Podcast

Episode 65: Erica Jorgensen - The value and impact of content work

January 30, 2024

Kristina Halvorson interviews Erica Jorgensen, a content designer and author of the book "Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX." They discuss the role of content designers in organizations and the need to demonstrate the value of content. Erica emphasizes the need to use data and analytics to measure the impact of content work and provides insights and advice on documenting content patterns, collaborating with stakeholders, and leveraging data to drive business impact. She also shares her thoughts on the future of content strategy and the importance of content designers taking on leadership roles within organizations.

About this week's guest

Erica Jorgensen is a staff content designer at Chewy.com and the author of Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX, published in April 2023 by Rosenfeld Media.

She’s a content designer, content strategist, and team leader determined to bring greater respect to the content field. 

In addition to working in content roles for companies of all sizes, she has taught at the University of Washington and Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts. Erica earned her B.A. from the University of Connecticut and M.A. from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. In her free time, you can find her exploring Washington State’s wineries or hiking with her husband and rescue dog, Rufus.

Episode 65: Erica Jorgensen - The value and impact of content work

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Episode transcript

Erica Jorgensen:

The outbreak was really here in our backyard in Kirkland, Washington. So Microsoft was not messing around, and they sent us home very, very early. My husband's a teacher. He got sent home six weeks after I did.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh, my gosh.

Erica Jorgensen:

He teaches fifth grade. They were raising salmon. Fun fact, fun little aside here, they were raising salmon in this gigantic tank in their hallway in the school, and he had to rescue the salmon before the school closed and bring them to a little park where the rangers could take care of the salmon.

Kristina Halvorson:

Just a note to my producer, I'm going to have you cut out this part about COVID and the salmon. However, I am going to pull a brief thing about the salmon to put in front of the intro music.

Hello, friends and neighbors. Welcome back. It's me, Kristina. I am so delighted today to be able to welcome back a very special guest. I have had the opportunity to get to know her quite well over the last couple of years, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about her right now.

This is Erica Jorgensen. Erica is a staff content designer at Chewy.com. She's the author of Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX, published this past April by Rosenfeld Media. She is a content designer, content strategist, and team leader determined to bring greater respect to the content field. In addition to working in content roles for companies of all sizes she's taught at the University of Washington and Seattle's School of Visual Concepts. Erica earned her BA from the University of Connecticut and her MA from the University of Missouri's School of Journalism. In her free time, you can find her exploring Washington State's wineries or hiking with her husband and rescue dog, Rufus, who just made a camera appearance. And Rufus is part chihuahua and part corgi. And Erica informed me that she just sent away for his DNA. So perhaps that is a thing we can add to the show notes once it's received.

Erica, welcome to the Content Strategy podcast.

Erica Jorgensen:

Yes, I'm eagerly awaiting those results. Thank you so much for having me, Kristina. Good morning.

Kristina Halvorson:

Hard hitting, deep dive immediately into what matters here, which is your dog's DNA.

So I always start off my episodes asking my guests to share their journey to content strategy and content design. So I wonder if you want to tell our listeners a little bit about yours?

Erica Jorgensen:

Sure. I'll give you the condensed version. I think like so many in content design, I started in journalism. Worked at the Boston Globe in college. Worked at The Seattle Times, when I moved here to Seattle. And then got a job at a bookstore, an online bookstore, that needed a lot of writing. So a lot of book reviews, a lot of author interviews and that, of course, was Amazon. They had nothing. It was a blank website. They hired workaholics like me to make a website out of nothing.

That's where I really started working in UX, when it wasn't called that at the time. The company grew from selling only books, to you youngsters out there who didn't realize that's how it started. We added different product lines like music and video, and we had to help people navigate the website.

So that's really how I got started in UX and have parlayed that into roles at Expedia, Nordstrom.com. Of course now Chewy and spent about five years at Microsoft, working primarily in content design there.

