Cruce Saunders
Welcome to
Towards A Smarter World. This is your host
Cruce Saunders, and I'm pleased to be joined today by
Kate Kenyon, a content leader and enterprise executive, currently head of content at Chase International Consumer Bank. She specializes in enterprise level
content operations, content architecture, modeling, team setup, processes, governance. It's all the gnarly, sticky bits of
content strategy, but she finds them oddly satisfying. She is active in the London
Content Strategy Community and speaks at content events across the world. Kate, thank you so much for joining here.
Kate Kenyon
It's so nice to see you.
Cruce Saunders
I'm really glad we could connect because this world of content has been really evolving over the last couple of years, especially as people are readjusting to needing to get content moved to lots of places in real time, often from home offices. And their teams are being reorganized around content production that requires a lot of operations, and that's an area you know a lot about: how to get content from place to place and out to consumer experiences in an organized, orchestrated way. That is something very interesting to our listeners. And I'd love for you to just share some of the projects that you've been focusing on recently. What are some of the areas you've been noodling around as you touch on UX writing, and localization, and modeling, and headless, and APIs, and all of the other things you touch during your day?
Kate Kenyon
It has been a wild couple of years, hasn't it? Yes. I think I've had maybe the strangest couple of years in my professional career lately, partly because I joined Chase in the very first week of lockdown here in the UK. So literally, the very end of March 2020, a new job in an almost greenfield site, to give you some backstory on this. So, Chase is, I'm sure you know, a huge institution in the US, but actually unknown in the UK. This was Chase's first consumer bank operations outside of the US. And I had a completely greenfield site. I had an empty CMS, unstructured, nothing in it, no idea of how to get content into it, out of it, no quality control, no idea about how we were going to move things across platforms. So, yeah, doing all of that from home, it's been an adventure, shall we say? A lot of the things I've been working on have been around, well, starting really with governance, I think, actually, a lot of people rush, particularly operations, rush to the well, how do we do this rather than what should we be doing. Like, what is good enough? Often when we're talking about some of the other, more sort of knowledge management ends of the world, good enough has quite clear standards, interoperability standards.
I'm sure you know about these things better than I do, when you're talking about the kind of content that I handle, which is mostly marketing or the app. I mean, Chase in the UK is an App only bank, so there isn't that sort of huge demand for content to be interoperable movable. You have to establish that from the beginning, and that looks at what is good enough. Though actually, a lot of my time at the beginning was really looking at what does "good enough" look like. How do we set up good enough? How do we know if we're even actually meeting that standard before we started production? Because if you know that standard, then actually setting up production becomes a mechanism to enact that standard. If you know where you're going, then the rest of it is how you get there. So we started there, really, which I think is unusual and I think quite a privileged position. Often I have to fight to get there. One of the nice things about Chase was that when I came in, the content was not part of marketing or part of product, but it was its own thing.
It was already considered by the bank to be valuable enough to customers, that it was its own thing, that it needed its own special consideration.
Cruce Saunders
That's a terrific surprise.
Kate Kenyon
Cruce Saunders
Yeah, and that shift is happening slowly but surely to content being its own function. It's been a theme recently and a lot of conversations sponsored very differently. It's tough because content is the basis for every customer experience in every place. It's so omnipresent in so many places that it becomes invisible, like the water we swim in. If you're a fish, you don't know the water's there because it's everywhere. And I think enterprises have that challenge. Have you had to describe the value of content in your career, and how do you find yourself describing why it's so valuable?
Kate Kenyon
Well, nobody misses oxygen until they don't have any, do they?. So, I think actually the best results I have ever had have actually been from being tough, from removing that oxygen? Not to sound too brutal, but you can spend a lot of time arguing and making the case for the value of content and return on investment, how it contributes to your internal run rates and so on. But they don't necessarily convince people. I'll be really honest. I've had better results from saying to people, well, you have five designers on your team and only one content strategist or UX writer, so they're only going to work on one project. And then when other people start to see how well that project does because of that person's presence, and they start to see the impact on the other people, on that team, of that person's absence, then you start to get traction. It sounds harsh. Maybe it is. Maybe I'm a terrible person.
