Building and leading a content design practice: A conversation with Keri Maijala

Keri Maijala has been in the user experience space for more than 20 years, focused on creating and organizing good, relevant content that uses human words for human people. Lately, she's been spending her professional time exploring how to best demonstrate the value of content design and what it means to be a leader. In her non-professional time, she hangs out with her husband in Santa Cruz, CA, and is trying to figure out how to sneak roller skates into Disneyland.

Queenie: Let’s start by talking about your current role. Keri, you lead the content design team at LinkedIn. Can you tell me what that’s like? What does your day-to-day look like?

Keri: There is no typical day! The easy answer is that it’s a lot of meetings.

There’s also a big difference between leading a content design team and leading a content design practice. At LinkedIn, because we're a horizontal team, it's more like leading a content design practice. Which means this: Other leaders in the industry often get to focus on a specific part of a product —they get to really dig into and own that particular product. At LinkedIn, we don't really have that. We're horizontal, so we oversee the entire experience as much as we're able to.

What this means for my day-to-day is: I spend a lot of time talking with other design leaders, understanding what's going on in their space and where they need content design partnership. On top of that, there's the other piece about leading the practice—figuring out things like offsites and celebrations and all that fun stuff, which also tends to fall to me (and another manager on my team, Lauren Camera-Murray).

So it's hard to answer what a typical day looks like. I'll give you a quick example. Today and tomorrow, I'm meeting with the branding team because we're currently doing some brand work. I'll also be in design jams to provide a content design point of view. I also have lots of one-on-ones every week—with my team, with other design leaders, or just people who want to talk about content design needs. And then, there's a lot of admin work. I think people don't realize how much admin work there is when you move into a people leadership role. I have to remind people about their weekly statuses being due and putting status reports together—that’s two hours of my week!

I’m giving you a very long-winded answer here, but all this to say that there are ebbs and flows and it’s hard to define a typical day for me.

Queenie: Thanks for sharing that—the long-winded answer is exactly what I was looking for. The details might be helpful for people deciding to walk down that career path.

Keri: Oh good! But again, I do think that leadership looks very different for different people. My experience might be very different from other people that work as content design leaders at other companies.

Queenie: Noted. You came to this role by way of being an IC. What steps did you take to get to where you are? What advice would you have for somebody who wants their career graph to look like yours?

Keri: I fall into the category of reluctant manager. I spent my entire IC career collecting accolades. And I've talked about this in other venues, but I love an award. Man, I love a freaking gold star! I like people pointing at me and saying: “You're good!” I live off of that.

One thing that made me reluctant was: I knew that these pats on the back don’t come along regularly when you move into design leadership. They just don’t. The other piece was being responsible for people's livelihoods. That was just a terrifying thought to me. So I spent most of my career in the IC space.

Then I moved to LinkedIn. I was the only UX writer here and eventually, when it came time to grow the team, my manager, Julie Norvaisas, asked me if I wanted to lead the team. And I said: “I don’t know,” to which she said, “Well, you know, it's not a huge rush, but we're going to need to make a decision sometime soon. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but in that case, we’ll hire somebody else to lead the team.”

I then spent 6 months having regular conversations with her, going back and forth on the decision, reading a lot of books and just really trying to understand what I was getting into.

And the book that made the biggest difference to me— and this is so cliche—was Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead. It's an amazing book! She specifically called out that the difference between leading and being led was collecting gold stars versus giving out gold stars. After I read the book, I thought about what growth meant to me. Was it collecting more stars? It might’ve been, and there's nothing wrong with that. But then I thought about my dad, who was in a teaching profession, and how many lives he’d changed with what he did. Did I want to have that kind of impact and give something back to the content design community? Or did I want to continue viewing the collection of gold stars as growth?

The answer to that was the former, which is why I made the move into being a people manager.

Queenie: That’s quite a story! I love it. You already mentioned Brené Brown, but are there other authors, speakers, or regular people who've influenced how you lead? Do you have any resource recommendations?

Keri:

It’s honestly the kind of the books that everyone recommends. Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager, Kim Scott’s Radical Candor. I went through all of the popular leadership books to figure out if being a manager was something that I wanted to do.

You asked earlier about what advice I’d give to people deciding whether to walk down the manager path. I wrote an article on LinkedIn a few years ago about this. But overall I’d say: think long and hard about what you enjoy about your work, where you're getting your energy from, and recognize that moving into leadership means it’s a completely new job. Other than working with content designers and still kind of being in that discipline space, my job as an IC has almost no resemblance to my job as a leader. It's a completely different set of skills. Of course, understanding the discipline that you're leading helps, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. It's completely different muscles that you're flexing. It's also a completely different pace of work in a lot of ways. A lot of it is long-haul work when it comes to building and nurturing a team.

