11 Leap to the Next Level of Content Operations

Transform content into a core competency sooner, not later.

SOMETIMES, TO CHANGE A SITUATION YOU ARE IN REQUIRES YOU TO TAKE A GIANT LEAP. BUT YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO FLY UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO TRANSFORM.

—Suzy Kassem, poet and philosopher

ALWAYS IN MOTION IS THE FUTURE.

—Yoda

Aspirations. In my research on content operations, I was happy to find no shortage of aspirations. Even though most study participants reported being at content operations level 3 or lower, the vast majority also reported a desire to reach level 4 (sustain) or level 5 (thrive) (Figure 11.1).

A circle graph represents content professionals reporting aspirations to mature their content operations.

Figure 11.1: Most content professionals reported aspirations to mature their content operations1

These aspirations for content operations are smart. Why? I believe that every company, big and small, will need content as a core competency that the company can use to its advantage. And right now, creating that competency before your competitors is an advantage unto itself.

Mature Content Operations Make Content a Core Competency

This point bears repeating: every company will need content as a core competency. And that competency will frequently cut across business functions, similar to the way competencies like information technology/engineering and design are crucial across business functions such as product, sales, marketing, and support. After observing a wide range of companies and considering the issue carefully for years, I now believe strongly in content as its own competency and that, at ideal maturity, it does not belong in other competencies or functions. Content is not design. Content is not marketing. Content is not information technology or engineering. Content is not support. Content is important to such competencies and functions, but content belongs in content.

If a company does not elevate content to a cohesive core competency, then the company is likely to suffer problems that make content ineffective and that make its operations inefficient at scale. Examples of those problems include but are by no means limited to

Additionally, content requires unique capabilities, processes, and tools that other competencies and functions do not support well or at all. Examples include but are not limited to

Although productive collaboration must happen between content and other business functions, that does not mean that content operations should be scattered throughout other functions. Content operations must be organized and aligned, or else your company will flounder not simply with content but with business itself.

So how can you mature content operations into a core competency? While the exact approach might, and likely will, vary from company to company, I can offer several success factors worth considering.

Success Factors in Maturing Content Operations

The Content Science team conducted in-depth analysis of our study participants’ answers, both those who reported success and those who reported that their company was at a high level of maturity. I combined those insights with my observations in consulting and training to identify success factors. To leap from your company’s current level of content operations to the next level and beyond, closely consider the success factors in these four areas:

Let’s start with leadership.

Leadership

It will be impossible to mature content operations at your company to levels 4 or 5 without leadership. I don’t mean leaders who are merely supportive of content. I mean leaders who have content expertise and who focus on making content successful for the company.

Hire a Chief Content Officer Soon

If you or your company are serious about content, I encourage you to hire a chief content officer or similar executive role early because it is the most effective and efficient approach to maturing operations. Once hired, this role can establish vision and strategy and then align and optimize teams, processes, and technologies.

The alternative, especially for a large company, is to wait until after content operations emerge under other business functions, such as sales, support, design, and product. And then you start to experience pain, such as different teams unknowingly creating similar content or turf wars emerging over who is responsible for what content. Your company will likely hire a content executive at that point anyway, and then the content executive has to use time and effort to reset vision and strategy, change teams, fix processes, and revisit decisions before making meaningful progress.

One distinction of the chief content officer role is crystallizing and advocating for a content vision. In my studies with Content Science, vision was far and away the top characteristic reported as effective in a content leader.2 The person in this role needs to unify the content teams and capabilities under a common vision, advocate for turning that content vision into reality, and lead the team to take ownership of the vision. Noel McDonagh, the director of information development at Dell EMC, articulates the value this way:

Probably the key thing that enables us to operate as a team is sharing a vision, sharing the plans, and ensuring each individual knows what the vision is and can contribute to it on an ongoing basis.

Another distinction of this role is defining and justifying budget. That might sound obvious, but I was shocked by one of our study findings. Most participants reported not only having operations at level 3 or less but also that they did not know what their company’s content budget was. How could this be? We learned from our comments and interviews that, for most participants, budgets didn’t work like that. Content was baked into other activities or functions, like marketing or support, but didn’t have its own planning, line items, and the like. Jack Lew once said that a budget “is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations.” The chief content officer puts numbers behind what a company values and aspires to with content.

