Episode 37: John Collins, Atlassian - Maturing content disciplines

Kristina Halvorson:

Hello, my friends and listeners, welcome back to the Content Strategy Podcast, I'm your host, Kristina Halvorson. I'm in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The sun is shining, things are beautiful. Most of my friends are up north at the lake, which if you've been listening to our last podcast, you know refers to any one of the 10,000 lakes that are here in beautiful Minnesota.

My very special guest today is actually calling in from Austin, Texas. Of course, I'm going to be asking him about the weather there in just a moment. Spoiler alert, it's hot. Friends, I'd like you to meet John Collins. John is a Senior Content Architect on the content platform at Atlassian. Long ago, John was an award-winning community journalist but he made the move to the software industry more than a decade ago and has extensive experience with technical writing, UX writing, content strategy, content design and localization. He has spoken internationally, but John is still learning and exploring content design and how to best get users the content they need. John is already my very best friend after reading his bio, John, welcome to the Content Strategy Podcast.

John Collins:

Thank you, glad to be on.

Kristina Halvorson:

John, what's the weather like in Austin?

John Collins:

It is hot and maybe more humid than I wish it were.

Kristina Halvorson:

What is going on with the humidity down there? Is there a mosquito problem down there this year?

John Collins:

Yeah, we had several weeks of rain about a month ago. And yeah, mosquitoes are here and they're big, Texas sized.

Kristina Halvorson:

Nobody wants that.

John Collins:

No.

Kristina Halvorson:

We often joke that the mosquito is the Minnesota state bird. It's not a joke, it's a cry for help. John, not that long ago, I posted on Twitter something complainy and provocative about how people don't understand the difference between content design and UX writing and content strategy. Of course, everybody piled on because it's everybody's favorite question, just kidding. Somebody told me I was gatekeeping, which is not what I meant to do. Then you came back a day or two later and said, "This exchange has prompted me to complete a post." And I don't know if you had started it or if it had just been in your head.

John Collins:

Just in my head.

Kristina Halvorson:

So I read it and it is, in my opinion, one of the best pieces to come out on sort of how the field of content strategy and all of its specializations and sub-disciplines and side disciplines has evolved over the last couple of years. I probably read it three times in a row and after my initial, "Oh, why didn't I write this?" I was just so taken by the way that you were able to articulate the different fields of practice, the different roles, not just on projects but within an organization. How you’ve put together all the different pieces around what content is, how it gets done in an organization, how we ensure that it is able to serve our users and help us meet our business goals. So I ambushed you and said, "Please come and talk about this on my podcast," and you graciously agreed and here you are.

John Collins:

Yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:

Before we get into that, can you tell me a little bit about how you came to your role as Senior Content Architect at Atlassian?

John Collins:

I have a path that's not atypical for the guests that you've had on the show, I did start out in journalism as you read in the bio. And I think that really is where it all started. I was managing a small, weekly newspaper and I was seeing all the bits and pieces of content and I was laying it out and going in the next morning, picking it up and distributing it. And I loved that, but I needed to get into something that would provide for a growing family a little bit better. So I made the jump to tech and very quickly saw, if the product were designed better, I wouldn't have to write this user documentation, some of it. And it's just morphed over the years, I've been really interested in that intersection of where content strategy meets reality, if you will. I've gotten into the systems work for the last four or five years, and I'm really enjoying that part of it.

Kristina Halvorson:

Did you go straight over to Atlassian?

John Collins:

No. I worked at another software company for almost eight years, I think it is. I was hired as a technical writer and by the time I left, I was essentially doing that same job the whole time, but my title was Senior UX Content Strategist.

Kristina Halvorson:

When you say that you were essentially doing the same, this is where we began, right? It was with job titles and people not being able to have consistency around job titles. I mean, tech writer and senior UX content strategist, those are two radically different job titles. So for you to say that you were doing essentially the same thing is jarring, almost. Talk to me about when you came in as a tech writer, how did they see the role? What did folks think that that role needed to deliver or be accountable for?

John Collins:

I was hired as a second full-time technical writer at that company and we were writing quick start guides that were, basically the content was managed InDesign. And user guides and the kind of more traditional tri-panel help that appears in software. And then a growing component of what we did was actually writing the user interface texts. And our team was actually, it grew to be eight content technical writers and we were also the localization manager for the companies on our team and so we were responsible for localizing that content into 10 languages.