So just a little bit of everything. A little bit of tech, a lot of e-commerce. But the through line really has been making great content, analyzing it, making sure I know how it's performing and making sure it works with the customers and audience.

Kristina Halvorson:

And we're going to really dig into that today. But before we do, let's just take a step back for a second. You started at Amazon when it was an online bookstore? That was like-

Erica Jorgensen:

1997.

Kristina Halvorson:

1997.

Erica Jorgensen:

1997. It was a couple years old then. I know people who actually worked in Jeff's garage. I worked with people who... employee seven, employee eight. Yeah, so really at the start, when we had to be really, really scrappy, before book publishers were comfortable putting anything online, before the public was comfortable giving their credit card, typing their credit card into a computer. We took orders by fax when I started there. Not everyone. A lot of people did need some handholding. They were not at all comfortable with online shopping and we had to make them comfortable. So we did things like one-click, created features to help people get more comfortable with this thing called shopping online.

Kristina Halvorson:

You know, I actually have a very vivid memory. At the time I was working for a cell phone dealership, just a small outfit. And when I started, it was like the really exciting thing was the Motorola flip phone, which is the size of a large brick, maybe a medium brick.

But I remember my boss, at the time, was so fired up about the Internet and e-commerce. I was just like, "My dude, nobody is ever going to buy a cell phone online. They need to see it. They need to hold it," you know, because I was very wise at the age of whatever, 25, 26.

But I distinctly remember him ordering something online with Amazon and walking into his office, and he's looking at the box like it is... that he's Indiana Jones and he has just recovered this from the Temple of Doom.

I remember him actually unboxing it, and there was careful packaging. There was a note inside. There were clear instructions about ordering online again and he was just like, "This is the way. This is how we're going to be serving customers from here on out."

Amazon really, really leaned into customer experience very early on.

Erica Jorgensen:

Yes. Yes. And fun fact, since we're coming off the holidays, I'm flashing back to the time when the web team, the website, the homepage team, we were sent to the warehouses to pack up books and CDs and videos when they were sold in that kind of format.

We didn't have enough people who would be willing to work in our warehouse, so we had to send our own staff to our warehouses to pack up packages for customers, including Jeff and his then-wife, Mackenzie. They were working the shrink wrap machine. They were working the assembly line to get packages gift wrapped and sent out as fast as possible. 24 hours a day, I was there from midnight to 8:00 AM shift. We did what we had to keep our customers happy.

And, in that way, I think it was great, the camaraderie on the team, we were all there for each other, like, "Oh, my God, can you believe that it's 3 in the morning and here I am in a warehouse."

I thought I was working on a website, but it was really great to have people willing to work with each other that way. And it was all very customer-centric, to the nth degree.

Kristina Halvorson:

You must win best stories at parties sometimes, when you start like, "Oh, yeah. Back in the day, when I was working in a warehouse with Jeff Bezos, it's no big deal." I mean, it's just really something that you were kind of there at the beginning of such a really an historic event, just the launch of this company, which now, of course, I have completely given up on not shopping on Amazon now. I tried.

Erica Jorgensen:

Yeah, it was strange times for sure. And I think we had an inkling of the history we were making. There were so many patents that we applied for. There were so many venture capitalists in the lobby. I think I didn't fully know what was going on. I was 26 and I didn't know what was up.

But I think as things started rolling, the tumbleweed started growing, we were like, "Wow. Something's cooking here."

Kristina Halvorson:

It is just blowing my mind. And I have such vivid memories of that period of time.

I oftentimes on this podcast, will find myself going, "Well, you know, back in the day..." and I try not to do that. But at the same time, I just feel like especially when it comes to content strategy, providing that context of how the conversation started, how the light bulbs went off, like, "Oh, hey. I think we need to not just design a page on the website and then think about the copy," really early on, I just think provides so much important context for where we are today and the sophistication of our tools and our processes and our methodologies, which is a perfect segue to talking about this book that you so very generously have written for the entire field of content strategy and content design.

