Web content capabilities
Hello leaders of content teams. How are you feeling about describing your team members' responsibilities? Over the past couple of years, I have noticed more and more nuance come into this space. And while that is not a bad thing, it can also add a layer of confusion.
In an attempt to help, I want to share this model for carving up content capabilities in medium to large web teams.
I have identified three groups:
The first takes a micro approach, focussing on publishing and individual pages.
The second takes a middling approach with a focus on sections of pages and how they work together.
The third takes a macro approach focussing on the organisation's goals.
To figure out if this categorisation works for your team, have a look at the tasks I have allocated to each level.
As you can see there are clear increments in terms of task complexity and scale. Level 1 includes mostly tactical, and mechanical tasks, while level 3 includes mostly executive management and strategic systems mapping tasks.
This might not be quite right for your team, but it should be a good starting point for you to map it from.
You can download this slide as a PDF at the bottom of this page, with some bonus slides about staffing ratios, cost and changes over the project duration.
Initially, I was going to label these levels as content creation, content analysis and content strategy. These names kind of work, but I think they are also restrictive. They fail to acknowledge that many people work across these three competencies - something we (as leaders) want to encourage as it helps us support job satisfaction, talent growth and risk mitigation.
I presented these ideas at Utterly Content in 2023.
