Episode 47: Sarah Etter, Procore - Building reputation, visibility and value for content

Kristina Halvorson:

Hello and welcome to the Content Strategy Podcast. I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson, and every episode of this podcast I chat to established leaders and exciting new voices exploring our ever-evolving field of content strategy. We cover all the topics that inform how we shape digital content. From user experience design to customer experience, accessibility to content design and everything in between.

Welcome back. I missed you. It's good to see you through the airwaves or the streaming waves or the tubes. I'm Kristina, again, and with me today, I have a very special guest who I actually asked to come on the podcast way back in September. So, she's been waiting. I've been waiting. And she's here now. It's going to be amazing. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about her.

I'm super happy to introduce you to Sarah Etter. Sarah is the senior manager of content design at Procore, which connects everyone in construction on a global platform. She has more than 10 years of experience in leading content strategy and design for enterprise companies on both the marketing and the product side. She has a special focus on driving ROI with content, that's right, understanding complex backend code and its impact on content and creating dynamic product experiences to drive user engagement through content. It is very exciting. Sarah, welcome to The Content Strategy Podcast.

Sarah Etter:

Kristina, thank you so much for having me. I'm such a big fan of yours, so I'm so excited to talk to you today.

Kristina Halvorson:

It's great. Sarah, where are we talking to you right now?

Sarah Etter:

I'm in Austin, Texas, which is where one of our second kind of headquarters is. Our main headquarters is in Santa Barbara.

Kristina Halvorson:

Great. I think that you are actually the third person in Austin that I have talked to over the last 48 hours.

Sarah Etter:

It's exploding down here.

Kristina Halvorson:

Yeah, it is crazy. I went to Austin to speak at South by Southwest for the first time in 2009. It was just an entirely different situation.

Sarah Etter:

Yeah, there's a huge tech influx down here. You can really feel it. The energy of the city is totally changing, which is... It's interesting for sure. There's good and bad to it.

Kristina Halvorson:

I'll make it back down there some day. Sarah, I always kick off the podcast by asking folks to talk to me about what is inevitably their winding path to where they are today through the hallways of content strategy and adjacent fields of practice. So, I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about your journey.

Sarah Etter:

Yeah. And I'll try to give you the kind of CliffsNotes version. I wanted to be a music journalist, but I graduated from Penn State with a major in English undergrad in journalism. And it was right when the internet just kind of killed print publications. It was just over. And so, I ended up getting a job as a prison reporter and so I moved to Boston and the place that was employing me would send me to prisons and jails and I would interview inmates and corrections officers and kind of report on recidivism and I did that for about three or four years and looking back on it, it was a very intense job to do when I was 23.

After three years, I was like, I can't do this anymore. I started to apply to master's programs and I became the editor in chief of a business publication. And I got my master's at writing fiction. And after I got my master's that's really when I made the jump to my first startup. And it was when I realized that I was being paid so much better in tech, I was being treated so much better. It was honestly kind of a revelation for me. It was one of the best jobs I ever had. It was okay if I had tattoos, it was okay if I worked a little bit weirder hours than normal. So, as soon as I got into that, it really gave me a chance to really learn the field.

This was on the content marketing side. So, that's where I really got into understanding leads, bringing people into the business, how are we selling these products and making them accessible to people? After that I ended up working at a very big software engineering company that did full scale engagements. So from research to content, to UX and design all the way to build. So we had an in-house engineering team and that's where I really got to start working with these kind of premier clients like M&M's or American Red Cross and started to really deliver content strategies that were guiding either their marketing or their products. And that's when I really started working with engineering closely and getting pretty fascinated by what was happening on the back end, how was it powering the experience? What were the limitations?

So after a bunch of years doing that, I really ended up at Procore and I was really excited for this one because it was a chance for me to build a team. It was kind of my chance to make something in-house where I would get to see the results. A lot of times with consulting, you're building V1 and you're handing them a playbook and you're kind of walking away. So this was a really cool chance to get to create something really long lasting. So yeah, I've been here for three years now and it's been probably, I always say it's one of my top three jobs. I've really got so lucky with this one. But yeah, so that's my path. Like most people, I started off as a journalist and then I got pretty fascinated. It's the writer in you and then the nerd. They come together.

Kristina Halvorson:

That's right and the analyst and the strategist and the mediator and the therapist, it's all wrapped up in there.

Sarah Etter:

A hundred percent, you know it.

Kristina Halvorson:

Yeah. So, can you tell me a little bit about what Procore is and what it does?

