Starting one's own UX design agency and getting in touch with yourself: A conversation with Torrey Podmajersky

As president of Catbird Content, Torrey Podmajersky helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX and content. She has written inclusive and accessible consumer and professional experiences for Google, OfferUp, and Microsoft. She speaks, teaches, and mentors UX folks worldwide. 

Queenie: Torrey, let's talk a little bit about your career trajectory. You started off as a science teacher before pivoting to content design. You then grew to become a content design manager and now you have your own business, Catbird Content. What prompted these transitions? 

Torrey:

I take great comfort in something I heard from someone else years ago: ‘The path only makes sense looking back.’

If I had set out, in my teens or in my 20s, on this specific career path, that would’ve been bonkers. 

The transition from teaching into content design happened through being a contractor at Microsoft. Getting that first job at Microsoft was a matter of talking to different agencies and saying: "I have these skills. Put me where you need me." And I landed a very weird role that didn't need a specific job title. It involved documenting the processes of how different vendor groups needed to work together. Even though each of them was contracted individually to Microsoft, they all needed to work on the same project in the same space, and that coordination hadn't been planned for. I came along and said: "Sure, I'll take that weird contract that’s definitely not a job!" And I went in and I did it. 

Eventually, that entire team was reorganized. And there went my job! But I’d performed strongly in that role. When another person came along, asking my agency for somebody to do a weird role—they had a division that was put together with a bunch of different people and they didn’t know why they were working together—my agency said: "We have just the person to help you." I went in there and I ended up turning that into a full-time internal communications role, which isn’t a role that every division needs all the time. And sure enough, in about a year and a half, that company didn't need that role anymore. 

I wrapped up that project and went on to talk with maybe a hundred different hiring managers about a variety of jobs. One of them was the Writing Manager at Xbox. He said: "You need to come work for me because you can explain abstract concepts to kids in ways they understand. We need nine-year-olds to be able to set up their Xbox on Christmas morning without waking up their parents, and we need to show them how to do it." That’s essentially how I made my transition into UX writing, where I’ve been ever since. That couldn’t have been planned!

Queenie: It really sounds like a mix of some intentionality on your part—in terms of making yourself available and casting a wide net—and serendipity. 

Torrey: Absolutely. There was the economic reality: I needed a job. I wanted something that I could build on later, something that would add to my resume. And I was lucky enough to be living in Seattle—the hub of Big Tech in a way—near enough to Microsoft. 

Queenie: Right! And then you went on to become a UX Manager at Google, followed by starting your own business. How did you know you were ready to take the next step? Were these changes comfortable to make? 

Torrey: Oh, there’s no comfort in any of this. Don’t take this backward-looking view to signal comfort.

It’s always been a combination—even up to this last July when I started Catbird Content—of: What’s available to me? What’s the best future that I can make for myself and for my family? And: how can I make that happen? In fact, in my case, it has almost always required a level of discomfort from outside to make me evaluate what's going on. 

Honestly, as user experience professionals, we're very accustomed to looking at our users and saying: What's the ideal case for them? How can we make their world a little bit better? It’s sometimes difficult for us to look at our own worlds like that and say: What are the ways that I can make my environment better so that I can be the best me that I can be? 

Often it’s hard because you don't have that outside perspective with yourself. I try to get that perspective by relying on friends and family—especially my husband—to reflect me back to me.

Queenie: Let’s talk a little bit about becoming a UX manager. When did you think you were ready to move on from an IC role to a leadership position?

Torrey: There's a difference between leadership and management. And understanding that has been pretty critical for me, because I was ready for leadership long before a management role was available to me. Learning to take on leadership—to stand up, speak up, and take responsibility for where things were going wrong, to lead initiatives—that’s all stuff that I needed to learn to do. I was terrible at this stuff initially and I got better at doing it by doing it. 

The management piece was something that came along as a business need emerged.

And the business need emerged long before I got the headcount in order to hire. There was a lot of negotiation for getting that headcount that then pushed me into a management role. It involved saying: "Yeah, we can do these things, but we don't have the people for it. So, we're not going to do those things." Of course, I could’ve felt badly about saying that, but I chose not to. 

Getting headcount in a big corporation for content design roles is often super difficult. But at other times, it just happens and you make hay while the sun shines.