Cruce Saunders
It's effective.
Kate Kenyon
It's real effective. Yes. I'm indebted to Jonathan Coleman for teaching me that lesson. He was very much somebody who I worked with years ago, but he is very much an exponent of And that has been my best way, I think, of actually showing the value of the content brings.
Cruce Saunders
So speaking of Jonathan, I'm curious about the evolution of
content strategy as a category. A lot of us in the industry have seen the practice of
content strategy stretched and contorted in lots of different ways. And now it seems like departments like we've seen at Facebook and Shopify, they recasting themselves as content design teams. And
content strategy, which used to be a very broad umbrella, has really bifurcated into multiple disciplines, it seems, with a different sort of focus. I'm curious your take if you could reflect on the role of the practice of
content strategy and its evolution?
Kate Kenyon
Yes, I'm old enough to remember this. When I first started, I did call myself a content strategist and yes, it was a very broad Church. It covered everything from the what should we make to how should we make it to is it any good? And right back round again, really. I think if you look at parallel disciplines like UX and design as well, you would see that with industrialization, with the increase in the sheer demand for our skills comes specialization. I don't necessarily see the lack of specialization as being a dilution of the
content strategy ethos, like the idea that content is a thing that needs to be valued and managed. But I think people are increasingly knowing where they can and how they can add that value as part of the overall rather than trying to be the sum of all parts. I suppose.
Cruce Saunders
So, specialization is a sign of maturity?
Kate Kenyon
I think so. I mean, maybe other people would ever argue otherwise, but I certainly see within design that. And Andy Bud wrote something about riding from Clear Left, wrote something about this quite recently, saying that the UX generalist is almost obsolete effectively, that some being someone you either go into management and start managing people who are specialists to help them guide their careers or you're going to struggle. And I think contact strategy similarly is such a huge thing now that maybe one person can't have all those skills.
Cruce Saunders
Right.
Kate Kenyon
I certainly started out in writing, but I've done UX writing, I've done these things. Did I do them brilliantly? I don't think so. I know what I do well and I've come to peace with the idea that I can't be everything that's covered within content strategy anymore.
Cruce Saunders
We started working with organizations on this idea of a
content services organization which is independent of departments and it's able to constitute at least content strategy,
content engineering and
content operations, which you kind of divide out.
Kate Kenyon
I love that idea.
Cruce Saunders
And that it's responsible for the cross functional standards and orchestration models for the
content supply chain, which really transcends, really even technology and departments. And it's more about the models and standards by which content and customer experiences are created. And it acts as an empowerment vehicle and orchestration function within the content producing department. Have you seen that kind of model playing out in the market yet?
Kate Kenyon
Not in those formal terms. But what you're describing is something I recognize from what we have built at Chase.
Cruce Saunders
Oh, wow.
Kate Kenyon
Certainly. I don't look after anything to do with UX writing. I have a peer, I have someone who leads that part of the work that we do, but we work hand in hand because how things are written is affected by how they are structured and vice versa. So what you're describing and the technology piece that comes into that as well, I work very closely with my Martech colleagues and we are a content services structure. I'm not sure we would put that label on it, but when you describe it, I'm like, yeah, I think I know what that looks like now. But it's recent. It's come about in the last couple of years. I don't think I've seen it very much in other organizations.
Cruce Saunders
It's starting, it's a minority. But there's more and more organizations realizing that putting content into one silo and depending on copy paste and ad hoc systems to get customer experience to stitch together across platforms, it's just not super functional. Somebody needs to pay attention to it, and ideally that somebody needs to be empowered to create common methodology, process and even things like tags, tagging things and
metadata structures for assets. And all of that needs to be shared. I'm curious about the evolution of technology. These are the content models you produce, because I understand you work a lot with modeling.
