Words. Ideas. Actions.

Mandatory changes can be a time to make some additional, much-needed changes. And sometimes, not so much. 

15 October 2023

Let’s make this clear from the start: These thoughts are far from the most important ones we should be exploring these days. So, if you have the capacity to read about content design right now, then this is for you. I know I am using this as a bit of a break from reading about the ongoing tragedies which continue to make headlines. Please, make the time you need for yourself as you go through your day. This post will still be here when you get back.

For those of you continuing on this journey here, I want to share two stories about times when I was tasked with updating some user experiences. One went great. The other was a disaster. Let’s start with the shitshow, first, shall we?

One of my first projects at Twitter as a newly minted Product Content Strategist (our roles and titles and career ladders were constantly evolving when I was there, but that was my title at the time) was to add a new option into the Tweet reporting flow. You know, the one where you notify the content moderation team to say, ”This doesn’t belong on the platform”? What a quaint thought today. 

Anywho, I got a note from a Product Manager saying she needed to add an option to the existing ones for reporting a Tweet, specifically, the ability to report hateful conduct. The exact wording was still under discussion with our Legal and Compliance teams, but I would get to write it and shepherd it through our approval process. I just needed to draft an additional bullet like, “It’s abusive or harmful,” which would live alongside the existing reasons for reporting a Tweet, which included, “I’m not interested in it” and “It’s spam”. No problem, right? 

I really wanted to nail this first assignment. To go above and beyond. Dazzle ’em. So, I audited what was already there, and reimagined the entire reporting flow. All six screens of it. And then rewrote all of it. I know; under promise and over deliver, right‽ It was a disaster. 

By redoing the entire flow, I would add weeks of work to the teams. Designers would have to create new screens and flows, with sign-off from their managers. Engineering would need to set aside time and resources to code the new experience. The Trust & Safety team had to understand the new choices to retool their own enforcement systems. Oh, and we’d need to get approvals from Legal and Compliance on all the new wording before the localization team could even start to translate the new screens into 42 other languages. With my one ambitious idea, I had created work for someone in almost every department throughout the company. Yay, me!

My PM, was not impressed. I was hoping for adulations and accolades and commendations. What I got instead was a stern, but empathetic, realignment from my collaborator who didn’t have time for my individualistic showmanship (thank you, again, Michelle).  

Years later at Google, I had a similar opportunity to make a big change when only a small one was requested. This time, however, I handled it very differently. We were renaming a feature, and all of the Google App Ads Help Center pages needed to be revised to reflect the new naming, and update a few of the features. Since we were going to be revising and editing the pages anyway, I thought it might be a good time to make them a bit more user friendly. Sound familiar?

My first move was not to start drafting, though. It was to start a conversation with my PM and Product Marketing manager. One of my first questions was, ”Do we have the capacity to do more?” This led me to pitching my idea of creating a new Help Center hub, improving and consolidating the most-relevant articles under a new information hierarchy to better serve the people who needed this help. We created a working group, which included not just our PM and PMM, but also our Product Operations Manager, Global Product Lead, and Operations Center Lead, to identify internal and external needs, coordinate launch dates and user journeys, and scope the phases of a roll-out plan tied to the renaming launch.

The plan we created included three phases: 

1. Creating a new Help Center hub, which consolidated all the articles relevant to the product, and drafting new ones to fill in any knowledge gaps for people using it for the first time. 

2. Identifying any unmet user needs, based on the data we had from page visits and Customer Service partner metrics, to focus on the top ten, most escalated topics, and creating new articles to address those needs.

3. Revised and improved articles based on our internal success metrics and user feedback on the existing pages to make sure they aligned with the new product experience.

Lastly, I partnered with our designers to make sure we could do all this within the design system constraints, mirroring the structure and format of other successful Ads Campaign pages, so we could create a familiar information architecture and navigational hierarchy to sort the existing articles. This helped ensure users could find the information they needed as quickly as they could on the rest of our site. This new hub increased satisfaction sentiment rates to 83% — up from the low 60s — and reduced escalations to our Customer Service agents by more than 6% in less than three months. A much better result than just springing a framework on everyone a few days before launch, dontchathink?. 

As much as I’d like my work to do my talking for me, I’ve had to reluctantly admit that no matter how stellar the improved user experience is that I pitch, it will never see the light of day if I don’t bring the people along who can help me get it launched. When we have a shared vision, we can do it together. Otherwise, I might as well just tilt at windmills on my own.

See y’all next week?

08 October 2023

Welp, I didn't think I was going to return to posting under this banner, but here we are. There are a few factors which have led me here, and I’ll name them in a bit. But I want to establish a few new ground rules that will make these next few entries more predictable, and less of a burden, so that we — yes, both you and I — can get more out of them. Hopefully. 

First, these won’t be daily. That was too much. And I’m too tied to this machine already, trying to line up my next full-time gig (if you need a seasoned content designer, please get in touch). Second, I want to make these next handful of posts focused on content design (or UX writing or content strategy, whichever term your employer has been using to try and portion out that tiny piece of users’ experience). But please know that there will most likely be some soccer or music or politics of — heaven forfend — Twitter references thrown in, because they have all defined me, (for good or for bad) and have definitely shaped who I am today. The last ground rule is that I reserve the right to undo or add to these ground rules at any moment, based on needs, mine or yours. So if you have an idea or response, please let me know. 

Now, on to the reasons we’re back here. I’ve been volunteering as a middle school math teacher on Tuesdays at my daughter’s school (have you read about our teacher shortage?) and during my lunch break, I listened to this recent conversation between Patrick Stafford and Kristina Halvorson live on LinkedIn while inhaling my lunch before 5th period started. They kept making one point over and over: We need to talk about our work. And not just where we’ve worked or the metrics we may have achieved. Sure, those are important, but we need to start sharing the intricacies and minutiae of how we do what we do. 

This got me to thinking’. I’ve been telling the same handful of stories over and over in job interviews and portfolio presentations, but I’ve only shared parts of them in my previous posts. So, another reason we’re back here is so I can write them all down. Not just for you, but for me, too. I hope that I can get enough detail out of my head and into these sentences to make the daunting task of interviewing a little less harrowing. 

The last reason I’m doing these again is I miss the community. When I was publishing daily posts, I really enjoyed getting reconnected to the voices I missed on Twitter. And I got to meet some smart people for the first time through LinkedIn. With the rise of BlueSky (I have invite codes, if you need one), and the start of Button just a few days away, I want to rekindle the deeper discussions some of my previous posts had garnered. With that in mind, here are a few ideas for upcoming topics: 

• Accessibility
• Conversation design
• Glossaries
• Office hours
• Reusable frameworks
• Templates

Now, I listed these alphabetically, but I don’t have any idea — yet — which one is coming next. We’ll find out together in a week. And if you have a desire to read more about some specifics about some of my past work, please let me know and I’ll add it to the agenda.