Kristina Halvorson:

Here's an interesting thing that I want to hone in on and that UX writing as a job title has really emerged just over the last, even 18 months. What I'm hearing is a lot of tech writers are really interested in making that jump or that transition to UX writing, to creating copy within the product experience. What case did you make? How did you make that jump from, or that evolution maybe, from writing user documentation to actually getting into the product proper?

John Collins:

I think there were a couple of things that were going on. One would be, give credit to the other senior technical writer, when I came on board. She was really, really good at thinking about users and she had kind of started making the relationships within the company and getting access to the code repost where the UI strings lived, so there's that side of it. Also our company only had one user experience person and that was a contractor. Being technical writers, kind of being an advocate for the user and in that role kind of defacto made us user experience folks. And there were times when I actually designed user flows and did some wire framing because that one contractor didn't have the bandwidth for it. So we were the word people and we were kind of the user experience people and so it just kind of was organic, really.

Kristina Halvorson:

I have to say that I think within so many organizations, if that connection were made by management or the people organizing the resources and allocating time and money and all of that, that technical writers really are at the core responsible for so much of the user experience after the products have been purchased, I think that that would really shift the way that so many of them are seen within an organization.

John Collins:

Yeah. And I would say I was going to conferences and doing technical writery things and a lot of them didn't have that access but they were kind of resentful that they were under appreciated. I was trying to find ways to help prove that value and give them tools to make more impact for their companies and I hope even this article that we're going to be discussing is helpful to them in doing that.

Kristina Halvorson:

When I first started talking about content strategy in 2008, 2009, there was a lot of blowback from the technical writing community and from the technical comms community and from people who were working in data and structured content. They strongly felt that I had somehow appropriated, and that the community had appropriated, the term content strategy from the technical community field. Specifically because Ann Rockley had written her book, Managing Enterprise Content, so they had been using enterprise content strategy and all the people who started talking about content strategy in the context of user experience design and specifically website content design, really, it was like, "No, you are marketing. You're talking about this as a marketing person and content strategy is not marketing." It was almost like there was an under-appreciation within the tech comm community for user experience design, which was so strange to me because I was just like, "Why can't we all get along?" All of this matters to the user experience and to getting the right content to users when and where they need it. So it's exciting to see this swell of interest within the tech comm community about UX writing. My hope is that with looking at them as resources for writing for UI and writing for UX, potentially that will help people better appreciate their value. But in the meantime, I'm going to keep banging the drum that I think tech comm writers are the most undervalued roles in the spectrum of content strategy.

John Collins:

Yeah, for sure.

Kristina Halvorson:

At some point you come over to Atlassian and your role there is what? When you walked through the door.

John Collins:

Day one, I was an information experience writer and essentially that was kind of technical writer, UX writer for one of our products, which has been sunsetted. It doesn't exist anymore. And I was in that role for about eight months before I transitioned to what is morphed into what I'm doing today. I was kind of, the team first that I moved to was kind of doing lean UX related to content and our documentation sites, specifically. And that was my in, to kind of start doing some of the systems side of content modeling and structured content and that kind of thing.

Kristina Halvorson:

Can you explain what Lean UX is?

John Collins:

Oh man, it's been awhile since I've done that, but the idea was that we had a very small team and we had a researcher, a UX designer, a developer and myself representing content. And we just iterated fairly quickly on a bunch of different experiments to see what impact they would have related to our content and the documentation site. So really nimble. We weren't necessarily trying to do anything that was permanent, but just seeing where we could move the needle.

Kristina Halvorson:

This is a unique thing about Atlassian as an organization is the team that you just described, included content as part of the core team of design and development. For so many organizations this just does not exist and there's a reason that that value was established so early on really, at Atlassian. You've mentioned that a lot of the credit goes to someone who was a previous guest on my podcast a long time ago, Karen Cross. Do you want to talk about the work that Karen did at Atlassian?

John Collins:

Yeah, so I mentioned when I started on day one, I was an information experience writer. But at some point, most of that time I was reporting into Karen Cross and she was a design manager but at some point she was able to centralize our content practice within the design team at Atlassian. And it was called the content design team. And that team was able to scale quite a bit and really, really advocate and focus on the content side of design. And actually the parts that we're talking about was one of the reasons I actually moved to Atlassian, was that they put such a premium on content within design. And so, yeah, she spun up that new team that was people focusing on product content, but also some of our marketing journeys, not so much product marketing per se, but the marketing journeys more holistically.

