Episode 68: Nikki Godley and Rob MacFie - Maturing content and design at scale

Kristina Halvorson:
All right, we ready? Okay. This is the other thing I hate. I hate looking at myself. In fact, I'm going to just hide myself view.

Nikki Godley:
I always hide self view. I don't want to know.

Kristina Halvorson:
It's so much better.

Nikki Godley:
It's really weird.

Kristina Halvorson:
It's so much better, yeah, because halfway through I'm always like, "Oh, my hair." Okay.

Nikki Godley:
Despite the fact that it's a podcast.

Kristina Halvorson:
It's so bad. Well, what if you're talking and you're like, "Oh God, her hair." Right? I don't want to distract you. Okay, here we go.

Hello, friends and neighbors. Welcome back to the Content Strategy Podcast. I am your host, Kristina, as always. And as always, I do that twice. I know I already say that in the introduction, do I? I haven't listened to my own introduction for quite some time. I have been waiting anxiously to speak to the two lovely, lovely humans that we're going to have on the podcast today. I am going to tell you all about them right off the bat. First, we have Rob MacFie. Rob has led content teams at startups, scale-ups, agencies, multinationals and government. He's currently a Design Director at Wise, where he is leveling up content design by applying the most important lesson he has learned in the last 20 years. It's not about the words. I love that you put that in your bio. Thank you. Wise recently won Design Week's Writing for Design Award, so he concedes it's sometimes about the words.

Also, joining us... That's right. We've got another two for today. Nicole Godley. Nikki has been fortunate to work with well-loved brands to create memorable and resonant digital experiences for Skyscanner, Picsart, Expedia, Disney Junior, Honda HRV, Danone... Oh, at Danone? I'll get clarification on that in a moment. The Glenlivet, French Connection and more. She's currently at Wise transitioning from Design Chief of Staff to a Design Director role for our newly formed expansion pillar. Her bias for action and forward momentum is often described as positively contagious.

Nikki and Rob, welcome to the Content Strategy Podcast.

Rob MacFie:
Thank you very much for having us.

Nikki Godley:
Thanks for having us.

Kristina Halvorson:
Those were truly amazing bios. You have set my new standard for fantastically written bios everywhere. So thank you very much for allowing me to read. So we are here today to talk about design ops and the design organization at Wise. So let me explain how we came to meet. I was referred to you by John McCrory, who is the content strategy leader based in New York City. I had been kind of complaining to him about the fact that, oh, I am really wanting to read a little bit more about design organizations that have done a good job really incorporating content design careers and career pathways into their organizations, and really treating them sort of on equal par with the other members of the product team. And he immediately said, you should talk to Nikki at Wise.

And we touched base last year and the conversation that we had... I just wanted to cut off in mid-sentence because I was like, everybody needs to be listening to this conversation, which is the entire reason I have the podcast. So thank you so much for agreeing to come and tell us all about design at Wise. The first thing that I usually like to do is ask my guests to tell us a little bit about their career journeys and how they came to do the work that they're doing today.

Nikki, I wonder if you would share yours first?

Nikki Godley:
I was a super arty kid and I went to RISD, which is an awesome school in the States, and I studied motion and animation there. And I suppose from there I spent the first half of my career, which is maybe eight or nine years working in production houses. And I did everything from make stop-motion props to do more like 2D animation. And I worked on TV shows and commercials. All of them reasonably low budget, but good experience. And then through that I realized that actually I was quite good at organizing work, and I got a lot of energy from working with other people because I suppose film and animation is quite collaborative art form and there's a lot of narrative in that, a lot of different types of talent.

But I realized I was really good with the budgets and with the shot lists and the communications to the clients and things like that. So I wound up taking a gig at Digitas as a creative producer, which is a hybrid role where you run the budget in third party productions, but you also do the mood films for pitches and you also do the cut downs for social. So you're still using your creative skill set, but you're applying a lot of your structural thinking. And I did that for about five years. Over time I became more of an integrated producer for omnichannel work and then I went... We actually all got made redundant my first week back from maternity leave due to a location strategy change, which was interesting. But it was probably the best thing because from there I went from agency to in-house. So I went to Skyscanner where I was for almost five years. And at Skyscanner, I was their first operational hire. When I went there, I built my team of design ops.