Sarah Etter:

Yeah, so honestly, the way I love to describe it is, all the paperwork that goes into building a building and construction, right. Everything from blueprints to the architects plans, to the RFIs, to the supplies, all of that digital. I really love it because it almost reminds me of the way Salesforce made sales digital. Right. All of a sudden you could keep an eye on things rather than having a Rolodex where you had to go through and use a spreadsheet to keep track of every touch. It's just that simple. And it's really cool because it's end to end. So that's even more fun and then the kind of added bonus for me on the product side is, that means our product is big. Right. So everything I do, I'm trying to scale it to meet a product that is doing this end to end kind of full construction management.‍

Kristina Halvorson:

And, how big is Procore?

Sarah Etter:

I think we're probably around three or 4,000 people now, have to be. Total for the company. Yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:

What part of the company do you sit in? Who do you report up through? Describe your team and your core partners.

Sarah Etter:

Yeah. So we're on the product side and then I sit in the design section. So I ladder up to the VP of design and the SVP of products. And then obviously that keeps going up to the C-level. So yeah, that's where I sit.

Kristina Halvorson:

Okay and tell me about how that team is structured. That larger business unit.

Sarah Etter:

Do you mean the design team?

Kristina Halvorson:

Yeah.

Sarah Etter:

Yeah. The design team, we're basically kind of allotted per business unit, almost. So, in the core part of our products, we have designers allotted to each core spot. And then based on that, when I came in I decided because our product is so complex, I've embedded a content designer with those teams so that the content designer can develop expertise, really learn the ins and outs of that area of the product and then they can become more of a strategic advisor. And the added bonus to that is, they get to be leaders. They get to create a content strategy for their area that ladders up to our bigger product strategy, right. They have a high level of ownership, which actually has been really good for us. It's worked really well.

Kristina Halvorson:

So those folks are reporting up into you. So there is a centralized content services team or content design team?

Sarah Etter:

Yes.

Kristina Halvorson:

So, when you joined how many of you were there?

Sarah Etter:

I came in there were two technical writers. And so, I was really starting from scratch. And I knew as soon as I got here, that my job was going to be to create a content team, prove our value right out of the gate and then also ramp these two technical writers up, teach them content strategy, really grow them. And that was kind of always my goal. So the first thing we did was kind of come up with that mission and vision for the team, which was really good for us, because for me coming in as a new leader, you really have to earn their trust because most people when they hear they're getting a new boss, the first thing they do is freak out.

They'd been with me in the interview process so they had helped pick me, but I do want to stress that I think a big part of the success that is happening with the content design team at Procore is through hiring. I'm really picky. It takes me a long time to hire and it is worth it. I'm very lucky that I've managed to find people who are great to work with and really hungry and hard workers and smart. I'm not going to say their names here because I know a recruiter will go try to find them.

Yeah. But I will say, I really have to give a shout out to both my VP of design and my CEO and my team, because I think good teams only happen when there is a good culture. And when I'm not going to work every day fighting to prove how important content is and I've had that job before. Do you know what I mean? When you're having to go in and fight every day to prove you need content, that's a different job than the one I have so I feel really lucky for that.

Kristina Halvorson:

Do you feel like that value, that people already understood the value of content when you came to work there, because you did mention that you had to do some work to sort of establish value for the team. Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of that? Because you're right. There are so many leaders who feel so isolated because they're just constantly trying to show up at the table and present their value and their worth, and I do want to talk about your demonstration of ROI, but just right there at the very beginning, how were you able to build that reputation or visibility or value?

Sarah Etter:

Yeah. So it started with getting those two technical writers on board and getting them excited in their buy-in and having them believe they were part of the team. So once we came up with the mission and vision for the content design team, then we created the first product writing guide, and that as me was probably a really defining moment for us because we hadn't had a global artifact that everyone could go to. So we looked at product writing guides from all the best in class enterprise. I mean, we really became students and then we also applied our knowledge of our specific product. We really made sure that we had parts on writing globally, right. Because globalization is huge for us, which I'll get to you later. Writing inclusively, right. Because obviously we have this huge push to make sure that our product is accessible and that we're not just speaking to one type of person.

So once we had that and we really went on that road show and started telling people, here's this thing you can use every day and you can make your job easier, they were excited because honestly, most designers don't want to be the content person. Nine times out of 10, they have enough work to do. So once we were able to start giving them tools that scaled like the product writing guide, they were really excited. I was really happy about that part. But the other part of this, once we launched the product writing guide, I came in right when we started to build out our design system. And so we had a chance to make sure that that was very content oriented.