I hope you’ll climb back on for this ride. It should be more focused than our last trip. I’m looking forward to connecting with you again. Oh, and if you know of a senior-level UX writing or content design role, I know a guy who’s looking again.

See y’all next week?

04 April 2023

Here’s the thing: This is the last scheduled post in this Not Tweets series. When I first came up with this exercise, I wanted an outlet for my thoughts which would replace my daily — at least — habit of sending Tweets. I also wanted some guardrails for how long this would last, so I came up with what I thought was a sufficient targeted number of posts, repurposing original Soundgarden song titles for the titles of each of these entries. Some nights, that worked better than others. And tonight is one of those others. 

I don’t really have a good tie-in for tonight’s title. In fact, I don’t really have a great topic for tonight. Some days were like that. And I think that’s a pretty good way to bring these posts to a close. Because throughout it all, life has gone on, and I’ve gotten to settle in each evening and try to make a little sense of whatever thoughts have bounced around in my head during the day. The fact that today was so historically consequential at the same time as it felt so mundane is actually a pretty great snapshot of how I’ve been feeling since I started these in November. 

Some days, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about, jotting ideas in my notebook between meetings or during dog walks or even as I misheard a song lyric. Other days, I was simply too overwhelmed with breaking news to have anything other than rambling tumbleweeds cascading around in my head. But every weeknight, I sat here for a few moments, honing fractions of ideas into whole sentences, helping to cement a snapshot of me and my brain on any given day. Through it all, the unexpected kept happening. And the fact that I kept these up through it all is honestly what I’m proudest of. 

You see, I love a routine. I rely on them. Patterns and systems and habits help calm me. Otherwise, my anxieties can get the best of me. Just the burden of putting down these words every night worked to soothe the unease of not being able to Tweet each and every thought in my head. But in a world where we’re having to reuse, and almost redefine, the word “unprecedented” almost every day, I fell back on routine as a way to keep calm, and carry on.

When I started these I was angry that a business made a business decision that I wish it hadn’t. In January, when Google announced thousands of layoffs, including my own, I was angry that a business made a business decision that I wish it hadn’t. What these posts have helped me realize, though, are a few ideas I want to capture form my future self:

1) No company should be worth more to you than you do to yourself.
2) No matter how prepared you think you are for something, you are never going to be prepared for everything, so just relax a bit.
3) No one knows what you’re going through, and you’ll never know everything someone else is going through, so give them a break.

I’m sure there are more reminders that would be helpful in the future, but I think these are a good place to stop. I love writing. I don’t love editing. I could keep writing for another hour, I’m sure. But great writing is essentially good editing. I don’t think anything in the Not Tweets collection could be called great, but there are nuggets there I’d love to revisit. And edit. And try to get them to great. So, while this is the end of Not Tweets, I hope you’ll see a more polished version of something which started here in another form in the future. Until then, thank you for allowing this experiment to go on for more than four months. And thanks for reading this, or any of these, posts. I ended each of them with the same question, “See you tomorrow?” I can tell you now, I definitely will not see you here tomorrow. But I hope to see you soon. Maybe on Mastodon? 

03 April 2023

Tonight’s post is a little bit of a throwback. When I first started these, it was a way to fill the void I was feeling as I abandoned Tweeting. But I ended up writing about Twitter quite a lot in those early days. So, as we come to the penultimate planned post here, it’s only fitting that the weekend’s events have forced me to look at the smoldering wreckage my favorite app has become.

Thankfully, these posts have kept me from logging into The Bird Site. I deleted the app from my phone long ago. I’m no longer loading the Explore tab on my laptop every other hour, either. I think it’s finally safe to say that my Twitter addiction is broken. But that doesn’t mean I’m immune to the continuing decline of a platform I spent so much time and energy helping to create. One such anecdote came to me at about 11 a.m. this morning when a friend in a Slack group shared a report that the Twitter logo had been replaced by Doge.

Now, I’m not a financial genius, nor do I have a business degree, but I’m pretty sure that using an image of a meme-ed Shiba Inu in place of an iconic logo which is known around the globe is not great for the potential profitability of your company. Never mind that the change comes days after April Fool’s Day, and during the window of time where the current management announced they would be removing the Verified check marks which helped people figure out which accounts were actually who they say they are. It’s almost like a voluntary self destruction. But through incompetence. 

I usually like to bring solutions to conversations when I point out problems. But as I’ve said here before, I’m not being paid to solve Twitter’s problems any more, so I’ll leave that to others. I will say that if you were looking to add more nails to a rapidly built coffin, making it harder to trust the information you’re getting there would surely do it. 

There are many things which could kill off a social platform. But most of the deadly choices currently being made at HQ seem to be self-imposed. It’s like knowing you’re deathly allergic to peanuts and deciding to sustain yourself entirely on a diet of Butterfingers. It’s not the fastest way to kill yourself, but it will bring additional issues along with completely, painfully destroying yourself. If I were advising Twitter users, I’d make sure that you’ve already downloaded your data, found another place where your community has gathered, and made the patient as comfortable as possible because it feels like they’ve made a Kevorkian-like choice.

See you tomorrow?

[Important note: I don’t make these suicide references unadvisedly. If you or someone you know needs help, though, you can call 988 in the U.S. at any time.]

31 March 2023

There are a lot of opinions about how today’s economy has been recovering since the start of the pandemic. And, this is the place where I would usually say something like, “people much smarter than me can better explain where we may be headed.” But lately, I feel like nobody actually knows anything. Especially when it comes to our current economic realities, much less the future and where our prospects are headed. All I know is my lived experience. I assume that’s the same for you, too. So I want to give you a peek into what it’s been like for me, looking for work in Biden’s America, and trying to navigate a constantly changing economic landscape.

In a surprise to probably no one, I tracked my job search in a spreadsheet. Here are a few of the facts and figures that I gathered as I scrolled LinkedIn every hour, emailed people I haven’t spoken to in years, and posted a couple of hundred words here every weeknight:

70: Days since the layoff announcement
51: Blog posts since getting notified
54: Applications submitted
29: Cover letters written
7: Phone screening calls with recruiters
6: Discussions with teams and potential collaborators 
6: Unique presentations created showcasing my work and experience
4: Interviews with hiring managers
17: Written rejections 

I don’t have a lot more of these posts scheduled. By my count, the Soundgarden titles left to use are “Kristi” and “Like Suicide”. So, I plan on posting just two more (for those keeping close track, Soundgarden released 121 songs, nine of which are covers which I didn’t want to use as titles, which would bring the grand total to 112 posts since starting these in November). After that, who knows? 