Kate Kenyon
I do, yeah.
Cruce Saunders
So I'd love to hear kind of your reflection on the relationship between the content models you produce and the technology that employs.
Kate Kenyon
Okay. I will try not to get too excited talking about content models, although they are kind of my favorite pet nerdy thing.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah, this is going to be fun.
Kate Kenyon
I am in the right place.
Cruce Saunders
Yes, you are.
Kate Kenyon
Okay, so as I said, my content is my content. The content is, although I am very attached to it, is mostly marketing or product content. So it sits within the app. There's a little bit of FAQ stuff, not very much, but a lot of people would look at that and go, "well, yes, but why do you need a
content model?" Because it's only in one language. It's mostly only one, maybe two platforms. Where's the benefit? You know, most people talk about modeling as being a benefit for knowledge management, for structures, for multiple languages and so on. But actually we found that just even using modeling has separated, over a traditional CMS, has separated out the content from the presentation layer, so that we have a much more responsive approach to design, certainly within the website. So that simple change alone was where we started. It's amazing to watch when the light goes on in people's heads.
And Either content isn't separated out from the code at all, or it's in content strings, which isn't necessarily an agile format that allows you ... you've got a JSON file basically. It's not ideal for moving content about the place, even a nested one. And one of the major problems that Apps have is at bloat, like the actual weight of your App can be massive. And that's if you have multiple language files, or if you have to include things like, say, your App has offers in it, for example, if you have to include every single offer that a customer might click on, that's like a lot of latent content redundant content. Who knows? Sat in your App taking up space, all of it having to be included. Apps build time, so you have to coordinate your App releases with your content updates. It's messy, it's slow, it's juddery, it doesn't allow for content to be changed on the fly.
Moving that where you have a repeatable structure in the now, So, anything where you can abstract that away and put that content out into ... even if it still stays in a JSON model, you can query it against an API, it means that suddenly your App is a lot lighter. You can serve language sets more quickly, and you can serve them at runtime. You don't have to include it in the App at build time. So that kind of approach to App content is not something I've seen a lot before, but it's really, yes okay I'm going to say fun and cool. I find it a really interesting way of using content models in a way that I haven't seen before. The second part of your question, I don't think it matters what system you put it in. As long as people can use it, as long as your offers are able to understand the models, extend the models. That's the value. It's not the system that it's captain, for me anyway.
Cruce Saunders
So, it's the model first approach that I'm hearing, which is the model and the technology maps to the model, and that is a different mindset. I'm glad to see you put that into practice. It is sometimes challenging to educate others, especially in IT, who are used to having a content model be like a one-time spec or a schema. How do you talk to IT about it and how do you turn it into an ongoing process?
Kate Kenyon
I think I always borrow from other domains. I stand on the shoulders of giants whenever I can. And certainly, data modeling is something where I am not a data modeler. But I understand how it works and they would be the first to tell you it's not all ever a "once and done" thing. This is what we have to date based on customer demand. Should we need to find a new piece of data? Should we need to extend a topic or whatever? Yeah, we'll do that. So, So, whatever you do, don't build it in a way that makes it hard for either a developer or an author, preferably an author, to adapt a model.
Cruce Saunders
Got it. So, it's really talking with IT about the fundability of it all, the changeability, the mutability of the content that it's structure itself may evolve and be.
Kate Kenyon
Yeah, It's what we know at the moment.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. And for somebody in business that doesn't understand what a model is, they say, you're spending all this time talking about this invisible thing I can't see. How can you help them understand? Think about an executive sponsor who is dealing with content as part of a bigger portfolio.