So we had a content designer on our design system team. Then we created a content template library in Figma so that our designers can just... It's like a Mad Libs. They can pull a template for an error message. They can pull a template for an empty state and they just fill it out. So if we're not on the project, they're still being pretty consistent. We're seeing the usage rates of that. We're monitoring those and it's like thousands of times a month. We're seeing our design team use that. And to me, that's thousands of times, I'm not on a project that they're not writing something that's not part of our style guide. So that's been really big for us.

Kristina Halvorson:

Let me ask you, and how many folks do you have on your team now? So you started out, it was you and two technical writers a couple of years ago and now, how big is the team?

Sarah Etter:

I have five, now. We've been looking really closely and I think this is why we started talking was the ratio of content to designers. And so, right now, I think the best practice is one content person per five designers. But on the product design side, it's a little different because we're not as content heavy as say like a marketing website.

So, we're a little closer to like, we're okay with a one to seven or a one to eight. But after having those discussions about a healthy ratio for us, and that came from looking at industry best practices, talking to our designers, our content designers, really figuring out how can we get the best quality of work without making someone's life horrible? Because burnout's really important, right. The way that I'm looking at it, I don't want them to support so many designers that they hate their jobs. So, we basically found this sweet spot for us. And then our kind of focus has been, okay, as we ramp up the design team, as we keep scaling, every X amount of designers we hire, we need to hire one content person and one researcher to keep us at this quality.

Kristina Halvorson:

Who backs that decision for you?

Sarah Etter:

That's at the VP level and then he's able to kind of go up and kind of fight for that. So, I've been lucky in the sense that... And my VP, he's always understood how important content is. And so, I don't have to scream and shout and stomp on that one. But, yeah, so, it's really been scale for sure.

Kristina Halvorson:

Something I'm really interested in is, you've talked about all of the work, obviously just the straight content work that your team needs to do with the designers. And for as few of you as there have been really to the number of designers, I mean, having that ratio in the first place is a win, right. Because I know so many people who are operating and supporting 60 designers, so, go team. But you described a lot of work and tools that were built out that were not actually serving content or content design doing the front lines work, right. You created a lot of strategic materials to be able to scale services. How were you able to help your team find the time to collaborate and work on that while they were still making the words go in the products?

Sarah Etter:

I have to tell you from a manager standpoint, it was basically being able to say, I need one content person on the design system, because that's the only way I can build this into a best practice, into something that's going to go across the org. So, I didn't realize it at the time but looking back on it, having one dedicated content designer on the design system when we kicked it off, was huge. She was allocated a hundred percent and then scaled down because once we launched the big versions, then she could go down to 20%. She's just checking in, looking at new components, that kind of thing.

But if anybody out there is listening, the investment of having a content person on the design system team is going to pay off because then you're replicating great content practices every time someone pulls a component, every time someone uses that system. And so that was a really great way for us to, looking back we invested maybe six months of work on that, on the content side. And now anytime someone upgrades to the design system or trades in a component, we're there.

Kristina Halvorson:

You've mentioned a lot of looking into industry or field of practice best practices, who is doing the really good work that you are just like, I want some of that too.

Sarah Etter:

Honestly, it's kind of almost arbitrary, but I always love to look at, I love what Shopify does. I love Spotify. I'm always going to go look at the behemoth. So of course we're going to look at Facebook and Google and just kind of crib some notes from that, that's always going to happen. But then again, when you're building this it has to be for your product. So, they might be able to give you some suggestions on the buckets or make sure you don't miss something big, but ultimately, it's got to be for your teams. We did a lot of talking with the design team about what they had needed, what would help them and then we did our own kind of look at where are the biggest mistakes being made? What are the things that we're going to have to clean up later? What does the design team struggle with when it comes to content? And then those were really areas we honed in.

Kristina Halvorson:

So, one of the things you also mentioned, actually I read it in your bio, is that you are very interested in and determined to be able to demonstrate ROI for your efforts in content design at your organization. Talk to me a little bit about how that works.

Sarah Etter:

For me, I always wanted to think of my team as a startup in the sense that I want us to be as profitable as possible, rather than a cost center, because, it hasn't happened to me but I have seen that in some places kind of one of the first places to get cut could be content. Because when you say the word content, it sounds kind of amorphous. It's words. Anyone can write words, right? That's not enough if you want to prove, hey, we're really integral to this product. We're really important. And so, I can only present on ROI even if it's once a year, right, because I'm not getting these metrics by the time we build something, launch it and we're tracking it. This isn't stuff that's coming in the door every single day. And when I think of ROI, I'm thinking of dollar and then I'm also thinking of product value. I'm looking at user metrics, right?

