
Yeah, because like you said, it’s like nobody would ever think to attribute Google for the research that they’ve done, so that makes sense. I’m really curious, and part of my curiosity around it, too, is around the attribution stuff. If you just go to an LLM and ask it to… I’ve done this… Give me the list of the Top 10 content strategy podcasts and who wrote them, and it’s just gibberish. It’s like it has Rahel Bailey hosting the Content Strategy Insights podcast. And it’s like stuff like that, so you can’t rely on them. So I think it’s important. Anyhow, it’s just really interesting to keep that trail of something like provenance of the idea as we run through these gadgets.
Larry:
But at the same time, you talked earlier in the conversation about your writing, teaching, and coaching. That that’s the worst fear in the world is for any writer, even probably like John Grisham or Barbara Kingsolver, they look at a blank page and go, “Oh, crap, what now?” And you just go, “Oh, I’ll just ask ChatGPT,” and then you’re off. That’s a level you would never attribute, but if you write a whole story with an AI…
Nicole:
Yeah, exactly. No, and I mean, I think when it comes to storytelling specifically, the AI, by the way, is still not really there. Or maybe I am not good enough at prompting it yet, so I’m not too worried about that yet. I’ll be honest, I really mostly used AI for very work-related things. I do a lot of creative writing on the side still, and I haven’t used AI for that yet. Maybe. Maybe I’m not seeing it yet.
Larry:
Yeah, no, I had a guest on the AI podcast who one of the ways he prototyped his work and tested things out was by using AI to write bedtime stories for his kid.
Nicole:
That’s pretty good.
Larry:
And then I just saw a social media post disparaging that very practice the other day. Anyhow, that’s not very kind. But that reminds me of something we talked about before we went on the air. There’s been a couple of incidents, and I don’t want to talk in specifics about any of this stuff, but I do want to talk about, and back to transparency as well. We’re both quite transparent about our operation in this field, in this world. And there’s been things like people calling other people out at conferences, or people making assumptions about things in the field because of just stuff you read on social media. Sorry for vague posting about this, but I wanted to talk just in general about being kind and considerate and professional to one another, as we share all this kind of stuff. Because I think AI is just going to introduce, I think, another level of snarkiness is one of my concerns. Can you talk a little bit about that, your thoughts around that?
Nicole:
Yeah. I mean, I think we can even be specific, at least in my case. I know you are mostly referring to other things now, but I have a very specific example. Last year, sometime I posted an article that I didn’t think was going to go viral the way it did, which was titled Why I No Longer Believe in Content Design. Which is funny, because I posted that just a couple of months after becoming a content design lead officially for the first time in my career. And most people totally understood this article for what it was, which was calling out some of the issues we have in the field that we are still struggling to solve and address properly. And the main reason I wanted to write about it was to show people, “Hey, you’re not alone.”
Nicole:
Because of the podcast I run, I get a lot of messages every week from people who are so sad. They’re just like, “I feel like I’ve been trying so hard, but maybe I’m not trying hard enough. They don’t see my work. I can’t get them to set up content design metrics. I’m worried about my job,” was of course, becoming more and more part of that narrative as the layoffs kept happening. So the main reason I wanted to write this was to confirm, “Hey, yeah, this is real. We’re all going through it, or a lot of us are going through it. And I think it’s important that we talk about it.” I was really happy because that article got a lot of people to read it that were actually in design leadership that reached out, and that we’re very grateful that someone put it down that way so they could be more supportive of their content designers. In that way, I think it has had some great impact.
Nicole:
For me personally, the impact wasn’t so great, because there were a couple of people in the industry that got pretty pissed off at this article that felt like I was shit-talking content design. There were some seamy personal attacks. I mean, the funny thing is no one actively attacked me, but there was a lot of debate and discourse happening on various social media platforms and podcasts talking about the article and me, without asking me for my opinion, but just with their interpretation. That was rough, honestly, because you know me quite well. I’m a very, very caring person. All I’ve done specifically in the field of content design, I’ve done for free. I’ve never gotten paid for anything except maybe one or two conference talks, but the podcast runs without ads. It’s completely free. All of the articles are, right. None of it is ever paywalled. I just put it all out there.
Nicole:
I respond to so many messages, people asking for help finding jobs, portfolios and forth. And I do that because I’m passionate, and because I think I have a lot of things to share that maybe haven’t been shared before. So to be attacked in such a way, or maybe attacked is too strong of a word, but to be viewed in such a way as someone that just doesn’t understand the discipline, or wants to shit on some of the things that have been done, that hurt. I got really, really offended. I have to be honest. I’m still a little bit meh about some of these people, where I feel like, “Hey, you should have definitely reached out to me before doing a whole debate on your platform with another person about this, trying to talk badly about this.”
