The Value of Good Content Design - with Jonathon Colman, Senior Group Design Manager @Intercom

Hey folks and welcome again to the Product Bakery podcast. My name is Christian and I'm here today with my co-host Alex and we both interviewed Jonathan Coleman. And before we talk about the special topic we discussed, I just want to remind you that you can follow us on social media and share this episode with your friends and your colleagues in case you liked it. So Alex, what was your key takeaway from today's conversation? My key takeaway and learning was definitely around how to best structure content design because I think I know the traditional ways and I had different opinions but Jonathan's examples really helped me to actually get a fresh eye on it. Couldn't agree more. And if you want to learn how you can save 15 million dollars with just a little change in one error message, stay tuned. So Alex, I would say let's get started. Hi Jonathan, hi Christian. Hey there. Hey there, how's it going? Good, how are you? Yeah, doing great. Amazing. Jonathan, it's lovely to have you here and that's usually it's my pleasure to introduce our guests. So I think like in your case, your CV is actually pretty long and it would actually take me quite some time to summarize everything. But I think one of the most important steps was also like that you spent five years at Facebook where you were mostly working around UX content strategy. You for quite some time were also the editor of Facebook design and post your career at Facebook, you moved to Intercom where you're currently and your senior group product design manager. And obviously besides all the tasks that product design manager has to do, I think there is like one important thing to highlight, which is actually that you spent a lot of time working on redefining the content design discipline at Intercom. And this is also the topic that we want to discuss with you today. So you're a little bit like the subject expert for content design. And I think to start it off, maybe just for the audience, for everyone who's not aware of what content design specifically is, maybe you can summarize a little bit what that entails. Yeah, sure. Most people who work in product, if they've worked with content designers, or if they have a sense of content design, they usually have this conceived notion, preconceived notion that a content design is essentially writing the language that appears in the interface. It's UI or sometimes called UX writing, or interface copywriting, things like that. But I don't see it that way. And most content designers, if you ask them, wouldn't see it that way either. We think that content design isn't just writing the same way that, say, product design isn't just about making things pretty. Donald Norman talked about design as being concerned with how things work. And if that's true, then I would say that content design is concerned with what things mean. So beyond the words on the surface of a product, that UX, and I mentioned earlier, content design involves things like conceptual design, or designing concepts that appear in a product and determine how it functions. Content design also is quite therefore focused on system design, which is breaking down all the elements in the system, understanding how they're linked to each other, and determining how those links can provide the most value in terms of solving problems. Content design is also concerned with narrative. What's the story the product tells? How does it fit into the user's or the customer's story, or the business's story? So there's quite a lot more there under the surface than just simply writing the words that you see in a product. And I think most people probably know the role of product designers, UX, UI designers, and so on. So where does content design fit in there? Is this something that someone should consider a separate function? Or how is it usually handled? Yeah, so let's talk about how it's usually handled, and then go into some very strong opinions I have on how to handle it better. How it's usually handled is as a specialist role, where you have one content designer, who's usually split across a series of different product teams, or even organizations. And that content designer is essentially asked to just write the words in the interface. That might include things like labels, or calls to action, or tooltip text, or information architecture, things like menus, or navigation, and so on. But I think content design can be a lot more impactful than that. Don't get me wrong, that work is impactful, and it's necessary, and it has a huge impact on the user experience or the customer experience. But at Intercom, we set up content design differently, by rethinking it from the ground up, because we wanted to see what we could do to maximize product impact from this specialist discipline. First of all, content design is a young discipline. It has not been around all that long, which is why many folks are not familiar with it. But what we did at Intercom was essentially to rewrite all the rules under which content designers usually work. So rather than have content designers split across five, or six, or 10, or 20, which is a real thing, 20 teams at one time, I knew this one content designer who worked for a very well-known company, who worked with over 100 different product teams. I don't even know how that works. What does that look like? So instead of spreading content designers thin across many teams, we dedicated them to just one team. And because of that, they worked on that one team, just like all of their product peers. The product manager worked on just that one team, the product designer worked on just that one team, all the engineers worked on just that one team, and so on. And that's where the magic happened. Because when you work with someone day in, day out, you see them do their work, they're right there alongside you. They attend all of your team's rituals, so