So it's not just money, but it is a return. A couple of things that have worked for me have been building a really strong relationship with our support team. The reason this is awesome is because we have an idea of how much it costs per hour for someone to call our support team. And so, if I know the support team is getting 10 calls per month, because this one error message is wonky, I can really calculate out, okay, how much is this costing us a year in support time? Then once we fix it, once you kind of extrapolate that out, all of a sudden you're like, okay, this is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars of people getting on the phone, emailing, doing anything just because the content wasn't perfect or wasn't giving them a good next step.

The one thing I would encourage anyone who is interested in ROI, talk to your support team. We have a monthly sync with them and they elevate what are they getting the most calls about? We can prioritize it based on the call volume, right, and then we go fix it. Because this is something where I can then say, hey, we saved X amount of dollars per year by doing this one thing. So that's been huge for us. The other thing is having really strong ideas about what we want to track when we go in. So we have a content testing plan. It's just a Google doc. It's nothing fancy. But basically, it makes sure that my team, every time we test content, we're looking at similar metrics, right. Because it's very easy if you have a bunch of content designers in the field and they're just winging it and saying like, let's use this tool, let's track that.

That doesn't help me next year when all the numbers start coming in. So we're standardizing our approach to content testing so that we're all kind of looking for the same things, using the same tools, that kind of thing. And I would say that, for me when I got here I was really focused on empty states because I could see that we had a lot of room to improve those. And so, getting the data before you make any changes is also huge. I think with content, it's very easy to jump in and give solutions, but you might want to say, hey, wait, what's the data right now because you can't get that back.

If you start making big changes and you haven't already looked at the KPIs that you want to change, then you can't say I increased user adoption of this tool by 97% because you don't have that benchmark. So I always try to keep the team a little focused on that too. Support is huge obviously then we look at user behavior, tool adoption, that kind of thing. For us it's a lot of educating people on how to use the product when they're in there because that also decreases customer acquisition cost. It decreases onboarding calls, right? So, all of those kinds of things are really good places inside the product where you can realize ROI.

Kristina Halvorson:

Something that has intrigued me is that as you've been talking you are really saying, we went out to the design team, we went out to support. We make sure that we gather these metrics, et cetera. You clearly are creating relationships outside of just the design org. You're in the product. We also have people talking about the product in marketing. We have people doing internal communications about rules in the product. We have the technical writers and all of this is content. To your point, everybody is writing. So, all of this good work that you've done to create consistency and accuracy with terminology and et cetera within the product, how are you staying in touch with these other areas of the organization to have that consistency of voice and tone and terminology and information and accuracy and timeliness across all these different customer experience touchpoints?

Sarah Etter:

Yeah, totally. So, one thing that's happened kind of organically is each one of the people that I hire has a different area that they're really passionate about. So I have one content designer who secretly loves marketing. I have one who loves support. I have another one who loves translation. So, each one of us has an arm of the business that we'll meet with monthly, just to check in, let them know what we're up to.

We just finished developing our goals for the year so we'll walk them through that deck and make sure that it's aligned with them or so they at least know, hey, this is what they're up to. And one thing that I want to point out for anyone who might be jumping in on design side and running content, when we developed our voice and tone for the product, we read every other voice and tone guide at the company to make sure that whatever we did in the product, laddered under those, so that it could just... It wasn't meant to be generic but it was meant to be flexible in the sense that we're not going against anyone else's style guide.

We're not blowing up anything that's happening in marketing. But one of the things as we evolve, I love content design on the product side because it kind of feels like the next frontier, right. On the marketing side, we've got personalization, we've got these fancy CMSs, right. We kind of have the top of the funnel nailed. But the thing that I'm really excited about is, how do I carry that into the product? How do I take the great work marketing has done and light that up once someone is using us every day, because that's a really long customer relationship. That is years of time that someone is spending in the product that we have a chance to respond to them and help them and guide them. So we have to be in lock ups with support and marketing and technical writing, right. Because if we don't kind of create this holistic view of the user, it's just the enterprise. That's what's required of the enterprise, as we scale up.

