First Things First: Audits, Standards, and Terms
Let’s talk startups for a minute. If you’re outside of tech and Silicon Valley is your main source of info, you might think it’s like college on a party weekend: playing on smartphones, high fiving a lot, drinking unlimited kombucha from a tap. If you’ve worked in tech, especially at a smaller startup, you just heaved a big sigh. Because all of that is true, but there is also endless work and every single meeting includes the phrase “building a plane while flying it”.
The reason a startup hires someone like me is to lean into that “building a plane” part of the work. One of the most important parts of my job is to set up a foundation for Content Design to work well for next 5, 10, 20 years!
That foundation includes auditing the content that already exists, and then creating a set of standards and defining key terms based on findings.
- Audit: Collection of screens and analysis of the language usage and patterns on those screens
- Standards: Guidance to make product content decisions consistently
- Terms list: Definitions of specific words and how to use them consistently
Those are the three basic tools to start building a true practice because they document the bigger picture. For example, my company is in the talent space. On other apps…
