Scaling Team Impact

Discovery

I sat down and reviewed a year’s worth of JIRA tickets, cataloging the requests, noting the time spent to fulfill them, and searching for patterns. What emerged was that we spent considerable time creating specialized, custom content for different clients. While this made those select clients happy, the impact was relatively small.

The team needed their focus back, but we didn’t want to leave departments with strategic business needs, like Client Success, out to dry. So the question was: how could we enable teams to create their own on-brand, high value content without involving Content Design every time? 

Option 1: Decision tree

I sat down with Client Success, whose requests took several hours of one Content Designer’s time (often even multiple days when fully tallied), to brainstorm how we could help them. Our first idea was to create a decision tree, which would help Client Success think through their asks before passing them to Content Design. Even in Lucidchart, this started to feel messy. 

The issue with the decision tree route was that it didn’t actually enable Client Success to create their own content. It just helped them help us—but we doubted it would actually be more efficient.

Option 2:
Self service

So, what would  it take to help Client Success create content our team felt comfortable with? Well, they’d need a flexible design that was hard to mess up, and specific instructions on how to write like Collective Health. And that’s what we created. The one-pager templates offer several types of templates to choose from, with info on each about what kind of message should go in that area. It’s like paint-by-numbers for content design. 

Seeing it in practice

Our first big experiment with these new tools happened during Collective Welcome’s Open Enrollment. We wanted to create 9-12 one-pagers with detailed content on specific topics that clients could send to members. But with my plate full creating other Open Enrollment materials, we organized subject matter experts, and were delighted with the results.