Episode 63: Kaysie Garza - A multidisciplinary approach to content at Hotjar

Kristina Halvorson:
Are you hearing a weird echo in this or does it sound okay to you?

Kaysie Garza:
It sounds okay. Are you hearing an echo?

Kristina Halvorson:
No.

Kaysie Garza:
Okay.

Kristina Halvorson:
Can you hear me? Hello? Can you hear me?

Kaysie Garza:
‍Hello? I can hear you now.

Kristina Halvorson:
Okay, I'm going to turn it back up. I have no idea what's happening. Okay, technology. All right, here we go.

Hello. Welcome back to another episode of The Content Strategy Podcast. I am your host, Kristina. And today I have with me a human being that I went chasing after because I listened to her episode on Larry Swanson's podcast, Content Strategy Insights, and I had so many more questions to ask her. And now I have her on my show to ask her those questions.

So let me tell you about her here. Kaysie Garza has spent more than 10 years working on words for digital experiences. She's consulted at companies of all sizes, teamed up with a handful of agencies, and fell into the world of design as a full-time word person at InVision. Today, she leads a team of spicy content designers at Hotjar. Kaysie, welcome to The Content Strategy Podcast.

Kaysie Garza:
Hello. Thank you for having me. It is the best I've ever been chased, so thank you for coming after me.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's good. And may you never be chased again.

Kaysie Garza:
Yes, that's enough.

Kristina Halvorson:

That's enough. Thank you. So Kaysie, thank you so much for joining us. I always start off my podcast episodes by asking my guests if they can share with us their journey through content strategy to where they are today. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Kaysie Garza:
Yeah, but before I do this, I have to say that just because I have a college degree, I like to emphasize that I do not think anybody in this work needs a college degree. So that will be part of what I say, but I don't think it's necessary.

I did go to the University of Florida and I double majored in English and linguistics, and that was partly because I knew I was going to do something with words, but I didn't really know what it was. So I figured I could cover all of my bases if I did the scientific aspect of language with linguistics and then also the liberal arts part with English. I felt I was missing a bit of the marketing potential there. So I also minored in mass communications.

By the time I was nearing my senior year, I had really gravitated more to the linguistic stuff and specifically forensic linguistics. But as it turns out, this can be hard to stomach. So I didn't think eventually that I could have a whole career listening to crime scene audio, for example.

So some of our projects were related to that, and I was like, "I got to find something different. I don't know if I can do this." And I just remember telling a teacher, "I'm going to do something that I don't think exists yet, or I don't know what it's called. I can't point to it and name it and say that's what I'm going to do." But that's what happened.

So after I graduated, I did a bunch of random things like most of us do, but they all had words in common. And then eventually I started freelancing. This was just because I was always in a small town. I could never move to New York or the Bay Area. So I started consulting, just writing anything. I would literally take any paid job. I think the first thing I did was a press release for $3.

But eventually built off of this and specialized more into what would be a normal copywriting role. And that led me to InVision, which you mentioned. That I would say was the floodgates opened. So I was in more of a content specialist, generalist role, but I did a lot with design education. So InVision had published a lot of handbooks and reports and actually, I worked on the podcast there.

So I spent all day writing about design, talking about design, interviewing design directors and VPs at these orgs and learning about org design and all of these things and it became so normal to me that when InVision started having some opportunities to work in the product, it was like a natural move and then something that I shifted into over time.

So that just leads me back into today. So after I left InVision, I did some more consulting, really enjoyed the variety of this, and I got to try out different industries, different types of products, agencies, everything. And then I took a client called Hotjar, and I just worked maybe part-time for them, and it was the beginning of their UX writing discipline. So they didn't have a team, they knew they needed this role and they wanted to bring me in to help.

I was just doing part-time work, what I would say is just a little bit of surface level UX writing work. And then that role became a full-time thing and they offered it to me. I said no, because it was just one role. So I talked about this when I spoke to Larry too, that I think a lot of content people become the first or the only and they burn out trying to prove the value in all of that. But eventually they decided to hire more than one person. So we all started together as a little team, and that's where I am today.

Kristina Halvorson:
One thing that has always blown my mind over these many episodes is hearing what a wandering journey it is for most folks to land where they are. And I have to say that yours, starting out with this love of words and knowing that you wanted to work with words, feeling like that was almost your calling, I haven't heard that very often.

