Natalie Dunbar
==============

[00:00:00] **Andy Polaine:** Hi, and welcome to Power of 10, a podcast
about design operating at many levels, zooming out from thoughtful
detail through to organizational transformation and onto changes in
society and the world. My name is Andy Pauline. I’m a service design and
innovation consultant, design leadership coach, educator and writer.

My guest today is Natalie Dunbar, a UX focused content strategist with a
unique blend of skills. As a journalist, content writer, and user
experience researcher, she excels in balancing the creation of
delightful user experiences with strategic content that supports the
needs of a business or organiz.

She’s worked in various roles as a content writer and strategist for
major brands and produced original content for many federal agencies.
Natalie is also an active member of Women Talk Design and was a founding
member of the Content Strategy Los Angeles Meetup group. She’s author of
the newly released Rosenfeld Media book, from Solo to Scaled Building, a
Sustainable Content Strategy Practice.

[00:01:05] **Natalie Dunbar:** Natalie, welcome to Power 10. Thank you
for having me, Andy. I’m so glad to be here.

[00:01:10] **Andy Polaine:** So congratulations on getting the book
done. I know we had a kind of, uh, a brief exchange sort of close to the
end of it. Yes. And, uh, talked about the, the sweeping up. I always
quote the sweeping up of the sort of last bits of getting a book done
take a remarkable amount of time.

[00:01:24] **Natalie Dunbar:** Oh my goodness. Yes.

[00:01:26] **Andy Polaine:** So well done on getting it out. So how has
the reception been of that? We’ll get onto the content of it in so far,
but, um, how has it been landing so far?

I

[00:01:34] **Natalie Dunbar:** have been absolutely floored. Uh, by the
reception, um, as we’re speaking, the book is still only available from
Rosenfeld.

[00:01:46] **Andy Polaine:** Yeah.

[00:01:46] **Natalie Dunbar:** And in about 10 days it will be widely
available from, you know, other book sellers like Amazon and others.
Yeah. However, it is sitting, at least a week or so ago, it was at
number one on Amazon for the most wished for new releases in content
management.

[00:02:09] **Andy Polaine:** Nice. Well done.

[00:02:11] **Natalie Dunbar:** Um, I. I don’t even know how to receive
that other than to have a lot of gratitude.

It’s been amazing.

[00:02:17] **Andy Polaine:** That’s great. So before we go into the
book, I, I always think it’s useful for people, you know, they hear from
people who are well established in their careers and, and you know, when
people write a book as well, there’s a little bit of that. Oh, you know,
I, I, I’d like to do that one day, or I kind of, I’m looking up to that
person.

I think it’s always useful, particularly for more junior people to hear
what your journey was, to hear. Usually not a straight line.

[00:02:40] **Natalie Dunbar:** Definitely not. I think I knew when I was
very young that I wanted to be a writer of some kind, and then I went
and did everything but writing as a career. stumbled into it as a
marketing communications specialist decades ago actually, and what I
really wanted to do was be a journalist.

So I went from marketing communications. into journalism. Worked for a
local award-winning weekly here where I am in Pasadena, called the
Pasadena Weekly and then ended up being a editor at another small town.
Paper was kind of doing both at the same time actually, and really got
into reporting and writing and, and that kind of.

And then I think it was SEO that first grabbed my attention as things
were moving from the printed space to digital. I taught myself how to
hand code. Those skills are very much obsolete now, but I knew that they
would come in handy. I, I always make people laugh when I tell them I
still can make letters blink on a page. Uh, that’s about the extent of
my coding, um, these days, but, I think I had an inkling that online was
the space that I wanted to be in. I was very curious about technology.
So then I moved into the digital space and started to hear this phrase.
Consumer experience, user experience. And I’m like, what’s that?

And I started working with, what were, they call them? Human factors
engineers. Oh. And UX designers and so on and so forth. And when I, I
kind of veered off into product management, the user researcher, and
then I made my way back to content and content strategy. Became a thing
and I was like, oh, that’s what I do.

And here we are.

[00:04:42] **Andy Polaine:** So it sounds to me, and you talk about this
a little bit in the book, you were doing content strategy or content.
I’m gonna come back to actually the differences between them kind of
before it had the name. Is that fair to say? Or did you already have in
your head like, this is, this is content strategy, this is content
design.

