Episode 57: Peter Merholz - The maturity of content and design disciplines

Kristina Halvorson:

This is the Content Strategy podcast, and I'm your host Kristina Halvorson. On each and every episode, I interview someone I admire who's doing meaningful work in content strategy and all its adjacent disciplines. If you care about making content more useful, usable, and inclusive for all, welcome in. You have found your people.

Welcome back, friends and neighbors. It's me. Kristina, here to talk to you today about content strategy, or is it design ops? Oh, it's a special treat today. We have a very, well, I won't say old. Well, we're the same age, so I'll say, you know, in their prime, friend who I've known for lo these many years here with me today. And his name is Peter Merholtz. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about him. Peter has worked at the intersection of design technology and humans for over 25 years. Currently he's an independent consultant focused on improving the effectiveness of design organizations. His clients include JP Morgan Chase, Ceridian, the New York Times, Roblox and Starbucks. My daughter's gonna wanna listen to this episode. She probably won't. He co-founded Adaptive Path, the premier user experience consultancy acquired by Capital One in 2014. After leaving Adaptive Path, he served as a design executive leading teams at Groupon, OpenTable, Capital One, Snagajob, now Snag, and Kaiser Permanente. He co-wrote Org Design for Design Orgs, still the premier book on building in-house design teams and co-hosts Finding Our Way, a podcast exploring design leadership. And oh yeah, he coined the term blog for real. Hi Peter, welcome to the podcast.

Peter Merholz:

Hi Kristina. I'm thrilled to be here. You and I we almost never engage in a professional matter, in a professional way kind of publicly. And so I'm excited for the intersection of whatever it is you do and whatever it is I do to be shared with the world.

Kristina Halvorson:

Really, today is just an experiment potentially gone awry, but we don't know yet. We have to wait and see. And yet Peter Merholz, you did basically help establish along with your cohorts at Adaptive Path, the field of user experience design. So, you know, let's be professional just for a hot second here, if we can. Normally at the top of this podcast, I ask people to tell me about their journeys to content strategy. You can't do that. What am I gonna do? Tell me about your journey to where you are now, wherever that, you know, however you may quantify that.

Peter Merholz:

Probably best to start with Adaptive Path, which was a user experience consultancy founded in 2001 by seven of us. And very slowly at first, and then a little more quickly grew and got up to nearly 50 people at one point in the kind of 2008/9 timeframe. I'm starting there because while at Adaptive Path, I was a project lead and did client work and all that kind of stuff, as we were growing, I ended up spending a fair bit of attention on figuring out how to scale our organization. And primarily with respect to how do we staff project teams and what were the roles on project teams, how did they relate to one another within a team, how did those teams relate to our organizational leadership? And started just kind of trying to make sense of what did it take to create teams that could dependably deliver great design work.

And so that was where, and it was just to solve like a business problem. But that was where I started thinking very intentionally about organization design. And then I left Adaptive Path in 2011, at the end of 2011 and became a design executive. And notably at Groupon, when I grew a team from 25 to nearly 60, there were no resources in the world to help someone in the position I was in to figure out how to do that best. And so, as I always did professionally, I started speaking and writing about my experience as a design executive and, and reflecting on that because I thought others would find it interesting what happens when you're on that side of the equation as opposed to a practitioner.

As I started speaking about my work as a design executive and, and the org design I was doing, to shape how do you take a team of 50 or 60 designers and researchers and stuff and shape them such that they can do good work? I was getting this really enthusiastic feedback from others who were saying, no one else is talking about this kind of stuff. Thank you so much for bringing this to light. And similarly, the woman who I would co-author Org Design for Design Orgs with, Kristin Skinner, was having a similar experience. She had gone, she had stated Adaptive Path and then got acquired by Capital and so she was figuring out what it meant to scale program management, design program management within a place like Capital One. And so we decided to join forces and co-author Org Design for Design Orgs, which was in, we wrote it in 2015 and it came out in 2016. So the book is about seven years old now. And that book basically became my calling card moving forward. I did remain as an executive for a while, but then at some point about four years ago, I got tired of the horror show that is how companies hire executive design leaders and decided to take advantage of whatever public presence I had built up and put out my shingle. I've been an independent consultant since.