I like the process that making these has forced me to go through. I feel like I’ve sharpened my thinking here in a couple of helpful places. And I know that some of  these first drafts turned into more polished thoughts and answers to questions during my interviews. It’s odd how this initial idea morphed into something so very helpful. And it just reinforces the notion that I never know what’s coming next. Even if that is one of the hardest things for my mind to accept. So, on this last official day of my Google employment, I want to say thank you to my now-former colleagues who have reached out after reading something on this blog. I hope I can find a way to keep us connected, even if it’s just through reaction emoji on LinkedIn posts. Most importantly, if you’re reading these words, I want to thank you, too, for coming on this journey with me. And as I mentioned a few nights ago, if you need help in your own search, please let me know.

See you tomorrow?

30 March 2023

Fair warning: Tonight’s post is all reaction, no research. And the essence of it, yes, is about a former president on the verge of being indicted. But I’m not sure that this is the best option right now. It feels, however, like we’re desperate for any sort of accountability, so we’ll take this win, even if it’s not the high point of honoring the democracy we all thought we learned about in school.

For a lot of people, actions have very few consequences. Privilege and access and money all lead to avoiding almost all repercussions for the people who have it and the choices they make. Even as we travel around this part of Florida, you can almost see the disdain for some rules, and a strict adherence to others. Want to fly a Pride flag? Absolutely not because the H.O.A limits which flags can be flown. Need to double park “just for a second” to run in and grab a few items at Publix? Nobody will mind because they all know me. And the enforcement of which rules apply to which people is constantly compounded by the darkness of  people’s pigment (despite the fact that most of the homeowners around here haven’t met the right amount of sunscreen in decades).

So, I’m not sold on the fact that our former Commander-in-Chief is going to see any real ramifications for what he decided to do years and years ago. And, honestly, I’d much rather him face much more severe punishment for the crimes against our Republic. I don’t want these hush money payments to get swept under the rug, but at the same time, these aren’t the charges I really want to stick. He tried to subvert the peaceful transition of power. If we can’t hold him accountable for that, then all those platitudes we learned in school mean about as much as those yearbook promises we made to “K.I.T. over the summer”. 

We are finding out, more and more, the pledges we always relied on to hold our society together are only as good as the people who are willing to keep them. If those people turn out to be untrustworthy, scurrilous, self-interested, profiteers, then the rest of us are left shaking our heads and wondering how we get our democracy back. I know it’s easy to say voting is important, but it’s become much more than that. The extremists aren’t coming, they’re here. And they are actively taking freedoms away from our most marginalized. It’s time to start getting a lot more vocal about holding people to the promises we were tested on in school. Otherwise, we’ll be spending the next few decades hoping one of these narcissists gets caught with their pants down, because — apparently — that’s the only kind of treachery we’re unwilling to tolerate.

See you tomorrow?

29 March 2023

I very rarely know if I’ve made the right decision. And I find that I question decisions I’ve made for a long while after. They could be big ones, like did I pick the right college, to small ones, like should I have ordered the shrimp and grits tonight instead. And as I sit here tonight, I feel that familiar feeling of second-guessing coming on again.

See, I think I’ve decided what my next gig is. I have been very fortunate to have a good amount of interest in my services since being part of the Google layoffs in January. I know that. There are a lot of talented people — and seemingly more and more every day — competing for what feels like fewer and fewer roles. So, I understand what a luxury it is to have my last paid day at Google this week, while starting something new on Monday. I just don’t know if I picked the right option. And I probably never will. What I do know, however, is I don’t think I’ll ever stop looking. Not anymore.

One thing these last few years has taught me is that you never know what’s coming. And I have also discovered — the hard way — that your only allegiance you should have is to your colleagues (both past and future), not your company. I am making a choice that’s right for me and my family today, and that’s the most important consideration. But I am going to keep my eyes and mind open to new positions for a few reasons:

1) The future is unknown and unwritten, both for you and your employer, so change can come at you in a moment’s notice, and your only true boss is yourself.
2) I want to continue stretching my understanding and my skills, so as soon as I feel like I am stagnating, I’ll look for ways to learn even more.
3) There are many highly qualified candidates on the hunt right now, and if I can help connect any of them with their next gig based on my network and teams I’ve already talked to, I am more than willing to help in any way I can.

I hope that in a few months I’ll be able to look back at this post and confidently see that I made the right choice. But there’s nobody handing out “Winning Decision” ribbons, that I know of. Instead, I’ll just have to ask myself some hard questions, and hope that I like the answers. In the meantime, if you’re reading this while looking for your next content design or UX writing gig, and you think I can help, please send me a note either here or on LinkedIn.

See you tomorrow?

28 March 2023

It’s late as I start this tonight. And we’ve been traveling all day. So this will be pretty short. But I didn’t want this day to end without extolling the virtues of libraries. Even in a state like Florida.

On our way from one set of grandparents to the other, we wanted to stop at a favorite spot for lunch. On the way, we made a detour at the Volusia County Public Library. And I have to say, it was almost like being in one of those amusement parks this state is so known for. 

We got to help create a space-themed, community pixel art project, go on a scavenger hunt, enter a spaceship-naming contest, grab a handful of books and puzzles in the very inexpensive book sale, get new library cards for the entire family, pick out a free beaded keychain craft kit to make, and get so much help, care, and information from the many, many librarians working there today. All in a state that is taking books out of classrooms. 

The contrast between the people so willingly trying to fill our heads with so much knowledge and information while the elected officials in this state fearfully cower from any information which may be new or uncomfortable to them was really quite stark. It almost makes you want to move down here and force every single one of these closed-minded officials to spend just one hour in a public library their tax dollars help fund. Maybe they’d learn a thing or two.

See you tomorrow?

27 March 2023

I’ve talked about dates here before. Some are more memorable than others. Every date probably has significance for somebody, right? I mean, there are only, at most, 366 of them to go around, and — what? — 8 billion of us. That’s a lot of people cramming a lot of meaning into just a few dates. So, I was surprised when I realized this weekend that a date had passed without me noticing. And I want to remedy that tonight.

Saturday marked one year since Taylor Hawkins died. When I read that, I was stunned. It was simultaneously yesterday and ages ago. It’s hard to put into words the strange place Foo Fighters have in my life. I know I’ve written about them more than enough times at this point, so I won’t be focusing on my connection with them here tonight. Instead, I just want to talk about the first time I ever saw Taylor play drums. I wish I had more of the details documented, but as I remember it, I was watching a music performance on one of the late-night shows. In my mind, it was “Saturday Night Live,” but I’ve never been able to find the clip I originally saw. Odds are better that it was an appearance on Letterman. In any case, Allan’s Morrisette was the musical guest that evening. So, I was watching with a bit of a chip on my shoulder.