[00:04:59] **Natalie Dunbar:** I had definitely did not have content
design in my brain at that time. Hmm. I had been exposed to, and I think
this might be the part in the book you’re talking about. There was a, a,
a group of content strategists who came in from an agency to help work
on a project at the online directory where I used to work, and I didn’t
know what a content strategist was and they didn’t really tell us what,
what it was that they did. It was like, it was like a secret society
that was existing. They didn’t really share a lot of artifacts. They
were just doing their thing in the background and then would tell us,
you know, you need to do this, you need to do that. But I was curious
about it more than just like having someone tell me, like, I guess if
there was an equivalent, I was the UX writer to them.

So they were doing strategy work and then we were supposed to execute by
writing whatever it was. , they felt like we should write, but I think I
first encountered Kristina Halvorson’s book during that time, but I, I
don’t think I read it immediately because I was just like, oh, I don’t
know what that means. Content strategy. Am I really equipped to do that?

Then I went off and did the product and the user research and came all
the way back around. And then the, the, um, discipline was maturing. I
left my, uh, position as a user researcher, not voluntarily company was
bought, you know, positions were eliminated.

And then, uh, I had to rebrand myself. And I kept saying content
strategy and all the job listings. And I’m like, okay, let me look at
this really closely now. And I, I picked up like a temporary assignment
and the hiring manager handed me Christina’s book and Richard
Sheffield’s book and literally said, okay, what I need you to do is
this, read these books and then do this with this site that we’re
building and I’m like, okay. And I literally was like learning as I was
like, how does the saying go? You’re like building the plane while
you’re flying it or something like that. Yeah, it was. . That was my
introduction. It was a, definitely a fast and furious, but uh, I fell in
love with the work.

[00:07:27] **Andy Polaine:** Yeah, that’s great. So, Kristina wrote the
forward to your book as well. It’s a nice kind of full circle.

[00:07:31] **Natalie Dunbar:** Yes, she did. Yes she did.

[00:07:33] **Andy Polaine:** Yeah. So I’m a, I’m a huge secret kind of
admirer, not that secret, I’m a huge admirer of, of content people in
general. I, I always have said, I think every design team should have a
content person on it. Mm-hmm. in a way that you probably wouldn’t have a
design team without someone who is a visual designer, whether it’s, you
know, graphic or UI designer.

And yet I would always see like a, a smattering of them wherever I went.
Or as you’ve talked about from, you know, solo person. But I’m really
interested to get onto the scaled bit because I don’t know if I’ve ever
worked in an organization where it’s or worked for a client even where
it’s been sort of properly scaled.

I think I’ve always encountered, you know, the one or two, or if I’m
lucky, three people who are kind of working away kind of in content with
a lot of, nobody really understands what I do here, but it’s so
important. Mm-hmm. , which it is. So we’ll get onto that. I, I want to
come back to, because people may not know, or I dunno, if it’s a sub
perennial kind of argument and conversation, what’s the difference
between content strategy, content design and/ or UX writing?

[00:08:37] **Natalie Dunbar:** Oh my goodness, . It depends on who you
ask.

[00:08:41] **Andy Polaine:** What’s your, because you talk about you,
you do have a, a sort of table of it in the book. So what is your kind
of definition of it? What’s the difference?

[00:08:48] **Natalie Dunbar:** I have to lean on the, uh, I think I have
the diagram about the front end and back end content strategist, but
yes.

Over the years I think that that’s really kind of been, uh, and, and
that, that, that Venn diagram. and Hadley wrote an article for content
marketing.com or con Yeah, I think that’s the website. I can’t remember
right now. And it was a really good conversation about, you know, the
front end work that focuses on, you know, the user and, uh, works with
research and visual design, and then kind of that middle space where
there’s.

Taxonomy and, um, nomenclature and labeling and wayfinding and in the
backend where you’re working more with like URL redirects and working
with, uh, you know, content modeling and content modeling documentation.
I definitely live on the left side of that space more. I’m a purist when
it comes to content strategy.

I struggle with the difference between content strategy and content
design because so many organizations have started with the name content
strategy and then have rebranded whatever that team looks like to
content design. I think it’s partially because. because there’s this
niche of product content strategy where you’re working in lockstep with
designers, and as our co-author friends have written, writing is
designing.

Yeah. So we’re designing the interface with words instead of, you know,
visual elements, although we do get involved with that. So I still think
that there’s, you know, Uh, I think the relationship between content
strategy and content design, and I may get in trouble with some folks
for saying this, but I think that’s still a little bit closer.