Kristina Halvorson:

Do you have right now any kind of actual, functional, governance for this? I mean, where there's a lot of conversation now coming around content ops, right. Where somebody or a team is really functioning as sort of that central overview and they're creating governance standards and policies to sort of help bring everybody together and empower folks so nobody is scrambling for, what do I do here or here, what does that look like?

Sarah Etter:

We really are focused on right now, I think as an interim to get to where you're talking about, centers for excellence, right. So, grouping people together who are really excited about content that go across the org. So, I'm really lucky we just hired a new VP of international a couple months ago, Anna. And she is very passionate about getting everyone who touches content on the same page, creating spaces for us to talk to each other, making sure we stay in the loop with each other. But yeah, I think we're working towards that kind of content ops governance model that you're talking about. I think, like any org at our size, that's going to be what's required for us to scale. And we're kind of working with bridge functionality to get to that point right now.

Kristina Halvorson:

Something else that you mentioned in your bio is that you are passionate about understanding complex backend code and its impact on product. That's a little nerdy. No, I have to tell you, we have Confab coming up in May here in Minneapolis, which you can find out more about at confabevents.com, but that's our annual strategy conference, in person for the first time in three years. And anyway, one of our keynotes is about learning how to talk to developers about content and content strategy, which I too have a very soft spot for this. So, talk to me about what that means when you say you're passionate about complex backend code.

Sarah Etter:

Yeah. I mean, it's really just building in that technical understanding of what can actually be accomplished. And when I talk about that, when you're working for a Coca-Cola or an American Red Cross or any major brand, you're likely talking about a gigantic code base that might cross multiple types of, whether it's React or Ruby or... You know what I mean? You can be crossing so many different languages just from that alone and then let's add in the piece of, you probably have a translation management system. So, for somebody, let's say you are talking about inside of a product, you might still have 2 million words inside that product that somebody has to manage, translate. Those words might be in different repositories and then you've got to think about mobile, right. So, when you get to this kind of enterprise level, the problems get much crazier.

I love it because it's like a big puzzle every day. It's like, can you write great content that you can translate into Japanese, that will not break the design and be read the opposite direction and can it cross all the code bases that we have available and what's going to happen on mobile, right? If those are your six questions, all of a sudden, the one error message that you just wrote that looks like it took two seconds, no, it means a lot more once you start thinking about what's happening on the back end, where does it go? What is the developer doing? And then thinking about things like, the documentation that we're giving to them, right. Like I would prefer to give you one wire frame and an Excel spreadsheet of the 97 different variations on that content that you're going to need to have, rather than leaving you to write all that, because that's where you really get in trouble.

I think with products, especially, when they're complex, you really have to think about content QA. That's a big push for us this year, building that engineering bridge so that we can go look and make sure the content we sent is getting built because I think that's a place that a lot of people fall down. And so, yeah, it is too, really supporting your engineering partners because they're not there to make your life harder, but they have a complex job. And so understanding their complexity, you can come to the table as a better partner and it becomes less of a kind of friction and more of a partnership of we both want to build the best thing and I understand what you're going through so I can give you the best documentation possible.

Kristina Halvorson:

So we are just about out of time, but before we go, you mentioned something to me before we started recording, which is that you just finished your second novel. I'm interested to know what is that about?

Sarah Etter:

It's about a woman working in Silicon Valley and she has severe depression. And so it's really kind of looking at a city that has been kind of ravaged by tech money and the disparity between kind of the haves and have nots in this one specific place. And I think that's something that we kind of have to reckon with a little bit and be good citizens around, right. What is the economic and social impact of exactly what's happening in Austin, right? It's happening in every city. Every city that I go to, they're like, it's different here. It's changing. The rent is really high. I'm like, that is every city in America. It's kind of looking at that and how do we grapple with that and live with that?

Kristina Halvorson:

I know about 80 million people who are going to be looking for that book once it's out. All right, thank you so much for joining me today. It was really just a pleasure to chat with you. I have to tell you, you mentioned you were concerned about recruiters contacting your people. I think you're going to be hearing from a few yourself after this.

Sarah Etter:

I just want to say thank you for having me. When I first got started in content your book was the first thing that I ever read and you really showed me what a career I could have. I think without that, I really wouldn't have gotten where I am. So I'm just really honored to get to talk to you today.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well, thanks. That's honoring to hear, so I appreciate it.

Sarah Etter:

Awesome.

Kristina Halvorson:

All right. Well, thanks. And thanks everybody for joining us once again this week. And I would love for you to come to Confab. If you want to, show up confabevents.com, tickets are on sale now. All right. Thanks a lot. See you soon.

Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.