Deep vs. wide content design: A conversation with Melissa Gould

Melissa Gould is a Staff Content Designer at eBay, leading initiatives in Seller Experience. In the past, she's worked as a writer, editor, content strategist and content designer at Meta, Walmart Labs, Instacart, and Williams Sonoma.

Queenie: Hi Melissa, you’re a Content Design Lead at eBay. What does your day-to-day look like typically?

Melissa: Yes, I currently lead content design for Seller Experience for one of the first ecommerce platforms.

My day-to-day work really involves keeping up with the different initiatives that we have. Content designers are spread thin. The ratio is roughly one content designer to?18 product designers right now, which isn’t ideal.?

I try to stay focused on my primary track of work, which involves onboarding new sellers to the platform, supporting them as we get them through their first listing and their first sale, and then encouraging ongoing sales, listing more inventory, and building trust with their buyers. But there are so many other facets that come into play cross-functionally—payments, shipping, concerns such as ‘is this a HAZMAT item,’ regulatory stuff. So I end up working? across the pillars with other product design teams that don't necessarily have a content designer assigned to them. We keep pretty busy.?

Queenie: Wow, yes, that does sound busy. You mention that while you do work cross-functionally, most of your work is focused on the seller side. Did this kind of ownership of a specific area of the product emerge as you grew in your career? Or have you always been hired to work on a narrow, specific area throughout?

Melissa: Seller Experience was the role that I applied for at eBay. They knew that they needed a dedicated content designer to lead this space specifically because it’s not an area that eBay has historically invested in. So, yes, I was hired with this focus in mind, given my background at previous companies.?

When I interviewed at eBay, I asked them: "What’s in scope? Are we building something net-new? What are some considerations that we need to think about in the long term or at a different part of the funnel or different teams our work can help support?"

It’s definitely something that I’ve grown into as I’ve onboarded into the problem space. Not just at eBay, but through previous gigs as well. Onboarding takes time.

Queenie: So, how would you say your work has shifted as you’ve gotten more senior as a content designer??

Melissa: I think that the work has definitely shifted in the sense that I purposefully go deeper now on whatever it is that I’m working on. I’m really very emphatic about going deeper and not wider.?

I spent a number of years as a content designer covering everything—trying to make everything great—and trying to appease everyone. I think you do need to do some of that when you’re breaking into the field. It proves your worth, it gives you a lot of experience in building relationships and allyships.?

But as you get more senior, you really have to develop subject matter expertise in a space. And the only way to get that is to drown out the noise and resist the urge to copy edit, or fix the surface of every experience that could be stronger. You have to really focus on making your metrics, understanding the problem, getting deep into the user research so that you know that you’re impacting the user experience in a way that's truly impactful and is also working to generate revenue. It doesn’t have to be revenue, necessarily. It could be creating a sticky experience and impacting customer satisfaction, but you do have to focus on quantifying your impact.?

Queenie: I think you’ve already started to touch on this, but can you say more about what you mean by deeper versus wider??

Melissa: Sure. Wider means that you do things like hold office hours—you give people an hour of your time, walk through the flow with them, and do the fairy dust work of ‘I can make this better by assessing the content hierarchy or making the CTA more contextualized,’ for example. This type of work—especially as you get further along in your content design career—is easy; these are fast wins. People see the surface change, and they celebrate content design’s value.?

But the real hard work—what I mean when I talk about going deeper—is being embedded within a team. You're going to be part of the business strategy, you're going to be a thought partner to the designer. You'll be involved in the kickoff, maybe even the wireframing. You're doing some of the rapid research along with your product designer to get some scrappy insights from the get-go about whether a particular approach is working. That kind of thing. And it just takes time. It’s clearly not the model of ‘I’m going to set up an office hour, or I'm going to scrub this flow before handoff to developers, or take a quick win by suggesting one extra step in validating account registration.'

Those are important improvements, but they’re not things you can talk about at length when you interview at another company. They’re nothing you could present a case study on.?

Maybe that's another way of quantifying it. Can you be there from the roadmapping of the initiative—when it’s about understanding the people problem, the business problem? Can content design impact the metrics? Is there an opportunity to set a UX to go after? Are you thinking about constraints when working—constraints from engineering, from localization, from an accessibility perspective. All of those are ‘deep’ concerns that you can only have if you have the time and space to think about a problem from different angles.?

Queenie: I’m sure folks are going to find that breakdown helpful. How did you advocate for yourself as you grew in your career? To get on teams and projects that allowed you to do the deep versus the wide work??

Melissa: I think it just takes time. You have to get some notches in your belt in terms of years of experience.?