Also, just be super honest with yourself about why you want to be a people manager. There's not a lot of glory over here. Having a new title is nice, I guess, but in your day-to-day work, that glory doesn't really show up that much.

And finally, talk to people who’ve made the switch from IC to manager.

It also helps if you're working at a company that lets you go back and forth, like LinkedIn. That’s a nice-to-have and helps with the decision-making. It doesn't feel like you're committing to something you may not like.

Queenie: All great advice. We talked about where you came from, and where you are now. Let’s address that last piece of the puzzle, with as much or as little transparency as feels comfortable for you. Where do you anticipate going from here in your career? And the main reason I'm asking is to provide people with insight into what growth might look like once one’s leading a content design team.

Keri: There are different levels of leadership. As you move up in leadership—for example, where I am right now—it starts looking very circular. We often view things in an up-down linear way, but that starts to fall away a bit.

Leading is about influencing peers and influencing upwards. Every job is about business goals, at the end of the day, but I think once you get up into the higher levels—I'm talking Director and above—it becomes a lot more about leading initiatives, helping your team move toward those business goals, and how you best position your team to get there.

I think that when you're a senior manager, though, it becomes more about team building and the relationships within your immediate team. So again, I feel like once you get to that level, you're developing a whole different set of skills.

All this to say: when you're Director-level or a senior manager, it's really about understanding the business goals and how we strategically get there. It takes a lot of effort to do that work because it's hard to understand the business goals across every single line of business and how we make money across each of them. But over time, you start developing a general model of how this area makes this amount of money and how that area makes money, and that these initiatives have this amount of potential, and so on.

Queenie: Keri, one thing I’m curious about is this: at different companies, there are design managers who’ve come up through product design and end up leading content designers. Is there a model for content designers to become design leaders that lead other design functions?

Keri: It happens! Chelsea Larsson over at Expedia went from content design to leading Experience Design as a whole. Meghan Kirby-McFarland here at LinkedIn came up through content strategy and is now a Senior Director of Product Design.

Queenie: Do people have to switch over to Product Design to grow in that way?

Keri: Thanks for asking about that. That’s a very common question, and yet, no one wonders about it when it’s the other way round! Product design often leads content design, and no one questions that. But for some reason, when it goes the other way round, people are often like: “Woah, hang on, can content design lead product designers?” Well, why not?

Like I said, it’s helpful to know something about your discipline. But I don't think VPs know the intricacies of every single discipline that falls within their domain! Also, once you move into leadership, as I said earlier, it’s less about the discipline and more about the set of skills you need to possess. And that set of skills is transferable, right?

So the fact that we, as a community, are still asking this question is very strange to me. I'm wondering when that's going to change. I think it requires people to move into those spaces, for there to be more examples of it.

Queenie: It’s a bit of a Catch-22. As you grew in your career, did you have mentors or sponsors/advocates?

Keri: I did! Super early in my career, when I joined eBay, I was one of the first content strategists there (that’s what our title was at the time). And my manager there, Ann Bishop, was a huge advocate for content design. I also ended up working for her again at another company.

I also work with a leadership coach, Sara Wachter-Boettcher. I talk with her every 6-8 weeks, depending on what's going on. And she's been very influential for me.

I also have my old-school content design community that I've been going to conferences with since 2010. It's an amazing community, and you can point to the usual suspects like Kristina Halvorson within it. With people like Kristina: sometimes we'll just get on the phone and talk about the discipline, but very often it's about how to make things happen. It’s real talk around the difficult situations that we find ourselves in sometimes and that’s very much needed too.

Queenie: Turning back to the job you hold right now at LinkedIn, I wanted to ask you about the shift in how we operate as a team. We used to be organized vertically, with content designers assigned to different lines of business (LOBs), and we’re now horizontal, with content designers moving around to high-priority projects, in an LOB-agnostic way. How did that switch come about? What was gained by it? What was lost?

Keri: This really came out of necessity and me seeing which way the wind was blowing anyway. I still believe that with the right-sized team, diving into a specific business area and owning that area is the way to go for a number of reasons. It helps content designers really dig into that problem space; it helps them develop relationships with the other people working in that space; they end up possessing a rich body of knowledge over time. There's also this sense of ownership, responsibility, and expertise that comes with going deep like that.

And yet, a couple of things happened that were significant. One was: GenAI popped up! Remember that? When we started building products with GenAI as a company, and as a product organization—with the urgency that surrounded that—what I was finding was that we were just grabbing content designers, like that claw machine, and putting them on these projects. On one hand, it's great that content design was being included in this important way, but on the other, we were also regularly taking content designers out of their product spaces and putting them in completely different product spaces out of necessity. That happened two or three times before I realized that this is what's needed now. So, I could either fight that or I could look at it as an opportunity and say: ‘Hey, we've got leadership that’s clearly recognizing the importance of content design and actively asking for this expertise! This is a good opportunity to showcase what we're capable of in these new spaces.’ I decided to embrace that.