Nicole:
So that was rough, and since this happened to me, maybe I’ve also been more open to seeing it happen to other people. So there’s been a lot of discourse. I think it’s natural. There’s rough times. The AI is coming, like we talked about. There’s been a lot of layoffs. Content design has been hit relatively hard. I mean, I would argue most of design has, to be honest, and there’s been a lot of talking about what’s going on. So I do think people are more vulnerable, and it’s easier to get offended and it’s easier to get scared. Again, I did not want to fear-monger at all with this article, and that’s also not what the article is about. It’s very much about calling out, “This is what I’m seeing. This is how we can fix it. This is how we can all help each other fix it.”
Nicole:
So I felt like it was very productive. But since then, I’ve noticed that some people in the field have started completely avoiding me. They’re pissed off at me, and that makes me really sad, because I’m not out here trying to sell something. I’m out here trying to actually help from the goodness of my heart, and I have also other things to do. And I think the thing that hit me the hardest was just the amount of people that came out and said, “Oh, she just doesn’t know better because she’s not leading content design at a big FAANG,” or “She hasn’t done it for 20, 30 years.” Which is rough, because yes, I work in Europe, but I’ve worked for some of the biggest product companies in the US, as well as in Europe, as well as for startups, as well as for tiny companies, as well as for very traditional companies.
Nicole:
Worked for SSAB, one of the biggest metal steel producers out here. I’ve really seen and done content design from all angles and in all industries, and in all places, pretty much. And I can tell you that I think I understand what’s going on. But I will also confirm, a lot of the issues that I have called out aren’t as bad as a big popular product company that has a much more mature design org. But the majority of us content designers don’t work at a company with a mature design org. And I think we all know that.
Nicole:
However, a lot of the thought leadership comes from people that work at very mature design orgs, and it’s just not the reality for a lot of us. And I think it’s important that we address that more and that we talk about it, and that we give people a chance who have just a lot of the advice they get, it can’t even apply to their position. Because the design org as a whole, or maybe even the product org in the worst case, is just not there. So that’s why I am so open and active, and want to talk about all these things to help people see, “Hey, you’ve gotten this advice, or this is what the best practice from that side says, but it may not apply to you.” But yeah, that was a very long-winded way of answering your question. The essence is we’re all human, and even though a lot of us only interact online, we should all be a little bit nicer.
Larry:
Yeah. And I think this is why I wanted you on the podcast because you model the passion and the compassion that we all have for this craft and trade and profession, and all the people. And I think, I don’t know, in general, this profession is so loving and collaborative and connect-ey and helpful. And I think the fact that that’s an outlier, but the fact that it impacted you so personally, that bothers me. But I think that’s my hope is that we can all just be, but I also appreciate a lot the equanimity that you bring to this. You could easily get pissy about it, but you’re just disappointed. Which I think is probably, that’s how it feels to me. So thank you for sharing that.
Larry:
I can’t believe we’re coming up close to time already, Nicole. These conversations always go way, way, way too fast. But before we wrap, is there anything last, anything else you want to talk about before we wrap up?
Nicole:
No, I think we covered some… I mean, there’s honestly tons of things we could talk about. We could probably do one of those. There’s this podcast in Germany, I always forget what it’s called, but essentially, the whole concept is they have a guest, and they keep recording until the guest says some code word, and then it just stops. And some podcasts run six hours, 13 hours, and they just keep talking until the guest decides, “Okay, now I’ve said everything,” and they do their code word. I think that’s really interesting. I would love to try out that format someday when we all have extra time.
Nicole:
But yeah, I think we’ve talked about the most important things. I think to anyone that is out there right now out of work, looking for work in content design or even, there’s still so many people that are still eager to break into content design and have it really hard right now. I just posted on LinkedIn yesterday about “Does anyone have internships?” Because I have so many people asking for content design internships in my inbox. Hang in there. I think it will get better again, sooner rather than later. There’s a lot you can do in the meantime to keep up with your skills. And always remember, it’s not about you. It’s boom and bust, and it’s not your fault. And it’ll get better again, and I’m sure you’ll find a great job.
Larry:
Thanks so much. Oh, hey, one very last thing, Nicole. What’s the best way folks want to connect or follow you online?
Nicole:
Yeah, I mean, I post a lot on LinkedIn and Medium. If you’re more into writing, I post a lot of articles there. You can find me Nicole Michaelis, Nicole Alexandra Michaelis. And then I have the Content Rookie pod, ContentRookiePod.com, where I’ve been slow with uploading. I think last year I only did five, six episodes, but it’s still coming every now and then. I just don’t have a set schedule. So I would recommend that. I used to be active on Twitter, but I can’t do that anymore. It’s only bots there. So yeah, LinkedIn.
Larry:
Okay, I’ll include that in the show notes as well. And also, I just want to give you, not a pass, but you’re a new mom. It’s understandable that you’re not cranking out every week like I am. So.
Nicole:
Yeah, so-
Larry:
None of us are disappointed in you for that. So thanks so much. Thank you so much, Nicole. Always great talking.
Nicole:
Thank you, Larry. Really appreciate it. Have a great day.
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