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Tuija Riekkinen brings a unique perspective to scaling both content and design operations, as well as other digital initiatives.
She has applied her holistic and pragmatic enterprise product management skills at organizations like IKEA, where she has worked on both their design system and content management system.
Tuija is a persuasive advocate of keeping design and content concerns separate to enable “creativity at scale.”
We talked about:
- her work as a digital product leader at IKEA where she has led teams working on both design systems and content management systems
- her unique holistic approach to managing diverse, agile teams
- how she aligns a variety of stakeholders around language
- the similarities she sees between design systems and content management systems
- how design systems and content systems differ
- her hypothesis that “good content management enables creativity in scale”
- how she educates stakeholders about the benefits of managing decoupled, semantically meaningful content
- her approach to preemptively addressing budget issues around CMS-adoption decisions
- the importance of getting past page-construction thinking to permit content re-use for purposes like omnichannel delivery
- an example she uses – a recipe website – to show non-technical stakeholders the benefits of structured content
- how the benefits of moving from manual, page-level content thinking to future-proof structured content might actually make a four-day work week possible
Tuija’s bio
Tuija is a digital product management professional with an extensive and multifaceted experience working with digital products. With a background in service and content design she has paved her way into leading and managing agile and cross-functional product teams – focusing on the user experience all the while adhering to the business objectives. She is known for being pragmatic and holistic in her approach.
Connect with Tuija online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 185. Content operations work best when they can scale, when they can take full advantage of the best design and content practices. Traditional content workflows that rely on hand-built pages conflate design and content concerns. Teasing out these concerns and helping organizations build efficient, scale-able systems is Tuija Riekkinen’s forte. Her work on both design systems and content systems gives her a unique perspective on these important elements of enterprise content architectures.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 185 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Tuija Riekkinen. I hope I got that right. It’s a Finnish name, and I’m just a dumb American doing my best. But welcome. Tuija, she’s a consultant. She’s currently working in a capacity as a digital project management professional at IKEA where she’s working on… Well, we’ll talk about this. That’s what the conversation’s about. She’s all about scale and getting out of your bubbles and omnichannel content. And anyhow, welcome to you. Tell the folks a little bit more about your work there.
Tuija:
Well, thank you, Larry, and thanks for having me. It’s a great opportunity for me to be in your podcast. Yeah, so I am a digital product leader and I did work in that capacity for a digital design system for three years. And now I’ve shifted into a more content management related product. So what I’m doing is that I’m actually working quite closely with my team, so managing the roadmap, managing the priorities, and bringing the team on board in what we are aiming for, and also working with the stakeholders to really understand their view on things and assessing the maturity of how they see content management and then adapt our communication to that.
Larry:
A lot of my listeners I know are content designers working in the digital product world, and all those roles and things you just described are their world, like working with product managers. And then there’s also a lot of collaboration with designers and engineers and researchers and other folks as well. We’ve talked a fair amount about your work and one of the things that I really appreciate, or the thing I most appreciate, I think about the way you talk about things is your sort of holistic approach and how you are aware of, and knowledgeable of, those individual crafts, but are really good about pulling them together. Can you talk a little bit about your philosophy and approach to your work?
Tuija:
Yeah, sure. So I think I realized that I have been always a little odd person in different digital initiatives because I’m not a designer, I’m not a developer, I’m not a project manager, I’m not an architect. I’ve always kind of wondered that what am I? And that’s sort of always forced me to be very curious about how the different professionals in this area approach the topic.And I’ve learned quite a lot.
Tuija:
So I’ve been the person in between different people or types of people or types of disciplines or professionals. So in the past it was, I was between the business and the IT, and now I feel that I’m in between design and developers, or between leadership and the product professionals, like developers and designers.
Tuija:
And yeah, I suppose that has been kind of the reason why I’ve always been then supporting… Or not looking at things that there is this one group of professionals who can make the difference, because that’s not the case. I mean, you have very talented designers, you have very talented developers, architects, engineers, leaders, but all of them need to come together in order to actually take something from start to completion, as we say in the agile.