The other piece was that our hiring had slowed. The LOB-type organization was heavily based on the assumption that our team would continue growing, because I had an end vision of what that would look like and it required more headcount to get there. When headcount had slowed, I realized that that vision wasn't going to be realized anytime soon.  So, I said to myself: ‘Let's pause on that. Let's see how we can make the most of the team that we do have, give them the best opportunities for impact, and go from there. And then, should we get to a place where hiring is picking up again, let's re-examine then.’

Queenie: Got it. Is leading a horizontal team one of the bigger challenges you face in your day-to-day?

Keri: Yes! And I think the reason for that is that LinkedIn is such a large company. I think that if one were to lead a horizontal team in a company of a thousand, or two thousand, or five thousand people, there’s more access to what's going on with the people involved. With a company of LinkedIn’s size, it’s an enormous challenge to keep up with everything that's going on and figuring out what the priorities are across the ecosystem, because each line of business has its own priorities. And it’s not just about figuring out the priorities from a business point of view, but also from a content design point of view. It’s important to name what those priorities are and to figure out how to align the team in a way that ensures that we're meeting those priorities.

Queenie: Since LinkedIn is such a huge company, and content design—as we often like to say—is a ‘small but mighty’ team, what do you do to make sure that content design has more influence? To make sure we’re more visible?

Keri: Great question. There are a few things that I do.

One: I try to make sure, as much as I possibly can, that content designers are aligned to the top business priorities in a way that showcases the full range of content design ability. I try to make sure that we’re going beyond the literal words in an experience, and putting content designers in a position to contribute to the hierarchy and flow of an experience.

Of course, language is a part of that, but it’s a very small part of what we do. Having other teams and leaders witness those capabilities firsthand is hugely important to me as a leader.

Second: I make sure to have a lot of one-on-one meetings. Whenever a content designer is aligned to a project or an experience, I attempt to set up regular one-on-ones with the design leaders on that experience, just to check in with them about what’s going on.

And of course, it depends on the situation, but those are usually once every 2-6 weeks. I check in about what's going on, whether they need anything from me, whether they have any feedback for me, and so on. I think that having that personal touch really helps.

The last piece of the puzzle is being highly visible, and representing content design, in things like design jams, reviews, and crits. It’s important to present that content design point of view at these venues and ask questions from our unique point of view.

Queenie: That's really helpful. There are two sides to every coin, and I do wonder: on one hand, it’s great to be able to staff all the important projects and make an impact, but on the other, how do you build a case when we’re underresourced? How do you advocate for headcount?

Keri:

The most successful case for headcount, in our discipline, is made by people who have influence. So my job is to get those advocates. If you have leadership that believes in content design, if you have people that are experiencing content design in the way that makes an impact at that higher level that I was talking about earlier, then you’ve won. Then, people are like: “Oh, I get it now. We need more of this!”

Like I said, it gets harder when it's a big company. The analogy I often turn to is: Imagine you have a giant building and it's got 25 floors. You turn on the light in one room and that illuminates something. And then other people down the hall may go: “Oh, that's cool, we want that.” That kind of influence works. But it takes a long time to get everyone on board—lots of lights need to turn on in small spaces to get the whole building lit up.

That’s how you get headcount—by amassing advocates.

Queenie: What a great analogy!

The next thing I wanted to get your take on was managing a distributed team of content designers, as we here at LinkedIn are. Can you speak to how you make the team feel cohesive to foster a strong team culture?

Keri: Honestly, in the ‘before COVID’ times, we were distributed anyway, between the Mountain View office and the San Francisco office. And then when Lauren—the other manager on the team—was brought in, she was hired before COVID and she was hired remotely. So we'd already had a distributed team. As a result, our efforts to connect started even before the pandemic.

However, as we've grown as a team, we started to need to be more deliberate in how we connect. So we’re building things in like our regular team meetings, crit meetings, Lunch and Learns, and so on.

There’s also our team Slack channel, where we regularly share our joys with one another. We also encourage each other to share personal photos—and honestly whatever we’re comfortable sharing—in terms of what brought us joy that week.

I think these efforts have gone a long way in helping us connect as a team, on a more personal level.

Queenie: As someone on this team, I fully agree. I haven’t met many team members in person, and yet I feel like I know them beyond work!  As a content design leader, do you have any advice for somebody who's starting to build their own content design team?

Keri: Yes!

