GoCanvas content practice foundation & operations.

Content at GoCanvas was the wild, wild west. No one had paid consistent attention to it across all channels, from marketing to microcopy. Team members were creating their own documents as needed, not knowing that that documentation already existed. From a style standpoint, the same feature was referred to by 3 different labels depending on how long you’d been at the company. Somebody needed to take charge of the content situation.

I took my case to the CFO and new CPO, arguing that if we wanted to be the type of company that we kept saying we wanted to be, we couldn’t be addressing content casually. Apple doesn’t have 5 different names for the iPhone, after all. I wanted to build a team, bring in someone to do the day-to-day writing and community management so I could wrangle the bigger stuff, put processes in place, establish and enforce standards, and provide a single, unified voice. 

I inventoried all of the content we had (thousands of pieces of web content, not even counting the behind-the-scenes one pagers and ephemera), the different departments that owned that content (4?), and then focused on the product roadmap, which was aggressive. In order just to keep up with help content for the features we had planned, I needed help. Then add in all of the additional messaging and training that needed to happen, and it was an intimidating amount of work. 

My pitch worked and I built a small (but mighty) team: one writer and one (surprise) video producer. We started completely from scratch. I designed (and iterated and re-designed and iterated some more) processes, created intake forms, attempted content sprints, made Trello board after Trello board, crafted metrics dashboards, and put together documentation so people would know how to get content from us. Together we became a resource across the company known for dependability, speed, product knowledge, and impact. 

People came to us for culture videos and brochures, sales one-pagers and onboarding power points, training content and strategy, and of course UX writing and product documentation. Our team shrunk and grew and grew and shrunk (weirdly in that order) as the company changed around us, always finding a good balance of personalities, talent, process, and commitment. 

We measured our impact in every way, from actions in the Community to video plays, supported everyone from the CEO and board members to the newest BDRs. I advocated for content modeling and author-friendly CMS architecture, introduced collaboration tools and methods that spanned departments, wrote and rewrote and rewrote our main brand tagline. 

I introduced the idea that content matters, and (to my delight) have been able to own the delivery and realization of that idea.