Around that same time, flanders was in our early days. We were writing and recording at a break-neck pace. For a long time, we practiced in a trailer outside of the first Cow Haus location on Lipona Road in Tallahassee. I had gotten a subway-sized poster for the then-new Napalm Death album, thanks to my volunteering on “Metal Madness” at V-89, and we flipped it over and tacked it to one of the sweaty walls of that unconditioned trailer to keep track of the names of all the songs we were cranking out. There had to be at least six dozen names scrawled in Sharpie on that big, white canvas. One of the earliest names listed, however, was concocted in the living room of Brain's house. He lived with a bunch of other musicians, so he kept his drums set up there all the time, and different local bands would roll through on different nights of the week, coordinating band practices around gigs and day jobs and shifts at the radio station. And, for us, “Simpsons” broadcasts. Back then, the flanders practice slot was Thursday night, from 7 until about 10, with a 30 minute break at 8:00 to watch “The Simpsons” on Fox. Is it any wonder why we ended up naming ourselves flanders (I was really pushing for Surly, though)?

Anyway, back to the point. We wrote a song called “‘You Oughtta Know” back in those early days. It ended up a manic staple on our early setlists, so we released it on our first cassette (I think. Honestly, all of this is suspect; my brain ain’t what she used to be, and I’m away from my “archives” at the moment). This was around 1994-ish. This part I’m sure of because we also took a break from practice one infamous evening in June of 1994 to watch an unfolding event on TV, then resumed practice to crank out a new song we immediately dubbed “White Ford Bronco”. (Again, apologies for another diversion, but that’s just where my brain is at tonight, as I wrestle with uncomfortable truths. I guess I run back to memories of better times, when finding joy was as quick and simple as heading to a friend’s house, turning some amps up loud, and piling up some distorted pop riffs with a group of people who always inspired.)

So, that’s basically the backdrop. I’m in a new-ish band, struggling to keep track of all the songs we’ve written, playing out anywhere and everywhere we can get a gig, and hoping to ride this nascent “Alternative” wave out of our day jobs and into pop-punk fueled financial and creative security. Obviously, that didn’t happen. We got notable airplay around the country, toured as much as we could, got an honorable mention in a “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” unsigned band contest, and even made it to the finals of a Musician Magazine/TicketMaster contest, where we got flown out to play a show at the Palladium in Los Angeles, along with eventual winners, The Refreshments. (Rumor is they used their winning studio time to record the song which later became the theme to “King of the Hill”. We used our losing prize money to record more of the songs which were documented on the back of that Napalm Death poster, and bought a 1977 Chevy Beauville so we could do more touring. Wow, the tangents are getting a bit out of hand tonight. I blame vacation brain, I guess. Back at it!)

Struggling band? Yes. Grasps at the brass ring? Many. More stories than we have time for tonight? Most definitely. This was all around the same time when other female-fronted, pop-punk acts started hitting our radar. The big, obvious ones were No Doubt and Alanis Morissette. We got lazily compared to them a lot. But those writers were just looking at our line-up and making those connections. We didn’t sound very much like either of them. For the writers who were really listening, they were talking more about Velocity Girl and Letters to Cleo and Scrawl. I always thought we sounded like flanders. But any time I saw No Doubt or Alanis Morissette with yet another huge audience, I was pretty jealous. Especially when I heard that Morrisette was performing her single, “You Oughtta Know” on TV screens across the States as well as all over her native Canada. 

Tuning in, one more time, to let the envy rein, I finally stopped to listen. And watch. And that’s when I noticed it. There was a whirling dervish absolutely destroying the drums in the background of the eponymous band I had grown disdainful of. Her band was solid. More than solid. I started watching even more of their live performances, each time marveling at the man behind the kit. I was awestruck. Each and every set was as if this guy had never played harder in his life. He gave his all. Every time. It was mesmerizing. It was inspiring. It was stardust. And as we know now, it was Taylor Hawkins. 

I obviously have a lot of musical memories I like to talk about. Some I’ve shared here, some only come out at parties or very infrequent band reunions. But getting one shot at a huge opportunity, and having that moment supported by the drumming of this man I had admired years before he joined Dave and Nate, is far and away one of my favorite sonic souvenirs. My disbelief that I had an opportunity like that is matched only by the disbelief that it‘s been a year since we lost him. Here’s to making more musical memories, however you can.

See you tomorrow?

24 March 2023

There’s this strange, liminal space that happens while looking for a new job. And I’m deep in it now. Offers are finally starting to come in. But so are replies to opportunities that I got excited about in the early stages of my search. Obviously, these are good — and privileged — problems to have, but I’m finding that I don’t really know how to approach finding the right decision. The idiom “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” keeps popping into my mind, and I feel like that logic is weighing heavily into my decision. And I just don’t know what to do.

Part of this decision paralysis is on account of my fear of making mistakes. But what really qualifies as a mistake in this instance? Let’s say I pick the “wrong” job. What does that even mean? Knowing that I’m really the only one making the judgment, I’m at a loss for how I’m even grading myself. I can compare pros and cons, but as the impending deadline of no more paychecks looms, isn’t the “right” choice the first offer you get? Again, I know what a luxury it is to have multiple offers, but that deadline also means that there were questions which went unasked during the interview process. And not knowing those answers may lead to regretting my decision. Which, I guess, then means I made the wrong one. Right?

I would love to be able to quiz my potential new managers more about how they think about career development and learn more about their management styles. All I hear in my head, however, is that ticking clock, counting down the seconds until I’m officially without income. I’ve been lucky to pursue new opportunities without this pressure in the past. But the job searches I remember most are the ones which came right down to the wire, and I had to balance my ability to negotiate with my need for a more immediate start date. If I look back at the summer of 2015 as an example, I had two offers to lead content strategy teams in hand when I finally got an offer from Twitter. It was the one I really wanted, but I know it stunted my career growth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of almost every piece of work I was part of there, but content strategy at Twitter was not a real discipline yet. There was no career ladder. No appreciation for the craft from other teams. No real understanding of what we did and how we could help. The three of us, at the time, helped establish all those things. And more. Those factors led to being years and years away from a promotion, however. And now, I think, I’m paying for that.

There are a ton more nuances to that situation, and a pretty long story about the first job I took right after leaving Twitter where I only stayed for 29 days. For now, though, I have a lot of thinking to do. And options to consider. And, also, bills to pay. With less than ten of these posts left scheduled to be published, I assume I’ll have a decision before these end. At least I hope so.

See you tomorrow?

23 March 2023

I’ve never lived more than a 30-minute drive from a large, salty body of water. I’m not really sure what life would be like without that access. I know there’s a cliché about coastal bias, but this is different. And I will fully admit that I am biased for the coasts. Whether it was during my early years in Florida, or my current ones in San Francisco, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be land-locked. And this is where we make a dramatic change in direction, and head straight into content strategy!

