Patricia Gomez and Mario Ferrer

Most enterprises and software companies now have design systems, and many have content operations and/or design operations teams.

At Cisco, Barbara Blythe works on the content design operations team. She focuses on sharing content guidance across the products she serves, enabling not only content designers but also their UX design and engineering partners to efficiently create consistent product content.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/barbara-blythe/

Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep and varied experience to her content design work.

Like all of us, she is pondering how to best use AI in her practice and wrestling with the impacts of layoffs and other change in the content and design professions. 

Despite the current challenging business and labor environment, she's hopeful for the future and offers encouragement to both current and future content designers.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/nicole-michaelis-2/

Terry Roach helps enterprises build a "web of connectedness" that helps them understand what's happening across the span of their business

Built on an ontological understanding of business that is expressed in a knowledge graph, his methods and technology help enterprises develop a holistic understanding that can be expressed as an operating manual that all stakeholders can consult.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/terry-roach/

With more than a billion internet users and half of all global e-commerce transactions, digital business in China is huge.

Anna Potapova and Arnaud Frattini work in content roles at Alibaba, the biggest online merchant in China. Lately they have been looking beyond their desks, trying to connect with their peers at other companies and to develop a broader understanding of content practice in the country.

They've shared some of their discoveries in an article on content design in China, and they're building a new community to share practice ideas with other content strategists and designers.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/content-in-china/

As the field of content design grows and matures, so too do the organizations in which content designers practice. 

At Condé Nast, the publisher of iconic brands like The New Yorker, WIRED, and Vogue, Sophie Tahran has built content-design orgs from one-person units to company-spanning teams.

Her latest work has been informed by original research that she conducted to learn more about how others design and manage their content-design organizations.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/sophie-tahran/

Matt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team.

The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization.

Among the secrets to their success: democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues. 

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/matt-hayes/

The promise of computers augmenting our minds has been a long time coming. We're beginning to see better tools for extending human cognition, but good guidebooks for using them have been sparse.

Jorge Arango's new book, Duly Noted, fills this gap elegantly. It shows you how to extend your mind with connected digital notes that capture your thoughts and nourish them in a personal knowledge garden from which you can harvest and share your unique insights.

Through February 15, 2024, use the code ContentPod to get a 20% discount when you order the book at the Rosenfeld Media website.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jorge-arango/

Peter Compo says that "the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy."

He's talking about the tendency of executives and managers to draft plans that present lists of goals and include a bullet point for every possible stakeholder in their purview.

Peter points out that true strategy involves tough trade-offs and lots of collaboration. His pragmatic approach lets strategic objectives emerge organically, includes a variety of stakeholders, and applies adaptive thinking to address questions that have no obvious answer.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/peter-compo/

Relly Annett-Baker recently said in a LinkedIn post, "The words are an expression of the solution, the last 20%, but we also need to do the 80% that comes before to know wtf to write. "

UX writers and content designers spend a lot of their time, arguably too much of it, explaining this core aspect of their work to their colleagues and collaborators.

While she sometimes bristles at the need to constantly defend and describe her team's work, Relly also realizes that that is, in fact, the most important part of her job.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/relly-annett-baker/

Like many digital practices, search engine optimization is becoming more conversational. 

Not long ago, SEOs had to make their best educated guesses about what was working to get their websites to rank better. Now, by focusing on both feeding information to and gleaning feedback from Google's knowledge graph, Jason Barnard helps companies craft content strategies and messaging architectures that keep their brand prominent in Google's search results.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jason-barnard/