What a timely reminder of how to run a great content crit from our friends at Button. I think how you run a crit says a lot about how you do a lot of things. When I started as Head of Content at Practice Better one of the first things I did was set up a weekly content crit. (We call it Content Jam, because of course we do.) Everyone across the whole company is welcome to attend, present, and give feedback. Because the point of Content Jam is to: 1. Create a community of practice that you feel a part of no matter where you sit in our org or what your title might be. Content is truly everyone's job, especially in an org of our size and at our stage of growth. 2. Make sure that all content across the whole user journey is on brand, on message, clear, consistent, and yep, delightful, in its own special way. (Delight means a lot of things in content, but we'll leave that aside for now.) Because my (incredible, wonderful, collaborative, and badass) team doesn't just own marketing content, we own content across the whole customer journey. From the first time you meet our brand to the whateverth time you open the app and run your business upon it. Why do I love this Button post so very much? Because it: 1. Offers a terrific refresher of what I call our Rules of the Road. How to run a great crit. How to make it a good, supportive, and useful experience for everyone involved. 2. Calls out how a person should feel after they present their content and get feedback on it. If crit is a product, what's the user experience? How do they FEEL after it's all said and done? Well, you should feel: - Supported - Refreshed - Confident - Motivated I'll be honest, I think this goes for a lot of interactions. I hope this is how you feel after a 1:1 with me. After a company-wide All Hands. After an async check-in on Slack. I hope you feel supported, refreshed, confident, and motivated. I try to design those interactions so that's how it goes. And isn't that how we want people to feel after they stumble across (or even find) our content? After they use our product? I think most, if not all, content teams are aiming for that. But this post is a great reminder that it all starts at home. You can't design supportive, refreshing, motivating, and confidence-building content unless you're actively building a supportive, refreshing, motivating, and confidence-building team. It all comes back to how we treat each other. Like we used to say at HubSpot, your culture is a product, too. You should spend at least as much time on thoughtfully shaping and refining it as you do the software you build.
Katie Szymanski
6mo
Thank you for sharing, Beth Dunn! 🙏
Product | UX | HubSpot Alum
6mohttps://www.buttonconf.com/blog/how-to-create-safe-and-inclusive-spaces-for-content-design-crits