Kate Kenyon
This is going to make you laugh. This is how I explain it to people. I talk about putting content on the shelves in Tesco. Tesco is a large retailer here, but effectively, rather than delivering a package three course meal, I'm like, no, we just put the ingredients on the shelves and then we let people come along and pick off the bits that they want. Our job is to make sure that the right things are on the shelves. I don't know why, but that analogy seems to work. I don't ever show models. Once somebody once told me, Kate, I find your spreadsheets disturbing. I'm flattered, but I was like, okay, never show you're working out unless people genuinely ask. Yeah, we do the work. But as far as I am concerned, what I say is
Cruce Saunders
Okay, that's super huge.
Kate Kenyon
I wish I could say it's really simple, but that seems to be enough that I'm just stuck in the shelves at Tesco's with all this content. You can come along and pick it up and it's all ingredients in whatever recipe you want to make.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. And that goes along with the move to Headless and Content-as -Service based APIs. It seems like there is no technology platform that hasn't gotten on board, and that wasn't the case when we were first talking about this stuff years ago. We had to really advocate hard for Content-as-a-Service and now the whole industry has moved towards Content APIs. And that's good, because I think that will ultimately address this app/content management challenge that you've described and some of the other future scenarios that are coming around for content in these three-dimensional worlds and all of that that are emerging. Right? Where now our content has to be more and more interactive to a customer's very specific contextual environment. And as they're dealing in a three-dimensional avatar-based world, eventually, as part of the digital twin, we seem to be building with this Metaverse, and there's all of this blockchain based content.
Kate Kenyon
You're scaring me now.
Cruce Saunders
But it's all of that stuff. I mean, ten years ago, 20 years ago, I remember we were talking about, in the future, we're going to be dealing with App based content. In the future, we're going to be dealing with voice content. In the future, we're going to have much more than just a website and here we are. The future is here and now it's proliferating even more, and that presents some opportunities. When organizations are looking at that landscape, how would you advise they break down that big problem of creating these personalized
omnichannel experiences across platforms into manageable pieces? What are the themes do you think are the most important for executives to consider?
Kate Kenyon
I think, I can only go from my own experience and having worked in quite a lot of regulated industries, so Pharma, medical, banking, there are some complexities there that perhaps don't exist in other places. There are always going to be companies that they look to. I know my execs look to people doing the smaller, the faster cutting edge, bleeding edge things and go, "I want one of those". Understanding the cost and the ongoing costs of doing these things is part of the education I think we have to do. It's almost like it's actually twice the label price. It's the cost of actually doing it and the cost of running it. On top and then being very mindful that what we offer customers offers value that it isn't just adding on trinkets. I have to be really honest and say that an awful lot of these things that I see, that we read about, I think I'll be reading about them for another five years before I'm actually seeing them.
Cruce Saunders
Right.
Kate Keyon
Truth be told, a lot of industries are still trying to get their Apps good enough, let alone thinking about what this looks like and whether they can do transactions in the metaverse.
Whether that would look right for personalization. Personalization, as we both know, is still pretty tricky to get it right. Even the basic. I wish I could say that there was stuff they should be considering, but I think I have to say that some of the basics are still not done that well. And I would also have to put my hands up and say that this isn't my specialist area. And I think it goes back to what we said at the beginning, which is the content strategy has become so much more mature and diverse. I feel like my job now is to look for those people and say, what do you know? What can I understand from you? How do I help you get what you need in order to be able to do your job properly and do your job well? I'm not sure I could be the right person to actually advise executives on the future.
Cruce Saunders
But that's very sage because the what is, it goes back to the definition of what is good enough, what is good enough to ship today, and how do we create content models that have, and processes that are flexible enough for today's customer experiences, and can evolve in order to accommodate tomorrow's.
Kate Kenyon
Yeah. Well, governance isn't a once and done thing either. You start from a place of knowing what good enough is, but if things shift, then your governance needs to shift too. So, I definitely agree with that.