Kristina Halvorson:

That was pretty visionary. I am lucky to be able to speak to a lot of different organizations, both here on the podcast and through my company, Brain Traffic Consulting Practice and then also of course, speakers at our conferences, Confab and Button. And so I have a pretty good purview of organizations and the level of maturity that were there with content as a practice and as a function. Atlassian is pretty visionary and it's one of the most mature organizations I know, when it comes to content. To some degree then it's not surprising to me that you've had the purview and the opportunity. I mean, you're very smart to pull together kind of all these separate threads and be able to talk about content as a practice, as a field, as an ecosystem, the way that you can. Because you've been sitting in an enterprise where a lot of these things are kind of coming to life.

I wonder now, if we can transition over to this piece that you wrote on LinkedIn.

John Collins:

Sure.

Kristina Halvorson:

I'm going to ask you to talk through it. For context, we have been in this field for so many years as things continue to evolve both within our organizations and within training and conference presentations and meet ups and cohorts that the field and our tools and the practice and the roles and responsibilities and levels and layers of accountability are just constantly shifting. Is it because products are becoming more complex? Is it because the internet is so big? There are probably lots of different reasons. So trying to sort everything out is important for a variety of reasons, but I'm really interested in hearing your perspective. Why does it matter what we call this stuff?

John Collins:

So I want to be clear up front that this really was to focus on roles in general and not be a debate about titles, I hate that debate.

Kristina Halvorson:

Can you tell them the difference between titles and roles real quick, because those do get conflated so often.

John Collins:

I'm picturing that the roles as kind of big, slightly amorphous buckets. And roles or titles are, they mean so many different things to different people but they're generally reflecting something a little bit more narrow, I would say.

Kristina Halvorson:

When I think about it, I often think about roles as almost like sets of tasks or groups of tasks that are related to one another that have to get done in order to move content, in order to facilitate, in order to plan it, create it, think about it, structure it. And that those job titles, like a person with a job title can be playing 14 different roles or they can be playing a very narrow slice of one role. I think the other thing that is crazy around job titles is that in terms of trying to find consistency or trying to establish hierarchy, the way that hierarchy even in and of itself is defined at so many different organizations is just radically all over the map. A lead in one organization can essentially have the power and purview of a VP in another organization. So I do think that that differentiation before we dive into this, is really important.

John Collins:

I have been thinking about systems and I like thinking about big pictures and so that was also kind of where I was coming from when I wrote this. And the hypothesis, basically, that I put forward is that we're seeing four clear roles coming in out of content and it's a sign that content as a discipline, if you will, is maturing. I try to address, we can go in more detail, but I try to address things that apply to somebody like myself who's working in a large enterprise company, but also that lone technical writer who's working in a dark room somewhere. I think this addresses all of those things and try to be as inclusive as I can with what I talk about.

Kristina Halvorson:

Let's go ahead then and dive in and talk about those four roles that you described.

John Collins:

The short little background of why I started thinking about this, at some point in my career I discovered the content strategy work that you and others were doing. And I was like, "Oh yeah, that's what I've been doing. I didn't know what the name was."

Kristina Halvorson:

It's always such a happy thing when that happens. 

John Collins:

I know. And then we had Sarah Winter's book on content design, and I was like, "Well yeah, that's another part of what I do that I didn't completely see in content strategy," so we have content design and content strategy on that radar. And then to me, it was probably about two years ago, I started hearing a lot of buzz about content operations. And I kind of, in my skeptical moment, I was like, "Oh for heaven's sake, another content thing? What's going on here?" And so that really started me thinking about this. And then I was exposed to some other work by Cruce Saunders, who I think was also one of your guests, and he talks about content engineering.

And I thought, "These things can't all be the same, what's going on here?" And so that led me to identifying those as the four roles, content design, content strategy, content engineering, content operations, no particular order there. And for the sake of the fact that this is a podcast and people can't see anything right now, I just created a diagram that has those four roles inside circles that are two-by-two, It doesn't really completely matter based on my first draft here of that diagram, but content strategy and content designer are on the left and content engineering and content operations are on the right. Each of those circles overlaps a little bit, and that's on purpose because there are parts of each of those roles that overlap with the others. And my statement is that we have to have all four of these roles working together before we can ship content out to users.

