The market's been bleeding. Product building and GTM thinking need defibrillation. Retooling process is the way to resurrection! sounds like a delusion but there's truth to it and today I'm joined by Winston Ford, our Senior Product Manager at NewtonX, to chat on how we push the bounds with our creative tools, specifically virtual whiteboards like Figjam, Miro, and Mural.

The tricky part? There's no roadmap for how these tools net you better outcomes. The fun part? There's no roadmap for how these tools net you better outcomes.

Winston's been at ACLU & Planned Parenthood, I've come from the Sweetgreen-meets-Everlane world, somehow our paths converged in B2B data, and I'm glad for it.

Share this with a product or brand leader who might find it valuable. Like or comment on my LinkedIn post; we'd love to hear from you. Thanks 🙂

A quick interlude - Who's NewtonX?

But first, context! At NewtonX, we're the B2B research partner to the stars (like Meta, NYT, MBB). We're the reason they can make high stakes decisions with confidence.

What this looks like: If Figma's looking for competitive intel on other SaaS players, or market data to back thought leadership on the state of design - we find the exact professionals who have those insights, and consult on the process from hypothesis to analysis. (If this sounds like something your company needs, let me know?)

Complementing the services side of the biz - last year we launched our expert intelligence platform, NewtonX Prime. It visualizes data from B2B surveys at scale, to help speed up the timeline from insight to impact.

Transcript

Watch the full video on my Substack.

Outline:

• (00:35) Winston on Figjam for product collab: How do you build something that doesn't exist in the market?
• (04:59) Vicky on Figjam for GTM strategy: What happens when you put data on an easel?
• (09:24) Winston's final thoughts: Having a shared vision of remote collaboration
• (10:29) Vicky's final thoughts: Cultivating creative subcultures in business disciplines

Vicky: Hi everyone. My name is Vicky. I am our Senior Brand Manager here at NewtonX, and I'm really excited to be here with my colleague Winston, who is our Senior Product Manager. And today we're going to step through ways that we're thinking about using tools in more creative ways to make the work more effective and the outcomes better in the long run. So we're going to dive into tools like Figjam and virtual whiteboards, go through a couple examples, and at the end recap on conceptually how does this materialize in team workflows, and how we approach the work. With that, what I'm going to pass it to Winston.

On Figjam for product collab: How do you build a tool that doesn't exist in the market?

Winston: Awesome. Thanks Vicky. So yeah, I want to talk about NewtonX Prime. It is our new expert intelligence platform that gives our customers their edge on the market. And the way that our customers have been using it is twofold. One, it gives you access to thousands of expert opinions across multiple industries and touch points. And also two, it provides very powerful visualizations that allow you to gain insights and solve, say your hypotheses or whatever you need a lot faster.

So one thing that's really interesting is that this is a very unique product in the market, and we had to go to market as a startup within a startup, which is something that not a lot of startups actually do. So we had to really think about how to work more collaboratively across our teams.

And the other thing is that our teams are remote, so we're spread out all across the country. So generally, a lot of startups start in, say a coffee shop or a garage or some type of conference room, but we actually have to start remotely. So how do we do that?

So the one way that we've really kind of leveraged remote collaboration is with Figjam. Every few weeks we do get together and we actually have physical whiteboards, which is really cool. Obviously a lot of startups do this, but then we leave and we go to our respective homes. So how do we continue to have that energy remotely? We utilize Figjam. You can see this is a customer journey that we've outlined on a whiteboard, but that actually spills over to our Figjams and we're able to really take that energy, that kind spontaneous whiteboard energy into a digital platform.

We use post-it notes. We also bring in rich images, video, anything that we need to help solve problems and going to market. There's a lot of problems that you have to solve quickly and efficiently, and this is our way of doing that. So another thing that's really interesting as well, so we went to market with our beta customers, got a lot of feedback from our customers, and our customers are like, your product is great, but we want to see data over time, and that's really important for us so we can make more informed decisions. Because something that say has a high NPS score last year might have a lower NPS score this year, just because, say there's changes in the market or the product quality has gone down. So we really want to start to capture that. So this is our new time series NPS chart.

This is a chart that does not exist anywhere in the market. So we had to build this from scratch. And we talked to customers, we had a lot of great input and we were able to build this out and convey multiple layers of information here. But the way that we did this, and I'm going to show you how the sauce is made, is we had numerous collaboration touchpoints between design lead and our engineering team, and also with customers to really think through what this experience will look like.

So we kind started with our current NPS experience and then jumping in here, and this is one of the cool things that I like about Figjam is that you can actually kind of jump in. I had an Apple pencil and picked up an iPad, started sketching through things, marking through things, and through that we're able to bring in prototypes and in real time have that collaboration. So it's just one of those things where again, we really want to recreate that in-person experience as much as we can.

