Building the discipline, not just the deliverables
Across most of my career, I've joined organisations where content design existed in some form or another but hadn't yet been established or embedded into the design process as a discipline.
There was content: app copy, text messages, and website pages. But there were no consistent standards, no clear process for when content design should be involved, and no shared understanding of what it actually is.
The challenge is rarely the content itself. It's the conditions that produce it.
Getting those conditions right, like the processes, the standards, the relationships, and the culture, is what determines whether good content design is possible at scale, and if it has any real influence on the products being built.
Here's what I've done to build those conditions at two different organisations.
Suvera: building from scratch
When I joined Suvera as the organisation's first dedicated content designer, I started from zero.
Before I could design anything, I needed to build the foundations that would make consistent, high-quality content possible across the whole organisation, and not just in the design team.
That meant writing content standards covering tone of voice, accessibility, and how to write for different contexts within the product. It meant establishing a content design community and ways of working across product, design, marketing, and clinical teams to create a shared language and a common understanding of what good content looks like and why it matters. It meant running training sessions and creating resources to help people write better content, even when I wasn't in the room.
The reach of that work extended further than I initially expected. Beyond the content producers and designers, it shaped how copywriters in the marketing team approached their work and, crucially, how our pharmacists communicated with patients.
Pharmacists regularly wrote messages to patients after appointments, and after training on our tone of voice principles, those messages became clearer, warmer, and more consistent with the rest of the app experience. That's the influence of content design in a place most content designers never reach.
The most meaningful outcome was the shift from content being called in at the end ("Can you write the copy for this?") to being part of conversations at discovery, when problems were still being defined. That change takes time and relationship-building, but it's the one that outlasts any individual project.
Lloyds: changing how designers work together
At Lloyds, the starting point was different. Content design existed, but often sits in a separate lane from UX design. Each discipline works in relative isolation, converging later in the process rather than shaping things together from the start.
I've changed that by shifting my team and two design squads toward a model focused on experience design: UX and content aren't separate specialisms who hand off to each other, they're collaborative experience designers who are all needed at the table from the beginning.
When we're deciding how users move through a space, both voices need to be in the room because structure affects language, and language affects structure.
In practice, this means UX and content designers ideate and wireframe together from the outset. We develop structural and content decisions in parallel, not in sequence. And we present as a single design voice from a unified perspective on the experience we're building, rather than as separate disciplines defending their own work.
The results have been concrete! Working this way has significantly improved our delivery pace: fewer handoff delays, less rework, faster iteration.
The quality of our output has also been recognised, with our squad rated the strongest in our Lab out of the ten total squads, and our ways of working have since been adopted by the other teams.
Perhaps the most telling signal, though, is internal. The way we work now has produced genuinely honest, productive relationships between designers, and our team has one of the highest satisfaction scores in Lloyds' regular wellbeing and engagement surveys.
Building great design culture and building great products turn out to be the same work.
What I’ve learned
Building content design into an organisation isn't a one-time project. It has to be maintained deliberately, and it's always at risk of unravelling when priorities shift, or people leave.
The most important thing I've learned is that culture change happens through relationships and repeated demonstration, not through documents alone. Standards matter. Communities matter.
But the thing that actually changes how people work is showing, consistently and over time, what's possible when content is involved early. As well as making it as easy as possible for others to replicate that, so the change doesn't depend on one person to sustain it.