Cruce Saunders
Welcome to Towards a Smarter World. This is your host, Cruce Saunders, and I am so lucky to be joined today by Anna Schlegel. Anna and I have known each other a number of years as the industry has evolved and her career as a senior executive in content has continued to evolve. We wanted to touch base again to take a look at the industry from a new vantage point. in the last, I want to say five or something years since the last time we connected. Anna, welcome.
Anna Schlegel
Thank you so much, Cruce. Happy to be here.
Cruce Saunders
You've driven global innovation across the technology sector. You've led high-performing teams, some of the best teams in the entire industry have reported to you, and you've delivered covered personalized solutions for customers in lots of different formats. Before that, when we spoke last, you were a VP at NetApp, and you spearheaded the globalization and content strategy and technical communications content. All across that very fast-growing enterprise. In addition to that, you are a co-founder and President of Women in Localization, and you also are really passionate and outspoken inclusion and sustainability and ethical leadership. You've shown through example what it is to be able to lead it holistically, but with this content basis as a platform for your executive career. That is phenomenal. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the priorities that you've been driving in your new role.
Anna Schlegel
Excellent. Thank you. And thanks for having me again. It's always so cool talking to you. I always explained that many years ago, I started as a translator. I used to have my own translating agency, and basically, I was very much seen as a service. That morphed into studying telecommunications and internationalization because I understood that translating words into the world was not enough for customers, for companies. I moved into engineering. Once, I think we found that women in localization, so much innovation was coming in and being explained to our forums that I got very excited. I think I was one of the first people to make the pace that globalization needed to be with content. I've always tried to be a business person on behalf of the customer. Looking at the customer perspective, they deal with platforms and solutions and products, and the first thing they see are pages and properties and web properties and portals that have words and experiences in them that most of the time are not personalized or don't meet the customer where they need to be. And also being a parent and trying to help my kids navigate logins. I quickly realized that there's got to be a way to make sure that these enterprises don't have more websites than they need to, more content that is needed for the customer, and that it was in the right languages.
It's a whole orchestration. The way I look at it, it has to be very much aligned to the company strategy. Where does the company want to go? What countries? What verticals? Then you can start to understand, Okay, who are these personas that are so important that we are going to sell to? right. Most companies that I've worked with are persona-led. They understand the verticals. Companies also go through their own journeys of trying to do too much. Then they shrink it to the right personas, and then you get more specific, and then you can be more targeted, and then you can do very specific campaigns and address product market fits. All of that requires talking and understanding the customers so that you can get them and give them what they need. It's almost like you need to know what are they worried about, you need to know where are they rigged, are they using your competition or similar application. So, As a user of many, many applications, I tend to gravitate to the ones where I understand that they're product leaders and they're engineers and UX designers, they understand me. I get very hooked to seeing, Oh, my bank just changed the UX or the application where I order my supermarket food now knows that I buy these things every single week. It's a lot of fun to try to piece all of these together.
Cruce Saunders
As you're connecting the personas into market-driven priorities that the enterprise is working to accomplish, I can see this map you're making between market strategy strategy and
content strategy. There's a pretty clear direction you've been able to chart within the internal conversations as somebody growing from within the ranks of content through the executive functions of an organization, you've had to be able to communicate clearly about the value of content assets to drive business performance. And not in the abstract, but in the direct line value between being able to open up new markets and develop new revenue and build new verticals. All of that can be advanced with content. And you've somehow successfully been able to make that case. There's a lot of people, a lot of content leaders I know who have have been stuck in a delivery mode where they see the value, they see the bigger picture, but they end up getting stuck and pigeonholed into doing this website redesign or just putting together it, installing a translation management system or something like that, as opposed to really driving business outcomes using content. Help the industry. As people have dealt with this dynamic of being pigeonholed into a cost center and a single quarter set of functions and whatnot, how did they begin to bridge to driving value with content?
Anna Schlegel
Because I'm the President of Women in Localization, and I've done content probably for 32 years, I think, I see different types of people managing content or technical publications teams or
content strategy teams. I think if you talk to directors, senior managers, senior directors, they get it. They are very passionate. It's almost like once you're a globalizer, you will always be a globalizer. Once you're in
content strategy, they are so hooked. But there's a lot of people that are I was very happy just taking orders and tickets and being associated to a cost center. I think explaining the value of if we would be attached to the strategy, if we understand the market, if we understand the personas and their specific needs, I don't see a lot of people being outside of our profession that they I get it. I think most companies obviously are there to bring shareholder value, and content operations and localization operations are being seen as services and not necessarily making the connection that the experience that a customer can have can actually make the customer really upset and churn and and look for something better.