So by the time I left there were eight of us across brand as well as product. And yeah, it was very rewarding. I feel like I grew up there. I did a short stint at a cool company called Picsart, but a lot of change with their strategy. So when Josh was calling me, who's my VP of design, both at Skyscanner and at Wise, he was calling me the first day that I started my new job at Picsart. He said, "Hey, I think I have a thing for you." And I finally caved and said, "Okay, I bite." And that was the chief of staff role at Wise. Yeah, that's how I came to be at Wise.

Kristina Halvorson:
And tell me a little bit before we talked to Rob, tell me a little bit about your role at Wise.

Nikki Godley:
So I'm currently transitioning to a new role, but the Design Chief of Staff role, I get a lot of questions about because it's a bit unique. So I suppose the way the short answer is, it's velocity. So it's thinking about taking the team in a specified direction at pace, fast, and you can only really do that well when you're zero to one a bunch of stuff if you have someone who's focused on doing it.

So the team had grown at Wise. In 2022, we went up to 60... Sorry, we hired 63 people. So we went up to... I mean, that's big. The team's only like 80 at the time. And so I was tasked with looking at our culture and our foundations and really focusing a lot on our, I suppose our fiscal responsibility. I'm in charge of all the budget and the cost center and stuff like that. So it's a very mixed and varied role and it didn't have any direct reports. So I have a very objective view across all of design and can be, hopefully, Rob, can be an objective kind of voice to design leadership that doesn't have the bias of having an org under you, if that makes sense.

Kristina Halvorson:
What an amazing position. I suspect that role just simply does not exist in so many organizations, and I know that what it has enabled you to do and the direction it has helped the Wise design team take like you said, in a zero to one capacity. I just cannot wait to hear more about. So thank you for telling us a little bit about that.

Rob, tell me all about your journey to where you are now.

Rob MacFie:
So like Nikki, my journey is nonlinear. I didn't go to art school and then become a designer. I have an engineering degree, which means my training's in logic. It's in process. It's in problem solving. I'm really comfortable with complexity. The harder the problem, the more enthused I am to jump in. And so after graduation, I have an engineering degree and I pivot. I pivot really hard because I'll become a ski bum. And I spend the next six years living in perpetual winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere, back and forth for six years. And I'm in a bar and a guy comes up to me and says, "I'd like you to write an article for my ski magazine, would you be up for that?" I wrote an article... Me and some friends had got ourselves into a bit of a big scrape on the mountain, so that's what I wrote about.

Then he asked for some more, and I started writing for other magazines and I started writing for newspapers. This is 2000. The dot-com bubble, for those who remember that, is in full flow. There is money everywhere. And a friend of mine is a dev at a startup, and I'm invited in to talk to the founders because they need someone to write their website and all of their support content for their software. And I'm standing there telling them I know nothing about websites, I don't know how to write for software support. And the reply I got is, "We've read the way you write. We want you to bring that to life for our product." There and then they told me how much they would pay me, which was three times what was on at my current job.

I started the following week and on that day, day one, that's when it was the first ever time I saw wireframes with Lorem Ipsum in them. And I have been raging against that machine ever since. With some success. From there, like as you said in the bio, I've worked for design agencies, spent a fair bit of time at what is now Publicis Sapient. I've been client side. I've worked for government. I've effectively gone all the way around the monopoly board and worked on all four corners. Generally, you pick up the best things from the companies you've worked at. And so from agency, I took with me what I thought worked there. From startups, I took what I thought worked there. Same from multinationals. And so by the time here I am at Wise, 20 odd years later, and we're trying to apply what we've learned over those years to improve what we do.

Kristina Halvorson:
So my response was going to be, I know, Rob, you say nonlinear. Almost all of my guests give the caveat when they start talking, "Oh, I don't have a traditional path to where I've gotten today." You may win the prize. Like ski bum for six years, approached in a bar to write an article and now hotshot content designer at Wise? I don't know, I might send you a medal. That's really, really something. Thank you for sharing.

