Bruce Springsteen once urged his audience to, “be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn't drive you crazy, it will make you strong.”
Content strategists spend a lot of time managing contradictions. Make this screen make sense. Make it pop. Make it better. Make it obvious. Make it clear. Make it funny. Just make it fast. Content strategists are uniquely positioned between design, business, and technology, and get a lot of competing feedback as a result.
This talk aims to focus on three major ideas:
1. Do you think your teams actually understand what you do? Could you explain your job to your parents if you really had to?
2. Manufacturing a “strategy pause” - getting teams to look past deadlines and sprint goals to consider the longer-term implications of content strategy input and decisions.
3. Content strategy as the champion of quality. We live in an age of digital decadence and content excess, aided by AI of varying levels of sophistication. How do you push back when corners are being cut?
Lou has interviewed 15 UX practitioners, developers, and product owners to get their thoughts on content strategy. His goal is to better understand how, regardless of industry, digital teams seem to fall into the same handful of traps. It’s a lot to cram into 25 minutes, but its never been more important for content strategists to have a serious look at our work.