We invite everybody, every single team across the organization that's super passionate about content, folks that manage the biggest properties. Then we come up as if we were our own business with goals and missions and metrics. What happens is companies are very dynamic, and so we bring in new leaders, and they may have seen it, they may not have seen it. Executives are very concerned in other areas where they should be, revenue and meeting customers and resolving customer issues. My ask is always that executives also understand that personalizing the experience, which can come in many, many different ways. Consistent in navigation, in drop-downs, in brand, in interfaces, in the words that we use requires an orchestration, and it requires the leaders of the support sites and the technical documentation and the marketing properties and the partner channel portals that they collaborate super tightly together. It's been my experience in more than one company where we form these forums and everybody in the forum gets it, and then sometimes an executive will come in and say, Why are you owning this? Or, What is this? Or they start questioning it. I always try to say, because it's the right thing for the business.
We spent hours explaining that if we guide the customer better, if we make it easier for the customer, we don't confuse them. If we can shut down some of the properties, the web properties that are not visited, if we to have data on mobile, on the apps, et cetera, it's actually to the advantage for the company.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah, you've done an incredible service within each of these companies by elevating content into its business value and then creating networks of support and tangible budgets, which I think are moving as people are responding to these observations about the massive opportunities that are available through using content in new markets, new personas, new ways of supporting customers, ways of avoiding the loss. In the case of customer churn and product confusion and frustration and lower NPS scores or just lower customer sat indices of any kind. There's all this risk, and then there's all this cost It's like, Oh, we're duplicating all of our infrastructure X number of times, X number of licenses. We've seen organizations where they're buying the same stock photography many, many times over because they have so many separate
digital asset management platforms. Nobody knows what's available and everybody's got different subscriptions and it's literally rebuying the same asset over and over or re-writing the same content over and over without that cross-functional visibility. There's cost, there's opportunity, there's streamlining performance, there's creating more of an economic juggernaut in the face of competitors who are also working on these same dynamics of personalization and market expansion.
There's a market competitiveness nimbleness value add as well that I'm hearing you talk about. There's this whole set of value infrastructure that as a content leader, you can leverage into bigger budgets and portfolios and cross-functional conversations with a little bit of leaning in. So thank you for this conversation on the politics and the value surrounding content.
I'd love to just get into operations next because this is an area where your teams have excelled, and I think our listeners would love to know a little bit more about what it takes to build a highly performant set of
content operations functions inside of your portfolio. How do you think of the metrics and KPIs for
content supply chain, for your
content life cycles? Then how How do you build a
content operations team? That's about three questions in one, but we'd love to hear your thoughts.
Anna Schlegel
Sure. I've done it from both angles. I've done it from the go-to-market angle because I've worked in marketing and field marketing, and I've worked for strategy officers. Most of my career has been on the engineering side in the last three years on the product side. I really I always tell my bosses, It doesn't matter where I sit because what we do is so horizontal. Usually, I think really big, and then we start very small. We have to be very careful with what does the customer need. So MVPs, what's the minimum viable product. In this case, we define what's the bill of materials for a product? I like to attach it—this is how complex my brain works—to the life cycle of a product. Their product products that are just incubating or companies are just experimenting with these products, they're not going to need as much content. Then there are products that the executives like and believe in them, and there's engineers attached to them, and product leaders attached to them, and UX attached to them.
That's when we get in with more humans to understand those products. The way we do this is we attach writers. In the case of technical publications, you attach and you want the technical writer in the tripod or the squad or very close to that squad or tripod for a particular product or solution. There's nobody that I've ever met that understands the product better because even product leaders, they give the features, the descriptions, they do the product briefs, they give them to the UXers and to the engineers. But man, the technical writers have to understand the product so, so well. Attaching them to these quads is very helpful. Then obviously, the reason why I want the localization team in these writing teams together is so that the content can leave, even at the string creation, can leave off to localization. We choose
content management systems that can work very, very fast . At NetApp, we had seen content leave a CMS and return, I think, in 17 languages within 2 hours. We apply neural machine translations. We make sure the the
taxonomy is in Inside the content management system is extremely clear.
Again, going back to that portfolio to market of products, the content that you will create for a product that's incubating, growing, or is the cash cow for the company, which I call the products that are gone global, will need different treatments of content or different amounts of content. Then equally, very important, and companies sometimes forget to do this or leave it for later is obsoleting, obsoleting, obsoleting. There's many tools that are not being used, so there's got to be somebody watching for those tools or products or solutions so that we don't place humans to work on things that bring zero value. That's how we get organized. I also manage the eLearning teams or the teams that do the certification for the customers and support site teams, training center teams. I think all of those are very connected. That's when you can start creating the experience of, I'm going to go to one place, and over there, I can get my answers through KB articles. I can get my team certified on the platform. I can create my own space, like a training center for their own employees where they can put all their operating procedures.