The work I do there, it's a mix of work, but it's either I go inside a company and work 10 to 20 hours a week helping them with their internal org stuff, career architectures, design leadership matters, recruiting and hiring practices, those types of things. Or I also have a practice that I call Partnership. Looks like coaching, but acts like consulting, where I work with heads of design, leading teams as small as four and as large as 400, companies all across the globe. Literally, I have Asia and Europe and all across North America. And just work with these heads of design and basically help them think through their challenges because there's no one inside their companies they have to turn to, as they're trying to figure out how to solve their primarily organizational challenges. And so I become that resource for them.

Kristina Halvorson:

You're so fancy.

Peter Merholz:

I am very fancy.

Kristina Halvorson:

You are. I just admire you so much and that that's the last compliment you're gonna get this whole time. Actually that's probably not true. I thank you so much for that. I am, I relate to a lot of it. Not the part where you had executive jobs at all those fancy companies, but just maybe we would like to share with our listening audience how you and I met because it was right back in that 2008 to 2009 period. Tell me what you remember.

Peter Merholz:

So what I remember was probably, I want to say 2005 or six, I don't remember exactly when I was invited to participate in, I think present to MIMA, the Minnesota Interactive Media Association. Am I remembering that right association?

Kristina Halvorson: 

Marketing Association. Yep. Close enough. That was me. PS I invited you.

Peter Merholz:

I gave a talk, I forget about what, something design, design, leadership, whatever related. And I remember my laptop froze, so we had to find it, but I had stored somewhere a PDF that we got on another machine and I was able to give the talk with just static slides, but it, but we soldiered through. And so that was, I believe where we met. I don't know if I'm confusing that with a local AIGA event that I remember Jason Fields and I were jurors on.

Kristina Halvorson:

No, you're right.

Peter Merholz:

And then so we met, we hit it off. Your funny lady, you reminded me a lot of another funny lady that I knew. And at Adaptive Path we used to host like after hours, essentially UX meetups on various topics. I guess I knew you were coming to town and so I paired you with Erika Hall on the queens of content comedy tour and the two of you gave talks on content strategy in front of a hundred and some people on the second floor of Adaptive Path in that 2007, 2008 timeframe. That's my memory.

Kristina Halvorson:

So let me add a little color to that memory for you if I may. I just wanna be clear, for those of you under the age of what Peter and I are, Adaptive Path is basically responsible for all of our jobs. Adaptive Path really helped codify, it's true, helped codify the practice of user experience design. And you all were it for years. I mean you were the like leading light of this and you hosted a conference that was called, what was it called?

Peter Merholz:

UX Week.

Kristina Halvorson:

UX week. That was like everybody's dream was to go to UX Week

Peter Merholz:

We had UX intensives.

Kristina Halvorson:

That's right. All that stuff. You, your business partner and the co-host of your current podcast is Jesse James Garrett, who wrote the Elements of User Experience, which you know, also gave us all our jobs. But is, you know, I for years still to this day, well I don't see anybody in their office anymore, but people have that diagram printed out and like hung in their cubicle or on their board sort of showing, in fact the elements of user experience. So anyway, I was terrified of all of you because I was like, Midwestern copywriting for websites gal, like watching you from afar. 

But then a couple years later I actually started emailing you and saying, Peter, let's talk about content strategy Peter, why isn’t content in the elements of user experience design graph outside of it just being like a software feature. Peter, I think that you guys really are kind of doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're doing it wrong. And you were just like, oh my God, please leave me alone. And finally, in one of my many emails, you were like, do you wanna come out here and talk to us about this? I was just like, yeah, I do. Cuz I was stupid and young and fearless. And then I thought I was going to give like a fireside chat with some people from Adaptive Path and then without asking me, you turned it into a meetup and added Erika Hall, who I'd never heard of before to the roster. So suddenly instead of chatting with like six people, I was giving a presentation to 150 people that my friend is what happened. What do you have to say for yourself now?

