Content Strategy Insights

Sabine Ocker Sabine Ocker helps enterprises organize their content. She uses taxonomies and other content metadata to make sure that customers get the information they need, when they need it. Sabine's superpower is her ability to talk about her work in a way that resonates with business decision makers. This ensures that she always has the budget and other support that she needs to do this import...

Noah Iliinsky When you're drowning in data, it's good to have an information designer like Noah Iliinsky looking out for you. Noah takes a human-centered approach to a data visualization, connecting people with information tucked away in massive datasets. His purpose-driven process is designed to help users quickly extract the insights they need from a flood of information. We talked about: his ne...

Tom Johnson Documenting APIs is one of the newer jobs in the technical writing domain. Tom Johnson enjoys the unique challenges of collaborating with and writing for the developers who create and use these Application Programming Interfaces. He also enjoys reflecting on his work and sharing his insights with his fellow technical communicators. We talked about: his evolution from writing to teachin...

Chris Savage Chris Savage founded Wistia to help businesses understand how well their video content was performing. Early on they stumbled across content marketing, using their own how-to videos to grow their own business. When COVID-19 hit and customers started interacting with companies virtually, Wistia really took off. We talked about: how he founded and has grown Wistia as a video platform to...

Rahel Anne Bailie Rahel Anne Bailie has earned the title Content Empress. One of the original cohort of content strategists, over the past couple of decades she has become a leading expert on content operations. While she focuses on content, she might better be described as a business analyst and consultant who helps companies with their digital transformation. We talked about: her title of "Conte...

Noz Urbina Noz Urbina can help you navigate the hype around personalization and create genuinely helpful customized content experiences. Noz focuses on the fundamentals that create useful, usable adaptive content. He starts with customer journey mapping and persona creation to develop an evidence-based picture of his users. Then he builds modularized content models that address those user needs. T...

Orchestrating the strategy, design, and software work that comes with enterprise-scale digital projects is a complex and painstaking mission. It's hard to imagine a team better equipped to take on these challenges than the founders of Autogram. Karen McGrane Ethan Marcotte Jeff Eaton Karen McGrane, Ethan Marcotte, and Jeff Eaton have each mastered huge swaths of digital business practice. Karen bu...

Carmen Martinez and Paulo Azevedo combine her linguistics and ethnography skills with his computing and product skills to create computer interactions that feel almost human. Carmen Martinez Paulo Azevedo Carmen and Paulo collaborate to design conversation experiences for FlixBus, a company that helps millions of travelers around the world book bus travel. It's hard to create natural-feeling conve...

Sara Wachter-Boettcher Sara Wachter-Boettcher helps design and content professionals discover and express their leadership ability. Leaders can come from anywhere. You don't have to be in a management role. With some personal work and a little courage, you can lead from wherever you are in the digital design and content world. Sara and I talked about: the difference between leadership and manageme...

Scott Abel Scott Abel is a content strategy original. He first took the title of "content strategist" in 1999. Since then, Scott has practiced content strategy and become a leading voice for the discipline. When he's not running his consultancy, Scott organizes content events, publishes and writes books and articles, and keynotes and speaks at industry conferences. Scott and I talked about: the se...

David Dylan Thomas David Dylan Thomas can help you tame the unconscious biases that can undermine your design decision-making. These biases are strong. You may never conquer them all. But recognizing them and accounting for them in your content strategy and design work can mitigate the hazards they present. You need to be on your toes at every turn to account for these cognitive biases. They can a...

Andrea Volpini Andrea Volpini creates products that help search engines and other computers find your web content. Adding semantic meaning to your content helps artificial intelligence agents and other computers understand how your information relates to other content on the web. Revealing these relationships helps both computers and the human users who rely on them find and use your content. Andr...

Erin Golden Erin Golden and her colleagues have created a model that shows the evolution of the practice of content strategy. Drawing on the Kardashev scale – an astrophysics method for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement – they rank content strategy practice along a 1-to-5 range. K1 represents the first stage, when content strategists were mostly concerned with putting w...

Bob Kasenchak Bob Kasenchak is an expert on taxonomy for web publishers. He's one of a handful of information architects who focuses on this powerful practice. A good taxonomy helps people find and navigate your content. It helps search engines index and list your content. It helps connect your content to similar content on the web. The process of building a taxonomy can help align different busin...

Laurah Mwirichia Laurah Mwirichia is a product-writing enthusiast. She loves her work and wants you to jump into this burgeoning field, too. Laurah applies her writing skills as a product writer at Square. She loves using words in her design practice there, and she enjoys her collaborations with her product and technical colleagues. She's gleaned a lot wisdom in her UX writing career and is eager...

Carlos Evia Carlos Evia teaches structured content authoring using DITA and similar tools at Virginia Tech. Structured authoring offers a number of benefits, most notably easy content re-use. By carefully structuring content as it goes into a repository, it can be used later in a variety of publications and applications. Structured authoring has its roots in the technical communications field. As...

Michael Andrews Michael Andrews literally wrote the book on metadata for web content (actually two books). Metadata puts the structure in structured content. It helps both humans and computers understand what your content is about and how it relates to other content. It ensures that your content is always up to date, easy to find, and able to be tailored to your customers' unique needs. In today's...

Scott Kubie Scott Kubie believes in you. If you're a writer contributing the words on a product team, he believes in you. If you're a front-end designer or developer tasked with writing, he believes in you. In his book Writing for Designers, Scott sets out a simple path to help you get the writing done. He also has good ideas about how to organize content work for digital products. He's not a fan...

Ilarna Nche Ilarna Nche is an award-winning expert on the technical aspects of building voice applications for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby. She designs and develops voice apps for clients who want to capitalize on the branding power that voice products bring to the digital content mix. Ilarna and I talked about: her path into the voice design industry how easy it is, even for...

Designing voice conversations requires new skills and new ways of thinking about how people interact with your digital product. Rebecca Evanhoe and Diana Deibel are experts in this new approach to interaction design. Like many content strategists, they are learning on the fly. And they are constantly studying the steady stream of research in their field. They'll share their discoveries in a book,...

Hannah Kirk Hannah Kirk has great ideas about how technical writing and content strategy can support each other. She's not a typical tech writer. She loves and appreciates technical documentation and enjoys practicing it. But she has always been more interested in strategy. And she has always spent a lot of time thinking about how content is organized. Hannah and I talked about: #BlackLivesMatter...

Carrie Hane Carrie Hane sees content strategy as a complex information ecosystem, not a simple stream of publications. Looking at content strategy as a system helps her give her clients a more complete picture of how content works. Carrie and I talked about: her recent decision to describe herself professionally by the activities she does instead of a job title or similar label her recent insight...

Nam-ho Park Nam-ho Park is a digital strategist who always puts people first and technology last. Nam-ho first designed experiences for people as an architecture student at Columbia University. The appreciation he developed then for the importance of genuinely human-centered design practice serves him well today. In fact, he hopes that we'll someday drop the word "digital" and return to genuinely...

Andy Fitzgerald Andy Fitzgerald is an information architect who focuses on content for digital experiences. He helps organizations bridge the gaps between their users' human needs and the constraints and requirements of their digital systems. A website or other digital product will always have an information architecture. Being purposeful and intentional about its design yields better digital expe...

Jack Molisani Jack Molisani knows how to put on an engaging and edifying professional conference. He founded and organizes the LavaCon technical content strategy conference, which draws hundreds of content professionals to cities like New Orleans and Portland each year. Jack has experimented over the years with virtualizing parts of his conferences, and he shares in this episode his discoveries ab...