they're there at stand-ups, and planning, and retros, and everything. When you spend that much dedicated time with a colleague, you begin to understand what they do, how they do it, and why it's important. How does it solve the problem or provide more value, either for the user or for the business? And that's the magic we unlocked by having our content designers work this way. And because of that, we found that they could do a lot more when they were dedicated to just one team. Partially because the team wanted them to do more, and saw that they had capacity to do more. But also because our content designers were no longer context switching across 5 teams or 10 teams or more. So they had time, they had focus, they had deep context, and lots of opportunity. So, to finally get back to answering your question, what we did at Intercom is set up our content designers to work under the exact same expectations as our product designers did. So, a team with a product designer and a content designer essentially had two product designers. It's just that one was a little bit more focused on things like narrative, concepts, systems, and UX writing and information architecture. I have to admit, I've never worked with a content designer directly, and I understand how to embed them into the team. But I would like to better understand how I as a product manager collaborate with a content designer compared to a product UI UX designer, for example. Yeah, I'd say you don't need a special engagement model. What we found works best is in most product teams, a PM and a product designer might have some sort of regular sync setup. Or they might have other rituals, essentially, where they share status, have work sessions where they work their way through problems together, and so on. A lot of teams operate by the triad or trifecta model, the three-legged stool, where you've got a PM, an engineering manager or engineering lead, and then a product designer, each sort of as co-leads of the team aligning on everything. All we did was add content design to that. So what I would recommend is that anytime you find yourself thinking, oh, I need to go to the product designer for this question, or the product designer and I need to align on whatever this detail is or solution path. Great. Excellent time to bring in the content designer as well. And that's assuming, of course, that your content designer is dedicated, that they have the context and can work as an equal alongside your product designer. It sounds almost like a little bit, if we look, I don't know, 10, 15 years back, or for some companies, even only five years back, the way they used product design, right? And if we talk about content designers only writing the labels or the CTAs, it was like designers. being pulled in to only add the visual layer to a concept that has been done, I don't know, by the product manager or by some stakeholders. And there are some wireframes that need to make pretty. So it feels known transition or something that we've seen happening already in the past. And even if we think for product designers, it worked very well to have them cross-functionally sitting in the teams, having the context. Yeah, that's absolutely right. When you look at a lot of the design team or design org maturity models that have been coming out over the past few years, you can see this path from people who are essentially assigned to tasks, are part of a centralized org, only work on the product surface, and so on, to being really embedded and to actually, in many ways, being more of a product professional who happens to design rather than a design-specific discipline-focused specialist. And I think that same transformation has happened in content design as well. Very nice. This also brings me to the question, purely from a business perspective. Now, if I would have you sitting in my organization, you would ask me to add two people to a team. So it's almost like doubling the headcount or doubling the roles, because now I don't have to think of, I need a product designer, let's say, a product one-to-one ratio with product managers and product designers, but we would also add a content designer. Is that true? Is that what I should be doing? Sometimes, yeah. But it's time for another strong opinion, which is that not every team needs a content designer. But some teams definitely do, and they tend not to have them. Or they tend to have them for maybe half an hour a week, because that content designer is split across five or 10 teams or more. What we did at Intercom was essentially to stack rank our teams by a series of factors, such as how well did their work actually align with what the content designer could do? Did they work in the same time zone as the content designer? Did they even want a content designer? Maybe they had someone on the team who was actually doing great content design work. Great. In that case, we had so few content designers, we'd happily have the actual content designer working somewhere else. But what we found is that not every team needs content design. Instead, what we did is where the teams had maybe surface-level content problems only to solve, great, they can solve those problems on their own. What we tried to do was give them principles to make good decisions, tools like style guides and lots of do-don't examples, so that they could work faster. But essentially, we made them accountable for the quality of the content in those products that they were building. We didn't want to gate their progress or otherwise slow them down. We saved our content designers for the things that were really difficult, really thorny and challenging, and needed that dedicated daily content design magic in order to succeed. You mentioned at the beginning that content design is especially about what it means, what the product means, instead of just adding labels. I 100% agree with that, because you see many applications where you have absolutely no