Peter Merholz:

Totally sounds plausible, sounds plausible. What I have to say for myself is you're welcome for what I did to help expose you, that is to an audience of a room full of San Franciscans who were hungry for your material.

Kristina Halvorson:

That is 1000% correct. And what I was going to say is that, that literally was the turning point in my career was showing up in San Francisco and being terrified with my Dell laptop P.S. and showing a PowerPoint with animations and sound effects and meeting Erika Hall who also scared the living daylights out of me. That was it. And then seeing how ready people were to talk about the role of content within user experience design was just, it fueled my fire, I guess. So thank you. Thank you for that and now we're friends. See how it all works out in the end.

Peter Merholz:

We are friends. It all works out.

Kristina Halvorson:

I wanna talk a little bit first about this, what kind of questions that you had asked me over the years and the way, you know, the way that we have kind of engaged back and forth about the idea of, and the practice of content strategy. I wanna talk about that first and then we're gonna roll that into a conversation if we can, about how design ops emerged and on its heels, research ops and whether or not content ops is a thing that comes next. So tell me first, what is your problem with content strategy? I mean, really.

Peter Merholz: 

My problem with content strategy is that it's still, from my exposure and, and I occasionally dip into it for my job and other reasons, but it's still a slippery fish that I can't get my hands around exactly what it is y'all are saying y'all are responsible for in the work that you do. And in every environment I'm in, it's a little different from company to company. I think that's starting to, I mean, I think that has changed. I think that it is firmed up and I know your question was somewhat facetious, but I'll take it at face value.

Kristina Halvorson:

Yeah, no, please do actually because I, I mean to interject, I mostly was saying it like that to be funny because I'm a funny gal. But your questions and observations about content strategy within larger organizations are gold.

Peter Merholz:

Yeah, well I'll use my I statements starting with, we talked about adaptive path. Adaptive path was a user experience firm. We did not distinguish content from research, from design. Really all of us all did all of it. I actually led projects for a couple different clients that were content strategy projects and we didn't think anything of it. Like we had to do something different than whatever we did. We just knew that our focus was on content strategy. One in particular was for Wells Fargo in 2002 or three as they were trying to figure out how to make their website suck less. And we called it a content strategy project, but we approached it as we would any project where we did user research and then we modeled that user research and we had prototypes and we had recommendations like all towards how they kind of better took advantage of content in that experience.

But then the next project would've been a very similar process, but an outcome that might have been an interactive tool, a piece of software, right? So part of it is personal to me and you know, the fact that I'm a writer and have been for a long time might explain some of these blurred lines, which is, I never decoupled content from any of the work I did. I argued, I don't know how early on it might have even been pre-Adaptive Path. I argued against usability that involved Lorum Ipsum, which I think people still do to this day, but this was like 20 years ago I was arguing against because I'm like, well the content is the thing that people are like, that's how you judge their reaction, not the shape of the rectangles. And personally it's always been wedded in now or like wedded to the rest of the practice as, as our field has evolved and we've gotten specialties and subspecialties, I feel like, let's say product design for lack of a better phrase. But we can talk about that. Product design is pretty well figured out. UX research is pretty well figured out content, I still, because I know it's more than writing, I do know that. But like the practices and the processes and the approach seem a lot more variable depending on the context you're in than, than research and design. And then the last thing I'll say in terms

of like what my problem with content strategy is though, I remember a few years ago reaching out to you and trying to understand, so it's content design now, but is that different than content strategy? I hear a lot from content designers who think that content strategy is different than content design. Whereas my argument is that content strategy is simply a more advanced practice of content design and just like how to, and then where does UX writing fit into all of this