I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the function of your role now at Wise. What is it that you are doing day to day? What are you tasked with?

Rob MacFie:
So when I joined, which was 18 months ago, I think it would be fair to say the team at Wise was well, they were leaderless. They're a bit rudderless. They are embedded in product teams. Most of them reported to a product designer. And a lot of what content designers are supposed to do wasn't fully understood across the organization. Part of my job over the last 18 months is to level up the understanding of content design, the value that it brings, what it is they actually do, how they work within teams, how they work cross functionally within teams, how do we develop and talk about a human-centered design approach to the problems we're solving on behalf of our customers, rather than finding ourselves in a place where we are designing something at speed to get out of the door, trying to scribble some words down, squeeze them into a box, cross our fingers and hope for the best.

That never worked. It's never worked anywhere. It doesn't work here. And so, one of the things that I do day-to-day is give the team both the voice, the confidence, the tools so that they can work far more collaboratively, effectively in the teams they're in. Find ways to measure the impact of the work they do. And one of the things I'm really, really passionate about is ensuring that content designers find a way to communicate across the organization about the value of the work they do. So if they've had a big win, if they've had an impact story, they get on the stage at town hall. Nikki is fantastic at making this happen, giving space for people who don't normally stand with the bright light in their face and the microphone in their hand. They're normally in the shadows, but getting them to stand on the stage and talk about what they've done.

I believe that impact creates influence within an organization. So content designers standing up talking about the impact they've made starts to provide them with the influence they need in order to shape where things are going to go within the teams that they work in, how to build better relationships, how to be heard and invited and how to better collaborate with engineers, PMs, other designers, research. When you land a win and you talk about it, the momentum it builds, it's so powerful. But I don't think content designers often do enough of it. So it's one of the key things I try and make happen as often as I can for them.

Kristina Halvorson:
So we're going to talk in just a moment about this extraordinary career map that you all have put together and that I think is really, from what I've seen, is such the foundation of what is allowing you to mature at scale. But I want to dive into what you just said just a little bit more before we do because I think that this is such a critically important conversation, not only in content design but really in every content profession kind of across the board. 

A sentiment that I hear quite a bit is, "If you have hired me to do this job, you need to make space for me to just do the work and not force me to just continually demonstrate impact or to prove my value." And what I'm hearing is that a huge part of your job as a leader within the organization is to empower people to do exactly that.

That is frankly very inspiring to me and I think it's very telling. I wonder, could you talk just a little bit about... Because I think that some folks are just like, "I don't have the skill set to do this. I don't know where to start. I've never written a case study before. I've certainly never stood in a bright light with a microphone in my hand." If they are given the opportunity by design leadership or product management or anyone at a town hall or any meeting to sort of say, "Look, here's the work that I did. Here's a very close look behind the curtain, and here's the impact that it's made." Where would you suggest folks start in terms of building that skill set itself to be able to do that?

Rob MacFie:
So you're right, it's not everybody's natural response to stand up and project themselves, but what we've been doing is we try and create a safe space for it. So for example, we have content design crit every week. Everybody turns up. Sometimes we're critiquing work. Sometimes we're just talking about work. Sometimes we're talking about some of the challenges we face. Sometimes people bring the early draft of the presentation they're going to work on and they present it to the room and they get a little bit of feedback.

And what you've got, you've got this really friendly soft audience who are 100% looking to help you do a better job. And so that's a really safe space both... In fact, all of the design directors and this happened just recently. One of the content designers has done a wonderful piece of work and she was explaining the story to me and one of the other design directors on a call and Lori, the other design director said, "Look, what I'll do is I'm going to block out a bit of time on my calendar. We're going to go through your presentation. We're going to work out what slides are you really, really keen to land. We're going to find places to create pauses. We're going to make sure the impact really lands from this."

So those who have maybe done it a fair few times before are really generous with their time to help those who are maybe new to it to work on the craft, to get comfortable with it. It's very gentle exposure that we give. No one's forced to do it, but people are encouraged to do it, particularly if they've got a great story to tell. And as a little sidebar to that, right now the content design team is in a bar next door with a stand-up comedian who is teaching them how to break down the structure of comedy and the structure of presentation and the structure of owning a room and providing your own confidence in the space. So we put these kind of mechanisms in place to help people get better at that. And we do it in a way which is fun, relaxed, no pressure, safe. And when you're ready to go, you press the button and then you get on stage and you tell your story.