See, I think one of the most important attributes for a good content strategist is to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Whether you do that through user interviews or customer data or even persona explorations, we need to be able to build for people outside of our own lived experience. Like baking accessibility fundamentals into product launches, rather than trying to tack them on afterwards. We need to build for everyone, not just for ourselves.

Sometimes, all that takes is some imagination. Other times, it’s really questioning the assumptions we have about how people will use what we’ve built. And, occasionally, it’s stepping in to say that what we’re building is not ready for public consumption because it could put people in harm’s way. There’s a lot of that kind of discussion happening now around AI tools and large language models, and I highly recommend you digging into those ideas on your own (try following Timnit Gebru and Mia Shah-Dand as a start). But we should be that skeptical about everything we build, making sure we’re not making design decisions based on narrow perspectives and unquestioned assumptions. It’s why I believe our design teams need to be more diverse. It’s also why I think we need to move away from attention-based metrics, and more toward ones focused on task completion. And, most importantly, it’s why I hope that if you read anything in these posts which misses the mark, you call me out on it; I can’t see my own blind spots until someone points them out to me. And I want you to!

This push for expanded perspective, though, isn’t limited to just building new things. It can come into play when looking at our own habits, too. I have a story which rattles around in my head that I don’t really know the source of. It feels like family lore, and for someone, maybe it really is. But on a recent call to my parents, they verified that they’d heard the tale, too, but it wasn’t from our family. The version of the story I know (embellished a great deal because I’m typing this on a plane and it’s what I’m doing to entertain myself for a bit) is this:

A college-aged daughter brings her new boyfriend to his first family gathering around Easter. There are many generations huddled in the kitchen, getting to know the new beau, and sharing those embarrassing childhood anecdotes which always seem to pop up as soon as someone you’re trying to impress comes around. As these get tossed about, meal prep is in full swing. And it has all the hallmarks of a classic Easter feast, with deviled eggs, fresh peas and asparagus, buttered new potatoes, green bean casserole, fresh-baked rolls, and a large honey-glazed ham. By the time everything is ready, the new boyfriend is ecstatic. He can’t wait to taste it all, especially the ham. It’s his favorite part of the feast, particularly the crispy, sweet end. 

When they all finally gather at the table, serving plates piled high with a steaming assortment of menu items, the boyfriend notices something which stops him cold: The end of the ham has been completely shorn off! He spends the next few seconds in a whirlwind of coalescing emotions. He’s simultaneously disappointed, appalled, confused, concerned, stunned, and even a little angry. As diplomatically and furtively as he can, he leans over and quietly asks his girlfriend, “What happened to the end of the ham?” 

Without catching his unspoken agreement of stealthy communications, his girlfriend casually replies, “Oh, that’s the way we’ve always made it. It’s our family recipe.” And without taking a moment’s breath, she turns to the other end of the table and loudly asks, “Hey Mom, how come we cut the end off the ham?”

The boyfriend sinks low into his seat. 

“It’s the way we’ve always done it,” the Mom shares. “It’s our family recipe.” 

“That’s right,” Nana weighs in. “We’ve been doing it this way for years. Isn’t that right, Ma?” 

All eyes now turn to the matriarch of the family, seated at her traditional spot at the head of the table. “Yep,” she confidently confirms, “It’s how my mother used to do it. See, when I was growing up, we had a very tiny stove and only a small baking pan would fit in it. Every year, when we’d get an Easter ham, we’d have to cut a part of it off so that it would fit, and since we didn’t want to get rid of the end with the larger slices, we’d just cut off the end.” 

Everyone else stopped their chewing. Some mouths even fell open a bit. 

“You mean the only reason we’ve been cutting off the end is because, years ago, your stove was too small to fit an entire ham‽” Mom managed to ask. 

“Uh huh,” the great-grandmother responded between the bites she never stopped taking. “It was the only way we could cook a ham.” 

“Then why are we still making it like this if we have pans and stoves big enough for a full-size ham?” the daughter asked.

“It’s our family recipe.”

The point, obviously, is to question even your own ways of doing things. Just because something has worked one way in the past doesn’t mean we still have to do it the same way today. Repeating outdated methods isn’t going to lead to progress. And won’t let us learn anything new. By breaking out of the ways we’ve always done things, either for ourselves, or our users, we get to introduce new perspectives on familiar ideas. Like the moment your daughter first hears The Beatles. Or your initial taste of your now-favorite food. Or jumping into a familiar ocean from a brand new pier. 

We all can use a reset sometimes, especially when we’re building for others. We have to constantly remind ourselves that we’re not our target audience. By imagining how and why other people are coming to us to solve their problems, we’ll build them better solutions. It just takes a little empathetic imagination. 

See you tomorrow?

(Also, if you know where this ham in the pan story is actually from, I’d love to know how I came upon it.)

22 March 2023

There’s no way around it tonight; I’m pissed. As we prepare to head to Florida to see family for Spring Break, I read that the governor there is planning to do even more to add to the stress and anxiety of some of the most marginalized people in his state. And it’s part of a growing, troubling trend around the nation.

People much more knowledgeable than I have been tracking the restrictions on people’s bodies which are moving through state houses across the country. Whether it’s limiting access to reproductive medicine or dictating who gets to have what kind of health care, we are quickly moving toward a reality where we don’t get to decide who is a human and who is a subject of the state. 

And, as I told some online friends earlier tonight, I feel helpless. Sure, I donated to causes and bought some t-shirts to wear while we’re in the Sunshine State, but what more can a person like me, who lives in a place which respects and protects an individual’s right to make the choices for themselves they deem appropriate, do to make the changes necessary to let a person live as they want to live? I don’t really know. So, I’m asking here. Because it’s the platform I have. 

But I feel like I need to do more. We all need to do more. When bathroom bans were proposed in Indiana in 2015, CEOs like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff pressured other corporate giants to band together to prevent the laws from staying in place. It happened in Georgia and North Carolina, too. But where are they now? How come our corporate titans haven’t spoken out now? When Disney tried to stand up for its employees, nobody stood with them. Why? What has changed in the years since? Except for everything. 

Like I mentioned briefly in last night’s post, we have fundamentally failed to protect the least of us when we had the opportunity. And the assaults on them are getting more pronounced. I ask, again, what are we to do? I honestly don’t know where to start. Pressure politicians? Sure. Push corporations to speak out? Hell yes. Support candidates who will repeal these backwards laws. Obviously. But without a unified coalition, speaking as one, we are going to be a bunch of tiny little voices shouting at a jet engine. 