Tuija:
So now when I say that I have been the person in between, now, I would like to say that my role is rather to bring them together and facilitate the discussions in a way that people understand each other. Because, I mean, I’ve noticed recently that it actually requires quite a lot from me. I need to really put myself out there and to really ask the stupid questions in order to encourage people to really explain what they mean and really ask multiple times so that we actually then get onto the same page. Because it’s not very comfortable role sometimes, but I guess I am experienced and old enough not to care.
Tuija:
But yeah, I guess that’s the thing, that it is really supporting people to understand each other and kind of force people outside of their little bubble, I guess, because it is all about delivering the value. And the value, one person in a team can’t really deliver the value. You need a bunch of different professionals to do it. And I don’t know, I mean I’ve always worked in digital, so I don’t know how is it outside of digital that is it like that, that you do need a cross-functional team to actually deliver something?
Larry:
That’s interesting. You got me thinking now about the history of project or product and project management. Was it different before digital? Was it all… Maybe that’s where waterfall comes from because you just had physical dependencies or something that had to happen before the next thing could ensue, but I guess that might be a whole other conversation we could have sometime.
Larry:
But I’m really curious about, the other thing I really appreciate about you is your pragmatic approach to this that you’re like, “Okay, here’s the situation. We have all these really talented and focused and disciplined crafts all working towards their thing and they all have each other to rely on. Here I am out by myself trying to make a customer…” And a third thing I love about you is your customer centricity. And so you’re like, “How do we best serve these customers? Gollies, talented people, have some resources.” What’s your approach for putting… I guess the first thing is how do you help span the communication things? Because everybody’s using slightly different language or things like that. How do you get people aligned on language to start, I guess?
Tuija:
That’s a very good question. I mean, in digital, we have loads of words that people understand in a different way. So basically, you can have a bunch of people in the same meeting talking about one thing and people clearly understand certain words in a different way. So I don’t know. I’ve always been pretty good in sensing when there is a situation that people are interpreting some word in a different way. I don’t know where that comes from.
Tuija:
But I guess I’m also quite good in, I don’t know, just interrupting the discussions and say that, “Hey, hold on, should we kind of go couple step back and just double check that we actually understand these terms in the same way?” So it’s again, super pragmatic approach. Having workshops, it’s something that I don’t feel that I am doing enough, but I just today had a workshop with my team where I just gave them a couple of assignments and we just used 45 minutes after daily to brainstorm on key features that we would need to have in place if there would be a new team who wanted to work with us in a month.
Tuija:
So we actually didn’t get to the point where we started sharing and aligning, but I think that that is one way of that you just first let the team to speak their own language and think from their own point of view, and then you just facilitate some sort of an alignment session. And in that alignment session, you just need to repeat a couple of times that, “Okay, well, are we now all talking about this particular thing? Or when we are talking about this word or this term, are we now understanding it in the same way?”
Tuija:
I mean, you can never achieve 100% alignment in terms of understanding words because, yeah, like I said, digital is really, really bad in that sense that we have so many different… we so many words that people understand differently. I don’t know, concept is one of the words, I guess you can understand.
Larry:
Or product or customer.
Larry:
Everybody has their own… Yeah. Hey, as you’re talking about that, you’re reminding me one of the many reasons I wanted to talk to you is that you recently wrapped that three-year stint working on the design system at IKEA and now you’re moving into the CMS. That’s a really fascinating confluence to me. And everything you just said about all these different stakeholders, it’s like there’s even more of that to where you’re going from mostly designers and design system stuff into content management stuff. Can you talk maybe a little bit about are there similarities between working on design systems and content management systems? I guess that would be the first question is how are they alike?
Tuija:
Oh, absolutely, yes. And I think that when I was first approached and asked that if I could take the product owner role for design system, I was first a bit like, “Hmm, how will that work out?” But then it turned out that there are a lot of similarities.
Tuija:
So I think that it’s the finding the balance between being very generic and being very specific. Because now I’m not in content management, I’m now more referring to content modeling that, of course, you can create superscalable content model, but then of course the content model in that case will be fairly abstract and generic. It works, it scales, but it might be a little bit difficult to use for the editors because it’s not specifically created for them. It might lack the language or terminology in the labels and et cetera in the content fields, but it will definitely scale.