Nikki Godley:
I think in addition to that, when we were doing the career map, one of the things that came up that was really important to us as design leaders is storytelling. So I think Rob does a really good job of framing this, but a lot of our job in design is really framing an idea, persuading an audience. And we have found through our careers that in tech companies, what you tend to find is you'll get a very senior figure up, like a CMO, and they'll be doing a planning update or they'll be doing a mission days update. And their first slide is data.

It's a spreadsheet of numbers going up and volumes going down, and it's really disconnected from the end users and connecting with the people in the room. So I would say it's a skill I've been working on, but Rob is a master. He's very good. Josh, our VP, is very good. We've got a lot of people who are quite skilled as well throughout the organization, some of our product partners in marketing. And so it's something that we value and it's made it into our career map. So whether you're storytelling to an entire room of people in a town hall or in a planning session or in a crit in a smaller space or really you're actually just trying to persuade one-on-one, it's a really critical skill for us.

Kristina Halvorson:

I have so many other questions about that that we are going to get to because I do want to give you an opportunity, this is why we've gathered here today, to tell me all about the design career map at Wise. So let's go all the bit, all the way back to 2022. Nikki, you kind of touched on that. That is where sort of the catalyst of this major change began. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Nikki Godley:
Yeah. So I think there's two things here. So one is that in 2022, Wise as a business doubled. So we went from about two and a half thousand people to 5,000 people, which is a lot of growing pain, I would say. Very exciting, but challenges as well. And in the design team we went from, we hired 63 people taking us up to I think about 83 or 84. So massive growth there. And I would add that in addition to the volume of designers, we also hired lots of different disciplines that we didn't have before, such as design ops and visual design. And we really significantly increased research and content design.

Kristina Halvorson:

So you've added on all these new... I'm just having this vision of everyone running onto the field and kind of bracing themselves and going, "Okay, who's on first? Who's going to take the ball here and bring it home?" So talk to me a little bit then. All right, so everybody's there. Everybody's in the room, everybody's ready to go. Then what happened?

Nikki Godley:

I think everybody's in the room and everybody's ready to go sort of by early 2023. And I think one of the things that became abundantly clear is we had, like Josh had hired his leadership team, so he hired someone like Rob to look after content design. He's hired someone like me to look after the team. Is that we just had a lot of gaps and one of the shifts we were trying to make was from design as a service... I can't remember the mission when I first came in, but it was basically, design is here to help you. And I was like, I think we can do a bit stronger. So when we came together as a leadership team, there were some things that we identified and having a clear mission, clear principles and values, and reimagining what was in a competency framework were kind of high on the list of things that we needed to action.

Kristina Halvorson:

Rob, do you want to add to that at all? Not to put you on the spot.

Rob MacFie:

Yeah. I think Nikki was alluding to there was a lot of rapid change, but the only real rules that we had had been set for the previous environment. And so we have annual reviews of people's performance. That's just cyclical for a large organization like ours. As you look across content designers, I mentioned earlier the reporting to product designers, so perhaps the craft, the skill, the career development, maybe not fully understood in terms of line management. You look at some of the ways that we had defined what we would've called competencies back then. And you look at them and they're really tick boxy and a bit one skill specific, and it tends more towards product design than others.

And so if you're in ops or if you're in visual design or if you're a content designer, you're kind of looking at them going, "These don't really chime for me." And so there's a disconnect between how we describe what designers are supposed to do and what these new disciplines, if you like, are these growing disciplines that we now have, how they relate to it. And so we are all looking at each other going that this has to change. We have to find a way to level this out so it works for all. And that's when Nikki ramps the whole thing up, and we go from there.

Nikki Godley:

I think the other thing on that was definitely around the collective identity of the team now that you're multidisciplinary and also as Rob's talked about, building that rapport and trust and investing in people to do their best work. So there's all of that sort of cultural piece going on at the same time because everyone's so new.

