Scaling content consistency and accuracy: A strategic framework
At BILL, delivering a seamless and trustworthy product experience depends on our ability to achieve content consistency and accuracy at scale. With our growing SaaS product, it’s critical to have systems in place that empower internal teams to create, manage, and iterate on content efficiently. Our Content Systems initiative is designed to address that need through strategic investments that align product design, content design, and engineering efforts.
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Content Systems overview
The Content Systems initiative focuses on integrating key tools and processes that standardize content creation and delivery. By centralizing our content infrastructure, we ensure that all teams—from product managers to designers to engineers—are equipped to produce high-quality, consistent content. Our strategy is anchored around three primary investments:
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Content Style Guide + Design System integration
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Contentful Content Management System (CMS)
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Writer Generative AI writing platform
Investment area 1: Content Styles Guide + Design System integration
In a fast-paced product development environment, having unified content and design standards is a must. UI text, interactions, and visual design specs are often separate systems—when they should be packaged together. Having language specs next to design components will make the system more powerful by making content guidelines available at the point of creation.
By integrating our Content Style Guide with our Design System, we create a centralized resource that supports collaboration and consistency across product design and engineering. This integration is about more than just convenience; it’s a strategic move to help future-proof our content processes and ensure that every product update also adheres to our content standards and guidelines.
Key benefits
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Centralized standards: Designers and engineers access content and design guidelines in one convenient place—at the point of creation.
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Increased adoption: By meeting our partners where they work, we speed up the adoption of content standards.
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Future-proofing: The integration sets the stage for consistent content quality as our product evolves over time.​
​Investment area 2: Contentful Content Management System (CMS)
Managing content efficiently is a constant challenge, especially as products evolve. Contentful, a headless CMS, is our solution to the problem. Contentful offers the flexibility to update content without draining engineering resources. Having this capability helps reduce content-related tech debt and maintain high quality standards. (Side note: Before deciding to go with Contentful, we evaluated these CMS platforms: Strapi, GraphCMS, and Kontent.ai).
Key benefits
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Saves PM and Eng resources: No more clogging up Jira tickets with minor content changes that disrupt the engineering workflow. Content Designers can make the changes.
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Solves content-related tech debt: In the long-run, solves the difficulties of making changes to hard-coded content.
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Improves product quality: Makes it easier to maintain consistency and accuracy across the product, incorporate late feedback, and optimize content performance.
More benefits
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Integrates with experimentation software: Gives you the ability to run content experiments and tests.
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Partner-friendly: Allows us to serve content variations for our partners without having to use conditional statements in the code.
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Positions us for international expansion: In the future, we can house translated content in Contentful, enabling translators to work directly in the platform.
Our three-phase approach
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Phase 1: This phase is our first foray into Contentful, where we enable content designers to make real-time, minor content changes in these dev environments: app test, staging, and prod.
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Phase 2: This is when we can start to leverage the power of Contentful. Once Contentful is fully integrated across the BILL product ecosystem, content designers can manage and search for content quickly and make turnkey, larger-scale updates. Simply put, a content designer searches for the content string and makes the change themselves—in a matter of minutes, with no engineering resource needed to push out any code. Easy-peasy.
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Phase 3: This is where we test and measure the impact of content in the product. Although Contentful has no innate experimentation capabilities, there are third-party integrations like Ninetailed that can plug and play with Contentful.​
Investment area 3: Writer Generative AI
It goes without saying that scaling content creation without compromising quality is a tricky proposition. That’s where Writer, a Generative AI platform, comes in. It helps teams to write with consistent style, terminology, and brand voice by aligning it with our Content Style Guide. Writer seamlessly integrates with the tools we use every day—Google Suite, MS Office, Chrome—even Figma. With Writer, AI-driven content generation goes beyond speed; it ensures every piece of content maintains the trust and relevance our customers expect from our brand.
Key benefits
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Scalability: Enables rapid content creation without compromising quality.
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Content accuracy: Generates content that’s aligned with established standards and guidelines.
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Alignment: Ensures all content generated is trustworthy and relevant.
Building a scalable Content Design model
As highlighted in my article, A Call to Action for Content Designers, one of the biggest challenges we face is the perception that content design is optional and dispensable. Despite being essential to the user experience, content design often has to cover a lot more ground (with fewer resources, to boot) than our counterparts in design and product management.
To shift the dynamic, our investments in Contentful and Writer provide a foundation for a scalable content model. With Contentful, we can do more with fewer resources—reducing dependence on engineering while ensuring consistent, high-quality content. Writer allows us to tap into the power of Generative AI for content generation—making our work more efficient and scalable. Having the "system" in place means setting new standards for content excellence that helps drive our product and business forward.