Gen AI innovation

Generative AI: A journey of early adoption and innovation

Preface
The content in this article was initially planned in the summer of 2022, with the goal of using the content to pre-record a customer Q&A session with Writer’s co-founder and CEO, May Habib. It was a way for Writer to tell their customer stories in a post-Covid world. The feature focuses on me and content design at BILL, to be published on Writer’s website and posted on LinkedIn. By May 2023, I was able to get the content finalized internally, but the interview never materialized. Much to my dismay, I was unable to get the official “sign-off” from the BILL communications team. And I never closed the loop with May. The unfinished interview remains a lingering regret for me to this day.

BILL was one of the early adopters of Writer (I brought it into BILL when Writer was still Qordoba), and I was proud to have lead the effort to introduce, vet, and launch it within the organization. Writer was instrumental in transforming how we approached content consistency, creating a unified content style guide, and establishing strategic practices across various writing teams at BILL. This foundational work has left a lasting impact on BILL and positioned Writer as a critical partner in our success.

Since those early days, Writer as a company has continued to soar like a rocketship, gaining widespread attention for its innovations and achievements. It’s exciting to see how far the platform has come, and its trajectory is proof that there can be tremendous value in early adoption.

I’ve decided to publish this story—unedited and unchanged—as it captures an important moment in my career and reflects on the beginnings of a transformative tool. The current relevance of this story will be the focus of a future article. For now, it’s a retrospective look at the challenges and breakthroughs of scaling content practices and fostering innovation.

May Habib: Tell me about your role and team at BILL.
Me: I manage the BILL product content design team. I was hired to establish, grow, and scale the product content practice at BILL. When I started in September 2019, I inherited 1 UX writer who had been with the company for 7 years. She was the only UX writer for all those years! It’s amazing how there was only 1 writer supporting all our product domains. It was very commendable, and she didn’t complain. But long term, we needed to have a strategy to help us scale for the future. A lot of the content requests came through JIRA, but as we expand our product, that wouldn’t be sustainable for the long term. We needed to add more discipline and rigor to our content practice.

I would say that the key areas of focus just before I joined was on what we consider the core function of our product, which is processing and paying bills and invoices. Another domain that content covered was international payments. As a lone UX writer, I can imagine how daunting it could be to get a deluge of JIRA ticket requests. In order for content to be seen as strategic partners in the design process, we needed to be more proactive and get in front of those JIRA requests. That meant prioritizing the work based on what’s most important in the product roadmap. Resourcing needed to be addressed.

At the end of the day, if we have 18 things that are considered priorities, but we only have enough resources to focus on 7 things, then we need to prioritize the work. I would say that there was some semblance of a content practice that existed, but having 1 content designer supporting multiple product domains was a big challenge. As the design discipline started to take shape, it became more apparent that they needed to hire a manager to add more rigor to the content discipline.

Defining our product content practice meant creating a mission and vision:

The mission of BILL is to make it simple for small and midsize businesses to connect and do business. Under our company mission we wanted to create a product content mission and vision.

Mission
To help customers get things done as quickly and painlessly as possible. How? By creating content that's useful and straightforward, and brings continuity to the product experience. We want to help customers understand, use, and learn. Though we prefer clarity over clever, we occasionally like to add delight by being joyful.
Vision
We're about big-picture thinking, but also understand the importance of focusing on the details. And we don't just write words; we like to tell stories; we create frameworks and guidelines to meet our customers where they are—delivering the right content, at the right place, at the right time.

Over the last year, we’ve hired 3 content designers, scaling how we cover our product domains so that our content designers are more embedded in our Agile teams. This means supporting higher-priority initiatives. For example, one of the first initiatives where we embedded content is with our bank partners. This means having content specialized and involved much earlier and more often. We wanted content to play a role in helping to define how we design the experience. This is how we’ll be recognized as strategic partners. The BILL product has a lot of layers, and having this embedded structure helps make sure that we can learn and grow with our partners as the product evolves.

