Barbara Blythe: Content Design Operations at Cisco – Episode 181

Content Strategy Insights

Barbara Blythe Most enterprises and software companies now have design systems, and many have content operations and/or design operations teams. At Cisco, Barbara Blythe works on the content design operations team. She focuses on sharing content guidance across the products she serves, enabling not only content designers but also their UX design and engineering partners to efficiently create consistent product content. We talked about: her content design ops work at Cisco how content design ops differs from content ops their cross-functional approach to empowering designers and engineers, as well as content folks, to use the content design system her involvement in the design of new bots to govern voice and tone and style her thoughts on how AI might affect content design ops some of the benefits, beyond consistency and the efficiency, of using a content design system how systems like hers permit content designers to focus more on content strategy and other work that may be more impactful than surface-level UX writing some of the work she does to evangelize their content design system Cisco's federated model of integrating their many design systems how they share content practice lore across Cisco her advice for folks interested in creating a content design system Barbara's bio Barbara was a Classics professor for six years before transitioning from academia to tech. As a content designer specializing in content design ops and content design systems, she creates tools that help content designers, UX designers, and engineers create consistent product content more efficiently. She designed and built a content design system for Cisco’s CX Cloud and PX Cloud products, and she’s now expanding it and developing ways to use tools like AI integrations to make it even easier to use. Barbara lives in Virginia Beach, where she enjoys birdwatching, gardening, and growing shiitake mushrooms. Connect with Barbara online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/H-Aoqwmzux4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 181. Over the past decade or so, enterprises and startups have adopted design systems and built teams to scale their design operations. In a few places, those practices have come together in content-specific design operations. Barbara Blythe works on the content design ops team at Cisco. As in many modern enterprises, there are never enough content designers to serve all of their needs, so Barbara's operation focuses on empowering cross-functional partners to also work with content. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 181 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show, Barbara Blythe. Barbara is a senior content designer at Cisco, big hardware manufacturer you may have heard of, probably runs half the internet stuff you're doing every day. But welcome, Barbara. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Cisco. Barbara: Yeah. So thanks, Larry. It's great to be here. So at Cisco I'm working on CX Cloud and PX Cloud, which are SaaS products that give network administrators a unified view of their network assets along with insights and analytics. And I specialize in content design ops. So over the past about two years, I've been working on building a content design system and I can talk in a little bit more about what I mean by that because I think it means something a little different to everyone who's building them. Barbara: Now I'm really expanding it and trying to find ways to increase adoption and trying to find ways to use tools like say AI chatbot integrations to make it easier to use for people who might be, say, a little reticent to dive into a style guide or to sort of sift through documentation. What are some ways that we can make it easier to use these tools.