If I were to isolate, uh, UX writing, I really feel like that’s the
interface writing the, the, the u i ux writing that makes an experience
usable also makes it come alive. It’s to me, within. product or feature
experience that you’re building, whereas content strategy and content
design and really more content strategy looks across the ecosystem.

And in many cases, content strategists do not write at all. They don’t
create any copy. Yeah. There’s a UX writing team that they may hand off
to, and then they execute on the.

[00:11:25] **Andy Polaine:** UI writing, would it kind of make more,
almost more sense of the way you’ve just described it?

[00:11:29] **Natalie Dunbar:** Yeah.

[00:11:29] **Andy Polaine:** And this really is the kind of tangible
thing that someone interacts with or sees or reads

[00:11:34] **Natalie Dunbar:** Exactly.

[00:11:35] **Andy Polaine:** Versus the kind of structural stuff.

[00:11:37] **Natalie Dunbar:** And it’s very important work. Because
that, that’s not to say that it’s not also strategic, but I think it’s
strategic at. It’s in the weed strategic, whereas content strategy is
kind of more, you know, the 30,000 foot view across all the things. Mm.
I could say maybe.

Yeah.

[00:11:58] **Andy Polaine:** So as the, the, the theme of this show, and
basically the thing I always just bang on about is this idea of kind of
zooming in and out, a difference of levels of zoom. Mm-hmm. One of the
things, as you were just talking about this in the book, I was very
pleased to see you talked about service design and service blueprints
and, and that whole kind of front end and back end thing that you were
just talking about. Obviously maps to that. And part of the job is to
map out all of those different front end and back end aspects that are
going on. You know, in what you were saying, I often talk about how
those two zoom levels interact with each other. So you might have a
strategic shift or you might have a str, you know, a strategy.

And then the question is, how does that get expressed across all the
touchpoints? And so how does that ex get expressed in the words that
people are reading and vice versa, right? How are those words in, in
touch points that may not have been thought of in terms of connecting to
the strategy. How are they either deliberately or accidentally, you
know, saying something about the, the bigger picture?

So, you know, uh, I’ve got a really banal example actually, which is I
have a, uh, a robot vacuum cleaner, and, uh, it sends me notifications.
But, uh, the notifications are written in this style, like a project
manager who is kind. irritated with me, so water tank needs emptying
asap. And I’m like, okay, yeah, I better go.

And I feel like I’ve become a slave to this robot . And, and then I, I
keep saying God, someone that they really need a decent content writer
here because it feels like someone has not really thought about what
it’s like to be dinged with these notifications. But you know, it’s a
classic example of, you know, the personality of a absolutely.

Product or service, them being expressed through those tiny things. I
actually hate kind of Apple’s fitness stuff of like great job and all
that kind of mo. I hate that kinda motivational speech that, you know,
the watch tells me when I happened to have walked a long way or
something.

You’ve done it, you’ve stood up, you know, 10 times the day. Okay. So,
you know, that sort of backward back and forth. Yes. I’ve always felt
this, there’s quite a lot of relationship between the sort of thinking
and service design and also content strategy and content design.

[00:14:00] **Natalie Dunbar:** Absolutely, absolutely. And I think
mapping touchpoints is, uh, I’m, you know, I’m still a novice.

Thanks to your book and, and a few others, I’ve been able to at least
speak to it, I hope, in a way that was accurate. I think, uh, I’ve, I’ve
had actually an opportunity in my last couple of roles to talk about and
then introduce, um, doing a, uh, blueprint, service blueprint. Yeah.
Where we. Think about touchpoints along whatever journey we were mapping
out and think about what’s appropriate to say and when and what format
is most appropriate to say it in.

So another way to say that that content strategist will definitely
relate to have tip to Christina getting the right content to the right
people at the right time and nice in the right format. and on the right
device. . Right. . So cuz our book was content strategy for the web.
Yeah. And you know, we’ve, we’ve got all these other things that we,
that we work with now.

But I think about this example that you brought up about your, uh, robot
that vacuums and. I would be irritated beyond belief if I was like I,
the whole reason why you would get something like, well the whole reason
why I would get something like that is I have two dogs and I just don’t
wanna deal with.

[00:15:29] **Andy Polaine:** That’s why I got one.

