How do you design a content design team?
Principal Content Designer Chad Wright shares how using design methodologies helped shift the way Zalando’s content design team collaborates and has impact.
Based on the conference talk “Designing a design team”, in collaboration with Content Design Manager, Sam Weingarten.
Relatively speaking, content design is a young profession, so it’s not surprising that it can be tricky for teams to understand how this specific role differs from other language roles, or even when to involve a UX writer or content designer. In fact, it’s quite universal across the product design industry for content design to be seen as a copywriting ‘service’, or an afterthought: the people who put the words into the design when it’s nearly finished. So when it comes to the strategic aspects of the design process, it can be hard for content designers to get into the room at all, let alone secure a seat at the table.
Our own team at Zalando has grown rapidly since we introduced the role just over 3 years ago, and we’ve learned a lot as we matured. Like most young and small teams, we used to react to problems as they arose, tactically. As we grew, there was a sense that we weren’t utilizing our skills in the best way within the wider design community. We touched lots of different projects every week, but felt there was an opportunity to be embedded deeper into UX practice, and to have a larger impact by being included earlier on in the process.
So, in early 2021, Sam Weingarten and I got together to discuss these problems and we decided to set an ambitious goal: to redesign how content design at Zalando works — as a team, and with other disciplines across the company. We decided to address some of the issues we faced in the same way we’d tackle any other design challenge: define the problem, design a solution, execute and launch.
We believe these learnings could be helpful not only for other content design teams but also for other teams who’ve faced similar challenges.
Discovery
When Sam joined our team as a content design manager, she could see that the team was working very hard, but had a hunch it was under-utilized as a strategic resource. To dig deeper and fully validate this assumption, she started out by interviewing each member of the team, myself included.
She asked questions like “What would your job look like if there were no constraints?” and “when was the last time you felt really really proud of your work?” and “what did you expect from this job on your first day — and does it currently align with those expectations?”
They were deep, difficult questions, and they required some candid responses. Luckily, the team opened up immediately, ensuring these interviews provided a powerful catalyst for the whole project. The answers showed that everyone on the team was well aligned. Everyone wanted to be doing UX design work and to work alongside Product Designers more than anything. They just weren’t sure how to insert themselves into the process.
Problem definition
There were three main issues Sam’s interviews highlighted:
- Our team often felt like it was seen as a service: people sent us briefs and requests, and we responded with finished or nearly-finished copy. This meant our involvement was mostly at the end of the process, with less scope for making collaborative creative contributions to the UX design work.
- Our scope of responsibility wasn’t properly defined. The team felt responsible for all words everywhere on Zalando, which is just not possible for a relatively small team to handle. Acknowledging this and its implications was a biggie.
- The team felt scattered across many areas, rather than having an intentional and defined focus for its contributions. This tended to reduce the autonomy or ownership people might have felt within projects. And yet the workload was really high, so people felt constantly busy without always seeing the impact of their work.
Solution design
Now that the problem was defined, we set out to design a solution–and an ambitious one at that. We were going to overhaul the entire way the team works.
No more copy briefs, no more requests, and no more scattered focus.
Getting closer to design
Our plan was that each content designer would be semi-embedded within an area of Zalando, working mostly on projects that were defined as a priority for the business, and working hand-in-hand with product design, product management, analytics and engineering. This way, content design would be able to participate in the entire design process from discovery to launch. We also worked with each team member to find project areas that felt most aligned to each person’s strengths and development areas.
Celebrating our wins (and learnings)
We also committed to making space for the team. First, space to breathe, to truly focus, by setting clear boundaries around where we should devote our working time. We’d only accept projects that were UX-focused and that we as content designers could have a real impact on.
We also made a dedicated space to celebrate and to recognize the good UX work we were doing. We created a monthly ‘show and tell’ where each member of the team would present the work they felt most proud of. For this session, critique hats were left at the door — it was purely about celebration. This helped the whole team see the kind of impact that we were actually having on projects. It also helped us all maintain a big-picture view of the project work being done across the company, and ensured that we distributed domain-specific knowledge to avoid any deep siloing.
Consultation hours
The third thing we did was implement content design consultation hours. These are similar to open hours (nothing new there), but we flipped it around and said, instead of bringing us an open-ended problem, let’s get stakeholders and teams we work with to draft what they believe the content should say, and then ask them to bring that to us as a starting point. We then spend a full hour collaborating together on that we’ll help them ultimately get it to a better place.
What that did was it gave our stakeholders a stake in the work they were doing, as well as a glimpse into the impact our work can have. It made our process much more visible. Most stakeholders come out of consultation hours having enjoyed the session, feeling proud of what we accomplished together, and even learning a thing or two about the basics of content design.
Additionally, these consultation hours are timeboxed, meaning that we don’t look at the projects ahead of time or take work away from the sessions. This allows us to be involved with lots of projects and teams across Zalando, without losing that hard-won time and focus time for our primary project areas.
Execution
Designing the solution was one thing, but making it happen quickly was another story. We knew that these kinds of changes can take a long time to implement within organizations, but we wanted to move fast to avoid a drawn-out process for the team and confusion for the rest of the company.
We started by listing out every single task that needed to be done, from every input to every output. This resulted in hundreds of little tasks. We then divided the tasks based on our strengths and our roles, but we knew we also had to embody the ways of working we were creating by doing it collaboratively.
Sam and I worked very closely as a team throughout the whole process. When it came to this stage we set up daily working sessions where we’d check in on one another, and see where we could support one another. This meant we ended up having great insight into every deliverable and most importantly of all, we had more fun doing it together.
to make sure we covered all support levels and use cases.
We made it
Ultimately, the changes we implemented helped our team feel heard, seen, and appreciated. They now work hand-in-hand with product designers at every step of the design process, and know that they’re having a real impact on their projects: seeing the meaningful results of their work every day.
People on our team are leading priority design projects, shipping highly visible UX work, and are seen as an essential part of product design. In fact, there’s a real, palpable understanding that in UX work, writing is design.
We’re proud to have rewritten the script around how content design gets a seat at the table by saying “Hey, the table is over here. Come sit with us.”
And rather importantly, “remember to bring snacks.”
Free resources
If any of this resonated with you, we have two free resources that you can use in your teams.
First is the interview guide that Sam created. Use it to onboard to new teams as a manager or as a team pulse check.
Second, we’re fortunate to have a growing community of principal designers, researchers, analysts and content designers. Here’s a conversation guide with some learnings that your organization can use if they’re considering a principal/expert track.
Enjoyed this article? We’d love to connect
Chad Wright LinkedIn | Twitter
Principal content designer
Samantha Weingarten LinkedIn
UX writing manager