Kristina Halvorson:
So you've described the opportunity, described the challenge. You see the opportunity. Where did you start? Something has to change. We're going to create a specific initiative to work towards that change. Where did it begin?

Nikki Godley:

Probably in the pub, like all good things, which led to booking an offsite in Edinburgh, which is actually where I live. We have a little satellite office here. So the team came up and we did an offsite up here with the design leaders, and a big focus of that offsite was on our mission, our principles and working through some other initiatives. But that was definitely a big part of that. And the action, the output of that was that Rob had to go away and actually write these in a way that was very intentional and purposeful and inspirational. And Rob and I were supposed to go away and figure out what to do with the competencies. That was the task.

Kristina Halvorson:

Can you tell me a little bit more concretely when you say you did an offsite, there was a lot of focus around the mission, around principles, what does that mean? Were there exercises? Were there workshops? Did people prepare presentations? Tell me what the shape of that offsite looked like.

Nikki Godley:

That's a good question. So I've done a lot of workshop facilitation and this one was super geeky, sticky note, fiesta type. We didn't really know each other unless we'd already known each other before we worked together, because we'd only been in the room for like a month or two. And so it was definitely a fat printout doc of facilitation exercises to get us through all of the things that we wanted to get through. We did deviate when I ran the leadership offsite the second time, six months later when we knew each other, we had 10 topics in four hours where we just went through them much more loose. But yeah, this one was like geek fest.

Rob MacFie:

What we focused on specifically was as a design team, can we articulate our mission and how does that ladder up to the vision for Wise as an organization? If we have a mission, what principles sit underneath that? What do we believe? What could we put on the wall, look at every day and use both as inspiration and also as a lever to make sure we're behaving, we're holding ourselves to the right standards? And as Nikki described, there's a lot of squeaky pens on whiteboards and on flip charts and post-it notes, and people are coming up with a... And definitely over index. We've got dozens and dozens of principles that chime with some and then we start whittling it down and whittling it down and whittling it down. These start to feel more like us, but at this point there's maybe 10 or 12 and at the same time we're breaking off into teams.

We're trying to work out, like if you were to articulate the mission, what would you say it is? How would you describe it? How does that level up so that it connects to the vision and the mission of the organization, but how does it connect down into the team so that those reading it could kind of emotionally attach to it? And so we went not quite run and run, but we had iteration after iteration after iteration in the room. People would come back, we'd articulate a little bit, we'd vote on it, and by the end of what is always a very long and quite exhausting day, we had ourselves some principles that we believed in, a mission that we were comfortable with. They weren't fully honed yet, but directionally we knew where we were going to go. This was going to work for us. We just had to then elevate it so that it could be shared, used and stress tested.

Kristina Halvorson:

Getting to that requires really extraordinary facilitation skills. So good work, team. You all did good. So tell me where you landed, because what you're saying is you needed to move from design as a service, how can we help you, to this new kind of organization. Can you tell me where you landed with your mission?

Nikki Godley:

Yeah, it's to light the path. Well actually, Rob wrote it. So Rob, would you like to do the honor? I don't want to steal your words.

Rob MacFie:

I'm more than happy for you to read it out, because you've got it in front of you. The only bit I can remember is to light the path to make the world and then I'm gone. I can't remember what's exactly.

Nikki Godley:

All right. It's to light the path to imagine and make the world's most lightful, meaningful and memorable FinTech products.

Kristina Halvorson:

That's incredible. And everybody nods and high-fives and says, "Yep, that's the org that I want to work for."

Nikki Godley:

They do. Interestingly, over time though, I would say the bit that everyone comes onto is just light the path. So maybe it should just be that.

Kristina Halvorson:

I don't know. I like all those other words. Sometimes it is about the words, because those are real good words.

Okay. So we have the mission, we have the principles. How do we get from there to this extraordinary career map? Talk me through, talk me through, because also I wanted... This is all happening very, very quickly. I mean, we're talking about rapid extraordinary growth in 2022 to right now. That is not a lot of time. Although I will say with COVID time, it could be 10 years. It could be three weeks. Who knows? But talk to me a little bit now about how we get from mission and principles to concrete if you work at Wise, here's what you can expect with regard to where your career can grow.