and how to unpack this and if, if I as an interested party have trouble making sense of it, I can only imagine what non UX types who have some responsibility to this make of all of that. So that's my deal with content strategy.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well it's extraordinarily valuable to hear your deal because you are working with design leadership and design leadership has to work with other areas of leadership throughout the organization. Product leadership, marketing leadership, internal communications, I.T. I mean it is not unlike content. There is design in just about everything. However, a thing that I would suggest is that part of why it is difficult to parse out who's responsible for what in content strategy or in content is that it is such an assumption that everybody does the content. I mean even even when you were talking about, you know, at Adaptive Path, well we just took it, we just took it for granted that content was a part of it and everybody would do the content. And yet at UX Week for years, none of your sessions were around processes required to quote do the content. And so I feel like the content processes around strategy and taxonomy and structuring, planning and understanding, you know, brand guidelines, voice and tone, UI copy, et cetera, that so much of that is almost just invisible work within an organization. And that's why we hear so often about content folks just burning themselves out, trying to help people understand, look, here's what I do. And advocating for the specific and unique skill sets required to do that work. So having said that, are you seeing within the design orgs that you are going into and talking to and helping coach and, and co-create and design, do you see that those folks are like, we are doing this in partnership with content and it's part of content, but content is not our gig. That's for the people that understand the areas of subject expertise and so on. Where do you think the disconnect is happening there?

Peter Merholz:

I wanna unpack a little bit of what you said before the question then I'll get to the question, because I think it's relevant in terms of my perspective and experience, which is while a forum like UX Week might not have had a whole lot about content, we did have a whole lot about information architecture. Tthat's always been a challenge of mine is at some point as as IA waned and content strategy waxed, IA became seen as a part of content strategy, which at first caught me off guard cause it really wasn't necessarily how I was.

Kristina Halvorson:

Really? You're seeing that you see that in organizations really?

Peter Merholz:

Well, sometimes. So in the career architectures that I build, fast forward to 2022, I define content design as a practice sitting at the intersection of UX writing and information architecture. I know there's more to it, but these types of career architectures often oversimplify. But information architecture, I mean you said taxonomy, right? Information architecture is so much about taxonomy, metadata, labels, chunking, grouping, et cetera of the content of the material that I see that as very much part of content strategy or content design. 

How companies practice it is different because there was some, people confuse interaction design with information architecture. And so the product designers are like, no, we do the IA,

but they actually don't understand IA. And so then they product designers produce shitty navigation schemes and they don't understand how to create good labels and the importance of like with like, and just navigating word spaces, which is crucial for successful software design. And so, so one I wanted to call that out. So while we didn't talk about content often, one of the very first most popular essays ever on the Adaptive Path site was something that Jeffrey Veen wrote called Doing a Content Inventory or a Mind Numbing Odyssey Through Your Website.

Kristina Halvorson:

Yeah, he wrote that In 2002. I know that. Believe me, I have that article just about memorized from the 2000s for sure.

Peter Merholz:

Yeah. So, and but, and that's kind of what I mean, like it, we never really focused on it. I don't know if we did a lot to focus on research either. It was all just part of a stew. Now going forward to your question around like basically what's the state of play that I'm seeing, banks get it, financial services team firms seem to get it. The organizations that I see that treat content most robustly are banks. Usually they're operating the scale where they have a lot of people who are focused on content. And, and this actually gets to something I was, as I was thinking about this, I I would ask back to you within banks, and I'm assuming other heavily regulated and compliance oriented environments like healthcare, your content strategists end up becoming the stewards of a kind of a content governance process in these environments where the content is like a material component of legality and and worth, because you say the wrong things and you can get sued or whatever, or your stock price goes down or whatever. So I think in those environments where content is seen as this kind of truly salient material to the business, it's treated better. You hire people to focus on it, you create systems and practices, processes to manage its governance and so banks become an obvious example. That said, so I mentioned I'm working with heads up design in a lot of different contexts. Many of them don't have anyone dedicated to content. Zero. I'm looking at the camera even though we're not using video.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh you're saying this as though it should surprise me.

Peter Merholz:

Zero people dedicated to content. And that speaks to, I guess a question I have, which is product management practice is different in every company, whereas design practice is basically the same in every company. Research practices are basically the same in every company. Engineering practices are basically the same in every company. They'll be fiddling about on the margins, but you can move a designer between companies or a researcher between companies and they can hit the ground running pretty quickly. Product management, you can't do that. Product management, you can't do that because the product, the role of a product manager is much more attuned to the nature of the business, the content of the business, how value is realized by the business. So being a product manager in a SaaS enterprise company is different than a consumer social media company is different than a whatever.

