Creating content governance
Process improvement | Brand, voice and style
Summary
Teladoc Health had an editorial style guide, but no process for maintaining it and rogue guides were abundant. This exacerbated inconsistencies in product and marketing content. I established a cross-disciplinary process and forum for inclusive content governance. Over the course of a year, I led committee meetings, documented decisions, researched past processes, audited all guides as well as potential solutions, and developed the process assets.
The challenge
When Teladoc Health acquired Livongo, the product content and marketing teams collaboratively merged their legacy style guides. The result was a lengthy PDF, maintained by two leaders on the marketing team. This solution served the teams’ immediate needs, but was not efficient or user-friendly.
A process to maintain the style guide was never established, and the cross-functional collaboration deteriorated over time. Questions about guidelines and proposals for new entries circulated in isolated Microsoft Teams channels. Decisions were not communicated broadly. The style guide also lacked product-specific direction. This left some rules open to interpretation and exacerbated inconsistencies. Decisions were rarely documented in an official fashion, so when concerns were raised, the teams had to dig to defend them. Even when proposals were raised in an organized discussion using a template for documentation, key stakeholders often didn’t attend. This halted progress in gaining approval.
During my time with OhioHealth, I co-led decision-making for our style guide, and had developed a passion for writing standards and the efficiencies they create. When I joined Teladoc Health and experienced this disorder, I seized the opportunity to create a process that would solve our problems. In doing so, I also uncovered that others had been trying to do the same in siloed pockets of the organization. This resulted in at least 12 separate guides that teams referenced for content production. Yes, 12! Even our product design team independently established content guidelines for components within our design system.
With 12 guides and limited internal knowledge across teams about how to use our preferred guide, it was clear someone needed to tame the chaos.
The solution
I organized a small group of key leaders from the product content and marketing teams, by establishing a biweekly meeting series. As time passed, the committee grew to include representatives from our technical writing, provider communication and Expert Medical Opinion report teams. I created a Confluence page to document our goals, questions and decisions and began conducting an audit of all guides that existed across the organization.
Creating a Confluence page gave us a shared space for us to document our shared goals and questions, and begin an audit.
GOALS
I spent the first few meetings encouraging the team to align on what we hoped to achieve. While we all agreed our first step should be to establish a better style guide maintenance process, I urged the committee to also consider a new solution for housing our rules. A PDF just wasn’t cutting it.
Together, we determined our goals would be:
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Establish a process for maintaining and updating the organization's style rules.
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Consolidate style and standards guides in one online solution with cross-functional value
and access. -
Minimize the level of effort involved in updating the guide.
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Communicate decisions across the organization.
QUESTIONS
I proposed a list of questions we needed to address, clustered around a set of topics:
Stakeholders
Who among us should be responsible, accountable, consulted and informed?
Proposals
Who can propose an update to the guide? Should they use a template? How should proposals and decisions be tracked?
Cadence
How frequently should proposals be reviewed? When would the guide be updated? How often would the style guide be audited?
Communication
What tools would we use for communication and documentation?
Needs:
What various needs must the style guide fulfill, and how do they differ by the team using it? How well were our existing guides, tools or processes meeting our needs?
Source of truth
Should rogue guides defer to the master style guide, or should they be absorbed? Was one solution feasible, or would multiple guides be required to meet the array of needs? What should our guide not do? How would our style guide interface with our fallback guide, the Associated Press Stylebook?
These questions, among others, served as a discussion guide for our committee meetings. Each time we met, we made progress toward decisions that would shape our final process. I also developed a template for collecting input asynchronously from our broader teams. The feedback form asked about the needs, pros and cons of our existing style guides and potential solutions.
AUDIT
In tandem with the committee series, I met with many stakeholders one-on-one or in small-group discussions. Some of these meetings led to the committee growing over time. This is also how we found at least 12 guides governing content production. Thankfully, none were as comprehensive as our shared marketing and product content style guide. This made it easy to recommend it as the source of truth all others should defer to.
The template I created for asynchronous input aided our auditing effort. By crowdsourcing, I combined my evaluations of the pros and cons of each guide with those of many.
ONE TOOL TO RULE THEM ALL
I learned the marketing team was developing a standards guide on the same hosting platform used for our product design system. And our design system already housed some product content guidelines that our style guide lacked. The design system included a link to our shared style guide, but in many cases their component guidelines were inconsistent with our preferred standards.
I wondered, could the design system be expanded as a collective home for all guidelines and standards? Our design system lead had a similar thought, and we decided to join forces in evaluating better solutions.