A lot of times people are just like, "I was a history major," or, "I thought I wanted to be a pharmacist." So I'm really, really fascinated by that. And I also actually wrote down forensic linguistics, question mark, but then you answered my question - listening to crime scene video or audio.

Kaysie Garza:
Yes, it's real. Do we need a trigger warning? Maybe. One of the projects that we did was we had to listen to what unfortunately was a murder scene, but it took place in a parking garage. So the task that was actually my professors, what he had to do was analyze this audio to see how many gunshots there were compared to some of the sounds in the background. Were they car doors shutting? Was it just noises outside? Because this would go on to affect the ruling in this case.

So literally some heavy deep stuff, and I was just like, "I don't know if I can make a career out of this." And then the fact that you have to go testify in a case that could really impact somebody's future or justice for a victim's family, for example. So that was a little bit too much and microcopy was a little bit more palatable for me.

Kristina Halvorson:
The distance between what you just described and microcopy is a lot.

Kaysie Garza:
It's a lot.

Kristina Halvorson:
It is. Yeah, that is intense. Thank you for sharing that with everyone. And I have to say, I am glad that you made the choices that you did because now here you are leading this wonderful work in content design.

I want to talk to you a little bit about Hotjar as an organization. When we first spoke, I did say if folks want to listen to it, we're going to include the link to Larry's podcast episode. Kaysie talks about demonstrating measurement and value and impact with content design and UX writing at Hotjar. She does an outstanding job.

And when we touched base, I told her that I really wanted to take things in a slightly different direction because I'm really interested in how content strategy and content design function overall at a Hotjar, where it sits in the organization, and where it's going. So that's the conversation that we're going to have today. So I do want to start with what is Hotjar?

Kaysie Garza:
Hotjar is a product suite for teams of all kinds and sizes to understand essentially what your users do and why. So I think most people are familiar with an Amplitude or a Google Analytics, and this can tell you, for example, where you have drop-offs in a certain funnel or where your conversion rate is high or low.

Hotjar can give you some of this as well, but what really is so magical about it for me is that you can see people using your products. You can get feedback directly from them and then you can send them surveys, more recently, also interview them. So it's like this end-to-end thing where if you want to dig into a question or a problem or explore a new type of project, you can do it from end to end using these different ways of incorporating evidence.

Kristina Halvorson:
I can really hear that you are psyched about the product that you work with.

Kaysie Garza:
It's so cool, especially for content design. I mean, previously, I think it's so hard to just get this information from someone else and then have to synthesize it and put it into your work as a content person. But because this product exists, number one, and it's our product, my team can go in and they can survey users, our users. You don't even have to target them because they're right there in the product. We can see people interacting with stuff that we wrote or worked on in the session replays.

So it's like this very natural ongoing way of doing content and design work that I have been missing in my career. And I don't know, someday when I leave Hotjar, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do content work the same way without it.

Kristina Halvorson:
Well, you're using your product to learn about the work that you're doing on your product. I mean, who does that? Nobody gets to do that. It's amazing.

Kaysie Garza:
I know, I know. A little bit of a cheat there.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right. How many folks are at Hotjar these days?

Kaysie Garza:
Like the whole company?

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah.

Kaysie Garza:
That's a good question. I think we might be getting close to 500 now.

Kristina Halvorson:
So we'd call that a mid-sized organization.

Kaysie Garza:
Yes.

Kristina Halvorson:
Moving towards enterprise. That's exactly right.

Kaysie Garza:
We are mid-market. Yes.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right. Yeah, have that answer ready next time. We're a mid-market.

Kaysie Garza:
Yes.

Kristina Halvorson:
Great. So 500 people is a really interesting stage in an organization's growth because especially when we start talking about design and content as a strategic asset, and how design and marketing and internal communications and external comms, how all those things are working together, because we're really needing to start creating some through-lines for consistency. And when we talk about user journeys, how is the content showing up for them, and what impact is it having, et cetera?

Can you talk to me a little bit about where content design is? First of all, where does it sit within Hotjar? And then, how is it that you all partner with other areas of the organization when it comes to content?