Those management skills—as I think of them—are really quite different from leadership skills. Of course, as a manager, you also need leadership skills because you need to provide direction, inspiration, and focus. Simultaneously, you need to cultivate management skills like the ability to listen well to people—to what matters to them—and then take what they say and do the figuring out of: Oh, you’re motivated very differently than other people on the team and I care about you, so I’m going to motivate you in the way that works for you.

Actually, that's where my particular history comes into play. I learned management skills as a teacher. I needed to manage the classroom—I needed to care about my students, lead them, and set them up for success in their careers. 

Queenie: I’m fascinated by something you said: you advocated for headcount as an IC?

Torrey: Well, if a content design team doesn’t exist and you’re a team of one, you have to advocate for headcount as an IC. 

Queenie: Oh wow, you were a team of one at a corporation as large as Google? Can you tell me what that experience was like? 

Torrey: I was the only one in my team at Google. Google was very much organized team-by-team. It was very cellular. And then there were content designers across these different teams. For a particular product, there might’ve been an entire content design team or there might’ve been just one content designer or there might even have been none. 

How did I navigate being the only content designer on my team? I did it the same way so many content designers do it, which is to say: "Here are the principles I'm working toward." I had to ask: "What business priorities are we working on?" It involved identifying the business priority that my boss would be judged on or my key partners would be judged on, and then saying: "OK, I'm going to focus on those and make sure that I'm making an impact on them. If I can also make an impact on these other things—if I have the mental energy and hours in the workday for them—sure, I can also help lift those boats."

If not, that was a great lever for me to point out: "Oh yeah, if you had more of us, then more of this could be done. But for now, it can't, because I'm only one content designer and here are the priorities I'm working on that we all agree are the right priorities." 

Being a team of one involved doing a lot of work to make content design scalable, to create artifacts that could then be used by different people to achieve a certain kind of quality with words.

But it also involved saying: "OK, this, this is only the amount that I can do." That’s the best way to create a need. If you do everything for everybody—if they think you by yourself can do everything—they’ll never hire other people. Think of it this way: if you bruise your finger and your nerves send that information about pain to the brain, should your nerves be sad about it? No, right? They’re just providing vital information about what's going on. Can the nerve by itself fix the pain? No, again. 

Queenie: That’s such a great analogy. 

Torrey: Yeah, sometimes you just gotta be the nerve and say: "Hey, I'm just reporting that there’s pain happening here. You can choose to fix that. Or not. It’s up to you. It’s definitely not up to me."

Queenie: Such a great way to think about it. I feel like so many people struggle to separate what’s a me-problem from a you-problem. 

Torrey: It's especially necessary in these incredibly capitalistic times.

A lot of people get into UX the same way people get into teaching: they want to change the world and they want to make things better for people. There’s nothing wrong with that; what a wonderful purpose! But at the same time, you’re part of that world you want to change—you’re one of the people in it—and you can't sacrifice yourself to make it better for everybody else.

Queenie: So, as one content designer on your team at Google, did you feel like your product or cross-functional partners understood the value of what you did? Of content design?

Torrey: Of course not, no. Much like any other very focused role, right? I had to often explain it as: "My work involves making these products work for people. I’m almost like a regulatory attorney. They're not your entire legal contact for all of the law, but they can help you with this narrow thing, like privacy regulations, for example."

I’d think of it this way: I just need to tell them why I’m here. They don’t know, and honestly, there's no reason they should know because they’ve never worked with one of me before!

Queenie: That’s such a positive take on that! Moving on to Catbird Content then—your new business, how exciting!—can you tell me what you do at Catbird Content? What services do you offer?

Torrey: Catbird Content just started in July 2023. At the time we’re talking: five months ago, so not very long ago at all.  

We do a variety of things at Catbird Content. I deliver content. Companies that are in contract with me might say: "We need this problem solved. We need an onboarding flow for this product." I’d then work with them and their team to deliver designs. 

I can also help companies hire staff. So, companies that want to hire their first content designer and don't know where to start, I can consult with them and help them do everything from write a role profile to interview candidates. Also, if they’re looking to staff contractors, I can staff through Catbird Content as an agency. 

I offer one-on-one mentoring to professionals in the field, and also corporate trainings. I go in and say: "Hey, here's how you do the basics of content design for an entire design team," for example, or "Here's how you do voice and tone development." Things like that—both broad and specific skills-building by leading trainings. 

I also just offer content clinics. Office hours, basically. So a company can come to me for an hour and say: "We think we need help with the content, the words aren't working." And I can help them with those words. 

