Case study: Identifying 4 emerging roles in content
I developed a framework that is widely cited in the content strategy community.
What was the problem?
The digital content profession is still fairly young, and there are a lot of job titles and not a lot of shared understanding of what those jobs do. In June 2021, a bunch of content-adjacent personalities on Twitter took offense at a Google Codelabs course that portrayed UX writing as a synonym of content strategy and content design.
Who was involved?
I identified this framework on my own after synthesizing other frameworks in the industry and iterating toward clarity with a UX design manager that I reported to. I had been socializing my framework with colleagues who I worked with and responding to their feedback.
How was the problem solved?
Instead of immediately piling on the Twitter thread reactions, I waited.
On the second day, I went home and wrote a blog post on LinkedIn that captured how I’d been thinking about the content discipline. My goal was to turn the industry response from a gripe session into a constructive discussion.
I jumped into the Twitter thread with a link to my post.
What was the outcome of this project?
Immediately, Kristina Halvorson responded publicly and privately about how helpful my response was.
Kristina Halvorson hosted me on her industry-leading Content Strategy podcast: Episode 37: John Collins, Atlassian - Maturing content disciplines.
Larry Swanson invited me onto his Content Strategy Insights podcast: John Collins: Content Engineering - Episode 106
Marcelo Lewin had me join him for a live podcast on HeadlessCreator.com: A Conversation about Content Engineering
I was invited to speak to at Melbourne Content Strategy Meetup (login required).
My thinking was cited by Paolo Negri, co-founder of the Contentful content management system, in his keynote at the FastForward conference in November 2021.
My LinkedIn blogpost was syndicated (with my permission) in Japanese at Kotaba UX in January 2022:
成熟するコンテンツ分野My framework was the subject of pages 89-91 in Natalie Marie Dunbar’s book From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice, published in June 2022 by Rosenfeld Media.
The 4 emerging roles are discussed in an upcoming book written by a college professor. (Details to come when I learn the book is published.)
Competencies demonstrated
Continuous improvement
Years prior, I’d done work to paint the picture of how content strategy could succeed in an organization that wasn’t “ready” for content strategy.
I continued analyzing how people responded to that work and gathering experiences.
I developed this idea of the four overlapping roles and started sharing it with colleagues at my company.
Their feedback gave me insights for continued improvements to my idea.
When the Twitter dustup happened, I was ready to share my work publicly.
High-impact communication
A single tweet linking to a single blog post sparked a lot of discussion and resonated with many, many people.
This led to three podcast appearances in short order.
The concepts I talked about, including variations of my diagrams, have been reproduced in a keynote presentation and a book.
Behind-the-scenes, I’ve had a number of discussions with folks in the industry about these topics.
Applied reasoning
I was able to take four roles that people have talked about and clearly show how they fit together.
I’ve been able to talk about how this approach can scale across projects and companies.
Coaching
I’ve used this framework to give talks about career trajectories and career opportunities.
I’ve conducted 1:1 mentoring discussions with folks in the industry.
I’ve used this to paint a picture for stakeholders of where staffing is deficient.
I’ve had colleagues join projects and we’ve used this to have a common understanding of our roles.