On Figjam for GTM strategy: What happens when you put data on an easel?

Vicky: Thanks for sharing, Winston. It's always really cool to see the process behind such a complex product that involves a lot of really deep data visualization for B2B surveys at scale. So with that, I'm going to flip over to the other side. I'm going to share my screen where I'll share my perspective on how we use creative tools like Fig Jam for strategic thinking as well as collaborative on the go-to-market side.

So within marketing campaigns, how do we go to market more effectively? How do we be not only more efficient, but more creative in the output? Because there's such a sheer volume of output that's demanded every day, not just in volume actually, but even customization of content and making sure something is laser sharp. So it resonates really quickly with your target customer who's going to be reading it.

So with that, I'm going to walk through a bit on the editorial process behind one of our campaigns last year that we called The Office: Research Edition, where essentially we respun The Office into an adaptation through the lens of a corporate researcher, so researcher who deals a lot with B2B in an enterprise context. We wanted to honor and celebrate and also commiserate with the realities of their everyday world and also the pain points of the industry and doing B2B research.

So with that, I'm going to jump into our Figjam, which is where it all started. Well, actually where it started was customer interviews, as we are a research company, so staying true to those roots. But I basically had this large glob of a transcript that I pulled out themes, stories, quotes, and terms from what I saw as trends over the course of the customer interviews that I ran. And also pulled out some really interesting earnest deep insights that actually ended up being folded into our personas training for our sales and client facing team. So that was actually also a really cool side effect of this work. It was really helpful to have everything in one place to start to map out the characters in the episode outlines. Mapping out what are the topics, what are the value propositions that we're going to focus on in each episode?

And also who are the researcher archetypes of each character in the office? For example, Dwight might be the intense, really academic quant researcher who's always talking about customer obsession. So it was really fun to imagine this world in the context of a flexible platform. And then that yielded prompts that I fed into ChatGPT to synthesize all of this into screenplays that I then edited and worked with our designer to publish. So yeah, that was an example of how a tool like this really helped content planning and development process.

I'm going to now move to another example that is interesting in that it's a little more exploratory. And this goes back to this is me testing out a hypothesis of - what does it look like to put data on an easel instead of just a spreadsheet? 

So this is actually me when I was doing some end of year reporting last year and planning for the new year, and I realized I was pulling from so many disparate data sources like Google Analytics or Salesforce, HubSpot, LinkedIn, and I found it really helpful to have the information, the executive summaries of all that dropped in one space so I could start to make connections between those. To find trends in the data and the stories in the data, layered on with anecdotes, with stories of customer successes, especially even layering pictures. You need to remember how you made a customer feel at moments too.

And those are kind of the moments that help you understand, okay, how do we double down on those aspects? And yeah, ultimately use that to start to frame out, okay, what are our brand maxims? What are our pillars for the upcoming year? And this really, it made it a lot quicker to align on priorities and just directionally what we're thinking with our CMO.

So that's kind of all I've got for my end, but ultimately this is really fun, Winston. And I guess as a closing note, would love to hear just conceptually, how are you thinking about using these sorts of tools more effectively to your team? How does it work for your workflows?

Winston's final thoughts: A shared vision of remote collaboration for distributed teams

Winston: I think for us, we kind of went in with a mission or ideal that we want to have collaboration across teams, and it was just very important for us. We're in go to market mode, so we really need to huddle down, but we also were remote, so I think we just aligned a lot quicker on that just because I think we had a shared vision of what we wanted across the team.

And then as we started diving in as a core team, as we started bringing in stakeholders and leaderships, as they kind of saw what we showed, all the whiteboards and all the Figjams, they also were excited and they kind of want to jump in and really help us collaborate. So it was fairly easy for us, but I think it started with that shared vision that we wanted to collaborate and that made things a lot easier for us in terms of how we want to operationalize on it.

Vicky's final thoughts: Cultivating creative subcultures in business disciplines

Vicky: I love that view on collaboration and how creative tools can foster deeper collaboration, quicker alignment, and also just excitement. I think there's a huge part of storytelling to the impact of our work, and it's really cool to see it kind of materialize on your side.

On my side, it's interesting because we're also exploring it from a go-to-market perspective of - how can tools like this, or tools using AI, be a thought partner to strategic work, whether it's independent or collaborative? How does it make us better at go-to market strategy? I think especially on the business side, these disciplines are very strong in operational thinking, very strong in the language and the formats of spreadsheets and data.

And I will say this again, my hypothesis I'm trying to push forward is - what happens when we put data on easel instead of just a spreadsheet? Or how do they complement each other, right? Because the reality is strategic thinking is non-linear. It pulls from multiple inputs that are both qualitative and quantitative, and what does it mean when we are able to marry that sort of the messy thinking with the hard data, and have it all in one place?

