Matt Hayes: Enterprise-Scale Content Design at LinkedIn – Episode 176

Content Strategy Insights

Matt Hayes Matt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team. The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization. Among the secrets to their success: democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues. We talked about: his work as a Staff Content Designer at LinkedIn the impact of the arrival of generative AI his take on place for AI in the content-design world the democratization of content guidance at LinkedIn how they triage content-guidance decision-making at LinkedIn how they communicate changes to their content-design guidance to design system staff and other users of the guidance an example of typical content design deliberation process his take on the differences between IC (individual contributor) roles and management roles, and the role of leadership in both Matt's bio Matt Hayes works as a content designer, currently with LinkedIn where he has led content design for enterprise products, launched their content design guidelines, and kept Post-it Note in business. Previously he has led content design for Deloitte Digital, spoken at several design conferences, and written long-form editorial for outdoor industry publications. Matt enjoys helping product teams solve design problems, mostly through language, and has discussed European cycling with Pablo Escobar’s brother over lunch in Medellin. Connect with Matt online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/VxzqeaDypPo Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 176. The content design team at LinkedIn is small by industry standards, especially when you look at the number of products they support and the size of the overall organization. Matt Hayes and his colleagues have to be truly strategic to ensure that their content work makes the outsized contribution that it must. They do this by democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 176 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Matt Hayes. Matt is a staff content designer at LinkedIn. Welcome, Matt. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to at LinkedIn these days. Matt: Hey, good morning, Larry. Thanks for having me on today. Man, yeah, LinkedIn right now, we are going full bore onto some AI projects. We're trying to elevate the user experience in general. I've been working on the enterprise side mostly, and yeah, just really trying to help people, hire people, hire the best people as quick as possible, and yeah, that's what we're working on at LinkedIn right now. Larry: Now, we didn't talk about it in our run-up to the show, but you mentioned AI and all of a sudden I'm like, "Oh, duh. It's a thing these days." What's cooking with AI at LinkedIn, especially as it pertains to content design? Matt: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting time because generative AI is very good at writing very mediocre words. So we have this big, I think across the tech space right now, there's this big question of how is this going to change word generation basically. Is AI going to be able to do it all for us? Is it going to take over interface content jobs? Is it going to take over blog post writing jobs? Is it going to turn out the exact same thing for every topic and it's going to be really see-through that it's generated by AI and no one's going to want to read it? Are we going to have, on social media sites, are we going to have bots creating posts and then bots writing a response to those bot-cr...