[00:15:30] **Natalie Dunbar:** Exactly. Right. So it’s a chore. Hmm. And
understand the chores are not fun. So there’s an opportunity Right.
instead of preaching about what needs to be refilled or whatever, give
the thing some personality. It’s funny because, uh, you know, family
friend has a, has a tortoise named Roomba , and immediately I’m just
like, you know, the exact opposite of, you know what that little thing
goes around and, and does.

But there, right there is like an opportunity. It’s to, to to be
playful. and to make something that really should be a delightful
experience. You’ve got a robot vacuuming your floor. Like there’s,
there’s a, a, an opportunity there to not spice it up, but like make it
fun, you know? Yeah.

[00:16:23] **Andy Polaine:** Yeah. And it, it feels like there’s been a,
um, That notifications are equated with alert messages, right? Because I
think when, and you know, even alert messages don’t have to be like
that, but there’s that. Yeah. I’m gonna be a bit mean to engineers, but
I think from a sort of engineering perspective, you know, in the program
it’s basically the kind of same thing, which is kind of tell the user a
thing, but a notification feels different because, you know, because
it’s a it kind of feels like a personal message in a way that alert, an
alert box doesn’t. Right. And that’s the sort of contextual paradigm.
And do you know, a friend of mine, Simon Waterfall once said this thing
I thought was really good. He said, you know, I could, um, I could send
you a text message about something, you know, inviting you to a party
and, you know, but that you would take it and, and read it and you know,
whatever.

He said, if I wrote the same message in hand calligraphy and a, a
uniformed messenger came in with that on a silver platter. The contents
there is the same, but the context of which is really changes,
obviously, the way you react and respond to that message. And I, I kind
of feel like one of the things that content strategists spend a lot of
time doing what you’re just talking about across those different devices
is really thinking about the context someone is in at that point. Yes.
Um, rather than it’s just a kind of, all text is equal. Mm-hmm. .

[00:17:41] **Natalie Dunbar:** Yeah, I’ve, that is definitely spot on.
You know, there are definitely situations. You wanna think about whether
your messaging should be more straightforward. Say if you’re a retailer
and you’ve gotten an order wrong or something like that, and the person
you know, um, Tries to set up, you know, return or something like that.
That’s not necessarily the time to be celebratory or, you know, selling
them something.

Yeah, upselling. Yeah, exactly. Hey, we messed this up. Let’s you know,
why don’t you buy this other thing? It’s like, no, let’s take care of
the, the situation at hand and leave that person feeling like. , even if
they got a push notification or an email that they were heard without
stumbling over, you know, too many apologies and that kind of things,
that there’s just such a delicate balance.

I think that’s where ux writing really shines, because you’re thinking
about like the, the moment that that message is received. And really
considering the mental state and the mental model that that person might
be in. Not saying that content strategy doesn’t do that, because again,
we’re looking across and we’re looking at content strategy is looking at
where might we.

You know, reach out to a person, you know, who’s going in this path and
this thing happens. So what is this use case and what is the most
effective way and the most appropriate way to reach out to this person?
What, what touchpoint should we use? And then the UX writer can come in
and say, you know, this should be celebratory.

This should be an acknowledgement. This should be confirmational, not
confrontational, , and so on and so forth. Both disciplines. all dis,
all of our content disciplines consider voice and tone. I think more so
at the ui, ux writing level, and even the content design piece of all of
those disciplines.

And then for content strategy, the way I like to explain it is, um, when
I’m faced with digital, uh, experience where there might be more than
one persona that I need talk to, let’s say, how does my tone need to
shift for each audience member? I may not write the words exactly, but
I’ll decide or, or recommend this tone with this touchpoint for that use
case and that tone for that touchpoint, and then leave it to the U I U X
writer to express that in words.

[00:20:29] **Andy Polaine:** I have seen those huge spreadsheets.

[00:20:31] **Natalie Dunbar:** Yeah. And sometimes I have to do both.
It’s like, yeah. Hey me, I recommend this, and then I, I go and I write
it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:40] **Andy Polaine:** So, you know, content… given that it’s
such, I mean, it’s such a, It’s really at the pointy end of, of user
customer experience. Right. It is a very direct thing that people
experience. I, you know, I have a bit of a theory, a bit like talking
about my vacuum cleaner that, you know, as humans we are, we are kind of
deeply narcissistic race and that we kind of anthropomorphize everything
including companies. And so content you, because it’s, it’s words and
because we are used to speaking words with other, you know, other human
beings, content fuels. I think that’s why we kind of feel it’s a very
personal thing and why, you know, this company’s talking to me in this
way that seems really inappropriate and all that stuff, you know? And in
German, I live in Germany, and there’s a formal and informal mm-hmm.
version of German, you know, and who companies, some companies switch to
the informal cause they want to be more sort of useful and trendy and
sometimes it seems, seems appropriate and sometimes. But given all of
that, it, it feels like content sometimes just happens in organizations.
Has that been your experience? I mean, is that basically the fact that
that’s going on, is that what means you have a job?