And I think in the process, the underlying note is also like, oh, is this culture change too? Or is this not necessarily change, but does this help cultivate more interesting, more creative subcultures even within a business discipline? Or how does it make us just more diverse and rich in how we think and work and operate with each other?

I think with that, that's all we have for y'all for now. We would love for this to be a dialogue, so feel free to reach out, drop something in the comments. We'd love to chat more.

Originally published on The Content Technologist on September 21, 2023.

Whether you know it or not, your next big campaign hinges on the technical concepts behind culture-making: organizational design.

Applied to content strategy, organizational design means fertilizing your media asset garden and slowing down to care for the people and processes that keep your garden thriving. Without it, your content loses the elements that most sharpen your brand's image.

Rather than pining for unavailable resources, org design orchestrates the dance between what you have on hand and the mechanisms you make to maximize them. It relies on optimistic, communicative, and experimental thinking that comes from trusting a tested system.

Whether you're in-house or consulting with clients, organizational change won’t always go as planned, but healthy friction is where you can make the biggest impact. Chances are, among the resources you lack, there are still processes and relationships that you can leverage, like internal operating systems and strong brand partnerships. Organizational design teaches us to lean on those advantages.

There are many ways organizational transformation can take place, but we'll focus on three cultural tenets that guarantee content that actually hits:

• Strong editorial processes invite ownership
• Healthy feedback cultures draw on rationale
• Content success depends on cross-functional advocacy

Building up a taste for content: Culture is fermented

Creative operations comprise more than process; they're about culture. 

Think of kombucha, fermented tea made with sugar and a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast). SCOBYs are literal bacterial cultures with the viscosity of human mucus and the sliminess of human relationships. Icky as they sound, SCOBYs are the crucial ingredient that led to a $2B market for kombucha, a transformed drink that's sweet, sour, and everything in between.

Like SCOBYs, you're designing the environment for something really wonderful or edgy to emerge from your base ingredients. Small interactions add up. Extra spices thrown into your fermentation bring richness and complexity to your final product — they just take time to work their magic.

Existing company culture will likely not be designed for content success from the day you walk in. Like fermenting, you use what you have to produce something new and unusual. Yes, cultivating a healthy culture is a slow process. But as fermentation and its SCOBY mascot show, the transformation that occurs after a long-term investment bears fruit is worth the wait.

Strong editorial processes invite ownership

What does ownership mean in organizations where everyone, everywhere is expected to step up? Well, it depends on seniority. Ownership for executives looks like buy-in. For cross-functional collaborators, it's about advocacy. For content contributors and direct reports, it's concrete, meaningful ownership of the development and production processes.

Specific to this last point, I want to stress that our job is not to be a quality-control gatekeeper — at least not during ideation. As my friend Behzod Sirjani said about his time running research at orgs like Facebook and Slack, "Our job is not to be product police; it's to build a practice of learning." With organizational design, I like to think about it as building a practice of collective writing.

Define progress expectations when setting up editorial processes

Ultimately, your team's growth is your growth. As a team leader, I offer a clear sense of long-term goals so others can envision their own professional development. With organizational design, development is not about the output of a particular piece of content. It's about becoming a better content strategist so you can deliver results consistently and quickly in the future. To communicate these expectations, I use a handful of mental scripts to keep things as unambiguous as possible. 

• "Expect two to three rounds of revisions in your first three months of submitting writing. At the six-month mark, those will consolidate into one round of revision. As you approach one year of working on the team, you should be a semi-autonomous writer who can ship thoughtful, on-brand projects with minimal editorial oversight."
• "Expect both strategic feedback (positioning, brand tone of voice, etc) and tactical (flow, clarity, etc). Take at least two passes before you pass creative to me for review. Please double-check grammar and formatting, as I shouldn't be proofing for foundational components. Self-editing saves time for all of us."

When your colleagues have skin in the game — oh, I see how this makes me more valuable to the company — they're bound to care more. You may have heavy, high volume  reviews at the beginning of the process, but those will give way to true-to-brand projects shipping smoothly with minimal oversight in the future.

Healthy feedback cultures draw on rationale

When educating up, show examples and evidence. Use logic! Source authority outside yourself! Link a reputable publication that makes your point. Say you're advocating for a bigger creative budget. If you need a resource, reference that McKinsey's proven the thesis that design-driven companies increase their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts. They did the research so your job is to gather the data for your story: Good creative enables efficiency.

Sure, there are also moments where you don't have data or need data that's custom to your business. Or, you're starting a new relationship with a company and don't yet know the context to interpret historical data. In those cases, I conduct my own research and rely on analyst-minded growth marketing teammates so I have data to point back to. 

