Issue 38

Managing your content model over time, part 2

Who owns the content model?

In Model Thinking Issue 37, we talked about why you should document your content model, and I made the point that the content model is never finished. You need to expect that it will evolve.

In this issue, I want to focus on the ownership and governance of the content model. Because it’s important to understand that one can’t just arbitrarily make a change to the content model that’s in the CMS.

I mean, depending on the CMS and your permissions, maybe you can, but you will likely mess something up in the process, and you could even break your published website.

A content-minded person could make a seemingly innocent content model change that might break a query that developers use to build an experience from the CMS data, which could trigger an incident for your developer operations team.

Less dire, a developer might change a label in the CMS (usually stored as part of the content model) that might confuse content teams or disrupt content operations.

To avoid these problems, there are several things that need to be in place for smooth, collaborative iteration.

Governance

Numerous roles have a stake in the content model which means there might be a lot of cooks in the kitchen. The content model needs governance, and the first step of governance is to have an ownership model.

Defining an owner for the content model

You’ll need to figure out if you need centralized ownership, federated ownership, or decentralized ownership.

Centralized ownership can be good at bringing consistency and driving an enterprise-wide content strategy, but it can also bring perceptions of slow, bureaucratic processes.

Federated ownership takes a lot of work to build consensus as teams from across the organization get representation in an ownership group. The ownership group handles “global” content ownership, while teams themselves may own “local” pieces of the content model.

When done well, a federated approach enables some consistency while leaving room for some leeway and moving more nimbly. When done poorly, federation breaks down into a decentralized model.

Decentralized models tend to fracture into independent silos, consistency goes out the window, efforts are duplicated, and there’s a lack of organization-wide strategy that leads to inconsistent user experiences. Teams working in decentralized models do feel empowered and have the sense that they are moving quickly, although that sense of inertia is often false.

If there were one role that should be designated to own the content model, that would be the role of content architect. Traditionally, this title has been rare in most companies, but it has been growing in popularity in the last few years.

The content architect straddles the content strategy world and the engineering world, building content models that reflect the needs and semantics of content while simultaneously providing a system that developers can easily query for the content needed to build experiences.

If the content architect role doesn’t explicitly exist, sometimes the best proxy is a content strategist, content designer, software architect, or software engineer—maybe even a technical product manager.

You might find that a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) approach is helpful for defining ownership of certain content types—or even certain kinds of changes.

It’s also a good idea to be clear about who should not have access to modify the content model.

Defining the change process

Just like you want to know who owns the content model, you should also figure how the content model will be changed.

When you’re starting from nothing, it doesn’t really matter how the content model gets created, but once the CMS is serving content to end users, the change process becomes very important. Some things you’ll want to think about:

• How to experiment and test content model changes prior to making a change that affects your production environment
• How to communicate changes with developers and content teams
• Guidelines for migrations (more on migrations later)
• Who makes the changes to production environments

The specific CMS that you use will determine a lot about how the content model gets updated.

Some CMS vendors have a visual content model editor that might be tempting to use, but I discourage teams from doing this for production instances because of the risk of breaking something in the existing model.

Instead, you should consider programmatically updating the content model through content management APIs or scripts or in code—depending on your CMS vendor—to have more control over the change process and its impacts.

Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper

Scuttlebutt

News broke earlier this week that Salesforce is acquiring Contentful (Salesforce’s announcement). The move signals the importance of structured content in the agentic age (Contentful’s announcement), and the Salesforce announcement emphasizes that the acquisition will help them combine content, data, and customer experiences. This has been a challenge for enterprises who understand that the “headless” approach enables a lot of flexibility but also requires a lot of additional work to integrate with other systems and ship a functional customer web experience.

Top of mind

• Best book I read in the last 2 weeks: Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara, who uses his experience as former owner of the restaurant Eleven Madison Park to teach how even simple gestures can be legendary for both giver and receiver. High-end dining isn’t my scene, but Guidara lays out principles that can be used anywhere.
• Best post I read in the last 2 weeks: Kate Pluth’s LinkedIn post positing why AI leans so heavily on em dashes.
• Something that made me smile in the last 2 weeks: I often tell people that Austin is a big city but a small town. We recently took my younger son and his friends to see Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu at the theater. Directly in front of us in line was a former manager and his family, and it was nice to briefly reconnect. Behind us was a local TV meteorologist. I love that I see people I know from different parts of my life almost any time in public in Austin.
• A pattern I noticed recently: I have certain Youtube channels I follow and several podcasts that I regularly listen to throughout my week. Over time, I’ve learned the posting schedule of many of these creators, and that I’ve built habits around consuming new content. (For example, I know that on certain days, I can listen to specific podcasts while I make a meal or drive to certain regular destinations.) In a sense, there’s a lot of patterns involved. But the thing I noticed recently is that a missed video posting or a delayed podcast feed—or a schedule change on my end—can really throw off my habits.

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