[00:21:43] **Natalie Dunbar:** Yes. ask my family members who all come
to me and go, I don’t know what this means, what is, what are they
trying to get me to do on this website? You’re always going to have a
job.

[00:21:55] **Andy Polaine:** I mean, why do you think it is that content
this…. because, you know, I wanna get onto, cuz you actually talk a lot
about the kind of the business, bit of, of content strategy and stuff,
which, uh, I want to get onto next. But why do you think it is that
it’s, whilst it’s very much the first thing often that customers or
users experience, it often seems to be the last thing that businesses or
organizations get a handle on?

[00:22:16] **Natalie Dunbar:** Oh, that’s so well said. It’s a mystery
to me because, I can’t think of a product or service or experience or
white paper or website or anything that’s going to make a difference for
a brand without words. Right? And giving some thought to the
appropriateness of. I don’t know, tooting your own horn in a white paper
or, you know, a positioning kind of document in, in the marketplace
versus, you know, uh, some kind of use case of, of a user encountering
your brand digitally and how you would speak to them. I can’t believe
that this conversation is still so relevant in 2022. It’s, and like it’s
it, you know, I hear on, you know, all different meetup calls and
different, you know, webinars that I’m either attending or speaking at.
There’s so many jobs out there and for content design and content
strategy, and I’m like, how is that possible? Like, I understand that it
is possible, but. Don’t brands get it by now that it’s central to
everything that they do. How you, even if you decide not to come across
more conversational and informal, it’s the words that you use to
describe what it is that you do that are going to make people either
decide to do business with you or not. how is that not important?

[00:23:50] **Andy Polaine:** Maybe it’s the universality of, it’s like
we all do words, so, you know, I think, I think just is kind of an
invisible thing.

[00:23:56] **Natalie Dunbar:** Yeah. And I giggle with my design
partners all the time when, you know, we’re doing design workshops and
you know, design sprints and things like that. And they’re like, okay,
we want you to sketch out. And I’m like, have you seen my stick figures?
They’re awful. So, and I definitely. I am not a visual designer that
said I have a good sense or I’m developed a good sense of what works
visually in terms of how all the pieces come together. So content to me
is not just words content to me and I think to most of us in this space,
it’s, it’s about the visual elements.

Can you tell a story here with an infographic or can you tell a story
with a video? You know, what’s most appropriate in this space? I’m
surely not going to tell a designer how to design a visual element, but
there could be one visual element that’ll be more impactful than
another. That’s content. That’s content.

[00:25:02] **Andy Polaine:** And so in your book you talk a lot, I mean,
you reference, you’re saying if you want to learn how to do content
strategy or content design here, here’s a great list of books and they
are a great list of books, but there’s also much more here about the
process and frameworks and kind of governance that’s going on in how
content sort of makes its way through the process and who does what and
and ways to kind of go about that governance as you scale. So the book
is called From Solo to Scaled. You have this building metaphor. Tell me
if… I love metaphors, and my favorite one’s gardens actually for sort of
ecosystems. But tell me about your building metaphor, cuz it’s uh, and,
and compression and tension.

[00:25:41] **Natalie Dunbar:** Oh my goodness. Yes. So a long, long time
ago, uh, in another career I worked in building and, uh, project
management and I was trying to understand like, The, uh, construction
manager would be talking about when he was talking about tenant
improvements becasue we, I worked in a high rise in downtown LA and we
had all these commercial tenants and, uh, I was like the admin to this
particular construction manager. And I stumbled on a book, why Building
Stand Up And I was like, that’s interesting. I’d love to know why they
stand up. I also like to know why they fall down, but maybe not be in
them when that’s happening, especially in earthquake country where I
live. But there was something about that book that just stayed with me
over the years. I got the book, I read it, and it made construction make
sense. It’s. It feels like, as I’ve gone back to look, as I’ve referred
to it in the, in my book, it’s more about a story about construction,
like how construction works.