Kaysie Garza:
So we are embedded within a broader experience design team, and then we have, I think ... I like how Chelsea Larsson describes it in one of your really early episodes. She said you come home to content design, but you go out to work with your product squads. So that's what we do. We have our little content team, but on a day-to-day basis, they're embedded in pillars and then squads within those. So they have a focus area. I try to keep them to a max of three, sometimes four squads.

So they have the same designers, they have the same partners and product and research all the time, and they're building those relationships. So there's that. And then at Hotjar, design reports into product. So that would be the multi-layers there.

Kristina Halvorson:
And can you talk me through, from the top down, who oversees UX? Is there a chief design officer? Where does UX sit in the organization?

Kaysie Garza:
‍UX reports into product. So right now the highest level of design that we have is a design director and then our highest product level goes to CPO.

Kristina Halvorson:
Got it. Great. So talk to me then about how you all are nestled in an experience design function. Of course, when we start talking about voice and tone and terminology, customer journeys, et cetera, you all are going to start butting up against or partnering with, maybe I should say, marketing. Talk to me about that relationship a little bit.

Kaysie Garza:
‍It's funny that you say butting up against, because this is what I've seen is that a company either has a good bridge between the product writers and the brand writers, or they never talk and they hate each other. And those are the extremes, there's no middle ground.

So actually when I came to Hotjar, it was the moment where they were going through a rebrand, so they really needed to define the voice and redo all of this stuff around voice and tone and defining attributes and all of these things. And I intentionally sat down with, I think it was a senior copywriter, this was Andrew London.

Sat down and was like, "I do not want us to have this relationship and I don't want this to be the legacy of our disciplines at Hotjar. So let's start together now and just establish not only a working partnership but a friendship of we are these two nerdy ... we're people who understand this stuff and we can go so much farther together than if we were trying to do it apart and then come together in a collision to make sure that we're adhering to each other's guidelines."

So I would say this is mostly still in place today on a regular basis. I would say terminology is a big one where especially now that the content design team has grown, there are four people on my team, we're adding things, changing things, researching things all of the time. It's hard to document them, number one, but number two, the marketing team is doing the same. So it's very hard to keep these things in line.

But what we've done is try to build in some process around the most important things. So for example, naming. Last year Hotjar acquired a company called PingPong, and we needed to rename this because we couldn't have heat maps recording some PingPong. So this tool was meant to be for user interviews and stuff like this and we needed to name it something.

And so this was a really good point to come in and say, "Okay, whenever we need to name something, it needs to be a content designer, ideally a product marketing manager, and then brand and the product manager of eventually what this product should be like. These other people should be informed or contribute to the pre-work or have some kind of stake in this so it's not just one person going off picking out a good name and bestowing the organization with it."

And so, I think just this, building it into a process and just making it known that we need to do things together if we're going to do them right.

Kristina Halvorson:
So that's outstanding because that is a value prop almost that you brought in from the ground up to form that relationship with the brand team so early on, and it sounds like that has really paid off for you. Let me ask, when it comes around to a thing like naming where there need to be multiple functions within an organization weighing in, who decides who decides?

Kaysie Garza:
I would like it to be that we arrive to the decision together. And maybe that's a cheater answer because there's always going to be one or two names and maybe the users decide. So for our naming process, that's exactly what it is. It's like, there's a point where we do get to a shortlist based on the pre-work and alignment with this other criteria that we have and our voice and tone of course, but we want to be testing the names too. We want to make sure that people understand them and can recall them.

So it's never just us internally choosing something, that we would have our users represented in this decision. So can I say our users decide? Should it be that? But we've put guardrails up so that they can't choose the wrong thing.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's basically like being a parent of a toddler, right? I'm going to give you these choices, also, you're going to choose this one-

Kaysie Garza:
Yeah, exactly.

Kristina Halvorson:
... because that's what's best for you.

Kaysie Garza:
I will curate. I choose the outfits of the day, but then say, "Do you want to wear this or this." Right?

Kristina Halvorson:
Absolutely.

Kaysie Garza:
And one of those choices is not the Halloween costume. It's clothes. So that's exactly it.

Kristina Halvorson:
And now I just compared Hotjar users to toddlers. That was not my intent. Let me roll that back.

Kaysie Garza:
Okay. It's all right.

Kristina Halvorson:
‍I'm just kidding. So here's a question that I have. First of all that's outstanding. And to have that kind of, I guess trust and collaborative spirit and understanding that everybody is on the same team, even though technically you're on different teams, I mean, that is great.