So can you tell me a little bit about the origins of the book? When did you first start thinking about it? What got you excited about writing?

Erica Jorgensen:

Yeah. Well, back in the day, no, I think it was right before COVID really, I got this inkling of like, well, I'm not getting any younger. What do I want to be known for? What do I want to be remembered for?

So anyway, yeah, so I was doing a lot of workshops at Microsoft on the team. I was working on Office, predominantly, helping sell Office to people around the world and helping the team understand how to use user testing and tools like that to drill down and understand what words are appealing to people, which words are confusing.

And that really, words and phrases level granularity, was really eye-opening. And it got product managers excited. It got leadership excited. I did a lot of reporting out to the CMO and others to help them understand, hey, the words are important here. We are figuring out which ones are ideal. And that is directly driving business impact.

And one of my coworkers, after one of the workshops, I think it was sort of like a development, kind of just like a dev day kind of thing and shared with engineering and others outside of the content team, outside of the content team spreading the love, if you will. And he said, "You have enough in your brain to write a book. You should really get this hour-long workshop and turn it into a book."

And I was like, "No, no, no, no."

And then I was like, "Maybe. Maybe."

And that's where I got the idea. That must've been... Was that like 20... 2020? No, it must have been 2019, because I think it was right around when COVID started, when COVID started. Yeah. But I figured if I couldn't go watch music shows or socialize, I could write a book. So I did that.

Kristina Halvorson:

So talk to me a little bit then about the core concepts that you were interested in capturing in the book. I mean, obviously, I'm going to tell people right up front, "Go buy this book." It is just an absolute treasure trove masterclass in content strategy and content design, developing the research tools and metrics that really, really help to firmly establish value within any size organization. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

But I do want to give you the opportunity, Erica, to talk through what were your core priorities in communicating this information to the masses, really.

Erica Jorgensen:

Yeah. Yeah, well, it did definitely start off as sort of a content testing, content study focused book.

But then, as I wrote it, I was like, well, we got to talk about content clarity here. We have to talk about plain language. We have to talk about making sure your lawyers are involved. There were so many little things that kept bubbling up and I was like, well, this is starting to mushroom. And then it grew and grew from there.

And then, of course, analytics, how to measure the performance, all the different tools you can use.

And then I was thinking, well, gosh, I am privileged here, coming from Microsoft where we have lots of data and lots of analytics. Not everyone has those tools. So what about if you're working for a startup or a smaller company or you're a team of one? How could I convey this information to make it useful to as many people as possible?

So the chapters, several chapters got added, several chapters got expanded. And then it became this 300-page thing, where I hope people can use it as a resource for all things content design and content strategy, specifically how to drive impact and get the attention of your company's leadership, get the attention of your boss's boss and help them understand the impact and importance of content.

Kristina Halvorson:

A theme that we see running through LinkedIn and Slack workspaces and chat boards, et cetera, is, oh, I'm a content designer and I'm so sick of having to establish value within the workplace. And why did they hire me if they didn't understand my value? And I'm tired elbowing my way into meetings, et cetera, et cetera.

What I typically will tell people, in no uncertain terms, is that the work that you have written about, which is about establishing value, which is about helping people understand the power of changes and recommendations for content and content design, that's part of the gig.

Can you talk a little bit about your values there and what you have seen across the organizations that you've worked with? Is it possible for UX writers and content designers to keep their head in the interface and just expect or trust that those metrics are going to... maybe this is the most leading question of all time.

Erica Jorgensen:

Ha ha ha.

Kristina Halvorson:

Not that I don't have an opinion about it, but can you talk a little bit about your perspective and what you've seen over the years?