Tuija:
You can create a content model and 90% of the content teams can get their job done with that content model. Whether that’s a good user experience, that’s another thing. The same goes for the design system. So when I took over the design system, it was very specific to a one use case and one channel. And then my assignment was to kind of extend it to cover all the digital product, both the customer facing and the coworker facing.
Tuija:
So then obviously no matter how big team you have, you can never scale a digital product by just hiring loads of people because then you kind of get into the situation that when you have too big of a team, then it just doesn’t work well anymore. You have to do some arrangements in that department. But basically in digital, you can’t scale by hiring loads of people. You can scale it to a certain extent.
Tuija:
So then obviously I had to think about other ways of how can I scale the design system to cover more use cases? And then I started to think that, “Okay, well maybe I’ll just bring in what I’ve learned from content modeling that you can, to certain degree, generalize things, that you just focus on the deliverables components that can be used in multiple contexts, that they are generic enough.”
Tuija:
And then, of course, yeah, if you generalize too much, because of course you can deliver your design system as design tokens and just like, “Well, hey, teams just create whatever you need from these tokens.” But then of course, you then lose some of the cohesiveness and again, it’s not the great user experience.
Tuija:
So yeah, I guess it’s just finding the balance between generic and superscalable, and then still maintaining the user-friendliness in using both the design system or the content model. So those are the similarities.
Larry:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. So it’s always about that balance of abstractness versus concrete.
Tuija:
Yeah.
Larry:
The more abstract it is, the more powerful it can be in terms of composable experiences of all kinds, but you still got to keep it usable. You’re reminding me of one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen this, I think an artist named, I think his name was Christoph Niemann, created this thing called the Abstract-O-Meter, which has this really abstract thing at one side, hyperrealistic thing on the other, and this sort of slider in the middle. It sounds like that’s where you are. You’re operating that slider trying to find the appropriate place.
Tuija:
Exactly.
Larry:
One thing, what about the differences between… Because I have my thoughts about this, but I’m really curious about yours, about how do content systems and design systems differ? It seems like they have kind of different intents. To my mind, content is operating towards either advancing in a journey, whether it’s providing information or motivation to do a task or something like that, whereas design systems are more about helping a designer do things consistently. Anyhow, I want to hear your perception of that, like how they differ.
Tuija:
Yeah, I think the biggest difference is unfortunately that there is a lot of interest towards design system. So when I was a product owner or digital product lead for a design system, it was like people came to me and they knew about the design system, they wanted to know more. It was very easy to approach the stakeholders. The stakeholders came to me. But when it comes to the content systems, people are not actually that interested in.
Tuija:
So there is something around the design as a topic that people find very appealing, and then the content management somehow doesn’t have the same vibe. People maybe find it a little bit too either boring. Also, people have a lot of bad experiences from CMSs. So I think that that probably might be one reason.
Tuija:
But yeah, I think it’s super harder sell, content systems are a harder sell from the product owner or product lead perspective than design systems.
Tuija:
That is definitely the biggest thing. And I think that people are still very geared towards concrete things like building pages. And so I think many people have very, very strict… I don’t know if strict is the right word here, but very firm opinions what content management is. So they’re not necessarily super open to hear about what is it today. People have very firm opinions and perceptions maybe from the few years back when it was still different.
Larry:
Yeah, you’re reminding me of the way everybody’s aware that they can’t draw that well and that they appreciate designers because they’re good at doing visual and experiential things better than… But everybody feels like they can write and everybody has access to WYSIWYG kinds of tools. But that gets at one of the main benefits of the work that you do is that you’re able to articulate in content models, sort out that content by its purpose and its use and its structure and articulate that in a way that makes it scalable, which is your whole thing. This whole notion, the whole reason you’re so pragmatic and holistic about this is so that you can scale things and operationalize them.
Larry:
I mean, we just hear this all the time as content people, the designers get all the love and we’re the poor stepchildren. But have you found any ways to make content management more sexy, I guess?
Tuija:
Well quite recently, I came up with a sort of slogan that good content management enables creativity in scale. I haven’t been able to test that message still with the broad enough audience. But what I mean with that is that because what typically happens is that you start a, let’s say that you are creating a new website. That’s a very simple example. There’s a lot of focus on how things look like and what is the design and layout and yada yada, yada. And then the content model, the other CMSs is kind of configured to match exactly what the designer designed.