Kristina Halvorson:

I think it’s such a fantastic evolution of the content strategy quad that we introduced at Brain Traffic in 2011. At the time we were breaking down the different elements of content as we saw what was needed to make it go, right? There was substance and structure, and then we had process and governance. Does that sound right?

John Collins:

Yep.

Kristina Halvorson:

Right. Even just introducing that term governance which we borrowed and learned from Lisa Welchman was a big deal, I think for a lot of organizations, because that piece of like, "All right, we got to take care of the content," was so important. That evolved then several years later, I think I finally wrote it down in 2018, where we really embraced this term in the field of content design as sort of something that was really focused on experience, on customer experience and experience design and sort of what was being presented, and seen, and heard, and felt, and navigated through on the front end.

Then we broke the other piece of it down into what we loosely called systems design, which was the content engineering that you described and process, which now I am very happy to adopt content ops because I like you was just like, "Oh, just put another thing in front of ops, lame," and I'm just like, "Oh no wait, it's a thing." So, I brought that up and you had a couple of interesting comments about why your thinking or how it had evolved from that. Because you talked about, "Let's turn on its side," talk a little bit about the differences there.

John Collins:

Well, that the revision that you did in 2018 really resonated, because that was about the time that Karen Cross had set up the content design work. I was grappling with content design versus content strategy, and I'm knee deep in a project of architecting a new content management system.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh, no big deal.

John Collins:

Yeah. And so that bottom half of systems design, I was like, "Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm doing some of this process and structure." And I got really excited about that revision, it meant a lot more to me than the first draft. I have somewhat of a little playbook play that I based off of that quad to help define a content strategy deliverable. It's useful, it's kind of a hard play to run, but I think there's a lot of value in that 2018 quad. I guess this is an iteration on that, but I almost kind of see it as something different.

The one tweak that I made personally to that Brain Traffic 2018 Quad was switching editorial and experience from left and right. Because that aligned editorial more with the process side, which I thought showed some neat collaborations with say the editorial team and the team that's building out the workflow. And maybe all of that subconsciously came together with the diagram that I put in my piece that we're talking about. But yeah, just continuing to refine how we think about what we do.

Kristina Halvorson:

Yeah, that's great. I talk to Sarah Winters on a fairly regular basis, and she has stated on more than one occasion that if she sees one more organization practicing content design without content strategy she's going to just hang it up and go live in the country. And I think that that's so interesting because I think so many content designers are strategic thinkers, right? They are thinking about the why, they are thinking about context, they are thinking about purpose and bridging user needs with business goals. Can you talk a little bit about when you think about the role of content strategy and how that informs those other three roles that you've described?

Because that is so true. All of those roles meet in the center, because if you make a significant decision in one area it's going to cascade into all the others. You can't make a big change in your content design system and not have it affect the content engineering work that's being done, not have it affect whether it's strategy or editorial or brand work or marketing, not have it somehow back into content operations. Can you talk a little bit about that function of content strategy? Why is that important? What does that help set either at the organizational level or at the project level or whatever lens you see it?

John Collins:

The one thing that I like about the Brain Traffic Quad is that that is centralized in that graphic. And I usually, if I'm showing that graphic to people, I'm like "Everything flows from the center”, whereas the diagram that I have it kind of has equal weight with these other disciplines. That might be a weak point of my graphic, but I make the point that content strategy is strategic and I would hypothesize that content design is more where the tactical part comes in. So I give the example of, maybe content strategy realizes that the company has a goal of selling more bundles instead of à la carte on items. And then content design comes in and determines what content helps sell those bundles or helps people know how to use bundles as opposed to ala carte. So yeah, there is that relationship, but I think it's pretty easy to conflate tactics and strategy. And so having content strategy as its separate thing I think is helpful and important.

The other point that I love to make about content strategy is that it has to address not just the user needs as we know, but it has to address the business goals. I like to say that if there's a content strategy that only focuses on user needs, you may end up with way more content than you can keep track of. And if you focus only on business goals, then that's where you get content that's cringy and people resent it. So if you can hit that balance of doing both, I think that's really important, and I think that's part of the role of content strategy versus content design.