Erica Jorgensen:

Yeah. I think not only is it important for you, as a content designer or content strategist, to help people understand the direct impact of your work, I think it's also important for morale. And I'm finding this from role to role. I think Expedia did a great job of helping us understand, oh, this word lifted conversion by 3% and that translates to X millions of dollars a year. I think big places I've worked, like enterprise, multinational enterprise companies, do a great job of that.

It's harder for smaller companies to get to that, but you can still extrapolate impact if you are going to do some content testing and see, oh, 80% of people prefer this word over another. It's not statistically significant and therefore not scientifically rigorous if you're coming at it from a UXR/UX research perspective. But it's very hard to quibble with, hey, the majority of our customers prefer this over that, and this is why. The quantitative and qualitative combo is really powerful.

Getting verbatims, getting direct quotes from participants in your studies about why words are appealing to them or not, or why they would click on something or not, goes right into review presentation decks for senior leadership, for monthly business reviews, and things like that. I think it just makes sense.

I also find I personally really need to know about that impact for my well-being. If I'm going to be working who knows how many hours a week, doing content design, which can often be lonely work, I want to know the impact of my work. I want to know that it's making a difference for the business, for the bottom line. And that makes me feel good. I think that's something that I go back to a lot.

Kristina Halvorson:
Erica, I want to go back to something that you said about providing information and value to folks who might be a content design team of one, or folks who are working in extremely siloed organizations who may have trouble finding the right kinds of connections or people or systems who are going to give them the information that they need to be able to demonstrate the kind of value that they want to.

Can you talk a little bit about what advice you would give to those folks? Or things that they can learn about, that will help them on their quest?

Erica Jorgensen:

Definitely. I think one thing I keep going back to, this is super... well, fundamental. Fundamental is the words that you use day after day, you can document them, whether it's in a style guide or your design library. The words that you go back to. And I'm thinking of an example from Chewy. I work on autoship, which is responsible for 80% of our revenue. Do we say, "This is your next order," or "Your upcoming order"? That distinction is huge to customers and can have a direct business impact.

So I like to document, document, document, the words and phrases that are in the designs I'm working on, to a very granular degree, so people know that I'm digging into them. I want to know the voice and tone implications of each choice.

And you don't need analytics tools. You don't need Google Analytics or Adobe Experience Manager or Hotjar or any of the fancy expensive tools that are out there to do that, necessarily.

You can put your thinking cap on and dive in and what you know about your customers and whatever data you might be able to get from your product managers or your company, your brand team, anything. Take what you've got at your disposal and document what you think are the best practices, word-wise, for your content strategy, for your content experience.

That will become a laundry list. That will become very long, very quickly. And if you have the opportunity to validate those word choices with user testing or a tool like that, or partnering with your UX research team to really know for sure, or from doing A-B experimentation to say, "Oh, version A does this, version B does that, and it's 5% or 10% more effective," that's huge. It's kind of scrappy, but it's also fundamental. I find I just can't do my job without having that long, long list of content patterns, content design patterns to go back to.

And, of course, you have to be flexible. Sometimes these change as you learn things about your customers, or maybe your target audience changes. You have to be flexible. It's not set in stone.

But I find that also builds trust with my partner teams. I can share that with product managers. I can share that with engineers, especially if they're building and I'm not available to be there by their side as they're building the product, I can say, "Oh, go to my content design patterns and check out this A-to-Z list of terms for you."

Kristina Halvorson:

What tools do you use to share those?

Erica Jorgensen:

I'm using Confluence right now. You can use Google Docs, a Word doc. If you have a content design library, you are lucky and you can have notations in your content design library of what terms work or not, where I've also used Zeroheight, that's another. It's sort of like WordPress, but better. So people across your organization can access it.

I think the thing that's most important is to make sure that as many people as possible can get into it, that it's not gate kept, or for whatever reason, security team silos. You want to make sure that as many people around your company as possible have access to it, or know how to get a hold of you to find out what's in it. I don't like having things behind gates of... Everyone should be able to access this stuff and that's not always the case.

