The Content Strategy Podcast

Cruce Saunders and the [A] team work with the largest and most complex enterprise content publishers. They know how complex content can be and have experience untangling the mess. Cruce brings his wisdom to the Content Strategy Podcast to talk about content transformation, unifying customer journeys through content, and establishing a true organization-wide shared vision around content. Plus his t...

The language we choose is an important part of the user experiences we create. Vidhika Bansal, UX Manager at Intuit cares deeply about language for the audience and also when communicating internally. She talks to Kristina about connecting language to decision making, using language as a tool for acceptance and belonging and the importance of avoiding bias in data when making content-related decis...

Establishing and growing a content design practice requires strong leadership and teamwork. Chelsea Larsson shares how she has grown such a practice at Zendesk and offers some tactics to help advocate for content designers. There’s also an insight into the content design team structure at Zendesk and peer mentorship. And let’s not forget the part of the chat which was all about bears.

As Program Manager at Brain Traffic, Tenessa Gemelke has reviewed thousands of conference talk proposals. In this episode of the Content Strategy Podcast, Tenessa offers her top tips for what to talk about and how to pitch it. There’s also a potted history of Confab: The Content Strategy Conference and musings about the caring content community.

Gord Roberts loves website content strategy and instilling good practices for successful collaboration on content. As Manager of Web Content Strategy at the Bank of Canada, Gord shares his thoughts on connecting silos for unified content strategy and the relationship between content operations and design. Gord has experience leading a team through a pandemic, delivering crisis comms and making a c...

Alexa Apallas was one of the first five content strategy leads at PayPal. Alexa talks to Kristina about her path into content and what it takes to advance to a content leadership role. Alexa also shares how content designers collaborate with product for a better customer experience, getting people to care about content and content success stories at PayPal.

Preston So shares his thoughts and advice for new ways of delivering content. He offers examples and insights into omni-channel content audits, thinking about audiences holistically and techniques for enabling content strategy whatever the channel and format.

With experience in technical writing, UX writing, content strategy and content design, John Collins shares his thoughts on maturing content disciplines. In his chat with Kristina John also talks about centralizing and scaling Atlassian’s content practice, content titles versus content roles and demonstrating the value of content work.

When communicating about difficult topics, like death, using the right words, voice and tone is essential. Helen Lawson shares how she approaches this with empathy at Co-op Funeralcare to ensure clarity in their communication. Helen also gives an insight into leading on the change of language, building self-serve products and why avoiding euphemisms in content is necessary.

Erica Jorgensen offers an insight into content practices at Microsoft. From more content not being better, ensuring content is an asset and the relationship between content and brand. Erica’s chat with Kristina covers using style guides to talk the same language across teams, the way that content works with research and testing and measuring content.

Jonathan McFadden moved into content strategy to solve problems and help people. He talks about using content strategy for change by advocating for underrepresented users, building designated spaces of inclusion and ultimately working towards an inclusive and diverse industry.

Jordan Craig has worked at Twitter for 18 months as the lead of their content design team. Jordan shares her experience of growing the team, managing Twitter’s terminology, using AI for style guidance, finding a community and creating paths into content design.

When Andy Welfle joined Adobe four years ago he got to work founding and building their content design practice. He now manages a growing team and talks about the relationship between content design and UX writing, content as part of a design system and equitable terminology in tech.

Kristina welcomes Robert Mills of GatherContent to talk about his experience as head of content for GatherContent. He talks about what content ops is, not just in the context of his team’s product but also as part of a larger conversation about the field of content strategy. Rob also shares how he handles content operations internally at GatherContent (how very meta).

As the UX operations lead at HubSpot, Beth Dunn applies a content strategy lens to the way she’s helping lead the company’s UX practice. In this episode, she and Kristina talk about how HubSpot defines UX operations and design, how she’s working to advance the practice, and how teams can get aligned on terminology and goals.

Bram Wessel is a co-founder of Factor, a Seattle-based consultancy that brings user-centered design principles and practice to enterprise-scale information problems. In this episode, he breaks down the types of taxonomy problems many large orgs face, including problems with findability, site search, and navigation. Bram’s work aims to cater to how customers think, applying user research to ensure...

Abby Covert, better known as Abby the IA, returns to the show for a repeat appearance to talk about information architecture, her influential book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, and life in the design world as a new mom (congratulations!). In this episode, she breaks down the steps to information architecture as outlined in her book, and shares some real-world stories of sensemaking from her read...

Ryan Skinner is the principal marketing analyst at Forrester, where he advises enterprise clients on content marketing activities through a strategic lens. In this episode, he and Kristina talk about the blind spots marketers (or sometimes entire companies) have when it comes to the customer experience, specifically in creating content that ties back to both the user needs and business goals. Ryan...

Christine is the Service Director of Content Strategy and Operations at SiriusDecisions. In this week’s podcast, she describes the Content Transformation Roadmap she uses to identify the strategy, people, processes, and technology needed to achieve these milestones. She also shares some thoughts on the definitions of “content marketing” and “content strategy” in B2B environments. (Kristina gets VE...

This week, Kristina discovers that user-centered SEO isn’t just some magic you sprinkle on finished web copy right before hitting publish. After clashing on projects and stepping on each others’ toes, Chris Corak (an SEO) and Rebekah Baggs (a content and UX strategist) found smarter ways to integrate their work and create helpful, relevant web experiences that are search-engine friendly, too.

Dana DiTomaso joins Kristina this week to stray only slightly from the topic of content strategy—this time diving into the world of marketing and measuring content performance. As president and partner at Kick Point, an Edmonton-based digital marketing agency, Dana works with clients to untangle their varied and sometimes disjointed marketing efforts. In this episode, she shares specific tools her...

Mike Petroff and Aaron Baker have teamed up to create a custom editorial analytics dashboard called “Scoop,” which they use to serve the content teams at Harvard University and the online version of The Harvard Gazette. Their goal? To give power back to the content creators, using data to answer their questions and help make informed decisions about content. Instead of just number crunching, they’...

This week, Tina O’Shea (Director, Content Design & Strategy at QuickBooks) talks in depth about how content design went from being “just writing the words” to a key part of the QuickBooks product design process. She describes her team structure, and how she won executive support for their contributions to design. She also digs into how they created the QuickBooks voice and tone guide—and how they’...

Author, publisher, conference organizer, and all-around renaissance man Lou Rosenfeld talks shop about writing the first book on IA, watching the evolution of design practices, and how he’s helping to keep people at the forefront of their respective industries.

Cruce Saunders joins Kristina this week to talk about multi-channel content publishing at the enterprise level. He describes how enterprises are starting (or hopefully starting) to take a more holistic approach to their content and customer experiences, moving away from the “content center of excellence” approach present in so many large organizations. He also shares some thoughts on content marke...