fucking idea what's going on. But still going back to Alex's questions, looking at the business, how do I measure the impact or the work of a designer when it comes to, in quotes, what it means? Sure, absolutely. I think you get a lot of signal on that from your research and any type of validation work you're doing. But the real thing is that we face this problem with product design as well, where the product designer might create some system by which elements in the product work. Essentially, that's how the product works. That's how it happens. They're extremely difficult to measure. The only things we can measure are the actions people take on the surface, what calls to action do they engage with, how long do they spend doing this or that task, and so on. Content design is no different. It suffers from the same measurement challenges. We find that qualitative feedback helps quite a bit, because then we can actually have our users or customers tell us where do they get confused, how do they conceive of this idea that we've built into the product, and so on. But we can also measure quite closely in those surface level details, and sometimes they really matter. One story I love to tell from my time at Facebook is how a content strategist, which is what they used to call content designers there, is how a content strategist rewrote an error message in their payment system, and just by virtue of having a new error message, increased their revenue by something like $15 million, which goes to show you, hey, error messages are really important. Give that person the raise. Yeah, yeah. They sort of missed the opportunity to bargain for that. So not only do error messages matter, if one error message that's rewritten can do that, imagine what you could do if you had that really talented content designer embedded on your team, not just rewriting error messages, but rethinking what things mean across the product. You'd have a lot more to measure. You'd probably see a lot more success, and the team would move faster, because the bottom line is that someone is already writing all that product content. Someone is already thinking through the system and the concepts, and it's usually engineers who don't want to be doing that. And you don't have to go back all the time, because you realize something is not working, because just someone has written something down, and you have much more post-work to do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you avoid all those regressions and fixes after the fact, and you spend more of your time doing more strategic things. Hearing this, I'm wondering, in terms of scope for a content designer, how far can I extend it? Because to me, it also feels like a little bit, a lot of companies have copywriters, and those is mostly on the side of, okay, what are the materials that we publish? What goes in an ad? I don't know, in my context where I'm working now, we have a lot of legal documents as well, where I feel like it's all part of the user experience, it's all part of something a user has to read and digest and understand. But usually there is no designer, there is no product manager, like no one actually involved who has a little bit the user lens on it. Is this something that also falls under content design? It certainly can. Content design and just content in general, it's like a liquid that you pour into an organization. The organization is the container that holds that liquid. And every organization is shaped a little bit differently, so that liquid takes a different shape as you pour it in. In some companies, a role like content designer or sometimes content strategist would take that big picture, that big wide perspective approach, where they're looking at everything the company puts out from legal documents, all those terms and conditions and so on, all the emails, even printed matter, or even like how the company responds to things like press questions, stuff like that, because that's all content at the end of the day. And then you have others where the content design discipline is more set up as something like, it's only the help docs. So something that I might think of as being more of a tech writing function, that's what content design means to that company. It's all the help content and that's it. And then you have other companies where content design is solely a product function. And that's the structure that I think you see really taking off with content design or with what's sometimes called UX writing, UX writers now. That's becoming much more popular and a lot of organizations are doing this. So it's becoming a pretty hot field, this product content piece. I have the feeling, especially the gaming industry is doing a very good job when it comes to such topics, when it comes to content design and content strategy. I think that's absolutely the right word. And I think Alex, it was like a while ago, almost half a year when we talked to Alex from Riot Games, but we missed to talk about content design because he just explained how much you spend eight hours in such a computer game or even more if you have enough Red Bull at home. You don't want to play a game that you don't understand or where you have a shitty interface and you always interact with text and you have to read stuff. So I think they're doing a great job when it comes to content design. Yeah, more than that too. Games, a lot of big gaming companies have dedicated roles that they call narrative designers who, apart from things like interface or text on the screen, shape the overall story of the game and how people essentially place themselves within that story. They become part of that story. That's the whole fun of playing a game like that. So yeah, I actually, if you made me predict something, I would predict that this essence of narrative design will actually filter through to products from the gaming industry, particularly products that are used over a long series of time and have lots