Kristina Halvorson:

So I want to go back to your book for just a second.

Erica Jorgensen:

Mm-hmm.

Kristina Halvorson:
I'm really interested in hearing you talk a little bit about... I'm not going to put you on the spot and say, "Tell me the difference between content strategy and content design," because I think it's less of a difference and more of a relationship.

But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how... Because I know you think of yourself as a strategist, right? I mean, a lot of people put their design foot forward first. But, of course, I think all designers should be strategists, but that's a whole other conversation.

But I wonder, can you talk a little bit about when you think of your work as strategic, what do you mean?

Erica Jorgensen:

What I mean is that it... Well, this is going immediately to the definition, what I think of as a definition of content strategy, is you're taking the business needs or the business goals and you're overlaying them with your customer's needs, wants, tendencies, preferences.

To get to that, I'm thinking of... I'm visualizing a Venn diagram. Those two things come together, and in the middle, that's where this liminal area is where your work is done, or that's where I think content design, content strategy work is really done.

You can't just make something that's going to be compelling to customers. It has to achieve the business goals, and you can't just function as the arbiter of all things business, because then customers are going to be turned off. So you have to balance those two needs. And that is not easy.

You're also juggling who knows how many stakeholders. I was going through writing my annual review this past week, looking at all the people I collaborate with, and you have to get their voices captured, too, whether it's PMs or partner teams. Your legal lead. Our design library experts. Our accessibility lead. All that input comes into play, too.

And it's this never ending juggling act of, well, what's the most important? What do I need to incorporate most vividly? What can be put on the back burner?

That is diplomacy, and that is a strategic role that's really hard to do.

Of course, we're also often wrangling, being short-staffed and being spread in a million directions and feeling like an octopus. There's that, too.

Focusing on the work that matters the most is important and communicating that to partners is very difficult sometimes. You can't be everywhere at once. You can't be in every meeting if you're supporting multiple teams.

Kristina Halvorson:

Do you think that there are any other roles in design or UX that have to talk to so many different people all the time? Because when I talk about content strategy with my clients, I often am just like, look, this is about connecting the dots across a million different parts of the organization, all of which have an impact on content.

And I have racked my brain. I mean, HR. But I've kind of racked my brain about is there any other role in the design and UX space that has to do that in the same way?

Erica Jorgensen:

Maybe engineering. I think there's a kinship between content design and engineering because they're the ones who end up building the final thing.

But before we get to the engineering point of the work, I do see content design, content strategy as being sort of the glue.

I have to know everyone. I have to know everyone on the team and make the case for the decisions I make. That's really hard. It can be super, super challenging.

But I also see it as a superpower. If you know everyone, they also know you. And you can humblebrag about your work, help them understand the impact of it, help them understand the rationale behind your decision making. And that builds trust, that helps people respect your work, and then see you as the go-to person for decision making.

I would like to see more content designers, content strategists take on chief content officer roles or UX director roles. I see that as a missed opportunity that a lot of companies aren't taking advantage of. For whatever reason, I see more product design leaders getting into those roles. And I think that's a big miss. I think that content people, we see it all. We know it all. We're so close to the customer and we're so close to the business. That's powerful.

Kristina Halvorson:

I won't go into this too deeply, but I do think that we are going to continue over the years to see such a misunderstanding of content within organizations as primarily marketing or it's quote, "just the words," which I know everybody bangs their fists on desks all the time, it's not just the words.

I think a core part of that conversation is sort of helping the larger organization begin to see content, whether it is large pieces of content or words in the interface, as a business asset.

And we've been talking about that for a very long time. I think that the first time I ever heard that phrase actually was from Scott Abel with The Content Wrangler, because they had been, he and Ann Rockley and Rahel Bailie had been talking about structured content way before we ever started to talk about content strategy in UX as a larger field.

Do you feel like the organizations where you're working content... Okay, other than your current organization, which is great and awesome, do you feel that organizations, by and large, really are seeing the content as a business asset? Do you feel like that is shifting at all within the larger milieu? What's your take on that?

