T-Suite Podcast: Content at the speed of Agile with Meredith Volk

Recently, I worked with a large tech company to help its marketing department adopt Agile practices. There were many business reasons for implementing Agile, but a big one was to keep pace with new product releases. Of course, there were other reasons, like staying ahead of the competition, filling the sales pipeline faster with higher quality leads.

Coordinated content

My client is a respected market leader in their content quality and the frequency at which they put that content out. Content teams have to integrate with product owners, partners, legal, content writers, video producers, agencies, and many more.

All of that coordination must happen with a rhythm that keeps pace with the industry and meets standards their customers have come to expect. Now, multiply all that content development by hundreds of times, and you can see that remaining Agile can make or break your content flow.

When you implement Agile, you are not necessarily saying, “Let’s remove x number of people from the team.” You are usually asking, “How can we deliver more customer delight faster?” When you ask that type of question, you have to (pardon the overused term) lean out old antiquated processes. Adopting Agile also means driving more team accountability and management stepping out of the way so those teams can operate more independently.

Bootstrapping content development

Agile

My client is lucky in that their budgets allow them to adjust their organizational structures and hire large teams. Those teams can also work with the product teams to align content schedules with the release of new product features and capabilities

For smaller companies that are growing quickly and competing with established players, it is not as easy. They have to deliver a product that is of high quality, offering more unique features and provides robust and useful documentation.

You will often hear of engineering departments using CI/CD (or continuous improvement and continuous development). That CI/CD process allows software engineers to make changes quickly and near-instantly send a new feature into production code. Some companies will even release new features daily.

Talking with Meredith Volk

Today’s T-Suite Podcast guest is Meredith Volk. As a manager of technical content strategy, she transformed her team to work in an Agile-first, CI/CD environment. You will learn how they keep track of changes, integrate their processes with software development, and align to fast-paced product changes.

You can reach Meredith Volk via email.

Special thanks to Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, for introducing me to Meredith.

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