Note: I started this article before finding out that my former employer laid off 1,600 people—more than the total employees when I started there 11 years ago—on Thursday, March 12. Included in that number are some content designers—some of whom may be subscribers—which makes this post feel especially timely.
I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion lately about content-related career pivots—journalists moving into tech, content designers keen to explore AI and structured content, and technical writers making their strategic thinking official as content strategists.
All of that resonates, because it’s pretty much the journey I’ve been on for about 20 years.
I thought it might be interesting to walk through my career progression from writer to content architect—and indeed, it gave me an interesting new lens on some of the things I’ve been talking about for years. Looking back, I see how each step in my career shifted my focus slightly from hands-on writing to designing systems that make writing possible.
I think you might find the reflection helpful too.
Just so we’re all on the same page
There’s a few caveats that I want to make before we get started.
- I’ve simplified my career path where the lines were blurry and non-linear.
- This isn’t a hierarchy of roles. Every stage provides real value.
- This is my progression, not a prescribed path.
- The lists below are illustrative, not exhaustive.
As a writer
I started my career as a journalist, and writing was the core of what I did. My next step was as a technical writer at a software company.
What I did as a writer
- Researched topics (with sources as a journalist and with subject matter experts as a tech writer)
- Wrote news features and articles
- Wrote headlines and captions
- Proofread content
- Followed Associated Press Stylebook
- Wrote knowledge base articles, quick starts, user guides, help topics
- Used source control
What I learned as a writer
- Information gathering
- Narrative structure
- Proofreading and editorial rigor
- Audience awareness
- Structured content fundamentals
Skills I applied as a writer
- Interviewing
- Active listening
- Narrative storytelling
- Information organization
At this point, my content focus was still mostly on producing written deliverables, but I was starting to see problems of scale.
As a content designer
My technical writer role moved steadily toward user experience (UX) content and eventually aligned more with what we now know as content design.
What I did as a content designer
- Wrote user interface (UI) strings
- Designed UX flows
- Advocated (sometimes) for fewer words (and better UX)
- Worked in UI strings files and even did some CSS/front-end design
- Worked in design tools (Sketch back in the day, then Figma)
- Used source control
- Wrote help topics
- Conducted user research interviews
- Designed the information architecture for what became our company’s most-visited web property
- Advocated for users
What I learned as a content designer
- Agile methodologies (Scrum and Kanban)
- Localization
- User research
- UX design principles
- Iterative product development
- Design thinking
Skills I applied as a content designer
- Interviewing
- Active listening
- User-centered design
- Writing succinctly and with purpose
- Collaborative writing
- Facilitation
- Typography
- Visual design
Now I was doing more than creating deliverables. I was designing experiences.
As a content strategist
The seeds of content strategy really started as a writer, but came into bloom as a content designer.
Basically, there was never enough bandwidth to handle all the planning and scoping and maintenance of writing. And as a technical writer or content designer, there were too many opinions and too few standards. Too many people felt they had the right to dictate what I worked on.
I needed to be more strategic.
What I did as a content strategist
- Led the migration from decentralized publishing workflows to a structured XML/XHTML repository
- Positioned content as a product
- Created frameworks and workshops
- Facilitated stakeholder workshops
- Thought about end-to-end experiences for internal users and external consumers
- Prototyped experiences
- Created and tested hypotheses
- Established standards
- Taught writers and content designers about standards and practices
- Identified tooling gaps
What I learned as a content strategist
- Stakeholder management
- Strategic planning
- Product thinking
- Managing up
Skills I applied as a content strategist
- Stakeholder management
- Prioritization
- Active listening
- User-centered design
- Facilitation
- Public speaking
- Mentorship
Strategy helped frame the problems, but I saw that there was a gap in making strategies into something tangible.
As a content architect
As I realized that strategizing only goes so far, I saw that teams didn’t understand how to get more from their content systems. I also saw that someone who could structure content could deliver capabilities that would unlock strategic initiatives and enable new content experiences.
What I do as a content architect
- Architect a content platform
- Create domain models
- Create content models
- Create controlled vocabularies and taxonomies
- Create CMS field labels and write help text
- Design authoring experiences
- Facilitate stakeholder workshops
- Run design sprints
- Establish standards
- Teach writers and content designers about the CMS and content modeling
- Identify tooling gaps
What I’ve learned as a content architect
- Domain modeling
- Content modeling
- Database design fundamentals
- Querying structured data
- Taxonomy design basics
- Structured metadata (Schema.org and Open Graph)
- SEO
Skills I’ve applied as a content architect
- Domain and content modeling
- Facilitation
- Visioning
- Stakeholder management
- Prioritization
- Active listening
Looking back, the progression seems obvious: Each stage moved me further from producing pieces of content. I distinctly remember reaching a point as content architect where I realized “I don’t write content anymore.” While I’m happy to wordsmith to the nth degree, I’m even more excited to design systems for other writers to use.