Nikki Godley:

So I would say that timeline is basically February to October 2023, which for Rob and I felt quite long. I suppose there's a few sides to it. So one, we come up with a mission and principles. Rob refines them. Then you have to start to get the team to use them and to understand them and communicate them and make sure they're right. So on that side of things, we use our design town hall ritual as a mechanism for that in some ways. So Rob was able to present our town halls every month. So Rob's able to present the mission and the principles. We let them sort of simmer for a few months. We get feedback on them, which is great. And then we ran a design day at the Barbican in September, and we structured the entire content around... All the programming was around the principles and the mission, and that got the team really excited, I think really excited about how far we'd come and how much opportunity there still was there. That's one side of it. I'll maybe let Rob talk through the other side of it, which is more the thorny, how do you get to the career map?

Rob MacFie:

Yeah. So I guess once we had stress tested... Now, we had eight principles at this time. We had a content design team, they fed back on them or user research team, they fed back on them. Some of the principles, people really leaned into, "This really resonates with me." Some are a bit like, "Eh, that one I don't really get." And so what doesn't tend to work is when you've got a whole bunch of principles that you like in principle, but people can only remember half of them. It's the half then that are probably the strong ones, and the ones that you can't remember are probably the weaker ones. And so the idea of killing your darlings was a job that Nikki and I had to go through. We had to work out of these eight, what are the most important ones to us and how do we get those to resonate as strongly as possible across a whole community of designers, not just a specific discipline of design. Holistically, how do we get these to work with all?

And discipline, sorry, principle number one is be a designer. That's the one that comes first and foremost. And where we felt we had a great deal of success is that if you're in ops or if you're in visual design or if you're in user research, we're at a place now where these disciplines are more... They're embracing the very notion of be a designer. It resonates for them. They can see themselves in it. And when that landed, when people started to really lean into it, so principle number one, it felt strong and then we built from there. Now, I don't know how far ahead I'm going to jump in the storytelling here, but the real challenge was trying to work out the difference between a competency and a skill.

And then when you've worked out what the skills might be, how do you connect a skill to a behavior, which is one of the principles we have. And for me, that's part of Nikki's genius. We were working through trying to understand what our competencies were, and we didn't want to use language like competency. We wanted to talk more about people having a skill of this being a map. It's not a ladder that you climb. It's a tool you use to help you get where you need to go, and you do it in a way where you're developing your skills.

We're having conversations which are much more aspirational rather than level setting or ticking something off. As we go through this process, what Nikki wanted to do, and it was the crux of all of it, is connect the skill with the principle. And the day that we got that onto one slide, yeah, that's the high-five moment. That's the, we've cracked this. It was not easy to do, I'm going to put that out there, trying to create holistic descriptions of L3 to L8 across an IC track and a lead track and doing that against all of the different skills that we have. So we have five different skills. So we have craft, we have strategy, we have influence, we have leadership. And have I just done five or was that four?

Nikki Godley:

Impact.

Rob MacFie:

Impact. There we go. Trying to do it across all of those and create the build from L3 to L8. I described it as trying to... It's like a Rubik's Cube inside a Rubik's Cube juggling Rubik's Cubes. It's just so complicated to try and get all of these levels to match and grow and be able to see the progression. But once we had nailed that... And that was really, really slow-going. That was hard work. Once we had nailed that, that's where the momentum came. We could see that this is really going to work no matter what kind of designer you are at Wise, this works for everyone. It's not tick boxy. It's a map. It's a way for you to see where you are. And it is a connection between the thing you do and the behavior that you bring to it because we connect skill and principle together. And that's for us, that's where the power, that's the potency in what we believe we've created.

Kristina Halvorson:

A thing that really strikes me as we're talking is how few organizations take the time to step back and do the time-consuming, thought-provoking deep work that you all are talking about, having the space to do... That leadership gave you the space and in fact asked you to take the space to create what essentially now is going to serve as this foundation for meaningful growth across a design organization and likely amazing retention for your staff, people. I mean, I want to work there and I guarantee, everybody listening here has already gone on your website to see if you've got open jobs. I mean that time is so well-invested for the foreseeable future of Wise, and I just am so inspired to hear about it and to hear that there's an organization that created this space for y'all to do this work. Quickly, was it just the two of you who were tasked with this or were there other folks on this team?