I think I will say that that dynamic is a thing that I often find comes down from leadership and a willingness between leadership to really talk to each other and work together. So that's great, and I hope that perseveres over time.

Let me ask this. When we think about a customer journey with marketing, for example, usually what happens is they start at the awareness level through to conversion or the sale. And then after that, marketing's purview just drops off, right?

It's like they kick the user over to product and design and experience and they just lose sight. Unless it's annual recurring revenue in which I know they're responsible for a different thing, but let's just stay with this one initially.

Kaysie Garza:
Yes.

Kristina Halvorson:
Does Hotjar have, at the enterprise level, customer journeys that everyone is adhering to? Do you have different ones that exist within different parts of the organization? How do you all treat those?
‍
Kaysie Garza:
I think they're evolving over time and I also think that they should because if you just imagine all the changes in the world in the past two years, those things affect basic economics and are people cutting out their software even if they were previously a perfect user, like a perfect market fit?

I think a cool thing about Hotjar is that we can build and tweak our customer journeys with our own tool. So I think a lot of places do these theoretically. It's easy to draw a circle on the piece of paper and say, "This is acquisition and this leads to this and this leads to this." But is that your perfect funnel and journey or is that what people actually do?

I think this is where the session replay tool will come in. It's like you can actually see that it's not quite that linear. And I think this is helpful for us to consider too, is someone may sign up and have never seen the pricing page and then they need to go back and look at the pricing page even though they've already created an account, and now they're on the wrong plan. So it's just this back and forth and all these variables.

So for Hotjar in general, when we're looking at our users and our perfect fit, it is something that our research team thankfully is always doing very strategic research, looking at value drivers, doing different evaluations, and then building off of even our own experiments to see, is this correct? Are we headed in the right direction?

Kristina Halvorson:
So let's talk about your research team for just a second because a thing that I see repeatedly is that organizations ... Well, first of all, let me just say again, this is a little bit of a unique conversation in that you work for an organization that has designed a research tool. And so research as a function and as a value within the organization is going to sit very, very high in the ranks. Can you talk to me a little bit how when research does their work, how are they communicating that across the organization so that everybody is making decisions out of the same playbook?

Kaysie Garza:
I should have brought Paula with me. Paula Herrera leads research at Hotjar, and she's fantastic and very thoughtful. And this is a big consideration because a lot of places don't have democratized research. They'll embed a researcher, for example, in a squad and then this person just does the tactical everyday stuff.

Whereas Hotjar, between design and even our product teams with the access that we have to Hotjar and other technical research methods, we can mostly cover this ourselves. And then this frees up the research team to do really strategic things like you're saying.

So they also report into experience design like content, but I would say they're ahead of the planning cycle. So they're constantly looking at what do we need to discover, what kind of research do we need to do that's going to guide everybody's road-mapping essentially, and decision-making.

So in terms of disseminating this information, I think it's something that they're ... Hotjar is fully remote, so this is another challenge. They can't just stand up and make a presentation. So it's this constant, it is a content strategy actually. It's like, maybe Slack gets just the insights or just a few one-liners to lead people into what we use is Confluence, where the full research report maybe lives.

But then that full research report might be summarized in another document in Confluence just to have highlights, for example, because Paula and her team really want to track how these insights are being actioned so that she can report later at the end of the quarter, the end of the year, the percentage of the insights that are getting used so that we're really making sure that the things Hotjar does is grounded in research or a combination of different methods.

So I would say it depends on what it is, but there is this kind of even communication strategy for the research depending on the type of study and how many departments it's going to affect and all that stuff.

Kristina Halvorson:
I think that that's such a thoughtful way to talk about it as communication strategy for internal insights and research. Because that is often such a challenge where you'll have within an organization, and sometimes it's a very large organization with a very small research team, but they're doing outstanding work, but they don't really have a good, effective way to get that work out into the wild and help people make actionable decisions fueled by that information.

So it's interesting and good to hear that that is ... Well, I don't know good to hear, but it is a relief or validating to hear, I guess, that even a research tool organization can struggle with getting that out.

I also love, you called it democratized research, and I really, really love that idea and that concept because if that's what an organization is striving for, then yeah, they are going to treat that like a strategic initiative that is constantly unfolding over time. I think that that is great.