of deep workflows within them. Beautiful. And you mentioned earlier that you can equip different people who are not necessarily content designers with the skills to also work in content design. And one thing that you also mentioned are like principles. I'm not sure. Are there some principles, like maybe also from the work at Intercom, that you could share or that are things that maybe someone working in product design or product management can try to apply themselves when it comes to making sure content is structured or written the right way? Yeah, absolutely. Let me walk you through a few of these. First of all, principles can mean different things at different places. So like the content designer within me wants to make it clear what they mean in this particular case. We use principles to make decisions about content when they are are two or more competing options that all seem equally good. If they're all equally good, then why not go with all of them? Or why would you pick any particular one? That's where your principles come in. And so for us, we put together principles with really strong opinions that represent extreme positions, but we also built them so that there's a productive tension between them. And we think that tension helps you land on content decisions that provide the most valuable outcomes. So our content principles at Intercom are to always start with why, to strive for less, to not make the customer think, and to always keep things practical. So just a few examples of those. So like with the start with why principle, we always try to focus first on showing people what they will get in return for completing a task or a call to action before we explain how they do those things. If we're introducing a new feature, we'll focus on how it solves that problem you have rather than walking you through all the steps you need to take to realize that value. We'll also do that somewhere else, but the first thing we do is start with why you should use it and what it'll do for you. So that means essentially focusing on that job to be done. For strive for less, for us, that means we should keep our content as short and as simple as possible, but no simpler. So that means that we always choose simplicity over being technically correct or functionally complete. It also means that we're skeptical about the need for more, or sometimes even any words or pixels on the screen. Anything we can remove safely, we will. And then we use progressive disclosure to reveal more information as it's needed. But that point around as simple as possible, but no simpler, means that we never leave out anything that people need to know to make good decisions. So for don't make me think, it's pretty much what it says on the tin. Essentially, be clear, not clever. Put the most important thing first. Use plain English. Be concrete and specific. And most importantly, don't name things. Try as hard as possible to never name anything. Just use descriptive labels if you must name something. We've all used products that have every widget and doodad with some fancy camel case name that I can never remember. Just call the thing what it is. That's really the way to keep it simple. And finally, keep it practical. Here, we just help our customers do their jobs well, quickly, and with confidence. We want them to be heroes and superstars. So we take some time to understand what our customer's top tasks and workflows are, and then we guide them throughout the product in how they can be successful. So beyond the obvious stuff like onboarding and empty states and error states and so on, we also try to provide them with just the right amount of friction, especially before they make big decisions that they can't undo. Those are our four content design principles and how we practice them. Beautiful. And I have to say at this point, I also need to highlight that I'm generally or always been a big fan of the principles that Intercom has across the board. And I think, please tell me if I'm now misquoting, but I remember a couple of years ago, there was an email that circulated from Paul Adams that went to the whole organization around the product principles. And I think like generally reading them and looking at them, it was very inspiring. And I can see that this helps guide a team very well. Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the ways that we all stay aligned with each other. We all build by a series of shared common principles, and there's not that many of them. So they're easy to remember. And that means that we onboard people with these principles. We challenge each other with these principles. When we do things like design critique, we'll ask each other about our practice of these principles and so on. And what it means is that everything that Intercom builds, no matter who builds it, it all works the same. It all looks the same. It all interconnects because that's one of our principles. And it all feels like Intercom and sounds like Intercom from a voice perspective at the end of the day as well. So yeah, I think principles help you make a stronger, more interconnected product system. You have so many companies that have design systems and a lot of discussions and meetings to try to achieve what you've just mentioned. But starting with the principles and then derive into the certain areas and into the product is actually what makes you successful. Yeah, they're great tool for making decisions and making them consistently based on the things that you or the people in the organization have learned most likely lead to successful outcomes, as well as helping you avoid the failures that you already know about. You may fail in exciting new ways. We always do. Nothing can prevent that. But they are the kinds of things, the kinds of decision-making tools that more often lead you to success. And that's why you have those principles. When is the time for a company to start hiring or setting up a design content