Nikki Godley:

I would say the majority of the actual work fell upon me and Rob, but we had a lot of really good support from Lori. He's another one of our design directors. And from Josh, she was like, "Yeah, work it out. You'll be fine." So we had a disaster. So this is before we realized that we would map things. And the thing is that what people tend to do... Competency frameworks are very difficult to write and they're almost always kind of tick boxy. And so what people tend to do is they distribute them and they say, "Okay, why don't you take this competency or skill? Why don't you take this competency or skill? And you just write them out and then we'll just put it together and that will work, it'll be fine."

And I see this most definitely done by discipline normally, where it's like, okay, the Director of Design Ops, you make the whole competency ladder for design ops. And Rob, for content design, you do all of content design. And Lori, you do all of product design. And it gets parceled out like that and you wind up with a behemoth of a spreadsheet. But what I did was like, hey, why don't we... Same approach. Same mistake. Why don't we ask a bunch of our group leads if they want to take a line? So why don't you take... You're good at influence, why don't you take influence? And what we got back was just a mess. And it wasn't them, it was just that it was a bad way to do it. Nothing fit together. It's very difficult to do it holistically. And so while they did great work probably from a standalone perspective, it does take more than a couple of hours to do and you have to look at the whole thing definitely together.

For the skills, we did work with a couple of fantastic researchers we have, Kira and Pete. So we actually user tested the skills in some of the question sets we had around them for our performance cycle and then iterated. So that was good to do some user research on it.

Kristina Halvorson:

So now you have the thing. You have it. It's done. You're excited. You've high-fived. How's it going? What did you do then?

Rob MacFie:

Well, there's a step two to this, which is we're able to create a holistic map across all of design that works for every stripe, every flavor, every discipline of design. It chimes for them, they can see themselves in it. But what we also wanted to do is we wanted to level set reward across design. And so that was the next phase of this work. Step one, build out the map. Step two, put the business case together to ensure that what we could do is if we create something that's holistic for all, how do we create a payment structure that works for all? And Nikki was at the forefront of that.

Nikki Godley:

I think it was a little bit of a risk because so if you go back to the beginning of 2023, what's happening in the world, all of the major tech companies are laying off a lot of folks and a lot of designers. And so there's not as much growth in the business, not much growth in any business, but there's not a lot of growth in the business. Headcount scrutinized, yada, yada, yada.

And so part of it's timing, but part of it is good data. So being able to see what's happening in the market and working with your recruitment teams to understand what is tangibly happening in the market. And then part of it is down to Rob and his team demonstrating that value and telling people about it and the influence and the sphere. So all of this is building over time. So the business case is the thing that comes at the end that brings it together, but it's the momentum and the diligence over time to collect the right information that you need as well as to influence, demonstrate influence and impact.

Kristina Halvorson:

I think that, again, that's part of what is so inspiring to me about the fact that Wise created your position is that you have immediate access to and the ear of the folks who can get you that data. Because I find that a lot of the challenges that in any design discipline people run into is that they just don't know who to ask for the right data. So I think it's outstanding that you were able to not only know what to ask for, but to go and get it.

Nikki Godley:

I think also time. Because this is my job. I'm not trying to lead a different thing, like Rob is every day, day-to-day, and also do that thing, if that makes sense.

Kristina Halvorson:

I hope that leadership everywhere is listening to this podcast, which I don't know. Everybody who is listening to it, send it to your leadership because what Nikki just said is so critically important.

Rob MacFie:

In addition to getting data, we worked very closely with one of our recruiters. And what he was doing is he was understanding what was happening in the market, understanding what tier one tech firms were paying individuals at different levels, for example, as a content designer. So if you're at Meta, what do you get? If you're at Google, what do you get? If you're at Spotify, what do you get?