Cruce Saunders
And the other part of that is that content is evolving in a way that allows us to look at some patterns that will play out in many forms. For example, intent response matching is something we have to do if we're just targeting offers to a given customer segment, not necessarily to an individual customer, just to people within this demographic that might want a college loan, versus one that might need a new house, or an insurance product. It's being able to just take some basic information about the customer within the session and change out what promo appears in a slot, and then managing that content so it's consistent across channels. So, we're already dealing with intent taxonomies. We're already dealing with some sort of demographic or customer data tagging, and tagging our content in order to match to that. And so that intent response matching gets more and more real time, more and more granular, and it takes on a different shape. But the organization is getting good at that.
Kate Kenyon
Yeah. And that is not an overnight thing.
Cruce Saunders
No.
Kate Kenyon
to split things out into tiny, tiny pieces unless it was useful, unless it was needed. And I think the same applies for personalization in all metaverses and universes and beyond.
Cruce Saunders
Truly. Yeah. So speaking of governance, and are there any particularly impactful content operating practices that you found are most useful and practical for teams to consider?
Kate Kenyon
I think generally
content operations and governance practices. I could give you a set of questions that you can kind of work through. In fact, I wrote a chapter for a new book that is coming out very soon, basically on
content operations. And I wrote a chapter on it on content governance because it's kind of like, for me, the start of what do we feed through the sausage machine? Starts with content governance. Like, So I think if I were to give you a list of questions that I think all teams can use to work through, the first is obviously, "is this good enough content?" What is our definition of good enough? And having the right people in the room to make that decision. And that is people who are producing the content on a day-to-day basis, plus customer insight, plus brand. But not people who are that far away from what it is to actually produce content.
Cruce Saunders
And good enough defined as?
Kate Kenyon
Yeah, "good enough" is a fairly unique thing to define. You have to do it for your own company. What do you lead with? Is it going to be customer satisfying so that they can self-service, so that we reduce the number of calls that come through? Is it brand defining so that we are unique in the market? Different people will have different inputs. So good enough is not one set thing. Once you know what good enough looks like, then you can start to codify that in terms of who needs to see this before it's signed off. When do we do sign off? What standards such as ... I mean, within finance, we have our own Financial Conduct Authority in the UK would say how financial promotions are written and presented. Right? So there are certain legal limitations that would influence your governance. But knowing what good enough is is a very valuable ... and there's another bit to it. Good enough is a good starting point.
Getting people to buy into saying, yes, that's what we want, and we're willing to do the hard work to get it is the second piece. It's actually getting senior management. They who live in the cloud above us all to say, yes, that's what we want. Yeah, that's what the standard we're working to. No, we won't accept less than that. And then when you have that, then you have the intent, you have an outcome, and everything else you can work forward towards that outcome, including codifying that into your architecture and content, your processes, and also your technical architecture as well. Where are your checks and balances? What do you need in the way of monitoring?
Cruce Saunders
Do executives need to get involved in the customer journey?
Kate Kenyon
I think it helps their empathy levels if they do see it, but I don't think they have to understand the nuts and bolts of it. They really just need to understand what good enough is looking like and how we're going to meet that.
Cruce Saunders
Okay, so the visual maps of customer journey are helpful to executives to consume, and obviously not the models themselves, but any interaction with the other aspects of the invisible world of content.
Kate Kenyon
Right. The magic black box.
Cruce Saunders
The metadata, magic black box. The tagging,
semantics and structures.
Kate Kenyon
Not in my experience, but that could be. I wouldn't say ... I always say I'm speaking from my own use case of one my experience. But no, I haven't found that ... There is always somebody who wants to know, like a little bit more. But if I was presenting it, I always put that kind of thing in the appendix, like, if you really want to know, then, yeah, knock yourself out. Here's 50 pages of how I got to this point. But usually, no.
Cruce Saunders
It's the physics of the rocket taking off. They just want to know.
Kate Kenyon
They just want to see if the rocket flying or not.
