Product management. Design leadership. Product content strategy
I am Vinish Garg, and I work with growing product teams for their product strategy and vision, product positioning, product onboarding and UX, and product content design strategy. I work on products in the UX and design leadership roles, product content strategy and content design, and sometimes in the product management roles.
I work with teams and functions to establish the standards and systems for a content driven UX and design by following a system thinking approach to the products.
Know about me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, Product Hunt, and Slideshare.
Founders are too close to the product and the functional leaders often fail to align their core competencies and motivations to take the product vision forward collectively.
Many years ago when I worked as a content strategist and a designer, I often wondered if I could contribute to the product strategy itself. At the early stage of any project, I am most curious about:
A fast paced course for product content strategists, content designers, UX writers, and content-driven UX practitioners.
I own a UX and content strategy conference in Chandigarh where international guests share their experiences and insights.
I enjoying working with leaders and teams who are willing to explore, learn, and grow to have a shared and focused understanding of what makes our work meaningful for all of us. I can lead the teams, define standards and systems, set up actionable plans for operational velocity, and make it work with pilot wins to have the right evidence early in the work.
A few of recent posts are:
Since 2015, I host industry experts and leaders in content strategy and folks who work on the intersection of design and content.
I speak at the industry events in UX, design, and content. I am looking for speaking opportunities in products and systems as well. My recent talks:
I have set up a focus group on Slack, to build conversations that impact our work, our career, our portfolio, our success metrics, and our working frameworks. The Slack workspace name is Outcome and Meaning.
If you use Miro, you can see a unified view of my experience and my approach to work in this Miro board (opens in a new tab in Miro).
A UI engineer to me: "Can you teach me UX?"
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) December 15, 2021
Me: "Be prepared to learn journalism, politics, art, and be more difficult to work with."
When teams get into the mode that they are waiting for the instructions.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) October 25, 2020
They: We have a design team of 40+ and we are designing incredible experiences for global enterprise solutions, and for growing startups.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) December 26, 2019
Me: It is a myth.
They: Why?
Me: You cannot do it because you do not have a single content strategist or content designer in the team.
As if a life.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) February 20, 2020
Many new products have a busy interface. Too many icons and inline actions to edit, assign, move, fix, reorganize, restructure!
There is a trade-off between "what they may need" and "what they need". #UX is all about identifying the small margins in trade-off.
I see many teams who talk about 'UX maturity' without a single content strategist around. One or two UX writers in the team is a such a one-dimensional way to process the UX maturity. Sorry. #design #uxdesign #contentstrategy
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) January 24, 2021
Build confidence to build conversations by being available, and by reaching out to others to understand, discuss, and then *document* the operating principles for how the org works, how the team works in core or certain situations, how the decision models shape up.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) January 29, 2022
They: "Why we call it content design if it is about the words and language?"
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) January 17, 2022
Me: "Send me your project report, the plan, analysis, and steps in a single text file. Can you?"
Content is message, framing, communication. It needs to be structured and packaged. Content design.
Design for moments.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) December 30, 2020
In design, users' goals are overrated. We design for
(a) what the customer might want to do
(b) what the org wants the customer to do
(c) what the customers might actually end up doing
Users live and interact for the moment, the goal is the natural outcome
When designers try to get into systems approach of designing, for strategy, leadership, or communication, I guess they need to get more into business side of design for a wider perspective of why org exists as a system. To communicate it to junior designers is a bit of challenge.
— Vinish Garg (@vingar) May 20, 2021