Queenie: So many exciting possibilities right there. Do you find yourself having to do a lot of marketing to get people in the door? 

Torrey: Most of my work is marketing, truly, but it takes shape as building connections with people. Being available and visible, letting people know that I exist and that this kind of a business is out there.

Queenie: And how have you been going about generating that awareness so far? 

Torrey: A lot of it is having conversations with people I come across on LinkedIn or online groups. Sometimes, it’s conversations that maybe start on LinkedIn and go elsewhere. 

Or initiatives like the Content Design Skills Survey that I just launched—the V1 of the Content Design Skills Survey (I’d launched a beta in October). That survey has more than 90 different content design skills, or skills that content designers use, on it. It’s about setting up a conversation in the broader discipline and in the broader industry of what impact these skills could have for a business. 

Queenie: Tell me: What does a typical day as a content business owner look like for you?

Torrey: Well, there’s no typical. When I was at Google, I was usually in meetings most of the day and had maybe a half hour here or there to do some heads-down work. So I pretty much knew that I would just follow my calendar and sit in front of my computer most of the day. 

I have fewer meetings now, which is pretty delightful. And the things I'm doing between those meetings vary vastly: I could be doing analysis for a survey, setting up automated personalized reports for the skills survey, or even doing administrative things like figuring out health insurance options in my state. Other than that, I try to read and learn about what's happening in the field. 

I'm also about to start teaching a class at the University of Washington about information architecture. So, I’m also preparing for that. Apart from that, there’s a lot of client work, prepping for speaking at conferences and so on. In many ways, it's a lot like what my world looked like before, only with a lot fewer meetings and a lot more of the business side of things.

Queenie: You do so much and you do it so well.  How do you manage your time to be able to do all of these different things? Do you ever feel burned out? How do you keep yourself motivated to reach in all these different directions?

Torrey:

Inner purpose, really. I really do still want to change the world and make it a better place for people. I was raised by an anthropologist and a philosopher, and I grew up thinking that we all thought about this human experiment in the same way: that we're all together as drops of water in this bucket, and we're all trying to make it better for future generations. Of course, I found out as an adult that not everybody thinks this way, but this was just natural for me to do because that's how I was raised. That’s where my core purpose comes from. And then of course, there are the day-to-day purposes: I need to pay the mortgage, my family needs to eat food. We need to do all these things for survival. 

How do I manage the day-to-day doing of all of these different things? I struggle with that, frankly. Being so purpose-driven, I really need to sit down and reflect on what my priorities are. What are the projects I'm working on? And how do I manage the time I expect to be spending on them so that I'm not just overbooking my time? 

In fact, one of the things I did for myself recently was to do my own card-sorting activity. I used Post-Its and said: OK, what are the things I'm working on? Why am I doing them? I grouped them into different buckets of why. And then, I went ahead and made myself little 3x5 cards that align to my top priorities. For example, one of them is to run the business because that’s what brings in the money. These 3x5 cards are really just—here’s the thing and here’s why I do it and this is the bucket it falls into. Then, when I’m feeling lost or burnt out, I go back and reflect: how did I mismanage my time and energy today that I’m this exhausted? And I end up realizing: Oh,  today, I worked across five of my different buckets, all in the same day, doing really intense things in each bucket. That’s why I’m feeling so spent. I didn't need to do that; I should’ve organized my time better. So I'm really making tools to self-reflect and figure things out. 

I also talk to coaches and mentors to make sure I keep myself balanced.

Queenie: Mentorship—that’s what I want to pick your brain about next. You offer so much mentorship to folks. When did you feel like you were ready to mentor others? That you had enough experience in the field to be able to share something valuable with someone else?

Torrey: To be honest, I don’t know that I ever felt that way—that now I know enough to mentor others. But, at one point, I changed roles within Microsoft and I was working in an area where they’d never had a content designer before. That introduced me to new people, of course, and some of those people said: "Hey, I've got this friend who's thinking about a career in this field. Would you talk with them?" And that’s how I started having these conversations with people. 

Over time, I started realizing how important these conversations were: how much I was learning about the other person, about different perspectives on a topic. Also, in being forced to articulate what I did and how I did it, I was thinking about my work in new ways. I think Chelsea Larson said it best when she said that writing is thinking. Any time you're articulating, into words, knowledge that you’d previously just sort of had rattling around in your brain, you’re learning it in a new way, in a different way. 