It does break down different terms like tension and compression, but, It
just, it’s, it’s a layperson’s book, I think, and it’s, it’s so
beautifully written and it just stayed with me. And there is a follow up
why buildings fall down . But you know, if in terms of, of the building
metaphor in the book and content strategy, uh, I talk about how… I would
often hear leaders in the UX space talk about standing up a practice.
Hmm. And there would be all this effort into like, let’s stand up a
content strategy practice or this or that. You know, UX design, whatever
it is. But particularly with content strategy, I would see these grand
methods of standing up a practice only to have it fall down later on and
falling down could be, you know, there’s budget cuts or you know, new
business priorities. So one of the first things to go is this elaborate
practice that’s been stood up, right? Or it gets absorbed into a
marketing function because I’m very decidedly a UX content strategist,
and that’s no dis, as we would say to content marketing strategists, but
it is a different thing.

For listener edification, the work that we do in UX content strategy is
usually internal to the brand’s digital experiences, whereas content
marketing strategy is more about creating content that you’re going to
put on third party websites or social media or that kind of thing, so
it’s more external. It’s still content created by the brand, but it’s
very different usages.

[00:28:31] **Andy Polaine:** Yeah. You make the thing and they tell
everyone about it.

[00:28:33] **Natalie Dunbar:** Right. Exactly. Yeah. As far as tension
and compression we’re thinking of here, you know, uh, tension and being
pulled in different directions that may weaken a structure, whereas
hopefully I’m getting this right, it’s early in the morning here. I’m
like, is that the right ? And compression being, being squeezed right
and, and compacted, uh, where it becomes difficult to do the work of
content strategy because there’s so much pressure coming from usually
top down, uh, pressure where doing the work becomes difficult. I’ll
leave it at that so I don’t trip up on my own words.

[00:29:18] **Andy Polaine:** Can you give me an example of maybe how
people can deal with that? Cause I, you know, that’s a pretty common
refrain, right? We don’t have enough time or if resources or whatever it
is.

[00:29:29] **Natalie Dunbar:** Yeah. The, the tension piece is just, you
know, being pulled in many different directions and having different
expectations from different partners you may work with.

So you may have one expectation from. More technical partners where
there’s a need to have, you know, um, content strategy and, you know,
the end product of that, the, the actual copy done. In a certain way
that’s, you know, I would say fast without a lot of attention to detail
so that you know the content. So whatever it is that’s being built can,
can, uh, the level of effort can be estimated.

Sometimes that’s where you’ll find your lorem ipsum and that kind of
thing. And then later on you’ve got this great experience, got this
beautiful design, and poof, the content just breaks everything because
maybe they didn’t consider that. It’s not just, you know, the, this
block of text, a headline and some buttons, but it also requires a
paragraph of disclaimer text, and it’s like…

[00:30:41] **Andy Polaine:** Or you write it in German.

[00:30:42] **Natalie Dunbar:** Yeah, yeah. We don’t have room for that
disclaimer. What do you mean you don’t have room? It’s like it’s a
regulatory thing. We have to have this there. So there’s that tension of
just being pooled maybe in one direction by, you know, maybe your
engineering partners where. Your marketing partners may be, if you have
any dependencies on them, you might be waiting for, you know, uh, what
the product marketing is gonna sound or look like.

So then you can take some of that language and, you know, incorporate
that into the ux. So the experience is seamless. I’m a big fan of the
marketing funnel. I have no idea where that happened or why, but when I
think about. A marketing funnel, the top of the funnel where you’re
people are doing their discovery and they’re, you know, just starting to
learn about a brand or a service or a product.

And in that middle where they’re starting to make that decision, you go
from the marketing of a thing into the user experience, cuz you’re going
deeper into that digital experience, right? Mm-hmm. . And along the way
you’re building that trust and there’s kind of a, hopefully a seamless
handoff where, Marketing has done their, the work of bringing the people
in, and then we’ve got to, you know, make sure the experience that
they’re having, that they convert to whatever it is that you’re trying
to convert them to, whether it’s a customer or a member or whatever.
Sometimes that’s really kind of, it’s not a technical term, but janky ,
it’s just like, it’s not..

[00:32:18] **Andy Polaine:** Yeah. I love the term, so I, I, I’ve wrote
a whole thing about jank actually. I love that. I love that term.