Tuija:
And at that point, if you are not actually looking into the content model and kind of think a few steps ahead, you are kind of cementing the layout and the visuals quite badly. Because then you go and create your content, you use the CMS, and suddenly you have, I don’t know, 500 content items and 500 pages, have a big website. And then someone thinks that, “Oh, we need to redo the visuals, we want to do a facelift, we want to do a visual renewal.” And then you kind of start looking into what you need to do. And then you realize that, “Oh, it means that we need to buy a new CMS,” in the worst case, “or that we need to rework all 500 pages somehow.” Again, because they don’t support the new idea of the visual layout.
Tuija:
So that’s typically often stops the whole thing. At least it hinders it a lot. So a quick visual update actually becomes a much bigger project. So what I’ve been trying to then explain that actually, if you do start from the content model and you break down your content into more structured content and you actually start applying some semantics in a form of taxonomies in minimum, and you kind of keep that away, you really separate the content from the presentation. So then you no longer need to do this big content work in order to renew how your product, how your design, how your website looks like. You can kind of separate them totally.
Tuija:
And this is what I mean with the creativity in scale, is that you can do a lot of visual revamps and all sort of improvements in quite a short period of time if you actually in the beginning already imagine those situations. Because that’s kind of maybe the holisticness and being pragmatic and thinking the operations upfront is that, yeah, I mean it’s not a project. It’s not a project where you create a website and you have a nice design on your website. It is a product that you very likely want to develop, so you need to think about the development steps, even if they are in two years’ time. But setting up the initial implementation in a way that you can do development in the most efficient way. Because I mean, it’s costly to develop digital systems, digital product.
Tuija:
So why not think about it when you actually start the initiative and think that how can we ensure that we have the budget to actually develop this in the future as well, and that our budget is not actually going to operations and these silly things that don’t really add value, but just only keep the product alive? How can we ensure that we can develop the product with small budget if our budget is being cut? So all these scenarios, you kind of have to think about in the beginning because if you start thinking about it when you actually come into the situation that, “Hey, now we need to do something,” then it’s too late.
Larry:
Mm-hmm. And you’ve done this enough that you can help people anticipate that coming. I mean, this is what I think a lot of us in the structured content world think of is we’re future-proofing not just your content but your operations as well. Also, the way you just described the whole scenario just now reminded me of this kind of fundamental notion in modular architectures of separation of concerns, that designers design, content people do content. You’re working in – IKEA is an interesting place to be consulting. Because I know they’re fairly, it’s an old company, well-established and I know their digital practices are evolving really quickly. Did you still have to sell that notion of separating those out, teasing out the content from its presentation?
Tuija:
Yeah, a bit. People are very consumed about how things look like, and I’m not opposed to that per se, but what I’m sort of trying to say in every occasion that I can is that you can still create amazing looking presentation, you can still deliver pages if you like, but you should actually think your content operation in a different way.
Tuija:
Because if you optimize your CMS to deliver pages, then you are ruling out the other use cases like omnichannel content, reusing content and this creativity and scale thinking. So yeah, I think there is still a lot of that messaging to be done. I also struggle a lot to find the right words to educate people who don’t have the technical background. Because it’s very easy to talk about these things when you all have an audience who has been working in digital and they understand the back-end and front-end and all these kind of basic concepts, then it’s much easier to explain that, “Hey, this is how a headless CMS works and this is how you separate the content model from the presentation. And hey, this is how you actually enable the creativity in scale.”
Tuija:
But yeah, I don’t know, I’m open for any advices how to communicate this to people who don’t have some sort of a technical or digital background because-
Larry:
This is why-
Tuija:
Yeah.
Larry:
This is why I do the podcast so we can all share this kind of stuff with each other because what you were just saying is I talk constantly with people about this that one of the things just that the two things you mentioned about communicating with a non-technical audience about the benefits of these kinds of systems, but also just that cemented in page-level thinking that people have and how to get them out of that. It sounds like you’re… Do you have any just specifically at that level of communicating with stakeholders, like going like, “Oh, well, yeah, you could think of this as a page, but actually if you look at the elements on there, they could be used in other ways as well”? Do you have a little, I don’t know, presentation or stakeholder wrangling tips around that?