I will say that this was the accepted way of working at Meta.? I consider myself fortunate to have ended up working at a big tech company that has a robust content design team. You just kind of go into the fold at a company like Meta, and you don’t have to do the work of advocating for your seat at the table. You're part of the process already.?

But you don’t need to do it that way, necessarily. Just start by documenting the projects where you contribute to the deep thinking and thought partnership. It’s often the projects where content design is involved early and often. I use these results in case studies when I’m interviewing for upleveled roles.

Also, sometimes I just sit down with Product, look at the initiatives being considered, and say something like: ‘OK, this onboarding is a perfect place for content design to be involved. Content design is invaluable to creating a sticky experience here, because voice and tone are key. And you really need content design in here for every iteration, for every lever you're trying to pull, because good communication matters here. We’re the voice talking to this new person that we want to keep on our platform.’?

Queenie: That’s helpful to hear. When it comes to early to mid-career content designers, do you think it's more valuable for them to be generalists or specialists? I ask this specifically vis-a-vis different ‘areas’ or ‘tasks’ within content design, like information architecture or terminology or prompt engineering.

Melissa: That's a great question. I think that it partly depends on one’s background—what you come to the table with. So someone who comes with a background in journalism or advertising might find it easier to work on transactional comms or voice and tone work. That might be a comfortable space for them. There might be others who come from library science and information architecture or heuristics comes naturally to them, and they might really not thrive doing voice and tone work.?

But I do think that junior to mid-career folks should push themselves to be generalists. I do recommend everyone try their hand at everything. It's important to be well-versed, especially as we're an under-resourced discipline. You might get an opportunity to be at a startup, for example, where you have to be involved in everything. So trying your hand at all of those different things helps you to grow, to understand where your strengths are, to assess opportunities for further growth.?

Honestly, the more multifaceted you are, the easier it is for you to move on to your next gig or to prove that you really are ready for that next level in your career and move up.?

Queenie: That makes sense. What about for more senior folks? Is that the time to cultivate a specialty or an area of expertise??

Melissa: It really depends on the person. Personally, I try to never back myself too far into a corner.?

For example, right now I have a big project coming up that's going to be a lot of information architecture paired with terminology alignment and likely some renaming; it’s really important small-but-big work because it’ll span the whole user journey. And I'm looking forward to that because I haven't done that type of work at eBay yet. I have, however, done it in the past. It's important to spot these opportunities and meet the challenge because you bring all these new lessons with you to each new type of content design ask that you get. And you grow from the experience.

I do think there's a danger in getting too far into a corner. But at the same time, sometimes I do say ‘no’ to things that could be a new area of exploration, because I just don’t want to get into that realm. For example, I had an opportunity at Meta that would have had me focused on the machine learning aspect of content design. I’m sure the right thing to do would’ve been to get more experience in that area. But I also suspected that that was a kind of investment that I genuinely wasn’t enthused about and didn’t think that I could do well. My background just didn’t seem to be a good fit for something more technical like machine learning and algorithms. So I didn’t take that role.?

Queenie: That does make sense. I’ve been thinking about this now specifically, because with generative AI becoming so huge—everyone’s trying to get their foot in the door with that kind of work. And that space could soon become overcrowded. Of course, on one hand, you do want to be able to step up and execute if you get a good opportunity. But also, everyone’s in that corner, you know, and is it wise to also clamor for that work when there are other avenues that are under-resourced?

Melissa: Yeah! When that opportunity was presented to me, I wasn’t thinking about this though. My meter was just like: ‘this is going to be really chaotic and I don’t feel like I have the grounding needed in this space to make good decisions.’ So I already saw I wasn't the right fit for that opportunity. I couldn't be a mentor or a leader or even feel secure in that space. To feel ready for that, I’d need to know that someone was like, ‘I am going to mentor you in this. You can get really good at this. We'll do this together.’ And that's not how that role felt to me. So it was really like, you don't want me and I don't want you. And it was just a matching thing.?

That's honestly what Meta does well because it’s so big. You’re hired but then you explore the teams that have open roles at your level. You meet with managers and team members to gauge where you might be a good fit.?

All this to say that I think it’s important for people to know where they want to grow, where they want to lean in, and where they want to draw their boundaries.?

Queenie: It’s interesting because I feel like I see this through-line in what you’ve been saying so far: how you’ve shaped your career has really depended on this deep introspection, it feels like. There’s a lot of evaluation around what you’re already good at, where you want to go, and then finding a fit between those things and the opportunities you’re presented with.