Kristina Halvorson:

What's interesting to me is that when we talk about planning for designing, structuring, crafting, delivering, measuring, even all the way through to sort of archiving content or sunsetting it all together, that none of these roles get to sit out. Everything you just described, we need to have content engineering as a function or at least as an input or consideration at the table at some point, because that's where deciding how we're going to build the content on the backend, in terms of how are the machines going to recognize the relationships between the pieces of content? How are we going to be able to serve up that content to the right people in the right place, whether it's personalization experience or AI even? 

That to me is where things get really interesting. Maybe we are considering strategy almost more of a framework, or principles, or priorities where we're saying, "Here's where content sits within the organization, here's who's involved, here's what their roles and accountability are, and that that as a function is working to constantly knit together those pieces." What's interesting to me though is that I think that that's where content operations is going to really start to see its function within an organization, and then maybe we'll see content strategy sitting there.

John Collins:

I've had a couple of projects that I've been a part of that have really used the content operations side of the house to make the company start asking those tough questions like, who does get to publish this content? Or when do we determine this content is no longer needed? And I've been less interested in the content operations side personally, but I see a lot of value from framing some of the discussions. But to your point, the trickiness really comes with whether it's multiple people filling these roles or one person filling these roles, is finding that balance and that collaboration between the disciplines. I had a discussion at one point with somebody kind of from more of the editorial side or if you want to say the content operation side and said, "Hey, you realize that when I set up this content model, I can put validations on fields that are effectively enforcing editorial guidance?"

Or I had somebody who was designing some custom author experience and said, "What are the authors going to be able to search by?" I said, "Well, you're kind of sitting there," I was using the Brain Traffic quote on that one. I said, "You're sitting in process, I'm sitting in structure. You tell me what your process should be and I'll make sure that we build the structure to support what you think they should search for." So I think that learning to have those discussions and dances, we really have to be educating people about how the pieces fit together, and I think that's an ongoing challenge.

Kristina Halvorson:

Can anybody do that? Is that up to a manager? Is that something that anybody can or should feel confident about? Do you feel like it's a thing that you really need to get a certain years of experience under your belt before you can start trying to parse those things?‍

John Collins:

That's a good question. Well, I come from Atlassian where we're very empowered to do things, so I'm going to probably skew that way of, anybody could have that discussion but part of the reason for writing and sharing this post is to get this idea out there and if other people find it useful to frame their discussions or to educate their stakeholders, that's the kind of thing I'm hoping to be able to help with, so that if you are that lone content person in a smaller company you can still say, "Well, here's all the things that we're doing and this is why it's more complicated than you think” or you don't always want to have that discussion with a stakeholder, but it's just giving some framework that people can kind of adapt and use how they see fit, I think is part of what I wrote this about.

Kristina Halvorson:

I think I have said in every single episode of this new season, the number one question I get asked is, "How can I demonstrate my value in terms of the work that I do with content?" And it really is, that is another side to that coin, right? Is being able to demonstrate and communicate the complexity of content. That it is not just about writing words and putting it on the screen or tweaking the language and shipping it in the next version. I just think that I wonder how as a community we can continue to come together to deliver a language that is non-threatening when we are talking about the complexity of content and also sort of framed in terms of the business value of the content activities that we're all steeped in all day, every day.

I feel like that is going to be an ongoing, shared challenge within our larger community. I really hope that we continue to see folks being brave about stepping up and saying, "Here's what I think about these much larger issues," and sharing them in posts like yours, because conversations like this are just, they're gold for me and I think organizations and at conferences and meetups and in Slack channels. I deeply appreciate your taking the time and demonstrating the leadership to post something that speaks about such big issues, so thank you.

John Collins:

You're welcome, it's my pleasure.

Kristina Halvorson:

We are unfortunately out of time because I still have 80,000 questions for you, I find that this happens very often. I will share with our listeners that a lot of the things that we're talking about naturally are coming up in early conversations that we're having with our speakers for Button, our new Content Design Conference, which is happening virtually in October. If you want to hear more about that event, you can go to buttonconf, C-O-N-F.com, we hope that you'll join us there. John, it's been just such a huge pleasure and I look forward to when we can in fact meet face-to-face. And I promise you, I will remember it because I might sit you down and grill you even further for another several hours, so you can look forward to, slash, dread that opportunity.

John Collins:

I would do both, and it would be my pleasure.

Kristina Halvorson:

Great. Thanks so much, John.

John Collins:

Thank you.