[00:32:22] **Natalie Dunbar:** Yes. It’s just not smooth. Yeah. And
that’s kind of, again, where that tension happens. Compression on the
other hand is the, a good example of that is the, education of a
leadership that just doesn’t understand. It’s like, well, we’ve given
you, you know, the the green light to go ahead and build this content
strategy thing that you’re building.

When is the content strategy going to be done? Yeah. And the answer is
never. And then you start to feel that, that pressure, that compression,
like you hired this team, it’s like, well, well, we didn’t hire them to,
and this is particularly in-house. We didn’t hire them to to be one and
done and then go away.

This is a cyclical thing. So we talk about the content life cycle.
Somebody’s gotta be paying attention to why this. experience on the
site, and this copy on the site is from 1998. Why is it still here? Is
it still relevant? Really , you know, so yeah, it’s, uh, those two
things are, and it’s, it’s a, it’s a give and take either way you look
at it, whether it’s pressure coming from the sides or pressure coming
top.

[00:33:35] **Andy Polaine:** Yeah, this is why I like the metaphor of
gardens, because no one ever says the garden is done. Right. We’ve
shipped a garden. It’s just this kind of ongoing thing. Uh, when you
talk about alliance, there’s a really good section in the book about
alliances and how to kind of build them and stuff, and it’s almost like
a, you talk about different departments or disciplines within the
organization.

Mm-hmm. , it’s kind of like a phrase book, which I guess makes sense
from sort of content person of, you know, the language that these people
use and how to kind of speak to these people. Mm-hmm. about content. And
it’s a, you know, going back to what you were saying, I think there
about leadership, there’s a lot in there and that, that’s a bit I can
really recommend. I actually don’t think it’s just for content people.
It’s kind of a section of the book that I feel like anyone working in an
organization that is designing stuff and making stuff could really, uh,
benefit from.

But you also talk, you know, the book is solo to scaled you, you talk
about these sort of moments of growth and I’m wondering, you know, when
people, there’s a thing that happens when I say people start an agency
or something and you know, getting to five people is pretty easy. Sort
of 10 people. Fairly similar and there’s like an inflection point as you
go from 10 to 20 and then there’s kind of somewhere around from sort of
20 to 50 where you start to have to have HR practices and you know,
people and, and a full-time accountant and all that kind of stuff.

And sometimes, you know, people find it really hard to escape the sort
of escape velocity to get to the next stage. Are there any kind of .
Step moments in scaling content strategy practice where there’s like,
yeah, there’s an inflection point here that’s really hard to get from
this bit to the next?

[00:35:06] **Natalie Dunbar:** It, in my experience, it’s usually when
the demands for content strategy or content strategists is beyond the
size of the team that you have. all of a sudden everybody wants a piece
of this content strategy and it could look different. So going back to
those different partners that you might encounter as a content
strategist, whether it be, you know, a dis, a visual designer, which is
more typically the person that you’re gonna be partner or the the
discipline you’ll be partnered with the most.

But there’s also the engineers, there’s also instructional designers.
There’s so many ways that we can partner. with different disciplines to,
you know, look at if you’re working with engineering, for example, uh,
which is fascinating to me. I’m in no way an engineer. I told you about
my coding skills at the beginning. But I still feel like I can sit in a
room or zoom room with engineers. And I have done this in a recent, uh,
job that I had and be the only. Not only the only content person, the
only creative or UX person in the room, and still be able to hold a
conversation. Hmm. And that’s, you know, that’s because I listen to what
they’re saying. I may not understand all of the tools and, and, and some
of the phraseology that they use, but I get the gist of, of what they’re
talking about, the thing that I want to create, the experience that I
want to create, using content as kind of a lever to, you know, Get to
the next point of the experience. Maybe it can’t be built. So maybe I
need to be able to articulate in a different way how we can, can create
an experience that that is frictionless when that starts happening
exponentially. And there’s, you know, people and disciplines from across
the organization, you know, want this service and you know, you’ve got
all the office hours and you’ve got all these different ways that people
can kind of get a little piece of it.

That’s when you know, it’s like, oh, we’ve reached that inflection
point. We need more bodies. We need more people who are going to excel
in this content space. Whether it’s an embedded model where you have a
content strategist, you know, per line of business or how you know, The
organization is set up, or you set up like a, a kind of a content
strategy agency within, you know, design ops or whatever.

