So you’re a content designer… what next?

Whether you identify as a content designer, strategist or UX writer, it’s likely you’ve thought about where you go from here.

You can think about career progression in many ways, but how you progress within your current role, and where do you want to go next, are often the key considerations. Sure, some people have a fully fleshed-out 5-year plan, but many of us struggle to think past the next few months to a year (sometimes it’s even hard to think beyond the next meeting to be honest).

Digital design roles weren’t on the career option list when I was at school. And even now, over twenty years later while they exist, career paths within tech aren’t that well defined. I’m breaking this post into two parts — how you can grow within content design, and where you might to go next.

1. Moving from beginner to leader

I’m often disappointed to see articles about the ‘shape of designers’ that don’t consider the specialism of content. However, some companies such as Intercom (and where I work at BT) have realised that aside from some specific craft skills (like tooling), many of the required skills are the same for all kinds of digital design disciplines. I’ve been working for a few years on my own definitions of the levels within content, and what I believe takes someone from beginner to a master and here’s my summary for each level:

Beginner: Can determine a strategy for their content, create content to a high standard and in line with a brand tone of voice. Understands the importance of working with stakeholders and setting expectations.

Developing: Uses research to identify user needs, determine structure, format and tone. Creates clear, concise content. Not only explores different options but can provide a rationale for their decisions. Collaborates with other design disciplines to ideate and create. Is comfortable sharing decisions with stakeholders and collating feedback. Follows a clear workflow.

Intermediate: Understands how to align business and user needs to determine content requirements. Confidently and proactively recommends research to gain further insights, and can analyse data or behaviour to form hypotheses. Can evaluate content to assess its potential success and sets key measures for content (and tracks against them). Comfortable giving and receiving feedback. Confidently collaborates using design tools and happily facilitates workshops. Advocates for content within the organisation.

Expert: Thinks strategically about how content connects across channels, experiences or an organisation. Proactively strives to optimise content and has strong influence in the design process. Can define information architecture and confidently prioritise content. Evaluates usability. Is comfortable creating various types of content (from editorial to UI and chat) and working with design tools. Proactively documents design decisions and can feedback on both design and content work. Takes full accountability for their work, and demonstrates the value of it. Helps coach or mentor others.

Lead: Plays a key role in setting product direction and defining business value. Can create and validate content and uses evidence to influence stakeholders. Confidently leads crit sessions or facilitates workshops with product or design teams and stakeholders. Leads and mentors team members and advocates content design both inside and outside the organisation. Defines new tools or templates to recommend better ways of working to make teams more effective.

As you notice from these levels, the actual content creation plays quite a small role. In fact, it’s ways of working and the mindsets that set juniors apart from more senior team members. Strategic thinking, influencing, and capability building are key assets for more senior practitioners, and they are not content-specific skills. You’ll also notice that demonstrating business value is key in senior roles, as well as being able to identify process improvements.

But what happens when there’s no room for progression or more strategic work in your organisation, or you’ve decided that these general skills just aren’t getting flexed enough in your day to day work of UX writing? Well, then maybe it’s time to think about your next career move.

2. Potential career steps from content design

Have you ever noticed how UX/Design lead roles tend to go to people with UX or UI design backgrounds? It’s strange when you think about how many leadership roles aren’t ‘hands-on’ and therefore the tooling skills become less important. Why don’t we have more content designers moving into those roles? And for content designers really strong on defining product direction, maybe product ownership is an option. I wanted to dig into these two areas a bit more to understand what’s holding content designers back.

Product Management

Several years ago I remember Sarah Richards saying she’d like to see more content designers moving into product management, and I didn’t get it. But recently I’ve changed my mind. You see content designers who work in product teams have great knowledge of products — how they work, how they’re managed, agile, iterative design, creating hypotheses and measuring value. But they’re also great strategic thinkers, collaborators and communicators. If you’re keen to have more influence over the product outcomes or often feel frustrated about how little strategic thought there is in connecting up products, then maybe this is the perfect direction for you. You already understand the design process and how all the roles work together to deliver impact for users and the business, and that’s key to success.

Design Leadership

In wondering what stopped more great content designers moving into design lead roles, I chatted to Jonathon Colman, who’s Senior Design Manager at Intercom to see what he thought. He mentioned two key skills that product designers often have over and above content designers: knowledge of design thinking as a process, and understanding of business strategy and how to impact it.

He says: “when I talk with content designers, I usually get a lot of tactics that have to do with content quality. That’s great, but it’s not tied into the product development process.”

Content designers need to know how what they’re doing fits into the process, and the value they add at each step of the way — this is something I recently wrote about.

I also see that a lot of good and rigorous thinking goes into content design, but as content designers we’re not often good at documenting our thought process. Yet designers do this constantly, sharing their explorative work and evolutions often. Look at the content skill levels above, and you’ll see that providing rationale, following workflows, documenting design decisions and suggesting process improvements all feature heavily. We can do this, we just need to get better at it!

With more focus on content designers to demonstrate business value and impact, this is another area that we can develop. This also forces us to think more strategically, because the more strategic your content is, the more impact you can have at a broader level. Leadership relies heavily on having this more ‘zoomed out’ view.

Strong leadership also relies on relationship building. As content designers, we’ve been building relationships through stakeholder management for our whole careers! We’re experts in communication and influencing.

I also spoke to Te Thebeau, VP of Product Experience of Xello, and asked him whether he thought experience leads needed to be from pure design backgrounds. His view was that leadership is about ‘creating the conditions for success’, and that the key skills needed were strategic business skills – communication, problem-solving, relationship management, demonstrating value... You see the theme emerging here?

Maybe as content designers we’ve been underselling ourselves all along, because we have these skills in spades!

Content Operations

Content operations enables content teams to run effectively and efficiently, and scale consistently. Think of operations as removing barriers, optimising, and creating consistency. It’s a lot like leadership, in fact.

If you love streamlining process, suggesting new ways of working, helping people move faster and selecting new platforms or systems, then an ops role might be for you.

Your role could cover anything from capability-building to helping with things like org design or budgeting. It’s varied, but all those skills will come in handy — strategic thinking, communication, process thinking, as well as coaching and mentoring. Similar to a design lead role, your aim is to create an environment that fosters success, but purely with a content focus.

As we move up the content design skills ladder, it’s definitely worth thinking about what might come next. Where are your skill gaps, and which areas can you develop now that will help lead you on to your next career path? If one of these new areas sounds like it resonates, learn more — speak to product designers or product owners in your team about their role, join Slack groups or read up on it.

Of course some of us might want to stay as individual contributors, and that’s perfectly fine. But we shouldn’t limit ourselves because we don’t see many content designers moving into general design/UX lead roles. We have the power (and skills) to change that.

Why you need a content team and how to build one is available on Amazon.