Building the content design function from scratch.

Having initially been hired as a growth marketer, I became the first content designer at Cuvva. I’d discovered the discipline through Medium articles, and realised it was similar to the work I’d already been doing writing copy for a growth product squad. I felt content design help us take Cuvva to the next level, so wrote a proposal for leadership to ask if I could do it. Luckily, they said yes.

So I was tasked with building out all content design processes and establishing new ways of working within product teams.

By the time I moved into content design, we already had 3 established product teams and 5 product designers. There were processes in place, and people were very much in a working rhythm. I not only had to introduce new concepts, but had to change behaviours that were well in place.

Additionally, the content marketing team was growing at the time I was transitioning to Experience. Pretty quickly there were 3 content roles within Marketing, all taking ownership of some element of the written word at Cuvva, but with a real lack of alignment with each other, and myself.

Integrating into product teams

For product teams, I knew it was going to be a case of creating habits over time. Initially I made sure to join all team meetings to understand every single process and how the team worked. I needed to make sure I knew the ropes (and that everyone was familiar with me and my role) before suggesting changes. I also booked weekly meetings with the product managers, just myself and them, to get them in the habit of consulting me and sharing upcoming work.

For the first 3 months, I slotted myself into the existing processes (which meant I couldn’t really influence design or have the impact I wanted to). I sought out projects that were particularly content-heavy - the ones that would need a lot of input from me, and less input from designers, so that they didn’t feel like I was stepping on their toes so much. I made sure to work collaboratively, always asking for their opinions and feedback, careful to create good relationships that would allow me to edge into a more active position within the team.

And I read. A lot. I attended courses, bought books, and absorbed just about everything I could about what good content design should look like.

Establishing new content design processes

When it came time to move into a new quarter, with fresh team goals and focuses, I worked with the Head of Experience to make content design a real focus. When we presented these goals to the rest of the team, I asked them for their support in rolling out some new processes. I also asked for their contributions to defining those processes - workshopping them together as a group. This way they felt some ownership of the changes, and I knew that I had at least one ally on the product teams.

I also took it upon myself to educate not just those I worked with, but the whole company, on the importance of content. Alongside other content writers, I trained the tone of voice guidelines to the whole company, and set up an alert on slack for ‘copy’ and ‘content’ so I could see where there was a need for it and take it on. I found small projects I could do outside of product squads to see quick results, like redoing all of our error messages and writing a style guide, and shared work regularly in show and tells.

After one year in the role, the company had really got on board with content design - so much so that all 3 squads wanted it to be a part of their regular processes. It was an incredible achievement for me, but it also meant that there was more work to do than people to do it. It was clear I needed to grow the team - so I got to hiring. Fast forward to mid-2021, I’d hired a content design lead and another content designer to help continue what I’d built.

Here’s a rough idea of the process we currently follow. 👇

Creating alignment across content functions

Alongside the efforts I was making with product teams, I booked in 3 weekly meetings with the other content folks in marketing - a weekly kick off to share plans for the week, a feedback session where we could share what we were working on, and a workshop session where we could start making and documenting language decisions.

Together we created new tone of voice guidelines, and starting documenting things like use of emojis and patterns of language use. I also created a content database - storing all the decisions we’d made around content. The idea is to use it like a searchable database - looking for terms that you want to use to see if there’s anything in there. This meant that language decisions no longer lived in one person’s head, and made sure the whole team were on the same page,

Extending the reach of content to customer support

At the same time, I began mentoring a budding content-designer from the customer support team - which not only stretched me and helped me learn, it meant the language that they were using on the frontline could also become more consistent with our tone of voice. We took inspiration from a Medium article we’d read from Deliveroo’s design team to create a guide for writing saved responses that went out to customers.

We categorised every saved response across 2 axes - the perceived mood of a user, and the potential impact of the information we were sharing.

With this, we were able to design a style guide that helped the customer support team write responses in the future using a 3 point system for each of the 5 types.

The customer support team have been using this guide for a while now, creating more consistent saved responses that have the right hierarchy and flow.