Tuija:
I quite often actually pull out a recipe website that I worked with I think 2018, so quite a long time ago already. Because recipes, food recipes are quite familiar. Even though they don’t cook that much, everyone kind of understand that they have a certain structure. And I’ve been explaining this via the food recipe example. Because you can have a food recipe, anyone can set up a simple blog where they share food recipes. But basically then what you have is that you have a heading, you have a field for the heading, for the recipe title, and then you have one big body field where you write the content. You have the ingredients and the preparation steps, et cetera. So that’s, it’s very simple. You can do it with a very page-driven way if you like.
Tuija:
But then the recipe site where I created the content model for that recipe site, so there we actually broke things to very fine grain. And what we also did was that we were connecting the ingredient lines, if you like. So how much you needed and what you need and what was the ingredient. So we actually connected that line to the preparation step, which meant that we were able to create this experience, which is very good if you to browse the recipe with your mobile, that when you scroll down and you actually go to that preparation step, it repeats the ingredients.
Tuija:
So you don’t have to scroll back and check that, “Okay, well how much was I supposed to add the seasoning and what seasoning?” Because maybe the step says that add seasoning or add flours. And then you’re like, “Okay, how much?” And then you need to scroll up. But when you repeat the ingredients that are actually mentioned in that preparation step, you don’t have to scroll back and forth anymore.
Tuija:
And that typically helps that people understand that, “Aha!” that yeah, if you do this a little bit upfront work, that you break down things into smaller, in a finer grain content model, you have more opportunities to present it. So this has been my way. It’s kind of bad that the recipe site is in Finnish. I mean, if it would be English, for example, it would be easier to explain. But I think example is a very good way to explain this and have some very familiar concept like food recipe to do it as your example, because everyone kind of understands what are the ingredients of a food recipe, if you like.
Larry:
That’s funny. I almost always default to events. I do a lot of event stuff …
Tuija:
Oh, events is another thing, yeah.
Larry:
But I think I’m going to switch to recipes because my mind is going off like, “Oh, yeah.” And you can have nutritional information and sourcing all that. Hey, I can’t believe it. We’re already coming up close to time. These conversations always go way too fast. But before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation or just make sure that we share before we close?
29:35
Tuija:
Yeah, maybe something thinking about the operations, that really when you are starting something related to content that really thinking about that, what are the operational aspects that you should really think about? Meaning that there are so many things that you can definitely still do with pair of hands, but whether that’s how things should be done in the future is not maybe… Okay, can you cut this and I can start all over?
Larry:
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, because I just asked the question like, anything last and then I’ll begin it again.
Tuija:
I need to think about, yeah. Okay. So yeah, so I can’t believe that it took me up till here before I froze, but okay, well let me-
Larry:
It’s fine. It happens all… Yeah.
30:45 ISH
Tuija:
Yeah. Yeah, so I think what I would really like to emphasize is that when you start an initiative or project or whatever you want to call it, which has something to do with content management, the operations, and really thinking ahead that, what sort of operational processes, operational tasks you at the moment have for your content? Because I’m pretty sure that majority of those tasks are something that you can actually make much more streamlined if you actually think about your content in a little bit different way.
Tuija:
If you move away from this page thinking, if you move away from, everything needs to be created manually together. If you really want to put future-proof your content, and when you do future-proof your content, you are at the same time and you can at the same time release a lot of people from manual tasks that I don’t think that anyone enjoys. So I mean, at this point, I often actually say that there’s a lot of talk about the four-day week. So I mean you can achieve four-day week if you actually look into these silly manual things that people do. For example, with content, there are probably other areas as well. How about if you optimize and automate those and maybe your team can actually work four days instead of five days?
Larry:
I love that. That’s the best articulation of that benefit. So those are the two… So I’m taking home two big things. Recipes is the best example of this, and the big benefit is buying back some of our time. Fantastic summary of the benefits. Hey, one very last thing to you. If folks want to follow you or connect online, what’s the best way to connect?
Tuija:
LinkedIn, definitely. So just drop me a message if you want to talk.
Larry:
Cool. Well thank you so much. Really great conversation.
Tuija:
Thank you. It was fun.
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