Whereas being a designer in each of those contexts, you can kind of do the same thing. And I wonder if content is more like product management in that regard, in places like banks or healthcare where you've got rules and regulations around content and how it's handled and how it's communicated, governed, et cetera. You get one practice of content strategy, but you're some startup enterprise SaaS company, another HR tool you can get by without formal content for a while because you just, you know, I don't know, product people are writing it, but it's not seen as material to the business. And so the practice around content is different.

Kristina Halvorson:

You're pointing out something that is sort of core to the challenge I think that people who are working with content as a business asset face, because I think that anybody who's doing any kind of content strategy, they're constantly beating the drum of the stuff quote that you put out there isn't just stuff, right? It is not just content that your product or your website or whatever, you know, that is, it's built to like put it in there and spit it out and engage and blah, blah blah. And then it's done. It is trying to continually establish and advocate for not only the needs of the user, but also the goals of the business. Integrate those two things, hold them, advocate for them, while at the same time engaging the folks in information architecture, which is sort of emerging as like a content engineering discipline. Engaging those folks to make sure that the content can be managed and found and personalized and whatever else.

As well as engaging with the brand folks to make sure that the content is, you know, on brand, you know, in the right voice, using the right tone for the right context, as well as being in touch with legal to make sure that everything is compliant and not opening us up to risk, in addition to maintaining a good link with research because of those user needs. In addition to navigating requirements, if you're working a product of the product manager and trying to keep up with the speed of the, you know, cycles and, and constantly remind people, if you invite me to the table, we won't be thinking about the words at the last minute. So it is like spinning a million different plates all the time in organizations who are either, you know, wildly under-resourced in any of these areas of like where people are paying attention to all those different parts of the content or there just aren't any like on these product teams that you're talking about. I just think it is, it is a wild underestimation of the complexity of trying to keep all those dots connected all the time, every time there is a content requirement that results in just sort of like a vacuum of these content practices because leadership's just, there's just words everybody can write, like just do the words and then give them to product and product will figure it out from there.

Peter Merholz:

Yeah, but I also, I I wonder if one of the things that's inhibited content strategy, do you have a preferred phrase content strategy or content design?

Kristina Halvorson:

I just think they're two different things. I'll just say as a side note, Confab, this I think will come out after our final Confab at our final Confab is the first week of May this year we're retiring that as an event because it is a generalist quote content strategy conference. And I don't think those are as relevant anymore because I think that content strategy is a larger field, and is really in a wonderful way starting to emerge as all these different areas of specialization. So I don't know if I can just say that like content strategy, the big thing is even a thing anymore so much as it is, you know, a collection of these amazing growing disciplines and content design is one of them.

Peter Merholz:

Okay, thank you. So let's say you're a professional in some flavor of content strategy. You know, I made the case earlier that you could be a researcher at Meta or whatever Facebook working on social networking for users and then you could be a researcher and then your next job could be enterprise SaaS helping Workday, HR software. And your next job after that could be doing research for a museum and helping user experience and museum collections or whatever. And you as a researcher, your job would not actually change all that much in those three very different environments. And so your practice, your craft, your processes would be largely the

same. Is that true of content or is content like 50% shared across these environments, but the other 50% is just really specific to whatever business environment that you find yourself in. And so it actually makes it that much harder to shift from job to job because you're having to build more of your practice at each job because how the work gets done differs necessarily in each of these contexts because of the relationship content has with the business.

Kristina Halvorson: 

Yep. That is a really great question. Who is interviewing who here? It's my turn to be on your podcast next and what I will say is, is yes to the latter answer that you gave and what really matters that we have seen. And I am, and I wanna bring this back around to your work in Org Design for Design Orgs is the level of maturity of digital maturity within the organization.

Because you can have the same set of processes, the same set of tools come to the table with the same questions, and your job from one organization to the next, depending on where they are, is gonna look completely different. And it's gonna largely be how many more people do you have to partner with the work? Does the product team appreciate and value what you do? Are you empowered to say, no, we're not gonna do this thing that you want me to, you know, publish all over the website because it's going to get in our user's way. The number one driver of how you're gonna get your job done is how mature digital operations are within the organization.