Kaysie Garza:
Yeah, the whole idea is around understanding what your users do and why they do it, and that they're not a long recruitment process and screens are worlds away that we can reach them so easily, why would we not capitalize on this? And so I think it's just become such a normal thing at Hotjar to use our own product to get this continuous feedback loop. And then yeah, it just frees up space for this really strategic stuff that the research team is doing.

And I also feel like this is a given. It tends to become the go-to growth plan for content designers on my team. It's like, what can I do to be more strategic? How can I influence and not just get writing requests? And so far, almost every single time I've been like, "Well, you have to follow your researcher, do whatever they're doing because that work ends up informing what everyone else does."

That's also the advice that I give content designers who write to me on LinkedIn is like, "What can I do? How can I be more strategic?" And it's this, incorporating evidence and perspectives into your work no matter what kind of content you work on, and then staying close to the researchers.

Kristina Halvorson:
You know what's interesting is that, a little bit, swerves into the conversation around being able to demonstrate value or prove value to grow, whether it's headcount or visibility or responsibility or collaboration opportunities within an organization.

Something that I've really watched over the last several months is content designers and content strategists beginning to untangle the difference between proving their value within an organization as a business partner and as a human being.

You have spent so much time thinking about demonstrating measurable value for content design, do you have any thoughts around the tension between those two ideas and how we've seen that unfold within the content community?

Kaysie Garza:
Do I? Yeah. Actually, I think Candi Williams should get props for this because back when we still had Twitter and we could have nice things, she wrote something like, "Why are we still asking about the value of content design instead of asking why we have leaders in place who don't understand the value of content design?" And this was at least a year ago, and for me this was a moment where I was just like, "Yeah, I'm done. I'm not doing that anymore."

And so I think it always comes back to this, it's like, what is this ask coming from? Does someone need this because they don't know what you're doing and they need to justify your existence in the organization? If so, pass. Or is someone championing your discipline and they want to help you show off and they want to do a road show or something like this? Or does an individual content designer need it to advocate for their promotion? I think those would be two different scenarios.

I think like you've said, it's gotten more common for people to be digging for this, but what I have seen is that it's getting easier and more common to find the one-off examples. So you changed a button and then you made a ton of money, or you added a confirmation modal and you saved something terrible from happening.

These things are getting easier to find because it's what we do every day. But I think what is still harder to pinpoint is, how is your discipline performing overall? What is a health metric for your team? These are the kind of operating metrics that I would love to see be more talked about now instead of this individual like, "You invested 20 minutes here and you made $2 million and now your salary is justified. You may continue working here for six months."

Kristina Halvorson:
I could not agree more. And I love what you said about no ... You said the health of the discipline as a whole, and I think that you went on to talk about your team specifically within an organization. But I think about this a lot within the content design discipline, and I'm going to go off on a tangent for just a minute.

Kaysie Garza:
Please go.

Kristina Halvorson:
So a long time ago when I first started talking about content strategy and finding other content strategists, you and I were talking about this before we hit record, it was really around websites. That was more of our focus.

And I think that a lot of folks who are listening to the podcast, that's also sort of where they are working, whether now or that they've come up around. And this idea of advocacy for the practice itself, for the discipline at large, it was just baked into the work, right?

Kaysie Garza:
Mm-hmm.

Kristina Halvorson:
Because words are a thing that anyone can do, let's be real. And the advocating for the complexity of the work, the power of it, the necessity of it beyond just the writing and the feeling, and Lorem ipsum on the wire frames, that was a whole thing that had to come up with website content strategy.

Kaysie Garza:
Yes.

Kristina Halvorson:
It remains a struggle. It's always going to be a struggle because everybody can do the writing, everybody can write. And so I think that looking at it as not just a how can I change this within my organization, but also how can I contribute to the evolution of the field and the discipline as a whole? Because that is going to continue to raise the profile of the activities and of the contributions within the organization because you have a thing to point to to say, "Look, this is valid, this is real. This is not just me angling for more money with a different title." Right?

Kaysie Garza:
Yeah. I've seen this conversation on LinkedIn. I feel like there's this divide now of people who are like, "This is an emotional discipline. It's equal to the liberal arts. This is art. We don't even need to be doing research. We just need to be making the best thing." And then people on the complete opposite end are like, "You need to be a product manager if you're ever going to do anything good and useful." And I think it's somewhere in the middle, and I also think that you could swing back and forth between the two.

