How to Build a Professional Development Program for Your UX Team
Let me break down an exciting new initiative in Wayfair’s Experience Design department: the Content Strategy Development Program, AKA “Content Academy.”
Tl;dr: Content Academy is a series of weekly discussion-based classes about key topics, methods, and deliverables in content strategy, held for the storefront content strategy team at Wayfair. This education program not only builds team culture, it also teaches us practical content strategy skills and helps us broaden our understanding of how we can improve our users’ experiences.
Why a Class?
A little bit of context. My colleague Jesse Kaddy has written before about Wayfair’s “pod” structure. In short, each pod on our storefront team includes cross-functional partners — engineers, product managers, analysts, and the like — and is dedicated to a different part of the user experience.
Wayfair’s storefront content strategists have recently embedded into our pods at Wayfair. We attend our pods’ daily stand-ups, we actively participate in roadmap planning with our product partners, and we all sit with our pods in the office instead of with the content strategy team. We’ve benefited enormously from embedding.
Over time, however, a new pain point emerged. While we were engaging more our cross-functional partners, we weren’t connecting as frequently with our fellow content strategists. We weren’t talking shop about content strategy, and we weren’t learning as many field-specific skills from each other.
As a former teacher and college lecturer, I was especially motivated to address this gap on our team. So I proposed a new professional development program for our team. I put my professorial hat back on and crafted a syllabus, complete with discussion questions, relevant readings, and case studies. And, before long, we started talking, listening, and learning together.
The Process
So: how do you actually build and implement a program like this?
Define a High Level Overview
I began by developing a program brief to concisely lay out the basics of the program for the team: the structure, the schedule, and the rationale.
More importantly, however, the brief describes the goals of the program:
- Invest consistent, dedicated time to personal career growth as content strategists
- Strengthen team unity and culture
- Drive more value to Wayfair through learning about skills, topics, and methods that we can use on key projects
- Align more effectively with cross-functional partners through interdisciplinary conversations
In foregrounding the goals of the program on an individual, team, and company level, we can assess whether the program is meeting the needs of those three stakeholders — and make adjustments when it’s not. We can also more easily advocate for the value of spending work time in class to our colleagues in other departments.
Choose What to Learn
I had some ideas about what topics and skills would be valuable to learn about, but it was important to develop a curriculum that reflected the team’s interests. During a one-hour brainstorming session, we jotted down what we wanted to learn about on Post-It notes (we are, after all, a Design Thinking organization!). We then shared our ideas, and dot-voted on which topics we wanted to learn about the most.
To ensure that the curriculum was comprehensive, the team came up with ideas in four different areas: key topics in content strategy, content strategy methods and deliverables, workplace best practices, and related fields in UX and e-commerce.
Construct a Course Syllabus
In order to carve out a curriculum, I approached the course syllabus if it were a narrative: how could each class build upon the conversation from the week before? How could we learn cumulatively? How could we weave connections between broad topics like “Ethics and Content Strategy” and specific deliverables like “Empathy Mapping”?
In my teaching days, one of my chief tasks was to create well-scaffolded syllabi, in which each discussion would build from that of earlier classes. I crafted this syllabus using a similar approach, being mindful of our pursuit of cumulative learning.
The course first introduces essential topics in content strategy, like “Empathy and Content” and “The Psychology of UX.” After aligning our team on the foundations of the field, the course shifts to deeper dives into key content strategy methods, like structuring content-centric brainstorm sessions. The course then broadens beyond the lens of pure content strategy to feature classes on general professional development — how to pick your battles, for instance — and related fields, like SEO.
After thinking through the series of topics we’d explore, I returned to our team’s Post-It notes to think through the specific questions the team wanted to address in our discussion. It wasn’t enough to simply say that we’d talk about empathy for an hour, an approach that would have led to a potentially meandering, less actionable conversation.
Instead, by imposing some guardrails on our conversation, we ensured that what we talked about would have a more direct impact on our ways of thinking about improving our users’ experience with Wayfair.
After developing a schedule of weekly class topics and guiding questions, I began searching for relevant readings or resources for each class. The content strategy team suggested several useful resources, and I filled in the gaps with an aggressive amount of Googling.
The Execution
After reading a few articles or listening to a podcast, we meet Wednesday afternoons for class. The conversation is largely fluid: we discuss key takeaways, open questions, and areas of confusion or friction. I sometimes share a relevant case study or example that we dissect within the context of our conversation. Or we examine Wayfair’s own storefront, exploring where we have opportunities to grow and improve our users’ experience or our processes.
Although the primary participants are content strategists, our colleagues in design, research, product, marketing, and engineering are also encouraged to attend when space permits. Those cross-functional conversations have been especially valuable. As bell hooks reminds us:
“Learning and talking together, we break with the notion that our experience of gaining knowledge is private, individualistic, and competitive. By choosing and fostering dialogue, we engage mutually in a learning partnership.”
In other words: becoming partners in learning can help us become better partners in our work.
Most of the magic of the class happens within the conference room itself, as we mull over our ideas as a group. To ensure that our discussions wouldn’t be completely ephemeral, however, we’re using a few platforms to commit those dialogues to institutional memory. We have a dedicated public Slack channel for continuing our conversations, resource sharing, and class recaps. A volunteer also shares their discussion notes on Wayfair’s knowledge sharing hub.
The Results
The program is still new, having just launched in early July. But early results are positive. There’s strong interest across our entire Experience Design team in engaging in these conversations, and in dedicating time to discussing new approaches and paradigms. The content strategy team is already incorporating the fruits of our conversation and reading into our projects. We’re becoming better content strategists and teammates.
Although the output of the program can’t be measured in hard KPIs or conversion lifts, we’ve all found value in taking a minute to talk through issues in our field. At the end of the day, investing consistent time in formal learning has been a powerful source of team-building and professional development.