Erica Jorgensen:

I don't think so yet.

And I think that might be, if I dare say, maybe the fault of content designers and content strategists for not taking on that business responsibility.

Yes, our roles are creative. Yes, they can be fun. Writing, writers are... We are a truly unique bunch and not everyone has our skillset, but we need to layer the business savviness into our roles to really shine, to really bring that home.

And I think that's... I'm looking back on a 20-year career and I see people who write being relegated to more lesser or minor roles because not all of us are MBAs. Not all of us have that bone in our body. We have to build that muscle to... whether it's comfortable or not, I think to really succeed in our roles.

And I think... My master's degree is in journalism, but there's a heck of a lot of finance and leadership and management in my master's program. And I think that was very, very inspiring to me. I didn't think of myself as needing to worry about that stuff or having to care about it as much as I probably should have, earlier in my career.

I do see Microsoft, my role at Microsoft, content designers were brought into monthly business reviews, quarterly business reviews, to share our work, to share our impact, because we were driving so much of it, because we were responsible for so much of it.

If you're not part of those meetings, part of that influence and impact, you have to bang that drum to make it happen.

Kristina Halvorson:

I'm nodding so violently right now. Can you hear?

Erica Jorgensen:

I can almost hear it. I can almost hear it.

Kristina Halvorson:

Can you hear it?

I know that I've talked about this recently on the podcast. There really is a larger conversation happening in the field of design, that so many folks who came in over the years, we've said, "It is our job to serve the customer. It's our job to represent customer needs. It is our job to protect the user in these interactions and website content," et cetera.

And there's such a swing now to what's good for what customers want and what might feel like is good for customers is not always what's right or good for the business. And that needs to be taken into consideration.

And I really do feel like, in some ways, a core value of our field is clarity and communication and empathy and ensuring customer needs are placed in the center. I wonder if there isn't a sense of like, well, if I start to really weigh or lean into business goals and what we're needing to accomplish there, in some ways I'm worried that I might be selling out. Have you seen that or sensed that?

Erica Jorgensen:

I think maybe that is part of the intimidating nature of getting into that work.

I see it with product designers, too. They're like, "Well, I'm creative. I am in Figma all the time. If I talk numbers and business impact, I'm going to lose my creativity. I'm going to lose my edge."

I don't believe that. I think if you expand your brain power in any way you can, that's... Maybe you don't want to spend all day on that kind of thing and keep your high energy hours of the day for your most creative work, make sure that you're working in a way that's most productive for you. I just don't see how people can avoid it.

And same thing, I look back earlier in my career, like journalism, we would just write a lot of things and we would get letters to the editor. That's how we would know about the impact ever worked.

But being able to get those numbers and digitally and see who's reading what when for how long the depth... the scroll depth, things like that. This is all really empowering and it should make you feel better, knowing the impact of your work, knowing how many people are reading, seeing your content, and then taking action on it. I think that's pretty cool.

And I think we'll probably look back in 10 years and be like, remember when we didn't have all the data we needed to do our jobs? Ha ha. The companies need to keep up and give their employees the tools to get that information. And the companies that are doing that are succeeding.

Kristina Halvorson:

I think the other piece to this, at least from my perspective, is to encourage looking at content design as problem-solving beyond even the user experience, that we're looking at solving for problems and meeting opportunities and challenges so far beyond the work that we are doing in Figma.

And, to me, that feels like such an exciting way to go about the job itself. I mean, that is part of... as a content strategist and focusing on websites and the enterprise, and that is part of what gets me out of bed in the morning, is not just I'm going to get in there, I'm going to be able to write, I'm going to be able to express ideas, but I've got to get in there and solve some complicated problems in order to create and deliver content that is going to exist in the center of that Venn diagram that you described.