This is how I see Hotjar. I hired last year and I didn't ask any questions about writing. And I think that's because I wanted someone who could think. I want people to be curious and to dig into a problem and to consider the words and the language and how that might be affecting the solution or holding it back. And I didn't just want a really good copywriter because this just turns into this nice magic-dusted layer on top of a product that might still have a bunch of problems.

So right now, where our team is at and the size of our company and the fact that it's a new discipline, we need content designers. We need people who might not even have a writing background to come in and care about the language and the sentiments and look at it through a global lens. Two of the people on my team do not speak English as a first language, and they've made us better because they challenge what I would say is a very common phrase.

And so it's just looking at the meaning of your products in a different way. I think there might be a time in Hotjar's future where we get this really solid and this is staffed really well across all the product teams. And then we need to go back and strengthen the actual writing and say, "Now we've got such a good foundation here, let's go back and really look at voice. Let's really look at how to bring a stronger whatever, delight into the products at this surface level because we've disentangled all of the problems that exist in the code base." Or, "The functionality is wrong and we've helped figure it out."

So right now, I feel like our little pendulum, if you will, is more in the side of meaning and designing the underlying solutions rather than this writing layer.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah. No matter where you are working with the content, whether it is on a website, whether it is across several websites, throughout different marketing initiatives, across product, across email campaigns that feed into product, I think that the problem-solving piece of it, which demands curiosity beyond the words, that is what is foundational to anyone who's going to succeed in this field.

Not only that, but I think it's foundational to be able to represent the work within an organization in a way that people are going to take it seriously. So even less about, oh, you have to prove your value, you have to prove your worth. It's like, how are you going to help solve problems beyond just, design needs to get their act together so that I can better do my job.

Kaysie Garza:
Exactly.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's not solving problems.

Kaysie Garza:
And I saw this in marketing as well. I'm thinking of a time that I was working on, I think it was a documentary for InVision and the writing manager that I had at the time, I did it, and I like to think the writing was okay, but I remember her feedback was like, "Don't just fill this template in, challenge it. Do you need this headline? Should there be a sub-description here that unfurls when we share this across channels?"

Always take apart your assignment and make sure that you're putting the right information in it instead of just filling in the boxes to get them done. Even if the writing is good, maybe you don't need the writing there. So I agree. I think it's across channels and mediums and all of those things.

Kristina Halvorson:
Let's swing back around to process for just a minute. We kind of took a detour down what is the future of the discipline of content strategy and all of its various fields of practice within.

So let's say that we are untangling a problem and we are looking at how the language is going to show up in various channels and platforms, et cetera, and we identify an area of friction that belongs that we've got to get on the same page with, or there's a problem that needs to be solved in a different part of the organization. So let's take TechCom who every time I mention them, I always have to say the unsung heroes of content and strategy because they really are.

How would you approach, because that I think is a huge piece of content strategy across an organization is the topic of ownership and territorialism, let's call it what it is. How would you approach working with or reaching out to a writer or content strategist within another part of the organization to say, "Hey, I'm bumping up against this"? Or, "I spotted this issue and I'd like to collaborate with you to see if we can solve it in a way that is going to remove that friction from our shared customer journey"?

Kaysie Garza:
I think this goes back to what I was saying with my earlier story about Andrew. Because we had established this relationship from the beginning, it was not somebody's door I needed to go knock on when something was wrong. And so I think the basis of all good content work is relationships. And even the way to get things done, influence, it all comes down to who you work with and who you've built trust with and who gets a regular drumbeat of your conversation and your thoughts on a regular basis.

Because then when you come to this person and you're like, "Oh, I found this thing and I think we can do it together and it's going to relate to your product area or your area of the business and mine, let's do it together." That is so much more convincing to say, "Here's this thing, let's do it together," versus, "Here's something you messed up," or, "Here's something that's wrong and now I have to come clean up your mess. We have to fix it."

And so I think leaning on relationships in this moment or in these types of challenges will be so much more productive than any kind of process you could outline. And I know I already said we needed a process, but I think that process works because of the people that we defined as being necessary to consult or work with along the way.