Empower Content Coaches and Advocates

Mature content operations need more than executive leadership. They need managers, team leaders, or project leaders who are empowered to coach their teams on content issues. And just about everyone on the team must be prepared to advocate for content. Joseph Campo of Dassault Systèmes Solidworks describes the value of getting content buy-in.

You have to get some sort of buy-in. Bottom line, people need to see what the big-picture vision is, what the goal is, and how they fit into that vision, and either buy in or not. If they don’t buy in, then you’re gonna have somebody who might leave, or they might just do the minimum possible to get the job done.

Content operations mature more smoothly when each member of the content team is equipped to lead.

Experimentation

One of our studies found that companies with maturing content operations were more likely to have at least some elements of content intelligence, even if they didn’t yet have an entire system.3 Chapters 8 and 9 cover content intelligence in depth, but here I want to note two insights that can help you succeed.

Enable Content Genius with Data Access

While they might not call it content genius, companies that are maturing in their content approach are empowering their teams to evaluate their content decisions. Lance Yoder, a program manager at the international health technology company Cerner Corporation, explains what encouraging content genius is like.

[Our teams are] really strong in analytics—they’re able to measure and define variables and recognize different data patterns and how they translate to content.4

While analytics are not all you need to make a content decision, they certainly help. Another study participant describes how limited access to analytics and other data hinders content decisions.

If we could get web analytics to report back who’s going where, how often, what they’re looking up, and were they successful, that would be invaluable to us. Unfortunately, the way our IT department has set that up it’s very restricted, very broad, and it’s almost useless.

A company that forces its content team to make decisions without data will never mature its content operations.

Dedicate Effort to Innovation

Mature companies devote ongoing effort to larger-scale experimentation—in other words, to researching and considering bigger bets on content. As an example, one of our anonymous study participants describes observing companies push the boundaries of content.

I go to trade shows, and it’s hard not to salivate over some organizations and what they’ve done—these new innovations. It’s clear just from what they’re doing that these organizations truly invest in their content. They’re fully committed to and understand the value of content, and you can see it just in the number of things they’re trying, even if some of them fail. I think if that level of understanding or investment is there, companies are able to go a lot further.

As I noted in Chapter 9, exploring ways to innovate paid off for Netflix, and for MailChimp, and it will pay off for you.

Create a Center for Content Excellence

You don’t have to call it a center for content excellence—I’ve seen everything from “Big Book of Knowledge” to “Content Awesome Central.” Regardless of what you call it, you need a go-to place to

You can do this in a format that works for your company or team. I’ve seen everything from a wiki to an intranet portal to a set of Google docs.

Automation

Companies with maturing content operations look to automation as a crucial factor in making their processes more efficient and scalable. Noel McDonagh of Dell EMC nicely explains the importance of automation in scaling content operations.

AI and machine learning is the only way we’re going to be able to deal with the fact that the demand for content is increasing exponentially. We’re going to have to automate the production of certain aspects of content.

Such companies are

One thing I love about content automation is that it benefits successful companies large and small alike. While their scale might differ, the need to respond to the intense customer demand for content is the same. And suitable technology is available for companies of all sizes. For a sample, see Appendix C, “Resources.”

People

Although automation can address a range of content tasks for maturing content operations, automation doesn’t replace people. Consider the following success factors.

Cultivate a Culture System

Culture is the often-overlooked but powerful connective tissue in content operations. Positive culture forms a level of trust that reduces the need for documenting and implementing pedantic rules and excessive reviews. Culture also makes governance infinitely smoother. I find that companies that already have a strong progressive culture create the right content culture more easily. But even if your company lacks culture, you can create a system that cultivates strong culture for your content operations.

Give Permission to Fail (but Learn)

Planning, producing, and delivering effective content requires people to put their minds and even their hearts “out there.” Oftentimes it works; sometimes it does not. Instead of chastising people for failing, encourage people to embrace curiosity and problem-solving. This approach fosters deep trust that is crucial to your success. Ann Marie Gray, who directed content marketing at Morningstar Financial for years and is currently the vice president of content at Americas’ SAP Users Group, explains:

Having a “safe space” for critically examining our work is essential. People on content teams need to trust their colleagues, share their work, and share honest feedback. Leaders need to create and maintain an environment where that can happen by establishing expectations about showing each other respect and kindness.

