PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
product police #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
In a self-service world, good content design helps users do what they’re trying to do
A content crit is a constructive, supportive peer review technique
Poor content design diminishes the value of your product or service to users
hello
If you’ve worked in any organisation for any length of time, you’ll almost certainly have noticed the occasional (ahem) disconnect between the message or information that organisation wants to deliver, and what the users or customers are actually trying to find out. Sometimes this is deliberate obfuscation, other times it’s simply ineptitude.
Content design as a discipline exists to remedy this disconnect. When trying to do something, people are more bothered about what they need to know to do it (what matters to the user), than they are about what the organisations want to tell them about (what matters to the organisation). This notion of putting user needs before those of the organisation should feel familiar to anyone who works in product management.
For this week’s edition of PRODUCTHEAD, I’m narrowing the focus onto content design. Content design makes a difference, not only with your products and services, but also with your customer-facing teams – anywhere your users and customers seek information to help them to do something. People, and increasingly AI agents, are interacting with your products, services and public presence on their own initiative and without ever speaking to your staff. How you structure and present the information they need ultimately determines whether they carry out their task with you or go elsewhere.
To do this, I’m drawing heavily on recent work by Content Design London (CDL). There’s no sponsorship deal here, and there are many other content designers at other companies and working freelance. However, CDL’s founder Sarah Winters was the first head of content design at Government Digital Service and coined the term, so it’s fair to say she knows more than most about the topic. If I get the chance, I’m hoping to interview Sarah in the coming weeks to delve more deeply into why content design matters more than ever.
To start with, have a read of Rich Prowse’s article which answers the question: why content design exists. He describes how there used to be a time when you could only interact with service providers person-to-person. Whether a travel agent or a someone in a call centre taking your details to give you a quote on car insurance, a representative was the gatekeeper to accessing that service and its information. There simply was no easy way to book things or look things up directly.
When businesses and (much later) public sector organisations let people access these services for themselves online, this signalled a shift from face-to-face to self-service, and democratised information. Not only could you book your own flights online, you could compare airlines to see which had the best price or most convenient travel time. Previously this used to be information only accessible through a gatekeeper (the travel agent).
Rich goes on to argue that the advent of agentic AI heralds another significant shift. Information and online processes, such as how you look up, select and purchase a flight, always needed to be sufficiently clear to human users to avoid tanking your conversion rates. However, when it’s an AI agent purchasing the flight on behalf of the customer, your workflow and content have to be crystal-clear and unambiguous otherwise the agent will simply give up. This is why content needs to be clear and well-structured – it needs to be designed as carefully as any other aspect of your product or service.
Next up, Sarah Winters describes one of the key techniques in content design: the crit(ique). Although it sounds like an invitation for colleagues to roast your carefully constructed content, a crit follows rules to keep observations constructive and supportive. (Again, something I feel there should be more of in general these days. But I digress.)
Then to see how a crit works in practice, Sarah conducted an open crit on the UK government’s recently published AI Skills Hub website. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t fare too well under the scrutiny of experts, and raises the question of why it cost £4.1 million. If you’re thinking to yourself, “I could have vibe coded that entire website in an afternoon,” you’re probably right. The final chapter in this week’s edition of PRODUCTHEAD is Sarah and her colleagues asking the hard questions of how such an egregious waste of public money was ever allowed to happen.
And you thought content design was just about writing words, right?
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
Why content design exists
Content used to be something you read. Now it’s something you use. When you apply for a passport, book a flight, or compare hotels, the content isn’t describing a service. It is the service. And when that content fails, people fail.
An AI agent won’t pause to guess what you meant
[Rich Prowse / Content Design London]
Content crits: what they are and how to run them
A crit is a critique.
I use them in content design to:
- help the team write and edit consistently,
- create or iterate a style guide,
- build a team,
- improve the product.
Uncomfortable for some to begin with, nevertheless valuable
[Sarah Winters / Content Design London]
AI Skills Hub: a content critique
Last week, I ran an online content crit on LinkedIn about the UK government’s AI Skills Hub website. As far as we know it was written by a machine and reportedly cost £4.1 million.
£4.1 million gets you 14 links to external courses, apparently
[Sarah Winters / Content Design London]
The public deserves services that are useful, usable and safe
Public money is regularly spent on digital projects (websites, apps and campaigns) without clear evidence of need or value. The UK government’s AI Skills Hub reportedly cost £4.1 million. For that money, the public got a list of 14 links to courses that already existed.
Non-existent content design results in people being excluded
[Sarah Winters & Matt Billingsley / Content Design London]
recent posts
Canary in the mine: AAA game developers are unionising
Product management has had its own fair share of problems over the last few years. Nevertheless, there are early warning signs from AAA game studios that there may be another storm brewing in tech for us to weather.
Union-busting just isn’t a good look
[I Manage Products]
Are developers vibe coding themselves out of a job?
And is the increasing reliance by junior developers on AI coding assistants storing up a generational skills shortage for the future – ‘professional debt’, if you will?
So simple, anyone could do it. Wait – don’t fire me
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Navigating your product management career
Ross Webb and I have been chatting about product management career progression.
We cover topics including:
» Thinking of visibility as a strategic competency, not self-promotion
» Controlling your narrative through regular updates
» Building cross-organisational relationships deliberately
» Mapping your stakeholders’ preferred communication styles
A roundtable chat on moving into product leadership
[I Manage Products]
can we help you?
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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from a fancy high tea.