I created an Airtable to list and prioritize the needs our committee had determined our guide must serve. This served as a tool our design system leads could reference against their own list of needs. The Airtable also served as a space to track notes and comparisons as I began meeting with external solution teams, like Writer, Ditto, Knapsack and more. I was curious to find out whether a solution existed that could not only house our guide but create efficiencies in our workflows with artificial intelligence and plugins for Figma and Microsoft Office.
Knowing the evaluation and procurement process would take time, I encouraged our team to purchase a hybrid AP Stylebook subscription. This allowed us to build our custom style guide into AP Stylebook’s online guide, with a custom URL. Now, the organization has a quick and easy reference point for both guides.
My relentless pursuit of progress gave the organization a new online reference for our custom rules and AP Stylebook.
FINAL DELIVERABLES
The work to consolidate our style and standards guides in one online solution is slow-going and ongoing. But I successfully shepherded the committee through accomplishing our primary goal. We now have a process for maintaining and updating our organization’s style rules, and supporting assets.
THE PROCESS
The final process is the result of deep, cross-functional collaboration and nearly a year of regular discussions. After we answered all of the questions I’d outlined at the start, my co-lead and I set about writing the final document. A few key tenets emerged and were carried throughout it:
Inclusivity: Assigning one or two experts from our team to make informed decisions would have been simple. But Teladoc Health is a wildly complex organization, with several nuanced products. Even with the best intent, a few people would likely miss important context that should influence how we communicate with our users. Instead, we developed a RACI matrix, with at least one R or A from each key discipline — product content, marketing, brand, design, user research, clinical and member support. Representatives from legal, product and health equity were designated consulted or informed, as needed. Responsible and accountable stakeholders are expected to attend a quarterly discussion where proposals are discussed, or delegate to a consulted or informed member of their team. This ensures we have a quorum of diverse voices for a productive review and approval. We also welcome and encourage proposals from anyone in the organization. Good ideas come from everywhere, not only content experts.
Clear documentation: A proposal template always existed for style guide suggestions. But it was not consistently used and lacked space for approval documentation. I refreshed the template, to ensure it captured all the necessary information for making an informed decision. I added a section to document the final decision and collect sign-off from responsible and accountable stakeholders. This gives us something to point to if questions arise in the future.
Proposals will now be tracked in a shared spreadsheet, used for planning each quarterly meeting agenda, status updates and a historical record.
Flexibility: While a formal process provides many benefits, rigidity is caustic. We recognized that some decisions need to be made quickly, and provided allowances for that. Key stakeholders are available for ad-hoc meetings during the quarter, or to weigh in by email when necessary. Decisions to keep work moving forward in the moment are documented, then tabled to revisit for final approval at a quarterly meeting in the future.
Some proposals may even skip discussion at a quarterly meeting if it’s so well-documented and broadly supported that it does not warrant deeper discussion. Asynchronous review and sign-off are still required.
Shared access to tools: While tools like Miro, Figjam, Figma or Airtable offer greater capabilities and are more enjoyable to use, we selected Microsoft Office products for our process documents. This ensures that any team in the organization can access them.
SUPPORTING ASSETS
I created and maintain the following assets, now with support from a direct report on my team:
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RACI matrix, listing representatives and their role.
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Proposal template, to standardize how style guide suggestions are discussed, supported and documented for historical reference.
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Proposal tracking sheet, to follow the status of proposals and serve as a historical record of documentation and decisions.
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Microsoft Teams channel, to serve as a cross-functional space for clarifying questions, idea-sharing and inspiration.
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Style Guide Sharepoint, to house process and proposal documents.
The outcome
Developing this process involved many people, and the outcome still does. When the process was finalized and approved by our key stakeholders, we took it on a roadshow.
The share-out led to stronger connections with our design system team. I provide regular input for new components and content guidance.
I scheduled and hosted our quarterly proposal discussions for a year. In that time, we updated the guide top-to-bottom and ushered in many new proposals, including date and time standards, actionable language in products, provider-facing terminology, and metric and imperial units for localization.
I mentored a direct report on my team to lead the process and support me and our design system team in exploring better long-term style guide solutions. It’s looking like we may even home-grow or own! Together, we are auditing our style guide and design system guidelines, to identify gaps and opportunities. We will develop a broader library of standard content variants for commonly used components and scenarios, like error messages and notifications. Eventually, the guide will also house new guidance I’ve produced for our chatbot and product notifications, like email, SMS and secure messaging best practices.