We did have this at Hotjar, where I noticed we were using the words product and tool and feature interchangeably, and it was getting to a point where it was bumping into what shows up in the interface, but also confusing what we talked about earlier is the customer journey and who is this product for. And even the pricing and packaging, are we selling tools or we're selling bundles of features? What is all of this stuff?

And so I think this is where maybe artifacts can help. In those situations, I think content maps are really useful, and then content models to show people the relationships. Even if you take the names out of our products and just show this is product A, product B, product C, and it contains these features or these tools and they go on these plans, or whatever the different combinations are, this can help bring understanding to this conversation.

So that no matter who looks at it, whether it's an engineer who's like, "Oh crap, the code base is not going to translate to this," or, "We have to do some kind of re-architecture so that we can make this work," or somebody in product marketing who's like, "Oh, this is not how we're tailoring our comm strategy."

No matter who looks at this thing or gets brought into this conversation, they have an understanding of the relationships between these pieces and then potentially also the disciplines that need these individual pieces. And then from there we can work together to clean up, "Well, what's the word that we're going to use for this thing?"

Kristina Halvorson:
Isn't it incredible that you just described all of those relationships, all of those layers, all of the potential artifacts and processes, and it all comes down to what is the word, what is the word that we're going to use to describe this thing?

Kaysie Garza:
It is.

Kristina Halvorson:
It's incredible and I feel like if we could give partners throughout an organization purview to that process and that degree of complexity and the quality of the output then, after all of this collaboration and conversation and seeing these relationships at work, that degree of education and raising awareness, I just feel like could go a long way.

Kaysie Garza:
Yeah, and that's why I talk about, at the moment ... It's like worst team lead ever to stand here and say, "I don't actually care about the writing." I do, of course I care about the writing, but right now I'm really focused on the meaning. And this is where it almost could be any discipline, whether it's marketing, it could be any of these specialties.

We have to be on the same page about the meaning and the message and then everything from there, we can ladder it all up, all of our style guides, everything. But if we have a different understanding of what the meaning of something is, it doesn't matter how good anything else is.

It doesn't matter if we've got a perfect strategy for measuring the impact and the ROI of content design or marketing assets or whatever it is, if it all ladders up to something that is fundamentally different and not serving a business need or a customer need.

Kristina Halvorson:
Let me tell you what I especially love about this is that I have talked about meaningful impact and meaningful decisions, and I can't get anybody else to pick up this word. Kaysie, you have picked up this word.

Kaysie Garza:
I'll hold it for you.

Kristina Halvorson:
And now you have to say it over and over and then I can say, "See, Kaysie says it. It's a thing, everybody."

Kaysie Garza:
It is.

Kristina Halvorson:
Fall in. Get on the bus. I just think that the word itself, it dovetails with the word purpose or purposeful because why does this exist in the first place? What does this need to do? Who is it serving? What does it need to accomplish? I just feel like that is a thing that we as content professionals do need to be steering and pushing and shaping that conversation within our organizations.

Kaysie Garza:
Exactly. That is the unique thing that we, I think, bring as specialists where other people assume that gets figured out or it just comes together, or maybe they just don't even know to look for it. It's not to throw anyone under the bus and say, "Oh, you don't do this." But I do think that this is the original thing that a content person can bring to any kind of strategy.

And it is just like babysitting the meeting, we'll go back to toddlers. If you help shape this and make sure that it stays true to who it is as it grows up, then no matter the output on the other end, whether this is a social media post or text in the interface, ideally it would be around the same kind of story or have the same message, or at least be true to the function underneath it. Which for me would be probably how the product is used, but in another team's context might be, I don't know, maybe the customer persona or the message that the marketing team is trying to push.

Kristina Halvorson:
Kaysie, I think that this is a great place for us to pause our conversation and I say pause because it needs to keep going. It can keep going between us. Listeners, I would love to have you take this conversation and carry it forward on your own, within your organizations, on social media.

This idea that content professionals have to be carrying and helping to shape meaning within our words and our messaging is just so powerful. So take that, bring your curiosity to the table, follow Kaysie's lead, and let us go forth and make a difference.

Kaysie, thank you so much for your time and for joining me here today. I really, really appreciate your perspective and your expertise, and I look forward to learning more from you in the months to come.

Kaysie Garza:
Thank you.

Kristina Halvorson:

Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.