Peter Merholz: 

That's also true, I think for design and research, but the maturity of the operation doesn't affect the practice of designer research, I think in the way that it affects the practice of content. I think though we, these three practices often are seen together, but two of them are quite different than one in this regard. I suspect that actually leads to some of the internal tension or misunderstanding or uncertainty that I think we're addressing.

Kristina Halvorson: 

Yeah. And I would suggest that, and I mean this is, I've just been saying this forever, that design is seen as a very specialized skill that not everyone can do. Research and things is a specialized skill that not everybody can do engineering and code is. Content. Everybody can write, everybody can do content. Everybody does content all the time. Like just go get it. And I've been, you know, saying that for 20 years. I don't think that that will, that I haven't seen that change unless leadership gets it. And I know way back when you were working with Wells Fargo, Mark McCormick was in there and he gets it. He's always gotten it. In fact, Mark McCormick wrote, what I have found is the earliest paper or post on content strategy in like 1996. So what is leadership doing and do they understand that content is hard, it's complicated and it requires all those plates in the air all the time. We are just about out of time. Tell me what you are most excited about right now in your work. What is really getting you outta bed in the morning?

Peter Merholz: 

Teaching. I've recently been more active doing what I call masterclasses is right now focused on design leadership and getting to engage with groups of, I keep it limited to 20 design leaders. I provide some context and some topics to discuss, but then much of our time is spent in discussion and so hearing from others, learning from one another, I love being a catalyst for that kind of engagement. So that's definitely something that's been getting me out of bed in the morning.

You know, what I geek out on in the content of my work is org design. And a lot of that recently has been career architectures. So I've been building these career pathways, career ladders, whatever you want to call them, for these companies for their UX teams and trying to find ways, trying to figure out how can we create a strong but still flexible career framework so that you can be a designer, you can be a researcher, you can be a content person, but not feel locked in to those fields.

Feel like there's some freedom to shift between them, or as you advance in your career that just because you were a content person as a practitioner, that doesn't mean you can't be a UX Director overseeing design and research as well as content and doing the hard work kind of behind the scenes to create structures that enable that, that then get operationalized through HR and knowing that I can have that material impact on these teams, that charges me. Which is

why I do this work and not design work. Because I'm sure 98.5% of the people who just heard what I said, they fell asleep sometime during that, especially when they heard about operationalizing with HR. But I love that stuff.

Kristina Halvorson: 

I don't know, I've got a lot of nerds that listen to this podcast. Peter, if people wanna work with you, where can they find you?

Peter Merholz: 

Petermeholz.com. P e t e r m e r h o l z as in zebra.com is the best place to find me. Also, Peter Merholz on LinkedIn where I am moderately active, occasionally leaning into a little too active.

Kristina Halvorson: 

Really? Oh, LinkedIn is so exhausting. I just really miss what Twitter used to be.

Peter Merholz:

Twitter's done. Twitter's over. You should listen to your old pal, Erika Hall, who she and I agree. LinkedIn is the bomb.

Kristina Halvorson:

I know, I know. Everybody says that. It's just, it's a lot of work.

Peter Merholz:

It can be. And there's a lot of nonsense and there's a lot of influencers filling their overly long posts with emojis and threads and all that nonsense. So I was blogging in 1999, 2000 when comments were just introduced as a thing you could do on blogs before they became essentially link farms for spammers. That was some of the best social media experience I had, was to write a post and then these really long, thoughtful responses from my blog community. LinkedIn is the closest thing we have to that these days.

Kristina Halvorson:

I like it. I just, I just, I'll get in there, I'll do it. Reminder to listeners, you can check the show notes for the links that Peter just shared as well as links to other things that were referenced throughout this chat. Peter Merholz, you have my gratitude, you have my admiration. Plus I just really like you. So thanks a lot for joining me today.

Peter Merholz: 

My pleasure, Kristina. The feeling is mutual. I would be remiss to not acknowledge that it has been a two-way street in terms of our both professional and personal elevations. And so I thank you and your audience for paying attention to me.

Kristina Halvorson:

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 Bear 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.