Nicole Michaelis: Thoughtful Content Design Leadership – Episode 180

Content Strategy Insights

Nicole Michaelis Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep and varied experience to her content design work. Like all of us, she is pondering how to best use AI in her practice and wrestling with the impacts of layoffs and other change in the content and design professions. Despite the current challenging business and labor environment, she's hopeful for the future and offers encouragement to both current and future content designers. We talked about: her current concerns and focus as a content design leader the broad-reaching impact of AI on content design, in particular how it can make our jobs more interesting her hope that AI may permit her and other human-centered designers to actually spend more time with the humans using the products she works on her explorations of the possibilities of AI helping with personalization her impressions of the benefits of AI in writing briefs and copy how they train AI models on glossaries, tone, and voice the paradoxical intersection of the ideas that transparency is crucial when working with AI but also that the boundary line about where to credit GPT for your work is fuzzy the unexpected impact of her post last year entitled Why I No Longer Believe in Content Design, which resulted in both support from other content-design leaders but also some criticism that felt unduly harsh and overlooked her deep and diverse professional background her encouragement for folks who are job hunting or looking to get into the content-design field Nicole's bio Nicole Michaelis is the Content Design Lead at Wolt/Doordash and runs the Content Rookie pod. She’s into authentic leadership, questioning any best practice, and figuring out how to scale all the benefits of content design across large product orgs, while not losing focus on what really matters: the people who can benefit from the product. She lives in Sweden where she relaxes with all things #nature, pottery and running. Connect with Nicole online Content Rookie podcast LinkedIn Medium Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/WJJDO5-03p8 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 180. The field of content design attracts professionals from a variety of backgrounds and brings them together in one of the most cohesive and generous communities that I've ever been a part of. As AI sucks the oxygen out of the room and companies discard content talent at an alarming rate, we need all of the camaraderie and generosity that we can muster. Nicole Michaelis brings a thoughtful leadership style and deep professional experience to these challenging times. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode Number 180 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today. Welcome back to the show, Nicole Michaelis. Nicole is one of the best-known content leaders, I think, in the field. She works for a big product company. And welcome, Nicole. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Nicole: Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me again. It's been a while, I think. Definitely an episode under the hundreds, so I'm very excited to be back. Yeah, what am I up to these days? So I'm a content design leader at a big product company, like you said, and I generally reflect a lot. And I recently wrote an article about my content design focus areas for the year, because I think it's really, really important to pick a couple of main focus points so you not get too scattered and too excited about too many different things. And actually, it's also relatively new to me to be a lead. Originally, when I got this role, I was hired just as a staff content designer. And then after just a couple of weeks, my boss said, "Hey, you have what it takes to lead this discipline here." Nicole: They promoted me to lead. And since then, I've been hiring and firing,