Bring it back to the money. Whether advocating for an idea or giving notes on a piece of content, lead your feedback with the business rationale. Link back to documented strategy. Remind your colleagues that you’re thinking from the lens of what brings your target audience the most value. That pressure tests the validity of your own feedback as well.

For me, business-forward communication validates the larger, ongoing pursuit to document strategy, audience, tactics, and how they’ve evolved. Keeping a documented content and brand strategy is crucial for those moments when c-suite comes to me with an idea that we didn't allocate resources to. In those situations, I can say, “Hey, here's what we have going on. Here's the strategy that we've aligned on. Here’s how we expect it to perform and on what timeline. And here’s all the motions we've outlined to get there.” From there, I propose that if we plan to add something new to the mix, we should try a pilot version so we work within the margins of our available bandwidth before going all in.

Content success depends on cross-functional advocacy

If this article is about soft skills, then these are the extra squishy ones. And extra necessary for the business.

The last thing I assume is that colleagues intuit the value of content and brand. On the same day, I've received these two very different sentiments from colleagues in engineering and operations teams:

• "I used to think brand was a dumb investment, but now I think it's the best investment we've ever made."
• "What does brand even contribute to growth? We need growth more than we need brand."

I use two core methods to increase understanding when presented with the latter statement.

Make it easy for stakeholders to contribute to or benefit from content.

Think of your favorite episode of a TV show, or feature in a magazine. There's repartee between characters, and it's often most interesting when you pair characters coming from different worlds. 

When we created NewtonX's flagship AI thought leadership report, I knew I wanted to quote our Head of Engineering. He wasn't what we’d normally consider a top contender — normally we host more external-facing executives. Given that he works on sensitive internal initiatives, this wasn't the easiest idea to pursue. Yet after a briefing and a 30-minute interview, we honed into exactly the right quote to illustrate our organizational ethos. It marked the first time in 7 years of company history that a technical leader contributed to external thought leadership.

He had no edits and shared the final output to his personal network. As a highly respected leader in our organization, the side effect of his advocacy was a boost to my own credibility. I can't underscore enough — as a content person, you know when you've done good. You know what it feels like to be proud. 

This happens in small ways, too. I've had an engineering manager reach out for support on crafting a team-wide message to promote our remote gaming nights. A sales director might ask me to look at a standardized OOO message for the sales team.

I also think of my friend Jason Talwar, who spent time helping stakeholders internalize research data while building a research practice at data visualization software Tableau. Whether the insights were relevant or not, the goal was to get them engaged with the research. Once engaged, those stakeholders are primed to ask, “Hey, Jason, I’ve got some ideas for research. How can we partner up?"

Host bullpens to surface new ideas and refine thinking. 

My next favorite concept to use when collectively sharpening ideas is the bullpen. I discovered this ritual through YouTube's Shishir Mehrotra: "[The bullpen was] a creative experiment that turned into a hallmark of our process. The time was intentionally unstructured…  Many of these discussions would have naturally become ad-hoc meetings, and instead got handled in a timely manner."  

I host a monthly bullpen between the creatives of product and marketing. At the most basic level, it's a way to get like-minded people from different worlds into a room together and see what happens from the collisions. It's a chance to understand how creative decisions get made in another area of the org and get functional expert input (or just moral support) outside our own team. Some days it's show and tell, with a fallback bank of questions like "What are you excited about or experiencing challenges with?"

In our first meeting, our product writer brought up an SEO idea related to image search from his journalism days. It bumped up an idea that had been collecting dust for months but was worth revisiting now that our SEO strategy was ready for more creative execution.

In the next meeting, we walked through a new feature the product team was working on — and also the challenges of adoption. It's an age-old conundrum: spend months to ship a new feature or campaign, just for your stakeholders to… not even use it. I had recently gone through a similar exercise with a new marketing campaign, and working more closely with the sales team on content training to prepare for launch. 

It led to me sharing my experience: I reached out to a core sales leader at key brainstorm and pre-launch points of the content process. The goal was to give him an exclusive preview and get his take on how he'd use it, to both optimize the content for impact and utilize his stories as examples for his peers. It led to the highest engagement we'd ever seen from the collective sales team. 

That created an aha moment for the product team to think of creative ways to involve their internal stakeholders in dialogues beyond user feedback, pushing the conversation toward the bigger goal: user adoption.

Your content is only as good as the culture you build around it

If stakeholders are uncertain about why editorial systems matter, start seeding ideas and quietly influencing around the edges. Explain your creative decisions with the language of business impact. Do this again and again until the analysis becomes intuition, for both you and your stakeholders.

Congratulations, you have reached content culture nirvana!

Interested in more creative strategy insights? Subscribe to my newsletter hyperdisciplinary and The Content Technologist.

Thanks to Wye Coday and Deborah Carver for the edits.