I’d also started teaching some of the very first UX writing classes that were out there, at the Seattle School of Visual Concepts, with Elly Searle. 

The combination of those two things made me realize, on a gut level, how valuable it is to be talking about these things. Even if it’s in a clumsy way, without anyone giving you the authority to be talking about it. It’s good for me and it’s good for others. So why not keep doing it? 

Honestly, it continues to be good for me. I still have these open office hours that people can sign up for, and I get to talk to people from all over the world. This helps me learn just how differently things are done in UX across the world. There's a new article that was just written by some UX writers in China through the UX Content Collective. I highly recommend it because UX writing in China is so incredibly different from how it’s done here in the US. 

So I’d say, it's not about being ready to be a mentor and an authority, per se. I think that that's the wrong frame to think about it. Instead, it’s about: are you ready to critically listen, think, and collaborate to co-create this discipline that we're in?

Also: everyone in this field has something to share. There are some people wondering: how do I get a content design job? How do I make a portfolio? And if you're in your first year at work, you may have great insight about the job market and how to talk with recruiters to get better traction. It’s about knowing what it is that you can share with some confidence and some reasonability, and then being humble and knowing that you have so much to learn from others too. 

Queenie: Great perspectives here. What advice do you have for somebody who's not just seeking a one-off mentorship session but is looking to find longer-term mentors in the field? How should one go about doing that? 

Torrey: I think the most important thing is to know why you want that longer-term mentorship. One person might be thinking: I've been in this career for a while, what does my path to retirement look like? And that’s very different from another person who’s thinking of breaking into the field. These are all really valid reasons to seek mentorship, but you would find very different mentors for each of those things. 

Frankly, one of the best ways to find mentors is word of mouth. Tell people that you’re looking. Honestly, that’s how I've found just about everybody that I’ve considered a mentor. I've had to first admit out loud that I'm looking, and that I'm looking because I'm asking myself these questions.

I don't have to proclaim it to the world; I can say this to a trusted friend. And then maybe in a week or two, they'll say: "I was thinking about how you said that. And I heard about this person, or I want to introduce you to this person."

Sometimes it takes longer than that, of course, but it’s about getting the process started. 

Then it's about getting to know that person, the potential mentor. And not all mentoring relationships work out. It’s not because folks are terrible people; it’s about finding the right fit. Sometimes, people have reached out to me saying that they're looking for a mentor and I say: "I'm not the right person for this. But here's three other people you might want to talk to."

It’s really about putting yourself out there, being vulnerable. If you're not willing to be vulnerable, you're also not ready for mentorship.

Queenie: You also spoke about reading to keep up with what's happening in the field. How do you go about doing that?

Torrey: I don't feel like I have a good system for this because I don't think that there’s a systematic way to be on top of the flow of information in 2023. It’s algorithmically driven. It's chaotic. It's ridiculous.

When I see something interesting, I first check to see if the source is believable and if yes, I can learn from it. Like this article I was just talking about: about UX writing in China. Fantastic analysis and work! 

There’s also some amount of benchmarking where the information is coming from—is it from the Electronic Freedom Foundation? Fom MIT?—and knowing what the biases of those sources are. For example, MIT is very academically-focused; that's its own bias. I’d want to balance that kind of reading with some ethics reading about the implications of this or that, for example. 

So, my ‘system’ is all over the place. In fact, it’s not a system at all. I wish I had a system. 

Queenie: Finally, I want to ask you: what advice do you have for content designers who want to strike out on their own as freelancers or start their own businesses like you did? 

Torrey: Investigate. Talk to people. There are going to be different constraints on people, so there's no blanket advice. But think about if it's the right call for you, because things aren’t going to start working out immediately. You can't depend on getting a lucrative client immediately that’ll pay all of your bills. Unless you have very low bills! 

For me, it took a bunch of investigation into what this would actually look like for me. I needed to make spreadsheets of what expenses I needed to cover and in what ways I’d do that before money starts coming in. I had to investigate what the market rate was for some of the services my business is offering, which is impossible to intuitively know. There's also all the self-reflection that looks like: OK, I thought I’d offer these services and that people would be really interested in them. But nobody seems to be interested in these particular ones. They have, however, asked me about these other things, so let’s offer those. 

Be super honest with yourself about what you need materially. Be realistic about what’s possible in the marketplace.