And when people were turning up potentially to work at Wise, he was capturing the input and output from them. So I am thinking of join Wise as a staff content designer, you guys pay this, but I'm paid that where I am. I would really like to join you, but the salary isn't quite where I hoped it would be. Therefore, I'm going to pass at this time. Once you start to build a record of trying to bring in the best talent, but you're not quite there in terms of pay parity with what else is out there, building that bank of knowledge and being able to use that as leverage for one of a better term, that if we want to attract the best possible talent, we need to readjust what we're paying certain disciplines. Because if they go somewhere else, they'll get it. If they come here, they might not.

So that was the wedge that we got to drive into this in order to help create that parity across disciplines, bringing others up so that content designers, product designers, ops, there's one level for all. And if you're at that level, I mean there's a band, but within that band, you're all being paid the same thing. There's not one particular discipline always gets paid more than another because it creates this two-tier system of I get paid more, therefore I must be more valuable. Therefore, what I say in a meeting must be more valuable. Therefore, my opinion must be more valuable. We were able to eradicate that in one move, and we did it first of all by creating the career map and then being able to build a parity reward structure that sits across the whole business, or sorry, the whole of design.

Nikki Godley:

And this was a gamble because these things both took whatever from February or even a little bit earlier until October. So there was a moment where I was presenting the career map in October where I was supposed to hear back about the salary bands, and that was meant to be the final slide. So now, we have one way that we evaluate and talk about our careers and one kind of map that we're exploring for every discipline. And now reward is the same for everyone, right? Because you cannot really have one sort of set of skills for level three for all these disciplines and then pay them on two tiers. So it was definitely a gamble.

Rob MacFie:

But it was a gamble that paid off, I believe, because as Nikki and I have spoken about it afterwards, content designers were paid less than product designers. And every single content designer in the team reached out to Nikki, independently, went to see her to thank her for the work, the effort, the industry that had to be put in to make this happen. The level of appreciation is incredibly high.

Kristina Halvorson:
So we are just about out of time, but I do want to say, I always... Before we record, I always ask my guests, are there any sensitive topics or any confidential topics that you want to or need to avoid in conversation? And one thing that I threw out there and was kind of laughing about is, for example, I'm not going to ask you how much you pay your content designers. And you said, "Oh no, we'll tell you that. That's public." So how much do you pay your content designers?

Nikki Godley:

We pay all of our designers including content designers. So in London, if you're a grad, you'll make between 35,000 and 45,000. If you're a mid, you'll make between 45 and 65. If you're a senior, 65 to 90. Staff or a lead, which is what we call managers, 90 to 110. A principal or a group lead, 110 to 150. And if you're a senior principal or director, 150 to 180.

Kristina Halvorson:

Thank you on behalf of designers and especially content designers everywhere. Thank you. So we're going to go ahead and wrap up here. I know that everybody, unless you've already been to the contentstrategy.com website, is like, "Where can I see this map?" And you put it out there. You wrote about it. Tell me where folks can read about the work that you've done online.

Nikki Godley:

So we put it on our, we have a wise.designmedium space since we have an article there, but Rob, do you want to talk about how we were going to publish the full map and then got cold feet?

Rob MacFie:

Yeah, so the map is complete. We've done some user testing. We're getting really good feedback. But what we wanted to do, we're about to go through the first round of performance reviews and we're going to do that in a few weeks time. The map will be used in anger for the very first time. People will be graded against it. We are probably going to learn some stuff about it as we go through this process. So Nikki and I'll get to the other side of it. If there's any tweaks or optimizations that we have to put in it, we will do so and then we can release it into the wild once it's been stress tested for real and is finalized for broader consumption.

Kristina Halvorson:

I can't wait. I'm going to be counting the hours until that happens. But in the meantime, we will certainly send our listeners to the article on Medium that you posted. So thank you again for sharing that.

This has been just a gift of a conversation, not only to me, but I know to the Content Strategy Podcast community at large. So I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your taking the time and creating the space with everything else that you have on your plates. Thank you for helping light the way within the content design discipline at large. I appreciate you.

Rob MacFie:

Thank you very much.

Nikki Godley:

Thanks so much, Kristina.

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.