That's how I start. Then I go to marketing and say, Hey, marketing, look, these are our metrics, so we Usually, the most visited website for any company that I've worked at is the support site. Even sometimes you gather all the rest of the websites together, cannot compare to the power of a support site because customers like to self-serve. But you still need to be very connected to anything that's go-to-market because the chief marketing officers, they are who bring the thought leadership for the market. We need to be very well aware and aligned as to how a CMO thinks. Also the chief product officer, they're very aligned on what are the personas, where are the markets, where are the countries, the verticals, and we attached ourselves to that. Have I ever had enough writers for all of this? I think I did at NetApp At one point, it was beautiful. We were able to tackle quite a bit, the most of it. But as we all know, the last year, two years, there's been a lot of tech layoffs. My advice for tech Technical publication managers or folks that want to run these enterprise content strategies, the focus needs to be on the top products, the top markets, and so you can do a great on, We're going to focus on these products and this market.
Then you need to have a really good relationship with the product managers and say, We can or we cannot deliver the content. Product managers need to be your allies. They are creating these products, but imagine if nobody's writing about them, or you don't have the bill of materials. We talk a lot with product managers, and we try to bring a lot of clarity of what can we support and what can we not support. I think that with AI, it's going to get better because you can create the first six assets. With AI, you can pick this asset and then say, and now give me a quick summary guide for this product. I see a lot of hope for folks that cannot hire a number of writers. There's also this push to offshore, and that's when you're working the midnight hour with an Indian team that is a contractor that doesn't have access to the platform. That's not a good solution either, in my perspective. Again, because we want to give a great personalized experience, you can really tell when an app that you use all the time is being upgraded. I always give the example of Wells Fargo, which is, I don't know if it's the best bank or not, but I love the fact that they're super personalized to me.
Their user interface is extremely easy. It's not that they're My interest is anything that I like, but for certain things, I'm like, Wow, this is an incredible UX product and engineering team. So all these companies need to keep making it easier and better and easier for the customer. Not more complicated. Don't send me to more logins. Ramp me up easy. The other place where I see where companies go south is when they start doing partnerships with other companies and it's like, Because you bought this, we suggest you buy that. I'm like, No, I don't want to buy that. I think very clear content and quick and scannable and actionable is what I like.
Cruce Saunders
The
content operations inside of complex enterprises is such a challenge to tackle because there's so many moving parts, and it sounds like you've got some really good methodology and also some measures around creating operational integration between different parts of the life cycle, like localization and authoring and management and keeping things up to date and working on structures for reuse and all of that. I've seen a number of leaders struggle as they get more and more cross-functional with their content to build disability across the whole portfolio because there's so many systems of records. It's like, where is the content?
I was just speaking with Mike Iantosca, who runs content at Avalarra about this issue. His phrase was, If you don't know where your content is, you don't actually have operations. I thought that that's interesting. He says, It's very difficult when you've got lots of content in lots of places to get a big picture
view of where content is in the different parts of the workflow for different kinds of content types. What needs to happen with those in terms of where the stages, is it localization is needed or being able to assign LSP or being able to monitor for regulatory approval, so doing the legal or medical regulatory life cycle.
Then once you've got assets checked in, keeping them up to date, knowing when they expire, keeping the expiring content either retiring or being refreshed, link checking and trademarking and accessibility. There's all these functions. Then when you're trying to understand the portfolio, being able to see where the gaps are happening and understand velocity and all of that is very difficult. Mike was talking about this idea that there's so many vendors that have different workflow engines, and there's different project management software. We've seen (Adobe)Workfront, and Jira and other things used as content signaling systems. But there's nothing that really gives this this overall view across everything. It's not something that could be vendor-delivered. One single vendor couldn't necessarily deliver the omni system for everything. It's about how you tie it all together and build an analytics framework and an operational framework around the whole portfolio. We were talking about this idea, and I've had it in the back of my head for years, but But Mike really articulated it about needing a pluggable content supply chain, probably like an open-source project where different enterprises can build their own connectors and hopefully share them against a common framework so that there's some way of building the glue in content operations without having to recode the entire infrastructure for a
content supply chain each time.
And so he started to develop something there that he hopes to eventually see become a part of an open source project. But I'm curious about your thoughts on this idea of a unified set of frameworks for sharing data and status and workflow between content applications and platforms so that you can begin to look at the portfolio across different silos and content types and systems and content life cycles. So as somebody who manages a global portfolio, you've you've got, you've got the ability to orchestrate more and optimize, especially as AI comes around, having all the data available and visibility on the topology of content will become important. Anyway, that's a lot, but I wanted to float it by you because it sounds like you're addressing that level of portfolio and have some unique perspective on that.