May Habib: You've been a content strategist since before it became a thing. What's the most unexpected turn the field has taken in your view?
Me: Although this unexpected thing hasn’t happened yet, I’m excited about the industry moving towards having content designers playing the lead in designing product experiences. This is really flipping today’s paradigm of visual/interaction designers playing the lead roles. For content designers, this means supporting fewer initiatives so that we can focus our efforts on designing.

Let me explain further. In all the companies I’ve worked for—big and small—the number of product designers supporting product managers is close to 1:1. In contrast, the number of content designers supporting product managers is more like 1:4 or 1:5.

That’s a substantial difference. If this content designer to product manager ratio gets closer to 1:1 in the next few years, then that certainly would be a very unexpected thing for me.

May Habib: Tell us about your tech stack at BILL
Me: We use many tools and platforms today—Figma, Google Suite, Microsoft Suite, Zendesk, Contentful, to name a few. This means having an eclectic mix of things, which is common in many organizations.

But that’s okay. When you come into an organization, it’s natural that company-wide systems have already been put in place, and you can’t come in and just change things. That’s simply unrealistic.

Bringing in Writer was really one of the key steps we’ve taken to help us bridge the content gap. There’s a lot of people that create content at BILL—writers and non-writers alike. Our content producers use Writer at the front end, and what we’re doing in parallel is trying to improve our processes for how we define, implement, and measure our content at the organization level.

May Habib: What are some of your key content challenges there?
Me: When I started at BILL, there were very few centralized discussions about content in the organization. The conversations were happening, but they were happening in silos without the cross-team collaboration and visibility needed. In order to help rectify that, I met with my product, engineering, and product design partners to better understand the content climate and did a content audit. Through those many discussions 2 key themes emerged:

There was no clear and consistent voice in our customer communication. (This was really about making our voice and tone more consistent).
There was no transparency into what other content creators were doing. (This was really about bridging those internal connections).

Those 2 themes really go hand in hand and can’t exist without the other. Why was our voice and tone inconsistent? We had a style guide. And if there was no visibility into what other content creators were doing, how come? And why was no one talking about it?

As far as style guides were concerned, I found out that the 3 key content functions in the organization (Marketing, Product, and Customer Support) had their individual content style guides! To solve the consistency and transparency challenges, someone needed to start the conversation.

So literally within 2 weeks of when I started at BILL, I created a “Content Committee” Slack channel and invited team members whom I had met through 1:1s. There was representation from marketing, product, and customer success. Here’s the Slack channel description:

“For the greater content good! A forum for content collaboration.”

In my eyes, those 3 business functions are what really makes up the true end-to-end product experience, and it was essential that there was representation from all of those business functions. Getting the collective support from this core group would help to facilitate ideas and make content successful as a whole at BILL. The Content Committee really became the launching pad for Writer.

Today, our Content Committee has grown from its humble beginnings, and it continues to grow. Recently, we added our risk and operations team to the group. We meet twice a month and talk content shop:

Do we have any updates to our content style guide?
What’s going on in our respective domains that’s worth sharing?
Hear from guest speakers

May Habib: What’s the most controversial thing you all have tackled?
Me: I’d say 2 things:

Although content inconsistency wasn’t exactly a secret, the Content Committee may have gone out on a limb when we did our very first cross-functional assessment of customer content across the organization. We communicated to our leaders that there’s a lot of content that’s being created at BILL, and we have some work to do to make things consistent.
The other is the mere fact that we established a global content style guide. It may seem innocuous, but now that there’s a cross-functional group that’s established specific guidelines, content standards have become “official,” if you will. So for those who aren’t used to being told that the copy they’re writing doesn’t follow our style guide, there could be some ruffling of the feathers.

For example, numerical dates. Using the format of month/day/year is only accurate in the US, so we codified using the first 3 letters of the month, followed by the day (with no leading zeros), then the 4-digit year. We actually got some pushback, and that’s how we were able to expand the style for numerical dates.

The Content Committee is a coming together of sorts for content practitioners across the organization with a common purpose, so for those folks that are outside looking in, our intentions for the most part are seen as good.