So I think that this is one of the many, many things that is so great about your book, is that you really do spend time on sort of helping people identify what is the information that we're looking for? Why are we looking for it? What is the problem statement? And so on.

Erica Jorgensen:

What are your goals? Yeah.

And I'll admit, I was an English major, to my father's chagrin, for undergrad. And then getting a master's in journalism. He was like, "Oh, no."

But the data layer, the math, the information, the performance data is really pretty cool and some of it has much more validity than... I'm trying to think. Like heat maps. There are different ways that you can measure the customer experience. Some are much more actionable than others.

You also need to know what is real and what is not. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to digital analytics and smoke and mirrors and things like that.

And so to know this is what our customers are doing and we know this because X, or we know some customers are doing this because Y, that's pretty cool. And to do something, make a change on your app or your customer experience and then see the numbers change, that's wicked cool. I love it.

Amazon had that. We had this little overlay I boomeranged to Amazon several years back. And we had this overlay on the website, where we could see if you change a headline or change body copy, change a CTA button, you could literally see the seconds click by and the revenue get boosted or negatively impacted by your word choices and your content choices. It was really cool to say, "Oh, I wrote a headline at 9AM. It made $40,000 in 10 minutes. I optimized it at 9:15AM and it started making more money." It's really cool to see that you are empowered to make these really cool things happen.

Kristina Halvorson:

I really would like to... If you are a manager listening to this podcast, I really want to encourage you to encourage your team to look for those numbers and to ask about the numbers and to go and find the data to help inform their activities and efforts, because what you are hearing, straight from Erica, is that that matters and it brings meaning to our jobs and satisfaction and opportunity. And it's just great.

And I'm so grateful that you wrote a book, helping people learn all about it. So thank you.

Erica Jorgensen:

Well, it's smart. And if your PM is the person on your team who has access to that data and they're not sharing it with you or they share it only weekly or whatever, see if you can get a login or sign in to those tools and learn how to use them. A lot of them aren't hard to learn to use. Some of them are like Ferraris and they are a little... you need to get used to them.

But I think it's really cool to see how your engineers are building your AB experiments, how your PMs are writing. They're usually the ones who write the monthly business reports, and the numbers, there are so many numbers that go into that. How many of those numbers are you influencing? Probably more than you know. And that's important in this current climate, where our jobs are hard to come by or there aren't enough of them. We can bring more attention to our work and show there should be as many content designers as product designers on each team. That's my rant. That's my tiny rant.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh, join the chorus, my friend. There are tiny rants and there are big rants, and it is important that you are out there with solutions and reframing things and tools that will empower people. So I really am grateful for that.

Erica, we are out of time. Can you share with me where people can find you online?

Erica Jorgensen:

Sure. I'm on LinkedIn, ejorgensen is my LinkedIn profile name. J-O-R-G-E-N-S-E-N. And I also have a website, EricaJorgensen.com. My book is available from Amazon, but I encourage you to buy it from your independent booksellers, or you can buy it at RosenfeldMedia.com. It's available in ebook format and the old hard copy that's pretty heavy. It's not cheap, but it's big.

Kristina Halvorson:

And it's beautiful, I will say. I'm grateful to have a couple copies here.

Erica Jorgensen:

An investment. Think of it as an investment.

Kristina Halvorson:

It is an investment. It is a lot of timeless information.

Erica, thank you so much for joining us today, and I look forward to seeing you on the interwebs soon.

Erica Jorgensen:

Thank you, thank you, Kristina. Great talking.

Kristina Halvorson:

Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.

About the podcast

The Content Strategy Podcast is a show for people who care about content. Join host Kristina Halvorson and guests for a show dedicated to the practice (and occasional art form) of content strategy. Listen in as they discuss hot topics in digital content and share their expert insight on making content work. Brought to you by Brain Traffic, the world’s leading content strategy agency.

Follow @BrainTraffic and @halvorson on Twitter for new episode releases.