Cruce Saunders
Sometimes getting all these pieces working together and orchestrated well together does seem like rocket science. There's quite a bit of engineering involved and it's quite a bit of collaboration. It's like putting on a movie or something. You've got all these different characters needing to work together, all these different roles and competencies, practices and disciplines. And there has to be some coherence in the way that large groups of people work together as a leader, just a human leader. What have you found works to help to create organizational coherence and collaboration with content aligned teams?
Kate Kenyon
I think having, there is a huge advantage in content being seen as valuable, is the first thing. In order to make any of this work, I think you have to sow seeds where the ground is fertile. Unless content either is your product or is perceived as being a significant value add to your product, it is always going to be very hard to orchestrate all those people because simply other things are more important, is the bitter truth of it, as far as I'm concerned. I've seen this work really well in things like media and newspapers, where content is the product, there is nothing else. That's why people are there. Similarly, that kind of thing in areas like knowledge management, where you need self-service, where there is nothing but the written word. That makes it easier to get the buy in for that because the content itself is seen as important. Having said that, if you don't have that luxury, if you are outside of these spaces where you are having to advocate for content, I usually start with engineers. As a content leader where I have had to gain buy in, I have had I would say I've had some success starting with content as a design tool and aligning you basically have to find your allies, and you can either start with the visual aspect of content, which is aligning yourself with design and research and seeing that content is design. As we talked about before,
content strategy, breaking out, content, design, becoming more of a specific discipline is, I think, reflective of this.
But at the same time, I have also had quite a lot of success from looking at this from a technology and engineering point of
view of saying most engineers a good sport, they loathe inefficiency, they loathe waste, waste, code, wasted time, scale is something they understand, and they want to get to. They will try and automate away anything that seems repetitive. So, there's a lot of opportunity within content to get those kinds of benefits. And I find that if you ask for money, they will give you advice. If you ask for advice and they will give you money. So, ask for advice. I guess I think I could probably boil that down to whether you ask for people from design first or whether you ask for your engineering people first? Ask for advice. And then people are like, you know what, we can make this, we could make this better when we do this and that and the other. And then you've got a Martech guy. An engineering guy. Oh, yeah. This is very inefficient. We should change this. And design who are going, yeah, well, we could incorporate this into the design system. And now we're talking. In my experience, I've never been able to do it by myself. Much as I find it awkward and uncomfortable, to sometimes say to people, I cannot do this by myself. I need help. I'd like your advice somehow seems to sit better than I need help. Maybe it's me, but I definitely have found that that has been my way forward.
Cruce Saunders
That's very practical. Yeah. It sounds like there's a couple of major themes. There's the theme of the new capabilities and the customer leading capacity that drives content value as a part of the product is perceived as the thing that drives the business value. And then the other side is the cost and efficiency, the speed to market, the reduction in waste, the making things happen better, faster in the content production lifecycle. Both of those are levers.
Kate Kenyon
Yes.
Cruce Saunders
You've employed along with.
Kate Kenyon
Yeah. And I think it's a reflection of the values of the tribes of people that I have to work with. Like, Right. Too far from the mind of engineers.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. So, you've talked about design and engineering as a backdrop. I think that bridge requires a very specialized mind to help create. Because you've got to be able to think both as a designer and think like technologists. Interestingly, at least the way I see it, models have to incorporate both. Right? How things are going to be presented. So, they have to be able to incorporate "oh, I need a title", like a feature promo thing. I need a space for the regulatory compliance language or whatever that's going to be on the layout, or there's some bit of
metadata I need there for accessibility. So, there's all these different things driving the model from a presentation and customer point of
view. And then there's all this data stuff that is driving the model as well. So, they seem to meet in the model. Is that a fair characterization?
Kate Kenyon
Yeah. Actually, content people, regardless of how you came to be a content person, many roads in. We're well placed to do that work. A lot of the work we do is understanding different people's points of
view, of being able to translate. We are translators, international translators, if you like. I probably aim more towards the engineering side of life than the design side of life, but I have learnt to engage with my design peers and understand what makes them tick. Because it's important to me that I do understand those people because they impact my work and I impact theirs. So, you don't have to pick a tribe, but you do have to be able to move between the two of them. I think content people are generally very good at that.