Whether you know it or not, someone in your life is scared about what’s happening. It might even be you. I know I’m afraid, and none of these laws put any direct restrictions on my body. Yet. I cannot emphasize this enough: Those of us with privilege need to be using it. Now. Tonight. Do something right this second to make this better. It could be sharing your own rant-y blog post like this. Posting a note about protecting people to your professional network on LinkedIn. Tweeting (gawdforbid) your opposition to laws like this out to your followers, if you still have an audience there. But enough is enough. Our silence is complicity to the current and future marginalization of an already at-risk population. If you care about people — all people — now’s the time to show it. 

See you tomorrow?

21 March 2023

Earlier tonight, I was watching an episode of American Masters about Dr. Anthony Fauci. It was a retrospective of his career, looking back not just at his role in recent years fighting the spread of COVID-19, but his earlier work during the start of the AIDS epidemic as well. It was a lucky coincidence for a couple of reasons. The first, and easy reason to explain is the fact that the title of today’s post was one of the Soundgarden song titles I had no idea how I was going to work into these. But the other reason is because I’ve been thinking about how and why we make the choices we make in the face of pandemics. The only conclusion I’ve come to is that, like a lot of our other choices here in the United States, it comes down to power and influence. 

If we look at the start of both the AIDS and COVID-19 outbreaks, it seems like we didn’t take them seriously until they started entering our personal lives. And if you didn’t have someone close to you who was sick, from either of these, you had the luxury to almost ignore them. Or worse, blame people who were sick. We do this a lot, I feel like, and not just with epidemics. 

Look at what’s happening to our banking system. In the last few weeks, a certain demographic of people in the U.S. basically caused institutions to fail based on nothing more than their emotions. But where was all this manic energy to save people’s money in 2008? Back then, it would have been just as prudent — and probably less expensive — to pay off the home mortgage loans for people who were being steamrolled by banks deemed “too big to fail” which were packaging and repackaging their homes and hopes for generational wealth in insipid schemes to pad the billions they were already making. 

Over and over, we elect and reelect leaders who make decisions for the median demographic of their constituent population. We repeatedly ignore the marginalized in our communities, despite the overwhelming evidence that when we invest in those who are most in need, everyone ends up doing better. Just look at the work of Judy Heumann. But there’s no immediate profit in helping people. No financial gain in investing in teachers and school staff and students. No dividend in weening people off drugs. No cash in rehabilitating criminals. But when we don’t, these underserved students aren’t prepared for the work ahead of them. Those who are addicted pull services and resources away from other city needs. And our incarcerated population is left with few choices outside of shackles, if we ever even let them out. 

Watching the Fauci story was just a reminder of what a missed opportunity these last few years have been. We could have made better choices. Selected more compassionate leaders. Rethought what and who is important. But instead, we’re back where we started. And heading in the wrong direction. If we’re not going to learn our lessons after 2020, then will we ever?

See you tomorrow?

20 March 2023

The job search continues. And continues to be frustrating. While I know I need to be patient, I just want to be done. Add to that the fact that there’s no real good system of feedback, and the process becomes even more demoralizing. Let’s take today as an example.

I’ve been honing a presentation of my work examples for weeks. It’s pretty solid at this point, highlighting some work I’m proud of and the collaborations which brought it to life. It’s a radically updated version of a deck I came up with when I was on the hunt in 2020. Thankfully, there was one interview panel back then where I got some valuable feedback. And I’ve incorporated it into this new, 2023 version. But that’s so, so rare these days. In one presentation today, for instance, I know I highlighted all the points I wanted to make. I tied them to the business needs of the position I was interviewing for. I even threw in some ideas for how I can help achieve the goals they have already revealed will be part of the position’s success metrics. But as I left the interview, I had a sense of dread. One of those, “You did your best, but your best wasn’t good enough” feelings that I’ve only had a couple of other times in interviews. And my intuition was always spot on, in retrospect.

So, as I sit here tonight, I’m thinking back to a line in one of my favorite things I’ve ever written: 

But even in the Bay Area’s highly publicized culture of “Done is better than perfect,” jobseekers never get a second chance to make a first impression. We aren’t given feedback. We can’t take what we’ve learned and make things better. The process ignores exactly what we are supposed to be good at: progress.

I try to approach these interviews like user problems. I get as much information as I can about why the role is open, what the success metrics for the position are, and ask for the types of things potential collaborators are looking for in their new college. Then, I try to see what examples I have in my work history that I can show which will help them decide I'm the exact person who can bring a solution to their specific problem. But I wish we would look more broadly at how people can help. 

Nobody should be hiring based on what people have already done. We should be hiring on the promise of what we can do together. The work I’ve done came to life thanks to a specific confluence of events, in a particular moment, at the hands of a unique combination of people and their ideas. We’re never going to be able to recreate that. And the solutions I’m showing in my portfolio would be different if even just one of those elements were changed. So, why aren’t we better at assessing and quantifying whether we can create beautiful solutions with someone, other than looking at their past work? I honestly have no idea. And I’m obviously frustrated by that. 

One thing I’m sure of, though, is that I — thankfully — have a few more interviews lined up for later this week, and I’m again refining my portfolio deck for them, one more time. I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied with having to present past work to represent future promise, but unless and until that changes, I’ll keep playing the game. Right up until I land my next gig, that is. Then, I hope to take this curmudgeonly perspective about how we hire and suggest changing it in each and every place I’m lucky to be a part of from now on.

See you tomorrow?

17 March 2023

When I thought about writing tonight’s post earlier today, I had a couple of ideas. Almost too many ideas. There’s the half-finished content design-related notion about where to put settings which don’t fit into obvious labels. Then, there was the one about that recently unearthed band I found in the used section at Amoeba which is right up my alley and a complete mystery about how I missed them. Another is the rant about consequences and who we, as a society, extend forgiveness and second (and third and fourth) chances to. Still another was the tension between our ability to use ingenuity to solve problems but not the incentives to bring about real changes which aren’t tied to someone’s profits.

They are all worthy of further exploration here, I think. But they take time and consideration, if I want to do any of them justice. And I do. I know that I wouldn’t be satisfied if I didn’t do my best to explore any and all of those. And that pressure I put on myself, which I talked a little bit about last night, means that I’d look back at a lackluster post and regret having done it at all. Even as I sit here now, I am lamenting the fact that I forgot to include one of the points I wanted to make in the post about naming and identity. 

So, instead of trying to struggle though trying to craft one of the posts I mentioned, we went out for ice cream. And I think it was a much, much better use of my time tonight, whether we were wearing green or not. My hope for you this weekend is that you don’t have to struggle as much as I do when trying to decide between a weighty task you’ve assigned to yourself, or a waffle bowl filled with a scoop of coffee ice cream covered in hot fudge, whipped cream, peanuts and a cherry (that your daughter will definitely steal from you, so you should probably get two). 

See you tomorrow?

16 March 2023

I am exhausting. Not exhausted. I mean, I am that, too. But what I mean is I think being me is also exhausting. I might be exhausting you as well, but at least you can take a break from me. I never get a break from me. I’m always here. With me. Making me do things. Which is exhausting.

