Scaling Endowus’s content design practice

As the first and only content designer at Endowus, I built the content design practice from scratch, with the help of a wonderful manager and trusty allies.

Here’s a few things I did to bring content design to Endowus and scale my impact.

Set up a framework for collaborating with PMs and product designers

To help the team know how we could work together and maximize my impact, I created and shared a framework with my manager, product designers, and PMs. This helped to set expectations for stuff like what problems I could help solve, when to involve me, how I’d prioritize projects.

I cobbled together this collaboration framework by referencing great ones from Andrea Drugay, Bronwyn Berkery, and Marissa Gemma.

Establish content standards and reusable patterns

To work more efficiently, I took time during each project to craft and document content guidelines and patterns that could be reused in future.

I stayed lean with these guidelines and patterns, since our hypergrowth stage meant that something might be irrelevant 6 months later due to a pivot or redesign. I aimed for just enough system, and evolved the standards as I went along.

Some content guidelines that I created while working on our transactional push notifications project.

On the side, I researched and created a style guide with the marketing team’s input to address all our finnicky style inconsistencies.

Scrappy not pretty, but our style guide does the job.

Developing a modular content system

To speed up our UI content workflow in Figma, I developed a modular content system with my product designer by mashing Ditto and Figma components. Long story short, it involved structured content and nested components.

This saved me lots of time in managing shared strings across multiple screens, and across our mobile and web apps. My product designer could also be confident that our mocks had the latest content.

How the modular content nests in Ditto and Figma components.

Related work

Setting up a content process →

Building Endowus’s content design practice

Set up a framework for collaborating with PMs and product designers

Establish content standards and reusable patterns

Developing a modular content system