May Habib: How have you used Writer to help with the consistency challenge?
Me: As I mentioned, there’s a lot of people from different teams that create content at BILL—writers and non-writers alike. So the question is, how do we bring consistency and transparency to content creation at BILL?

I used the Content Committee to help champion and vet Writer. It took several months, soup to nuts. Starting the conversation, exploring other platforms, building the business case, getting the budget, etc. Doing all this within the purview of the Content Committee certainly made it a lot easier because of the collective support.

Consistency is essential when it comes to content governance. I didn’t mention this, but before the Content Committee and Writer, we had 3 separate style guides—1 for marketing, 1 for product, and 1 for customer success. So we needed to operate more efficiently than that.

Writer was instrumental in helping to bring content consistency. Meaning, we needed to aggregate our 3 style guides and have 1 unified, global content style guide to use as the recommendation engine for Writer. My team took this on and worked with our brand marketing and customer success partners to make it happen. It involved reconciling the 3 style guides and aligning on the updates with the Content Committee over several weeks.

Being a smaller company, we needed a content governance tool to help us scale. We don’t have the luxury of hiring an army of writers. Looking for a company-wide platform was necessary. That’s where Writer came into play. We looked at other solutions, but none could give us the power and flexibility of Writer. And because we deal with financial data, it helped tremendously that Writer had all the Soc2 and data privacy certifications our information security team required. Moving forward, we also wanted a partner that could grow with us.

I recall early on at the Content Committee level people talking about Writer, and how it would be great to have such a tool. My team happily stepped in to champion it through our organization to get cross-functional buy-in, and we worked with Writer’s account team to make it happen. And here we are today.

May Habib: What has the impact been of solving the consistency challenge?
Me: We still have work to do, but we’re on the exciting journey of establishing consistency with our content.

Writer has been a huge conversation starter to get the ball rolling. We’ve implemented the tool for a small number of users, and generated more interest from other teams, even our engineering team, who write technical, customer-facing content.

All the foundational work we’ve created—the Content Committee, aggregating our style guides, and launching Writer—have caught the attention of our leadership at BILL, including founder and CEO, Rene Lacerte. And they’ve tapped into the Content Committee to help drive a company-wide effort. It’s a content accuracy and alignment initiative, and this move just elevated content across the organization. We have a leadership committee composed of top-level leaders. I partnered with our knowledge base content manager and presented our work and plans to the leadership committee. It’s an exciting time to be at BILL where content has been elevated and recognized like never before!

Beginning in the second half of FY21, I’m spearheading an effort to identify KPIs to track how content is making an impact in the product experience. In other words, how is content driving results, and how do we report those results more broadly? It’s about being more strategic and influencing our partners about the real value that content brings to the table.

For example, now that we have a global content style guide, how do we start to enforce and propagate it across the organization?

Which teams are using the style guide and how do we measure frequency and consistency?
How can we further socialize the style guide?

This also means finding areas where we can have quick wins and impacts. For example, our payment and risk operations team communicates directly with customers. We can easily run all of their legacy content through Writer, for starters.

Net-net, we continue to make great strides to help move the content cause forward.

May Habib: It might be fun to ask about content strategy and customer success content because I think you’re at the forefront of that.
Me: If you’re creating a content strategy for any org, I strongly feel that customer success content is par for the course. That’s been my experience in the past, so I don’t feel that we need to debate the topic. At Intuit, the content team has a self-help team that writes and publishes articles and information for QuickBooks Online customers. That’s essentially the same role that our customer success team at BILL has, so the content we publish at should be integrated and consistent.

Today, customer success, product design, and product management all ladder up to our customer experience organization, which is a testament to the importance of consistency. Again, all the foundational work we’ve laid down through the Content Committee has placed a conscious emphasis on our efforts to keep all the content pieces cohesive.

Closing thoughts
Looking back, the work we did with Writer wasn’t just about scaling content; it was also about trying to drive meaningful change across the organization. It’s been an honor to be part of that journey, and I can’t help but feel proud to see Writer continue to make waves in the Generative AI space. This story has taught me that the tools we champion are more than mere “platforms.” They can be catalysts for transformation, innovation, and enduring impact. I see a bright future for content design.