Anna Schlegel
Yes, thank you. We did that at NetApp. Again, you need a very unified set of leaders inside the enterprise to get to that. So this is the ultimate goal. One thing that we did at NetApp, where with Richard O'Brien, we ran the Innovation Lab for nearly 12 years, we ended up with something that we called the Content Lake and the Content Fabric. We started by the inventory of systems, the shutdown of websites, the alignment on how we were going to author. It didn't matter what department. Usually, companies have 13 major departments. The most authors are inside the support teams, the marketing teams, and the strings of the product. Now, the goal is to have as few content management systems as possible and dump the content into what we call a content lake. I think it was the first time that we coined this term years years ago, right there at NetApp, then you can see all the content in this content lake, and you don't have to rewrite that content. That was one project that we were working on. Because just like with products, you can be cannibalizing content. Some people think they have a training center and a library center and a certification center and an e-learning center and a knowledge base, and, and, and, and, that's where you create the confusion for the customers. The way to operationalize this is to have a team that wants to achieve this goal, the sharing of the content into as few as possible platforms so that you can extract it with AI and ML into a content lake, and then writers can grab content to create this new message for these personas, for these markets.
I'm saying it as it looks very simple, but it's very complex if there is no discipline as to how many systems you bring, how many authors you bring, if companies are siloed or unsiloed around
content strategy. Companies need to have a very clear description of the personas. What do these personas do? What do these personas need? The ones that exist and the ones that we want to bring in. We have customers that are in. They're the company customers, and you have to take care of them already inside. They already bought. But your Companies always want more customers, more customers, so that's a different motion. Regardless of this, we did do that at NetApp to have a content lake and it was awesome. We had engineers working on it Then authors can pick the latest brand, the latest words, the latest tag lines, so that we're all talking the same, so that we all look the same. If the companies end up with 10 websites, they at least look the same. The fewer the content management systems that we have, the better cross-tool reporting we can do, and the better user experience that you're going to offer for a first-time customer, the experience is so very important.
The consistency, navigation, the drops down, the brands, the interfaces, all of this will only happen if these leaders are super aligned and they can share the content. Then that's where I'm going. It's unnecessary. It needs to be controlled. It needs to be operationalized like anything else. You don't want two sides of I've worked at companies where there's many business units that are worth multibillion dollars. Part of why NetApp made me the product lifecycle vice president is all I did all day long was, whoops, this product is being duplicated or these leaders are creating the same product. If they're creating the same product, they're creating the same content. If they're creating the same content, we're going to localize it twice. You have to operationalize this. You have to keep a close eye. Again, I'm very in favor of matrix organizations, and not everybody's ready for that. Not everybody likes that. But at the end of the day, the customer ends up winning.
Cruce Saunders
Very last question. I'd love to keep going down that thread because it's so rich. But I've got one last last question, which is in the industry, you have seen and formed different affinity groups for content professionals. I've noticed a missing industry association in content, and a number of folks in the industry have been noticing that. Is that something you think might eventually have a future?
Anna Schlegel
Don't give me more ideas. I think I'm running five nonprofits already. But yeah, there's Women in Localization. Why couldn't we have a
content strategy or a forum where... When we were at NetApp, we created our own, and we used to talk to PayPal and Salesforce, and it was so fun and Autodesk, and we would share each other's metrics and dashboards. Oh, my goodness. Some of these dashboards were beautiful. You need the right systems, though, to give you the data and all that. But yes, to answer, I think we could elevate it because these are people that want to grow their careers, too. They don't always want to be writing. Maybe they want to become managers, and managers want to become Senior Managers and Directors and Senior Directors and Vice Presidents. But again, you don't see that in companies, I think, understand the value, maybe, of what you and I see.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. Well, we're getting there towards a more coherent industry and more coherent enterprise, smarter and smarter. Little bit by little bit, your leadership is moving the watermark for what well-run
content operations looks like in the enterprise. I've been really enjoying our multi-year conversation in the parts we were able to reconnect. Thank you for sharing with our audience, and thank you for sharing with everyone in the industry that has benefited from your leadership. Anna, we appreciate it.
Anna Schlegel
Thank you, Cruce, for letting me explain all these things that I can see, but they seem to be tough to achieve. But I think they're doable, and we're heading there.
Cruce Saunders
One step at a time, we sure are Towards a Smarter World. Thank you so much, Anna.
Anna Schlegel
You're welcome. Thank you.