Cruce Saunders
I love it. And the model becomes kind of a Rosetta Stone for that broker to mediate or it's almost like, what do you call, like an international deal broker between countries, you know what I mean?
Kate Kenyon
Yes. One thing that just popped in my mind, as you were saying, that was it stops being about content and starts being a blueprint for the thing we're going to build. Like, , stops being about the choice of words. The copy, if you like, because the engineers don't care about that and neither did the design people, they really don't like. Neither of them wants anything to do with the words, like in the choice of words. And what verb do we put here? No one cares but the copyrights and the copy contact people, if you can, see if you can separate out that from the model that sits underneath it, then suddenly people have, the word that springs to mind is blueprint. You're architecting a blueprint for something which design are going to be informed by that from the way that they present front ends. Data knows why they're doing what they're doing, why they're making these queries.
And suddenly everyone's got a commonplace, if you like, to reference. I'm not there yet, I would say, but I'm damned if I wouldn't really love to get to that place. That's definitely what I'm working towards.
Cruce Saunders
And you're well on the way. There's a lot of organizations, not nearly as far along, and I'm wondering if you could help them with how you get started with modeling. So, if teams are just nosing around with the idea of content models, because in most organizations, many we've worked with, they start out with accidental models and there are models everywhere. It's just that they don't know that they're models, right. They're just system schemas or they're sort of front-end wireframe boxes and arrows. There are other kinds of permutations of it, the CMS specification that's in Google Doc or whatever. Right, so it takes all these forms. How do you tell people who are just getting started and becoming aware that content models exist? This is a good way to start the process.
Kate Kenyon
I would start with, don't panic, and you're going to get it wrong. If you can just embrace the idea that you're going to suck at this at first, you'll be a lot better off. Models are not a once and done thing. You do come back to them, you revisit them, you revise them. They are temporary structures to hold a piece of thinking, if you like. So, the process that my old boss and friend Cleave Given used to say, that they probably still does fit, but used to say that What does it need to do? Where is it deficient right now? So I would start with find a repeatable pattern. Like some easy ones are things like FAQs. They're usually easy to break down anything which has a structure. Repeatable patterns are first and foremost the thing that model easily, start with those. It is a progressive thing. There are degrees of headlessness. It's not an all in. You can be in, you can be out, you can half in and half out if you like.
You can just have some of your content modeled. Some of it will be just special and magic and you will never get it to fit into a model. So don't stress, just start with the pieces that do seem to want to play, that do seem to want to structure themselves. And if you structure them to big blobs to start with, be okay with that. Because some structure is better than no structure. And I personally never model down beyond what a business thinks they will need for the next six to twelve months on the understanding that everything is a snapshot in time based on what we know. So I'll build you a model based on what you tell me. For the next six to twelve months, I might make a couple of guesses, but if it's large and chunky and we don't know why, but we have no reason to break it, I'm going to leave it like that. I'm going to leave it like that until you come up with a reason why it needs to be broken down. And then
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. Okay, so what is the good enough scope?
Kate Kenyon
Right, absolutely.
Cruce Saunders
And what is the six month horizon? Right. And then what that's the recipe for is making something that can ship. Because if we take on the boiling of the ocean project, then eventually somebody gets tired of trying to boil the ocean. It says this thing needs to go on a shelf until we have time.
Kate Kenyon
Yeah. It goes in the big round file, or bin. Or somebody just marks it as just too damn hard once it's got that label. Tricky.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. You got to ship customer experiences in some form benefiting.
Kate Kenyon
Yes. As I said, I haven't quite worked out how we're going to do this all for App content yet, but I know it's there and I know I can see the repeatable patterns, so I know I can industrialize this and I know I can make this scale. When I first started looking at this, I tried slotting it into some of the existing models and went "it roughly fits, but not elegantly". There was enough diversity for me to one thing, now I need to remodel this. I need to take this a different approach. That happens a lot with models, as I'm sure you know. It's like it's not a once and done thing.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah. Models need to be able to pivot, expand and contract. They're more like graphs and less like grids. Really?