Melissa: For sure. And I think it's important to point out, for folks who are new to this field or growing in their careers, that we do have some agency and autonomy. Content design can sometimes feel like this passive space, where it feels like you have to be good at everything and that you're a failure if you're not good at everything.?

And to be fair, by thinking like that, we're doing ourselves and our discipline a disservice. You can only take the generalist thing so far, right? It’s almost like your first two years in college: some people just want to immerse themselves in the experience and figure it out; others might have their major from the get go. But being of the mindset that ‘I can do everything and I can do everything excellent’ is just setting an impossible standard for yourself and for the discipline. I don't think any other discipline has to have as many capabilities as content design because it crosses over so many different areas of the business.?

Queenie: That's true. Also, from what you’ve been sharing about your experience at Meta and so on, it seems like you’ve been quite intentional about how you craft your career and the opportunities you take on and the ones you say no to. Any tips for how to create that intentionality? Is there a specific place that you want to get to eventually in your career?

Melissa: I've gotten more intentional as I've gotten older. I think that's a gift that years of experience give you. You understand how finite time is and how you have to get smart about the hours in the day.?

One of the things that was interesting for me—and you'll probably find this about a lot of folks who went into management from content design—is that, at some point in my career, I was told: ‘You're never going to move up in your career (beyond a certain level) unless you become a manager.’ I thought that that was an okay fit for me because I do love the mentor role, but some of the other parts of management—such calibration, or managing an underperformer, or quibbling over timelines and roadmaps with other design managers when you just don't have as many resources as they do—were challenging for me. I did really love running a team, though. So I ended up becoming a manager.?

When I went to Meta, I had the opportunity to choose again: did I want to be a people manager or an IC? Because at Meta, people can move up in both of those tracks. One can get to Senior Principal as an IC and one can also get to Senior Director or VP level in content design if that's their aspiration. At that point, I went ahead and chose the IC role at Meta, and honestly, I think Meta chose that for me as well. It was a mutual decision.?

At Walmart, I had a hybrid role—I was both a manager and an IC. I think that's a difficult road for content designers to go down because you’re stretched really thin. Having said that, sometimes that’s the only option that you have at a company.?

That was a roundabout way of speaking to next steps: Do I aspire to be a Director? I don't know. We don't have enough mentors that are Directors to even know what that path is like. All of my mentors have been Product Design Directors or Product Design VPs.?

I've only had really excellent content design-specific leadership at Meta. They were very accessible and I just really got to learn so much from them. That was one of the things that I deeply appreciated and was very intentional about—while being at Meta—to seek out that leadership. But you don't have that kind of mentorship available everywhere.?

I’m as guilty as everyone in the discipline when it comes to impostor syndrome: could I even do that Director-level role well? Am I capable of getting to that level without anybody training me or mentoring me? All this to say that right now, I'm on the IC path and I continue to aspire to the next level of being a subject-matter expert and taking on what I have to to get there. At the same time, I’m not ruling out the possibility of getting back into running a team, growing a team, overseeing a team because I do know so much more now about how to resource, how to effectively cover concurrent tracks of work through content sprints and also when to say no.?

I'm one of those people who doesn’t lead with no, but over time, I've learned to say no to things. Some of my more junior colleagues are just really trying to get in there and do the thing that I was telling you that I used to do—wanting everybody to like them, wanting their work to be noticed as impactful, wanting to help everyone. Like most content designers, I’m empathetic to the team’s needs. So, as a leader, I have learned how to help reel that in for them because that's a real tough lesson to learn, but everybody does need to learn it. If you want to have some sense of normalcy or work-life balance, for lack of a better term, in content design, you have to figure out boundaries.?

Queenie: You’ve already segued into my next question a little bit, which is about the skills you came in with when you started in content design, and which ones you felt like you needed to develop as you advanced in your career. And then how did you go about developing those new skills??

Melissa: Great question.

This may or may not be true for a lot of content designers, but I feel like I came in as a very strong writer and thought that was going to get me everywhere I needed to be. But I needed to learn the product space. I had a lot of opportunity for growth in understanding systems thinking, design thinking, user journeys.

Honestly, I had everything to learn about Product because that wasn’t something I had much exposure to when I was working on the branding and marketing side of ecommerce products— drip campaigns, Instagram campaigns, or Google Display Network ads, that kind of thing, where the only goal was to get people to click.?

A lot of what I had to learn wound up getting comfortable saying ‘I don't know,’ and asking people questions like: ‘I don't know what that metric means. I don't know how to read this dashboard. Can you walk me through?’