In an effort to avoid going down an Izzard-esque monologue, let me explain. One of the many fascinating — but frustrating — features about my brain is that it keeps making demands of myself. Let’s take these posts as an example. Nobody walked up to me in November and said, “Hey, Stephen, I dare you to write a three-to-five-hundred word essay every weeknight right before you go to bed.” Yet, here I am, clad in my jammies, watching a recorded episode of “World News Tonight with David Muir” on the DVR, typing these letters into a few digital boxes. So, why am I doing this to myself? The honest answer is I don’t really know. I’ve often given myself lofty goals or tried ambitious projects. But I’m not really sure what motivates them. Or why I finish them. 

Well, that last part isn’t accurate, is it? I finish them because I tell myself I have to finish them, right? Would something terrible happen if I didn’t? I mean, seriously, if this post didn’t show up here tonight, would you have been disappointed? Yes? No? Would you have even noticed that one was missing? You’re not reading these that closely are you? I mean, did you even catch that every sentence in this paragraph has ended with a question mark? And why should you? You have other things to do, right? 

Whether it’s this Not Tweets blog, my Journal Journey look backs, #The100DayProject called ”Choose Must” in 2015, and the revisiting of them in 2016, or even my one EP a month in 2018, I keep signing myself up for extraneous tasks in addition to either working or looking for work, and — more importantly — being a partner and a dad. I know I need creative outlives. In fact, I love these creative outlets. I hope that after I’m long gone, our daughter can look back at them and learn aspects about me she’s now too young to quite comprehend. But why am I pushing myself to get through the entire list of original Soundgarden song titles I’m using to quantify how many of these blog posts I intend to do? If I tell you there are only two dozen left, what does that make you feel? What about if I told you there were only a dozen left? How ’bout six? And what if I said tonight’s was the last one? Do you have different feelings about each number? I know I do. So, I keep typing, hoping that as I do, a new thought spurs an inspiration for just one more post. Is it the attention I’m looking for? Seriously, I have no idea. But it’s definitely come up in therapy. The only real reason which makes any sense is that if I don’t finish these projects, I feel like a failure. And that’s unacceptable. At least to my brain it is.

As I leave you tonight, I can tell you this isn’t the last one of these. At least it‘s not intended as such. I have a few more ideas for posts, and more than a handful of song titles to use. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a satisfying answer to why I sign myself up for these kinds of journeys, but I am glad you’re on this trip with me. You’re still here, right? Hello? I’m exhausting. 

See you tomorrow?

15 March 2023

Well, I spent a good part of the day gathering my thoughts, looking back over notes, and taking a lot of deep breaths. I’m not sure, however, that I’m any less troubled by how bad we are at categorization. So, let’s get started, shall we? But first, a flashback …

More than a decade ago, while leading a team at Symantec, one of my favorite schticks at lunch was doing an Andy Rooney impression (I was old way before I actually got old). The premise was his thoughts after going to the farmers market. 

“I went to the farmers market with my wife this weekend. She likes to get our produce fresh. Have you ever noticed how strange the names of fruit are? As we wandered around, I kept noticing them. I like oranges. Oranges make sense — they’re orange. But why don’t we call bananas “yellows”? I like grapes, too. They’re fruit. But grapefruit? That’s not only redundant, it’s just factually inaccurate. There aren’t any grapes in grapefruit! …”

I can go on like that for a while. A long while. But it brings me to my point: Every name you can think of came from a human. A wonderful, fallible, living, breathing human, much like yourself. Maybe. It could have also come from a racial segregationist and apparent accessory to murder. So, you know, maybe not like you at all. But these names tend to stick around, no matter where they came from. And no matter whether or not we have any similar intersections with the people who came up with them, we have to live with their consequences. And, not to get too TED Talk-y, but we need to be a lot more diligent and thoughtful about the labels we place on things and — especially — people.

I mentioned last night that this came up again for me as I was applying to jobs. A lot of the online systems I’ve been using for applications have sections which gather demographic information. Some of them are well thought out. Others, not so much. But one thing they all have in common is a set of labels each and every candidate needs to fit themselves into, whether or not they identify precisely with them or not. And all of them are fiction. To quote one of the Daniels during one of their acceptance speeches at the Oscars the other night: 

“We are all products of our context.”
– Daniel Kwan 

Names, labels, categories. They all result because of somebody’s decision. We can decide how we want to be identified. But we can’t impose that choice on someone who’s meeting us for the first time. They are going to bring all their lived experience and bias and assumption to define you for themselves. Until you define yourself for them. But if they only give you a few options for how you are able to do that, are you defining yourself, or are they still defining you?

It all comes down to choices. And the more of us who are making those choices, the better. I know I don’t want rooms full of people who look like David Starr Jordan to come up with the names of things that I am going to have to use for the rest of my life. Not only do I not have a lot in common with him, but I don’t really trust his judgment. And when it comes down to it, don’t we need to trust the labels and categorization which we give to things? Otherwise, we are entrusting a handful of the powerful to decide between terms like “looter” or “survivor,” “refugee” or “migrant.” Let’s take two more examples that have always gotten under my skin. 

First up, Comcast. Or Xfinity. Good lord, now that I think about it, they can’t even get their own name right. And when I scroll through their program listings looking for soccer, I find everything with that label is all men’s teams. But if I want to watch the NWSL, I have to search for “women’s soccer”? Why is that? The number of players are the same. The objective is the same. The field, ball, and rules are the same. So why are the listings named differently? Soccer is soccer, no matter where it’s played or who is playing it. So the distinction is either unnecessary or sexist. If it’s unnecessary, then any match, whether it features men or women, should just be labeled “soccer”. If it’s sexist, then let’s list “women’s soccer” next to “men’s soccer” so that there’s no question as to why Comcast/Xfinity includes “women’s” on certain events. 

Another example is musical. And may be a bit more controversial. It’s about genres. These are tried and true, sure, but are they still helpful? Take jazz, as an example. How are we defining what jazz is? And who came up with that definition? Is it dependent on the instrumentation? The composition? The performers? What Miles Davis did with J.J. Johnson is very different from what he did when he played with Carlos Santana. Are they both jazz? And if so, why? I think it comes down to putting a label on something so that it’s easier to find. And now we’ve gotten to the content strategy portion of the program.

All of these categories and labels and taxonomies are methods to try and bring some order to what is, essentially, chaos. We try every day to communicate the amorphous ideas and emotions trapped in the squishy collection of fat and water and protein and nerves, we call a brain, housed inside the bone helmet we call skulls. And we have to do it in a way that makes sense to other people with a completely different collection of fat and water and protein and nerves. So whatever names we come up with have to be understood and agreed upon, otherwise, it’s just more chaos.