department? I don't think there's any one answer to this, but some companies or just problem spaces, let's say, probably lend themselves better to starting out early with content design than others. So for example, Intercom had content design as part of its DNA and as a dedicated function relatively early on. And that's because at its basis, Intercom is a communications, it's a conversational platform. There is no Intercom without content to some degree, but the early staff and the founders also cared quite a bit about systems thinking and systems design, which is a big part of how content design operates just as a discipline. So it also made sense for reasons like that. Now, not every industry or product company or problem space thinks that way, and that's okay. You can bring content design in later. The problem, just if you bring in product design late, is that you accumulate debt, whether or not content design is a thing, whether or not product design is a thing, that debt will still be accumulated. So you're just making a decision about trade-offs essentially. And an increased cost, obviously, towards the end. I think that's the general problem of debt in all meanings and senses. But if we speak about hiring and also looking at the fact that content design is a fairly new role, obviously, if we look at your career, it has been around since quite some time, especially bigger organizations that set the focus right. But what would I have to look for when hiring a content designer? Is there some sort of a content design education or is it generally something that someone grows into and it just needs the right mindset for it? A few years ago, I would have told you, yes, all content designers are self-taught essentially, and that's beginning to become no longer the case, which is really exciting. So content design and content strategy before are what I think of as like big tent practices, meaning that we're just excited that you're excited about what we do and we welcome people from all disciplines. So a lot of early content strategists, content designers came from things like, of course, copywriting, technical writing, some from design, a lot from marketing. That's where I came myself is from marketing, as well as things like museum design, as well as things like poetry. I know several poets who are the most amazing content designers and various kinds of published media as well. But I'd say the first thing to do if you want to hire a content designer, rather than focus on, I need UX writing and I need IA, but I don't need this or I don't need that, is determine what are the content problems that you need to solve? Where do you see this person fitting into your org? What's the opportunity for them? Is this like a three-month thing or is this going to be part of how you think about your org going forward? Because it is a specialist role and that means that you'll get someone coming in who's super excited about this thing, but may have a narrow band of skills. They're the extra tall T of the T-shaped designer. Now, maybe over the long term, you could foresee developing your content design function or team into doing a lot more. That's great. I would try to think about what the next, say, two to three years of that person's life look like at your company, rather than just what's the immediate piece of UI copy that needs to be fixed. Connected to that question, I was just about to ask, what are the biggest mistakes companies doing with content designers? Oh, great question. Yeah. So several, and it's actually what drove me to change the way content design works at Intercom. I think the biggest mistake is essentially shackling content designers to solely working on product surfaces, writing the words. They can do a lot more than that. They want to do a lot more than that. You will never struggle to find a content designer who wants to do more for the company, but oftentimes companies just put them in this copywriting box and won't let them out. So that's one thing. But the other thing is really closely linked to that. The reason why companies put content designers into this box is because they want them to work across just an unsustainable amount of teams. They want one content designer to cover a hundred different teams, or they want one content designer even to cover five to 10, which, hey, can be done, but you sacrifice a lot in doing that. Most of what you sacrifice is that content designer's ability to work really deeply, like everyone else on the product team. And so they often feel left out. They can't attend all teams rituals because they'd have to attend rituals for five to 10 teams. They don't have a lot of context, at least not in the way that all the other product people do. They can't work deeply and so on. Plus they burn out because they're constantly context switching. Unfortunately, most content design roles are set up this way. At Intercom, we just think we can do better than that. So that's why we redefined the discipline in the way we did and saw a lot more impact and value from the content design discipline because of it. So I would challenge other companies who think content design must work this way. I would challenge them to prioritize. And instead of those 100 teams and locking that one content designer up into that writing box, think about the one team, that one critical, super strategic team that really needs deep thinking on content design, concept design systems, and narrative. And then have that content designer focus on that. Oh my God. What an opportunity. Yeah. And that's a typical issue you have, right? So everything is important and nothing gets done and nothing has a good quality, unfortunately. Right. We would never ask a PM to work across a hundred teams, right? Oh my God. What PM would take that role? Or, or we would have them do that, but they're at whatever the VP level, and they don't actually do that PM work, but they guide the work of other people. So