And, you know, there’s an intake and whoever’s available works on the
thing. When those projects and those people, when those numbers start to
grow, that’s when you know it’s time to start. Right, and that’s the
only way that you’re gonna be able to survive or the, the, the, the hard
work that you did to start the practice in the first place kind of
starts to disintegrate because now you can’t, you’ve talked about how
great content strategy is and you’ve built this great reputation, but
now you can’t give the people what they want because there’s not enough
for you to go around.

[00:38:24] **Andy Polaine:** So you’re a victim of your own success.

[00:38:26] **Natalie Dunbar:** Exactly yeah, yeah.

[00:38:27] **Andy Polaine:** You mentioned, uh, you have Candy Williams,
who’s the author and, and head of content design at uh, or a, an author
and head of contact design at, at Bumble, and she used, there’s a bit,
it says for her, "alignment comes down to showing a keen and genuine
interest in other people’s roles and what they do."

I underlined it because it’s just like, yeah, it, you know, we think of
alignment sometimes, as they just don’t get it. I need to kind of make
them understand rather than, you know, coming from the other direction
of and I would bet it’s partly because you’re a content person. You’re
like, how can I rephrase this so that this person, you know, it’s my
fault that it’s not landing with them. How can I rephrase this so that
they kinda get it?

So listen, we are coming up to time. It felt like that was quite a nice
place to, uh, to end. The show is called. Power of Ten after the Eames
film Powers of Ten about this relative size of things in the universe.
And I’m always fascinated, we talked a bit about this before, around the
kind of relationship between things at that very micro scale and their
effect on the Macron and vice versa. So the, the final question is
always what one small thing you think is, you know, overlooked or
underrated that could be designed or re-designed to make a or to have an
outsize impact on the world?

[00:39:39] **Natalie Dunbar:** Oh, definitely. Uh, it’s kind of related
to what we were just talking about. It’s listening, active listening. I
am guilty of being in conversation, especially with loved ones because
you think you, you kind of, you, you just anticipate what it is they’re
gonna say or how they’re gonna react or something.

And you’re listening to respond rather than listening to understand
Active listening is the thing. Just the, just the act of listening, but
active listening, like really hearing mm-hmm. so important because we
have so much information coming at us from so many different channels
and it’s hard to sometimes discern what is the useful bit from all the
other noise.

Um, and I think listening actively, uh, is. is a skill that it, I wrote
an article about this, so I’m very passionate about this. The gentleman
who coined that phrase wrote a, like a booklet to management. I forget
what the management, what the company was, but it was like early 1950s,
U.S., you know, corporate America. And when I found their, like a
reprint of their booklet, everything was still written in the pronouns
of him, right? You know, when a manager is doing this, he blah, blah,
blah. But when I stripped that all away and just focused on what they
were talking about, just the act of not trying to solve something before
you fully understand what the problem is, that’s where active listening
comes in. So whether it’s alignment with a teammate or cross-functional
partner, whether it is hearing from your users or customers, whether
it’s your loved ones at home, just so important to focus on, really
listening to understand rather than listening to be heard.

[00:41:46] **Andy Polaine:** I think that would make the world a much
better place. Where can people find you online?

[00:41:52] **Natalie Dunbar:** I am on Twitter and Instagram. My handle
is theliterati. I am on LinkedIn. I welcome anyone’s with questions
about content strategy. Who’s curious about what this work is to please
reach out? I have, uh, people who I have, not a formal mentoring, but
just, you know, we have a lot of these, um, UX boot camps and different
things that are, they’re quite ubiquitous and, and quite popular. And
many of those people will come out wondering, like if they’re focused on
content, like, well, what is this content strategy? And I love talking
with them about how many different ways that you can get involved with
this work? Uh, so yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. I’m
there.

[00:42:48] **Andy Polaine:** Okay. Good. Well, I’ll put all the links in
the show notes. Uh, Natalie, thank you so much for being my guest on
Power of Ten.

[00:42:55] **Natalie Dunbar:** Thank you for having me, Andy. I love
talking with you, and I hope we get a chance to talk again soon.

[00:43:01] **Andy Polaine:** Take care.

[00:43:02] **Natalie Dunbar:** Thank you.

As I’m sure you’re aware, you’ve been listening to Power of 10.

My name is Andy. P. You can find me at a lane on Twitter op lane.com,
where you can find more episodes and sign up for my newsletter. Doctor’s
note, if you like the show, please take a moment to give it a rating on
iTunes. It really helps others find us, and as always, get in touch if
you have any comments, feedback or suggestions for guests, all the links
or in the show notes.

Thanks for listening and see you next

time.