To go back to the candidate identifications, I have to ask myself who is imposing these choices on the chaos of our varied identities? I know when I look at these lists, I have a hard time figuring out which levers to pull. How do I qualify my own heritage? I’ve learned the birthplaces of most of my great-grandparents. But the lineage of one of them has become a bit more muddled the closer we look. And some of those Italian secrets were taken to the grave long ago. Without divulging too much about our own possibly torrid family history, though, it makes me wonder how much of my identity is truly definable, and how much of my presentation is quantifiable. Do I present as Hispanic to you? What if I tell you that I grew up eating much more ropa vieja than apple pie? Does that, along with the fact that my grandfather was born in Cuba, qualify as enough to put a tick in the Hispanic box? And who’s checking anyway? It’s a name. A label. A category some fellow human came up with so that I could be quantified. And, these days, it sometimes sits right next to the relatively new “LatinX” label. I have no problem using it, especially when referring to people who prefer it, but when I talk to family still in Florida, they have no idea where it came from or why they need it. It’s just a new square-shaped box they’re not sure how to fit themselves into. 

I wish that this post had a really concise solution for this problem. It doesn’t. Sorry about that. But I do have a suggestion: Bring more brains into the conversation when you are naming and categorizing and sorting your information. If yours is the only collection of fat and water and protein and nerves coming up with a name, you’re going to miss something. Or unintentionally exclude somebody. Or worse. We have to be more deliberate, and careful, about the way we are identifying things. Especially people. 

See you tomorrow?

14 March 2023

Well, while applying for jobs today, I got really worked up about the names we give to things again. I know it’s a little bit of a recurring theme around here, but naming and labeling and taxonomies and categorization are all ways influence is imposed and structures are enforced. 

I definitely have a lot more to say about this, but I feel like if I try and get it all down tonight, it will just end up as a ranting tirade without a real point. I mean, I could turn it into a bit of a party trick and just vomit a bunch of poorly thought-out half-ideas, like starting with 3.14159… and just keep going until I run out of breath. So, instead of just aimlessly venting here, I think I want to put a little more focused effort into talking about pull-down menus with the titles companies use to try and categorize its candidates. White. Black. Hispanic. Female. Male. Disabled. Veteran. Ethnicity. Identity. Almost every application includes a demographics section where we have to squeeze into these little boxes, defined by others and understood by few (and don’t even get me started on the places which use Workday as their application software).

This is my promise to you: I am going to jot down some notes tonight, watch a few new episodes from season three of “Ted Lasso” (I know!), and sleep on all this angst in the hopes that I can have something of a little more coherent approach to talking about why we should be more careful when we attach a label to something. Especially if we want other people to feel both represented and understood.

See you tomorrow?

13 March 2023

During my — what seems like — hourly scrolling of LinkedIn, I came across a post about writing that resonated with me. I know I’ve talked about the act of writing as a way to crystalize ideas, but the link Jonathon Colman shared captured a lot of what I tried to say the other night on my own. 

I’m sharing this because I want to use tonight’s post to better formulate an idea I had when I misheard a phrase while listening to a podcast yesterday during our last evening dog walk. I don’t even really remember what I misheard at this point because I spent the remainder of the walk trying to work out the notion I had. The gist of it, however, was about how we spend a lot of time looking for, “a needle in a haystack.” And that’s our jumping-off point.

See, I feel like a lot of times, we develop a number of ideas trying to locate and extract the needle. Can we use a magnet? Could we get a light to reflect off it somehow? What about sifting it to the bottom? What I don’t think we spend enough time on is how to sort through the hay. In my mind, that’s where the problem really is. 

Essentially, it’s a signal-to-noise issue. And the methods to going after the needle just add to the chaos, and probably won’t yield the results we’re hoping for. But, in my content strategy-focused brain, I want to bring some order to that stack of hay, leaving nothing but order and the elusive needle.

As an example, I’d advocate developing a sorting system for all the hay. Let’s say we just start organizing them by size. This would do a couple of things in my mind:

1. Bring some focus to the search

2. Force a methodical, systematic evaluation of each piece of hay

3. Identify what’s been done and what’s left to do

4. Ensure that nothing was missed

Obviously, this would take a considerable amount of time. But the other advantage is that you’d be able to evaluate how long it should take you to get through the pile and estimate when you’ll be able to actually stumble across the needle. 

Thankfully, I don’t think I’ll ever actually have to find a needle in a haystack. But I have had to come up with ways for people to find the information they’re looking for amongst a sea of other information. By thinking about how everything else is sorted, we help people more easily find what they’re looking for, rather than sending them on a Quixotic path. Thanks for letting me tilt at this windmill for a bit tonight.

See you tomorrow?

10 March 2023

The other day, when I had lunch with a friend, one of the topics which came up is still resonating with me. And it’s something I had to learn the hard way. During my interviews this week, I’ve been trying to be more cognizant of it, and more open about the fact that I didn’t always get it right. What is it? I don’t want this to be a big wind-up, but — essentially — it’s that the work doesn’t always speak for itself. 

This has been a recurring theme for me, unfortunately. I like my work to be good. Scratch that. I need my work to be good. Even better than good. And my assumption had always been, it could stand on its own. Unfortunately, I know — now — that’s not true. In fact, the work is usually, like, 40% of your job. Especially in places where content design is not yet a known quantity. And for people like me who love both doing content design and talking about content design, it should be easier to be successful. But I often didn’t get that balance right.

See, most of the time, and especially when I started at Twitter, I thought that if I put my heart and soul into each and every project, the results would speak for themselves. And most of the time, the results were great. I’m very proud of the contributions I made to the product while I was there. But I didn’t do enough to create the relationships which would allow more of my work to see the light of day. I can’t even imagine how much more I could highlight in my portfolio if I had just taken some of the effort I was putting into the word choices and experiential flows, and invested them in my relationships with the teams and leaders I was building with. 

Now, I definitely got better at this while I was at Twitter. And a vast majority of the time I spent at Google was doing what is frequently referred to there as “stakeholder management”. But throughout my career, I feel like I neglected the relationship portion of my role, preferring to spend my time with templates and frameworks and style guides instead. The possible explanations for this are numerous, but I’m glad to finally have the self awareness to think more realistically about how much time I should spend on the process of content design and how much I need to spend with the people who will help get all that design thinking into the project I’m working on. 

I think we tend to carry habits from job to job, both the good and the bad. I am very thankful for the places and the people who allowed me to grow, pulling me aside when I went astray, setting me on a path for improvement, and making the work, our product, and me better along the way. As hard as it is for me to admit, no matter how good the work was, it needed a team behind it to launch. I keep reminding myself that in my interviews. And I hope that I keep learning, no matter where I go next.

See you tomorrow?