why is the one discipline of content design set up this way? It just doesn't make sense. And one thing that is really beautiful also in that mix is that even by having like few specialized people that are very focused on one specific part of the company and one specific team, you still have the knowledge also within there. And I think if you have good team culture or overall, is it like in design, is it in product and so on, you can benefit from it. And as you said, right, you can also get product designers step more into that role and take on a lot more also of those responsibilities, but you need to have this one expert that can lead and bring in the best practices. Yeah, I think that's right. A lot of times we see content designers passing on their knowledge and experience to product designers or to PMs or a lot of times to engineers tend to write a lot of the content that's in the product, even at companies like, for example, Facebook that have, Facebook has a team of something like 500 content designers. That's, I assume the largest team in the world. I have no idea, but even so they have so many more engineers than that. And, and because of that engineers probably write the bulk of the content within, within Facebook. But that's okay because what those 500 content designers can do is set standards and principles and build tooling and help all those engineers and whoever else is writing content to incrementally bring up the quality of what they're doing. And oftentimes that's all it takes. It doesn't have to be super complicated. Thinking of the 500 Facebook designers, actually there's one thing that comes to my mind, a product like Facebook obviously is super international, right? So you work in a lot of different languages. How do you balance that in a team? Is there someone who then translates it or do you have different languages even sitting in a team? Because I think like once you start like adding this extra layer of localization, it might get very complicated. Absolutely. Larger teams will have content designers who are fluent in different languages and more than languages, cultures and locales. I just think about all the differences there are in the way people use Spanish in different parts of the world. It's very different depending on where you go and you have to translate or localize really differently based on that. A company like Facebook, you know, has a very deep and well-built out system that actually starts at the code level for how they think about localization. And they have people plugging in from all kinds of different disciplines. Not the least of which are content design and dedicated translators, but they've also built functionality into their design tools so that designers who are building workflows and designing screens can do all kinds of automated testing to see how different languages appear, how they render, if they have to rethink things like spacing and so on. The second you add German to an interface, it gets complicated. It does indeed. It's very true. And unfortunately, English, when you use it in a really simple way, it tends to be one of the most minimal languages. So even without going all the way to the extreme of German, when you translate English into almost any other language, your text will almost always expand. How is content design connected to, for example, branding? Is there also like a connection that a content designer works with a branding team or even with the marketing team to work out the campaigns? Yes, absolutely. There's always been this fine line and a bit of a love-hate relationship between content design or what's sometimes called kind of strategy and content marketing. That's also part of this wrinkle of this metaphor of pouring content into an organization and the shape of the organization holds that liquid and gives it, you know, defines it and gives it a shape. So a lot of times what used to be called a content strategy role would almost always be focused on marketing to some extent, but what does the organization publish and not just its website, but like, maybe it does books, maybe it does audio, maybe it makes movies or films. Like all of that is content to some point, there's a, actually a great podcast, what was this thing? It was the mule design podcasts where they were talking about what, what actually is content. We all use this word and we all know it when we see it, but what is it? And I think Mike Montero or maybe Christina Halverson, I can't remember who actually said it, but someone on this podcast, I'm pretty sure it was mule said content is the thing I came here for and that's as good a definition as any, and it really, yeah, full stop. It really stuck with me because at the end of the day, your customer or your partner, whoever it is you're doing business with, they don't see those organizational lines in your company where, Oh, this is marketing and this is product, and this is support. They just want to do the thing. They want to get what they came here for. And so, yes, absolutely. There are many content professionals who work across all these different silos and in fact, who are charged with bringing them closer together. Yeah, absolutely. Makes totally sense. But as I said, I did not work with a content designer, but due to the fact that I was always seeing a lot of stuff going on in the marketing teams and in the branding teams, I was asking myself sometimes, wouldn't it be good to have one dedicated person who oversees, for example, not only the written things, but the things I came for. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes that role is not a content designer in all caps. A lot of times you'll see product marketers playing that role and they'll be thinking about, Hey, how do we talk about the story and the product? And is that the same as how we actually plan to market it and take it to our customers? Is that the same way we'll sell it? Because that's a totally different kind of set of conversations, but ideally all those things would be aligned. That's exactly the point, right? Because the more of these functions you have, the more complicated it gets because you have a brand designer, a branding person, a content marketing manager, a product marketing manager, a product manager, so the communication gets quickly, I would say, yeah, or can quickly explode. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't matter to me at the end of the day, who does the work so long as it gets done? So I'm perfectly happy to have that talented, thoughtful product manager or that product marketing manager or the communication specialist or the lawyer who might be unusually talented at writing clearly or whomever it might be, the engineer writing all those error messages, I don't care who does the work. I do care that we solve the problem. And I think that we talked about maturity models earlier and talked about how design went through it and how content design is going through that. Now, I think as content design transforms, it's going to need to scale a lot more. And, and I think there's going to be more of a demand for it, but that demand may not play out as demand for people who call themselves content designers. I still think the need, however, is there. And so I don't care who does the work. I do care that we solve the problem. And as content designers begin to work in new ways and see themselves as product people first, then I think they won't care either. They'll just want to make sure that everyone has what they need to do good work. To me, it also sounds a little bit like there is a lot of function who produce content and obviously like happy to take everyone who can produce good content. But at the same time with having a content designer, I feel like they're supposed to also, or they're applying also more like human centric design principles to the whole process. They would follow a process that's more around initial discovery, multiple iterations, validating the solutions that they came up with, and then only implementing them or launching them finally into the world. Is that correct? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. One of the things that I think is important is that content design does not enter a product team or a company and create some entirely new fangled process. The best way to work or the best way to get the most done the most easily is essentially to. follow the same process as the rest of the company. So if a product team is essentially doing double diamond work, like you're talking about, content design should work that way as well. They should plug themselves into that and show how they do all that converging and diverging and so on in ways that help the team move faster or better. But they shouldn't go off and work alone. They shouldn't go off and invent some new processor system. They should align with what's already there and just help the team get there more quickly. Amazing. Yeah. And it gives the designer also an additional sparing partner, right, in the process too. Absolutely. Yeah, how many of us want to do pair design and we don't have that partner there? Especially one who might be shaped a little differently than we are. It's an excellent opportunity. Nice. I think that's a very good closing, but there's one final question from our side. What do you believe will be the future of content design in the next five years? Earlier, we talked a bit about narrative design in gaming. And I do really think that some aspect of that, even if it's not part of content design, but I do think some aspect of narrative design is coming to products, particularly lifestyle products, particularly products with long lifespans and deeply engaging workflows. That's one thing. I think the other thing is that a lot of content design is going to become automated. And this is scary for content designers to hear. We don't like talking about it. And yeah, it's true. There's already AI that's so talented that it can write local news stories with deep context, rich storylines, and regular humans cannot tell it apart from what has been written by other humans. And that's for something as nuanced and deep and long form as journalism. So I have no doubt that these tiny strings that we use in our product, error messages, button copy, labels, calls to action, onboarding even, et cetera, could probably be done much simpler and much faster and potentially better. And that's scary for content designers to think about. By the way, the same thing is going to happen in product design, so no one's immune from this. If you see all those GPT-3 experiments out there, it's fascinating and frightening. But that's okay. It's okay for things to change and to get automated and to scale. The role of content designer will change as well. It'll be more something that's probably focused on systems design and on concept design, moving a Zoom level up so that that person can then guide how that AI or ML or whatever it is ends up executing in the interface, putting restrictions in place, making sure it stays human-centered, making sure it stays safe, and making sure that there's still value exchange and not value extraction. That's where I see the role of content design going under this scenario. And Alex and I, we also realized how much product design and product management is about to change in the future, and that's why we just said, let's start a podcast. Brilliant. I look forward to the robotic version of this podcast run entirely by AI. We're already doing our editing with AI, so I guess it would be fairly easy to replace us here. Hey, robot editing this podcast, remember, I'm your friend. Don't come for me. It knows. It was a pleasure having you. Well, cheers, Alex. Christian, thank you so much for having me. Great conversation. Really appreciate your time. Thanks a lot, Jonathan. Have a great evening. You too. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.