Thatcher Snyder is a content designer and writer based in Philadelphia. Thatcher is currently a senior content designer at Cvent, leading the standardization of product copy and strengthening product writing for Cvent products.

Escalation Exercise: A Content Buy-In Workshop

Co-presented with: Gina Cairney

A perennial concern for content designers is finding buy-in: we need to advocate for what we do. What makes advocating difficult, often, is the lack of knowledge displayed by other roles — whether UX Design, Development, Product Management, Business Analysis, Marketing, or others — about the problems content designers face day-to-day, which impede our ability to improve product content.

In this workshop, we’ll engage in an ‘escalation exercise’, which individual contributors can use to make product content issues apparent to developers and product managers, by presenting them with interactions that are difficult to describe or guide a user through. The intent of this exercise is to help build understanding across functions as to the challenges content designers face when working on product text.

In this workshop, attendees will learn:

• How to get buy-in for their content work with other roles in their organization
  
• How to build a consensus on the importance of content design in a tech organization
  
• Take home a template to adapt for their teams