Again, finding those advocates is hugely important. And remember, it's much more about showing than it is telling. I can sit here and yell till I’m blue in the face about how content design is important and that we’re more than just copywriters that fill in boxes, but that doesn't do any good really. Being a strong advocate for your discipline means really digging in and showing the breadth of what it is that we do and showing how we can make a difference. So very often that means speaking up in spaces where it might be uncomfortable to do so or stopping a process mid-flow to raise your hand and say: “Hey, I don't think this is right. Here's why.”

Once upon a time, when I was the only UX writer at LinkedIn—we were called ‘UX writers’ back then—I started offering hour-long Writing Labs to get at breadth. But I would still try to find ways to demonstrate depth in those meetings. I would say: “Well, in the time that you have before you launch this, here are the immediate changes you should make to the language. However, here’s what else could be valuable.” And then, I would show them what I’d do if I had more time as a content designer dedicated to this team. That was super helpful in helping people understand what it is that we're capable of doing.

There's not necessarily a right or wrong, but the downside of me doing Writing Labs at that level was that sometimes people thought that that's what content design is—it’s just wordsmithing. When I worked on projects and had the opportunity to go deeper, that wasn’t the perception; but for people who didn't experience that, they had a simplistic experience of the impact content design can have. The opposite of that is: if you do decide to go deep, you only get to influence very small parts of an experience or a group of leaders.

The other thing I’ll say is: if you’re just starting to build a content design team, have patience. Be kind to yourself. Celebrate the small wins. Looking at what our discipline has gone through in the last year, setbacks are going to happen. Every now and then, I'll actually write down the small wins in my journal—that this is a good thing that happened today. I also have a folder on my desktop titled “Yay, Keri”. I take screenshots of things that have gone well and I drop them in there. You have to remind yourself of these little things because it's human nature to get caught up on the things that you haven’t accomplished yet, that didn’t go as per plan. Also, remember that building a discipline takes years. That’s just how it is—it takes time and patience.

Queenie: So much rich advice! Thank you. The last question I have for you—and a weighty one at that—is: What do you think is the future of content design?

Kero: I've seen the evolution of the discipline and it's been so interesting. In the super early days, we’d finally figured out what to call it—content strategy—and we raised our flag and said: "We exist! We're here, we do this thing!" Then, our discipline fractured a little bit in terms of there being content strategy, UX writing, content marketing too (which is a whole separate animal as far as I'm concerned), and of course, content design! I see those three things—content strategy, UX writing, and content design—as different things, but all this to say that we were broad and then we started to get more specialized.

Now, it's about trying to figure out how to coexist with tech like ChatGPT. Maybe not coexisting, but accepting what it's used for and then figuring out how we can harness that technology to make our work better. I think a lot of emphasis has been placed on just using the technology without some specific understanding of how it works, how it can contribute, and where it can't contribute. So I'm very interested in things like prompt engineering and response quality. I'm also very interested in optimizing the pieces of our work that aren't strategic, that are repetitive and can be automated.

But it’s important to note that context and nuance are things that AI doesn’t do well, and I think that people forget that. We still have to ask AI the right questions. We still have to understand our audience. We still have to understand culture and individuals and the nuance they carry. And that's the squishy human brain work that content designers do. It'll be interesting for me to see how this technology evolves, because right now it can't do those things.

But what if someday it can? That's not outside the realm of possibility, but I do think that there's always going to be a human component that can't be replicated. And figuring out and honing in on what that is will be hugely important—not only for content designers, but designers in general.

Queenie: Keeping that in mind, if you were to give advice to content designers about futureproofing themselves, what would it be? Is it better for people to be specialists in one thing and get really good at it—like prompt engineering or conversation design—or is it better for them to dabble in and hone a wider set of skills?

Keri: I don't think there's one good answer to that.

I'm going to completely cheat and say: Go deep on the things that you're interested in. Go broad on the things that you're not as passionate about. I’d throw the question back: if futureproofing means diving into things that you’re truly not interested in doing, that’s no fun, right? That's just a recipe for misery!

My husband and I are both generalists and have been so for our entire career. And I think that that’s helped us get to where we are now—we've been curious about various things. I'm totally dating myself, but I was curious about what this World Wide Web thing was, and what HTML was, and then what information architecture was. So my career just progressed along those lines. I know a little about a lot of different things owing to this curiosity.

I don't think there's any such thing as futureproofing. I think it's really about understanding yourself, your skillset, and where your curiosity lies, and then pursuing that, showing impact and how that work makes a difference, and then applying it to the areas that need that the most.

It does get a little harder when your passions aren't marketable, but that's when you cultivate a hobby. And then you ask yourself: ‘OK, what's the next thing that I like to do that is marketable?’

You can be doing something for an imaginary future that makes you miserable constantly, but is that the way you want to live?