Content Strategy Development Program

Create and launch a new L&D program to accelerate content strategy craft growth and enhance team culture

Overview

In spring 2019, members of Experience Design embedded on their product teams at Wayfair. Embedding significantly improved our cross-functional collaboration and trust within our areas of the business.

The only downside? The team spent less time together as a community of crafters. We had fewer forums to share content strategy methods, workshop and improve our craft, and build relationships within the content strategy team.

Problem

Building from my experience as an educator, I independently created, structured, facilitated, and scaled a learning and development program known as the Content Strategy Development Program, alongside my responsibilities as a manager and crafter.

Members of Wayfair’s Content Strategy team gathered to learn and discuss critical topics in UX, content strategy, and professional development.

Solution

Focus areas

Program development

Drawing from experience in academia, created a learning & development program tailored to the content strategy discipline from scratch.

Discussion-based learning

To enhance team culture, learning, and trust, created a psychologically safe space for discussions that kept teammates empowered and engaged.

Craft excellence

Aligned class discussion topics with key elements of content strategy craft, to both elevate the team’s content skills and discuss ways to make our customers more successful through our work.

Team culture

While maintaining focus of discussion topics on content strategy, invited product designers, user researchers, product managers, and other teammates to participate in class and build trust across crafts and teams.

Process at a glance

I started by defining the goals of the program and circulating a program brief with Wayfair’s Content Strategy and XD leadership teams.

The program would enable the team to:

  • Invest consistent, dedicated time to personal career growth as content strategists

  • Strengthen team unity, trust, and culture

  • Drive more value to Wayfair - and our customers - through learning about skills, topics, and methods that we can use on key projects

  • Build trust with cross-functional partners through interdisciplinary conversations

Create a program brief

In a one-hour brainstorm session, I gathered the content strategy team’s perspectives about which topics they would value discussing and learning about as a group.

From there, I crafted a syllabus with discussion topics, readings, and themes across four different areas:

  • Foundational topics in the field of content strategy, like “Empathy and Content” and “The Psychology of UX”

  • Deeper dives into key content strategy methods, like structuring content-centric brainstorm sessions

  • Broader conversations about general professional development

  • Cross-functional or cross-disciplinary intersections, like SEO and content strategy or marketing and content strategy

Create a course syllabus based on team recommendations

For the next 8 months, I led weekly, one-hour discussions for the content strategy team as we made our way through the syllabus that I had created.

Typical discussion session structure:

  • Pre-read: 2-3 articles, a podcast, etc.

  • Discussed key takeaways from that day’s readings, open questions, and areas of confusion

  • Discussed relevant case study or example to deep dive into, or analyze some element of Wayfair’s storefront experience that pertained to our conversation

Facilitated weekly discussions for content strategy team

Feedback

“I’ve never had so much focused time at Wayfair for professional development. It’s both incredibly useful and super fun to read the materials and discuss them with the group. The classes balance structured learning and open conversation.”

“The open atmosphere makes the experience laid back, and the guiding questions help structure the conversations well. It’s a great space for learning and taking in new ideas that could influence our work.”

Feedback from the program was resounding and positive. Based on that feedback, I continued scaling what was best about the program outward, both within Wayfair and outside of it:

  • In summer 2020, I expanded the program to to the entire Storefront Experience Design team; “XD Academy” was Wayfair XD’s flagship L&D program for the duration of my tenure at the company

  • I advised the Employee Learning & Development team at Wayfair in discussion group best practices, shaping documented guidance they shared with the entire company about creating and leading group discussions

  • I spoke at the Big Design Conference about the benefits of discussion-based learning for UX teams in Summer 2020

Scaled the program beyond the Content Strategy team

What I’d do differently

I believe in the value of discussion-based learning, but if I were to facilitate this program again, I’d thread in more interactive workshops and activities.

This would help anchor concepts raised in discussion to concrete output—ensuring that what we were talking about could have demonstrable value and impact in our day to day work.

The participants in the program all worked on customer-facing surfaces, so most of our readings and conversations primarily focused on B2C content strategy. In a future iteration, I would include more resources about content strategy beyond primarily B2C use cases, including B2B or internal content strategy best practices, or content strategy beyond e-commerce.