Content Design + Product Marketing = A collaboration story

For me, Content Design is a highly collaborative discipline. Long gone are the days of the lonely copywriter given a task and sent off into the distance with a deadline. 

Even that evolution is built into the language of how we refer to ourselves. For many of us, we did start as copywriters, with some of us transitioning into content strategists, or perhaps segmenting into UX writers, and eventually to our current title that explicitly links us to design. With that explicit link comes the implicit connection to not only the design process but, more importantly, the people—our relationships with other designers.

But, for a truly cross-functional team, design works closely with numerous partners. Those connections between the disciplines are more than a set of check marks to get a project out the door. They can be the source of collaborative sparks, creative inspiration, and downright fun and friendship.

Over the past year, I’ve developed strong collaborative relationships with several of my project counterparts in Product Marketing. Back when I was a freelancer, contact with anyone on the Marketing team was often through some kind of slide deck stocked with personas, go-to-market strategies, and branding materials. It was like the product marketers were invisible, yet omnipresent and all-powerful stakeholders, whose comments might arrive in one of my work-in-progress Google Docs, as each one corrected the proposed and painstakingly slender UI to copy to stretch for their “messaging.”

In those strange and siloed days, I often felt like the pivot point of a seesaw attempting to balance the product designers, who wanted to shrink copy, and the product marketers, who wanted to expand copy. It was part of my work to negotiate the right balance between the visually-minded and the messaging-minded. All the while trying to keep in mind the humans who would ultimately be using the product. A dizzying ride for sure!

While settling into my role here at LinkedIn, all that has changed. No longer faceless, mysterious entities, the product marketers have come into view, and hopefully content designers for them. 

First, there’s Nix, with whom our collaboration was forged over a particularly contentious modal (sorry readers, I cannot reveal the actual text here!). The business constraints, legion-levels of stakeholder weigh-in, rapidly shifting market conditions, and overall experimental nature of the project was like navigating the narrowest strait, against ear-popping headwinds, with a shredded sail, on a sea of fire. We’ve all been there! Amidst these proverbial forces, a moment I relished was going into what felt like a 40-person meeting with all eyes on the controversial modal header, and Nix literally rolling up his sleeves and doubling down, “It’s the only copy we’ve tested and we’re keeping it!”

Then, there’s Paresh, my partner-in-words on many of LinkedIn’s skills-first initiatives (what is skills-first, you ask? check out this post from our CEO Ryan Roslansky). Over the course of onboarding onto our first shared project, we found ourselves in so many of the same meetings, same strategy docs, same Slack requests, same Figma comment tags, that we finally set up a weekly tête-à-tête we call Content Collab Thursdays! (exclamation intentional). We use that time to talk through copy, strategy, share ideas, tour each other through the various projects we’re working on, get second-writer-eyes on any particularly thorny strings, and sometimes just bond over all things Tolkein. Paresh’s secret marketing power is that he’s a gifted product writer. I’m hoping to someday poach him for the Content Design team. 

Most recently, there’s Maria, who, on a late Friday afternoon, banded together with me when we both sensed an opportunity to develop a strategy proposal for a project that had hit a roadblock. While the roadblock was initially focused on a visual design element, we pulled back the lens a little and discovered that providing a new framework around key concepts in the information architecture could help our team move forward. It was a moment of true “thought-partnership.” 

These instances are only a few examples of the ongoing collaborative spirit that can be found between our two disciplines. While this article has focused on the people, there’s so so so much more room for further explorations, especially around the edges that define Content Design and make it a distinct specialization, and the arenas of overlap with Product Marketing. But all that for another day, another post! 

In the meanwhile, if you have thoughts on this topic, or stories about collaboration (highlights and lowlights), toss it in the comments or give me a shout!