I guess I was just fortunate that for the most part, the engineers were really helpful. They liked working with content design but didn’t have a lot of access to us, especially at Walmart. We were in one building in San Bruno and they were in another building in Sunnyvale. The PMs went back and forth between the two locations, but design and engineering didn't come together all that often.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I really needed to brush up on my technical skills: both terminology and then also understanding backend issues, like ‘no, you can't just sketch this out and expect it to work. It's got to be built into the framework, it's got to be coded in a particular way to work.’ That’s honestly something I still struggle with and am trying to get better at.?

Queenie: And how do you go about this upskilling of sorts? Of building this technical familiarity or just keeping your finger on the pulse of the field?

Melissa: I try to level up by showing up to brown-bag presentations that are usually way over my head. I listen to what they’re talking about—whether it’s the implications of ChatGPT or how they're utilizing this or that new thing.

I also try to be involved in all the betas, and I attend the readouts. I follow along with everything and take lots of notes. That’s made me a bit more fluent in the technical aspect of things—what makes a successful product launch, for example.?

In terms of building the discipline: I feel like I was doing a lot better when I was a people manager at Walmart. I was pushing myself to attend conferences like Button and Confab. I was also putting myself out there and signing up to do the meetups that they used to host in San Francisco. I also read a lot of articles online. I have so many bookmarked! I scan them and save them and then I go back and read them. In that sense, I’m a fan of LinkedIn. It helps me keep up with where the discipline is going.

Queenie: What do you think the future of content design is? Do you think there's a way for people to futureproof themselves in terms of getting more skilled in certain areas??

Melissa: I don’t want to close on a negative note, but I have been worrying lately that our discipline has really suffered with all of the recent tech layoffs. We're already under-resourced, you know? It’s dark, and maybe not where you were expecting me to go with this, but it does have me worried. If a company like Meta is comfortable tossing aside so much of the talent they invested in hiring and onboarding, it does have me worried about the longevity of this discipline.

I’m actually a little bit nervous about all the certifications and the options to do this and that additional training for content designers. I’m not sure we need to do even more to prove we’re a valuable discipline. For example, they’re trying to hire folks back now, at Meta, but they’ve significantly decreased the salary, and I’m hearing people managers are now expected to be more of a hybrid IC/people manager, and that they’re having to take on some more of the technical program management aspects of content design like running the string library and so on.?

I worry that it detracts from what content design is supposed to bring to the table and might make it too muddled to be relevant. It’s this ‘do more with less’ approach, which is exhausting. The actual gold of what content design brings to the user experience—if you spread it too thin—then the magic is lost, you know?

I think about future proofing all the time. I think there are a lot of concerns about AI taking over the writer's work. But will it really? I don’t know. People are demanding more of their online interactions. In this scenario, content moderation and leaning into the content strategy and thought leadership of your content experience for your user becomes key.?

Maybe it needs to all play out. Maybe there will be another renaissance for content design. It might have to get worse before it gets better.?

I will say that I think folks are pretty tired these days, both those that were laid off and those that weren’t. People who were laid off are feeling really despondent, and the people who were kept had to pick up the slack and are exhausted. Some of it is just going to be about holding out. You can't just suddenly take someone's salary down $50,000 in the Bay Area for the same job and expect that to work. So I think it's going to get a little bit worse before it gets better. I think people do need to say: ‘I'm not so desperate that I'll take this.’ And I do understand that the flip side of that is that some people are so desperate that they have to take it. So I don't have an answer, but I’m worried about it. I'm keeping an ear to the ground.?

People are already stretched so thin and then to expect them to take on more work? And then there's also the flip side to that, right: if existing content designers who haven't lost their job do that extra work, the company can justify not hiring more content designers because the team is getting by, but not thriving.

Covering everything really undercuts the discipline too because you’re not going deep. You don’t have the time and space to learn and iterate and arrive at experiences that are sticky and gratifying for the customer.?

There are emerging opportunities out there. I’ve definitely seen a lot in government roles, climate initiatives, even car companies: things that are a bit off the beaten path for content design to play such a valid role and likely offer a different level of stability.? Emerging tech is where people really do need clarity and cohesion and simple, straightforward content to help them understand and navigate complex processes. I don't think ChatGPT is going to cut it in these industries.?

So there are some other opportunities out there. I’ll be the first to admit: I've been in ecomm for so long that I don't know how I would make that shift, but that is something I have to be prepared for and open to exploring.

Maybe futureproofing oneself means looking outside the traditional big tech companies that seem to have lost their appreciation for the discipline of content design or maybe never fully understood it. Other industries seem like they could really take advantage of content design and offer a more progressive approach to indoctrinating content design as an equally viable counterpart to product design into their company. It takes pixels and words to create a user experience.