Content Operations Strategy and Design
For the last fifteen years I’ve framed my work primarily as “information architecture”: I help make complex information spaces easy to understand and pleasant to use. This work has always been about communication—helping teams convey facts, concepts, and ideas so audiences understand what matters. Often, the focus has been on creating pages (despite my perennial efforts to move beyond that metaphor).
In the last several years, we’ve witnessed seismic shifts in how content is created, communicated, and consumed. That we’ve moved past “pages” is a foregone conclusion. To communicate effectively online we now need models that treat content as a living asset, ready to flow wherever it creates value. Information architecture remains essential. The holistic operationalization of how content is planned, created, published, and managed, however, is now more crucial than ever. This is why I’m narrowing how I define the scope of my practice to “content operations strategy and design,” with a focus on modern content operations platforms.
I realize this is a bit of a mouthful, so let me unpack it piece by piece.
Content Operations
Content operations is the coordinated ensemble of people, process, and technology an organization uses to plan, create, govern, and measure the effectiveness of content. Purposeful, outcomes-focused content operations guide both human authors and generative algorithms in the creation of trustworthy, effective content.
In my practice, I’ve found that creating a successful approach to content operations relies on three interdependent activities:
- Discovery and alignment: uncovering an organization’s communication goals, domain language, and author realities
- Thinking in systems: designing models, services, and workflows that scale beyond individual documents and consider communication goals across contexts
- Engineering for intended outcomes: building structure and guidance into the content operations environment so that the creation of on-brand, on-purpose content is the path of least resistance for both humans and machines
If you follow my work at all, you know that this is the kind of work I’ve already been doing for years. By formalizing this focus, my goal is to more directly connect with organizations that need help uncovering what must be said, modeling it so it can move fluidly across channels, and embedding those models into workflows that create consistent value.
Strategy
As Herbert Simon observed more than fifty years ago, in an information-rich world, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” While it has never been easier to create more content, identifying effective approaches for creating and articulating the right content reliably and efficiently across channels and contexts remains a challenge. If anything, the proliferation of low quality AI generated content now makes that task even more difficult.
This is where strategy comes in. Creating, publishing, and managing content that furthers organizational goals doesn’t happen on its own. Stakeholders, SMEs, designers, and engineers must be aligned on what those goals are and what constitutes a “win” in achieving them. Teams that are all pulling in different directions can spend a lot of time and energy staying in same spot.
Successful content operations projects build consensus on what they will achieve prior to deciding how they will achieve it. I work with my clients to vet and apply time-tested frameworks for ensuring their strategic approach to content is grounded in measurable business needs, not the latest trends of UI design and front-end development.
Design & Engineering
Jared Spool writes that "design is the rendering of intent.” I like to extend this truism by adding that engineering is the realization of design. To move from strategic intent to operational reality, both design and engineering must be carefully coordinated. When misalignment exists between these elements for content operations, organizations can end up with “technically correct” implementations that ignore business requirements and author needs, or visionary design recommendations that never survive handoff.
For nearly a decade I’ve been developing and iterating methods for bridging engineering and design. As part of my focus on content operations, I’ve brought together a set of time-tested frameworks and methods for uncovering and instantiating the requirements for an organization’s content operating systems. These tools allow me to lead projects in which:
- Alignment workshops provide informed input for domain and content models.
- Domain and content models directly inform the schemas and components of a working content platform.
- Content platforms are embedded alongside training and governance guidance that helps teams take full ownership of their content operating system and its evolution.
The systems that emerge are ones that authors actually want to use because they speak their language, support their tasks, and provide effective tools for embracing new ways of creating and managing content.
Modern Content Operations Platforms
For the past five years most of my client work has been deep inside the Sanity ecosystem: I’ve launched studios, written plugins, developed apps, and designed and iterated custom workflows and integrations. I’ve also had a front-row seat as Sanity and other platforms have evolved from capable headless CMSes into full-featured “content operating systems.” For organizations with specialized entities or domain‑specific complexity, the customizable schemas and API‑first workflows of modern tools make them uniquely suited for creating purpose-built content operations solutions.
The openness and flexibility that makes these systems powerful, however, can backfire: Development teams new to composable content are just as free to create implementations that work against core value propositions as they are to build in a way that embraces them. By committing to understanding the platform and its features deeply, my goal is to help organizations using Sanity and similar tools work with the grain of these platforms to achieve the operational outcomes that best serve their needs and deliver lasting value over time.
Carrying On
Twenty years ago I pivoted from a career path as an English professor to the then budding field of “UX.” My goal then, as now, has been to understand and enable the creation and sharing of meaning between individuals. The changes wrought by generative AI in the last few years have tossed a lot of what we thought we knew about those practices into an epistemological juice mixer. The outcomes I seek to support, however, remain the same: the communication of ideas from one mind to another.
I’m excited to carry on with this work in this new, weird world of ours. If any of what I’ve written piques your curiosity—or if you find yourself in the thick of any of the challenges I describe above—please do reach out. I’d love to start a conversation.