Encouraging content genius, as I mentioned, further reinforces this notion of learning from, instead of harshly judging, content efforts.

Don’t Hire a Rock Star; Hire a Star Constellation

Your content operations will not be sustainable or scalable if they depend on one content rock star. That star will flame out quickly. Instead, you need to assemble a constellation of stars who, together, can make your content operations shine. In our “What Makes Content Teams Thrive?” study, we asked content leaders about the qualities they look for in hiring new team members. Top answers included

I have found particularly useful two insights shared with me by content leaders. Tracy V. Wilson, of the immensely successful HowStuffWorks, notes

I look for overachievers [when hiring], regardless of the role they are looking for—people who are driven to do exceptionally well.

Aaron Burgess, of the high-potential company HomeAway, explains how the mix of qualities enlightens content operations:

There are some intangible qualities that team members need to have: curiosity, tenacity, systems thinkers, design thinkers. People who can look at a complex problem and break it down into simpler elements, synthesize information, make sense of lots of user data and product requirements, and consistently ask “why?” and then get from “why?” to a better way of doing things.

If you are a content team of one for now, you can still connect with other stars through conferences, training, and online communities so that your content efforts shine bright.

Hire for New Roles

By now, I hope it’s clear that hiring a writer/editor (or dozens of writer/editors) will probably not give you the capabilities you need. Consider hiring people who can take on a variety of content roles, including the five emerging roles in Table 11.1.

Table 11.1 Emerging Content Roles

ROLE

DESCRIPTION

Content strategist

Identifies key content opportunities and conducts high-level planning

Content analyst

Establishes or refines content intelligence systems and conducts analyses or evaluations

Content engineer

Models content and architect rules to enable dynamic, automated content delivery and management

Content designer

Plans and develops the content for specific experiences, especially dynamic experiences and conversational interfaces

Content marketer

Plans and coordinates editorial and production for marketing

A small or medium-sized company might need someone to take on more than one of these roles, such as content strategist and content analyst. A large company often needs these roles to remain distinct, and their demand for these roles is increasing. As of this writing, each of these roles represents hundreds of full-time position openings on career sites such as Indeed.com.

Train, Train, Train, and Train Some More

If you already have writer/editors or other content professionals on your team, you might need to train them in new or additional roles. Our studies have found that companies with maturing content operations offer training opportunities specific to content for their content teams. Simply offering the training reinforces the other success factors because it conveys that the company takes content seriously, embraces experimentation, and supports curiosity. To make the most of experimentation and automation, modern content roles need technology savvy, which demands training. Product content manager Erin Crews of MailChimp elaborates:

We started by establishing our content team’s mission and clarifying roles and career paths for both individual contributors and managers. Setting clear expectations for content roles early on helped us identify skill gaps on our team and find training or other resources to fill them. We’ve drawn on a mix of in-house workshops, conferences and seminars, and learnings from our design team’s critique process.

One reason I started Content Science Academy was to provide cost-effective content-specific training in a convenient online format. Many content-related technology companies have their own training resources, as well, at reasonable cost. For a sample, see Appendix C, “Resources.”

Consider a Content Operations Roadmap

By now, you should have a sense of where your company falls in its level of content maturity and some ideas about what to do to take your company to the next level. Overwhelmed? Not sure where to start for your company? Creating a content operations roadmap can help. You can think through issues such as

This roadmap can take a variety of formats. I like to use a visual format, as shown in Figure 11.2, to support presentations and discussions. A spreadsheet or other document can complement that visual with more detail as you refine your plans.

An illustration represents a sample content operations roadmap showing high-level phases of change.

Figure 11.2: A sample content operations roadmap illustrating high-level phases of change

Congratulations. In reaching this point in The Content Advantage, you have closely considered content, from vision through implementation. Before we conclude, I ask you to consider one more aspect of content: the future.

References

1 “Content Operations and Leadership Study: Detailed Findings,” Content Science

2 “What Makes Content Teams Thrive?” Content Science

3 “Content Operations and Leadership Study: Detailed Findings,” Content Science

4 “What Makes Content Teams Thrive?” Content Science