Kate Kenyon
Yeah.
Cruce Saunders
So you've had a really interesting career touching a lot of parts of content and with a lot of depth over years, and it creates a wisdom.
Kate Kenyon
You're calling me old?
Cruce Saunders
I think both of us have. We're seasoned. I think we're aging like wine. They call us seasoned at this point. We've been in the industry long enough that we know that there needs to be a next generation. And that process is not necessarily evident in terms of the educational system. And how are content professionals of the future born and made now, and how should they be? What do you see is needed in the industry?
Kate Kenyon
I think it's a really interesting question. I was having this conversation with another content modeling friend the other day and we said, Where are the people I'm supposed to be teaching this to? I can't keep doing this forever. I need some more to hand this to. And I find it interesting that there's a lot of UX writing courses. There are even the master's degree in graphs, of course, which covers all of content strategy. But content modeling takes practice, it takes application, it takes a certain mindset, I guess. I am not seeing that in the market. I'm not seeing people with those skills and I'm not really seeing people teaching those skills either. Anyone listening wants like, mentorship or ideas or me to give feedback, I am always happy to do that for people. But I have to say, at the moment, I'm not seeing these people. I don't know where they are. I've seen a lot of writers and a lot of people who are coming into content management, but as authors who are learning rather than people who are looking to define models,
content engineering. It's like a gap, I think.
Cruce Saunders
Yeah, it really is. There's an opportunity, I think, within our educational system to embrace the next generation of information professionals of many stripes. But this area where content needs to be structured is a natural progression from other sort of sentence diagramming and grammatical skill sets that are taught that are really just need to be extrapolated into the future, which is the one we're living in. But the educational system hasn't caught up and I think we need to come up with professional development approach within the industry somehow.
Kate Kenyon
Yeah. And career paths into it. I am teaching modeling at the moment to one of my colleagues and she comes from an SEO background and actually she has that mind, that sort of technical mathematical mindset that you need a little bit of. You don't have to be really good at math to do what we do, but it helps.
Cruce Saunders
Anyone exposed to
schema.org understands models implicitly.
Kate Kenyon
Yeah. So I have found that Interestingly people who have a background in SEO, technical SEO often make great modelers. But how do you get from that point into it? How do you switch? That is something where that training really comes into its own.
Cruce Saunders
We've also trained a number of folks from the semantic side from MLIS backgrounds that have an experience in taxonomy, design and management, because they actually have a faceted information mind already. So it's not a huge leap to understand structural modeling from semantic modeling. Those two things have to come together. The ability to understand the tagging systems, controlled vocabularies, the
semantics that then get inherited to the model, which is a whole other conversation we won't have time for today. But those worlds are certainly in progress and evolving very rapidly today towards knowledge graphs. I will add it seems like there's a progressive evolution from basic tagging systems towards actual knowledge graphs, and basic content models towards more graph-oriented models as well. And so that is going to be a very interesting movie to watch over the next five years. And so when we meet again in another five years we'll look back and see what has unfolded in this incredible evolving world of content. Thank you so much Kate for joining today. Is there anything you'd like our audience to know before we wrap up today?
Kate Kenyon
Only that I am hiring right now. If you are in the UK then please do come find me on LinkedIn because I have got openings for both UX writers and also content producers. We are very busy hiring and we will be for at least the next six months. So if any of this today has piqued your interest in please do come find me.
Cruce Saunders
I love that we had a chance to talk about bringing the worlds together of both design, and technology across departments. Content sets, technologies, and that beautiful role that content strategists and content leaders play in making the world a little smarter. One content set, one team at a time. Kate, you're making the world a smarter place. Thank you so much for joining.