Kate Thomas
Kate Thomas is leading the transformation of marketing content at PayPal from hand-crafted web pages to structured content stored in a headless CMS.
Like many organizational-transformation projects, this one has highlighted both the benefits of structuring content and the challenges of getting content authors to work in new ways.
We talked about:
the migration of the PayPal marketing content from hand-crafted web pages to structured content managed in a headless CMS
her prior work at PayPal modeling their legal content
how they structured their content and ascribed meaning to it with metadata
the main benefits of structuring content, foremost among them speed to market, the ability to scale, and to more efficient content localization
her first foray into structured content when she worked on a developer portal
how the governance issues she dealt with in content roles in higher education and government, as well as the governance processes she saw in agency roles, led to her interest in structured content
the operational transition from hand-building pages to the new structured-content operation and governance framework
the importance of the authoring experience in a new system like this
the role of content modeling in her work to structure the content
how their new structured-content model let them create new pages about business practices in Ukraine in just a few days
Kate's bio
Kate Thomas is a content architect at PayPal. She has led content teams in Australia, the UK and the US, delivering workable, scalable content solutions for government, universities and global brands over a 20+ year career slaying the content dragon.
Connect with Kate online
LinkedIn
PayPal jobs page (work with Kate!)
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUd8s4b-zgU
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 117. The benefits of structured content are now well known: improved consistency, the ability to scale, quicker content delivery, more governable content operations, efficient localization of content for other countries and cultures. But even the most progressive and successful companies are still working to fully adopt this important content practice. In this interview, Kate Thomas shares insights that she has gleaned as they've structured the marketing content at PayPal.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 117 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really happy today to have with us, Kate Thomas. Kate is a content architect at PayPal, and she's working on some really interesting structured content and CMS work there. So welcome, Kate. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Kate:
Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. Yes, at PayPal we've been working for the past couple of years on moving all the marketing content on paypal.com from hand coded, handcrafted pages into a structured content framework delivered in a headless CMS.
Larry:
Nice. And so have you been involved from the very start with that? Is it kind of your baby, this project, or?
Kate:
Kind of my baby in the sense that I was asked to work on it and I thought, well, that's now my baby. It's someone else bigger baby, but I'm the midwife, I suppose, of the content model in a way. So we had new management come in and head up paypal.com. When you look at paypal.com, there's lots of things going on. So when I'm talking about it, all I'm talking about is the marketing content. So on paypal.com you can also get help content, you can get legal content and there's a whole lot of campaign pages that you know exist but they're sort of outside of the core marketing pages. So the first thing is to qualify we're talking about the core content that we deliver in marketing.
Kate:
And management change, sort of the person in charge of .com changed in mid 2020, got some consultants in to advise on how can we do this better? Because it was sort of at that time and a lot of the site now still actually it's standalone pages. Someone in PayPal needs something up on the site so they go directly to the web operations team, sort of web ops, and say, "Hey, scrum team, can you build this?" And they build it in code, based on some vague like content types and templates, but not content types and templates structured in any way. And page gets built, job done. So there's no, "We should take this site down now. We should remove this page it's out of date." Or someone's got a page that's similar, but no one knows that it's there.
Kate:
So this wasn't an ideal way to manage the site because of course PayPal we're in gosh, 200 markets I think, something like that. I can confirm that and get it back to you.
Larry:
Wow.
Kate:
And hundreds, not hundreds, dozens of languages. So every time an engineer had to build this in one language, they had to then essentially copy and paste for, you know, for the rest. For the languages. So not particularly scalable. So we had some advice about, you know, let's build, deliver .com in a headless CMS. I had been working in another part of PayPal and one of the things I'd done was start to model the legal content. The legal department had come to us 18 months before and said, "Hey, can we deliver our site more efficiently?" So I'd done a content model for that, for the main legal agreement, the user agreement that, you know, something like 320 million people have signed because that's the number of PayPal customers there are. And I'm pretty sure no one has ever read it, but after modeling it, I can tell you, I have read all of it. So I've done that work and then was asked to come over and help and do similar for the .com marketing content.
Kate:
So that's through the rest of 2020, so Q3 into Q4. I looked at the content and as with any project like this, the most important piece is the content itself. So what does the content need to do? What are its characteristics? I can't obviously build a model unless I know the full context of the content. So what identified the fields that we'll need in the content model. I also hired a taxonomist, a contract taxonomist, just to help us because I realized, and I had hugely supportive management, the new head of the head of paypal.com, many of your listeners will know her, Lucy Hyde. She'd been at PayPal for some time, but she'd moved across into this role. So I just went to Lucy. I said, "Hey, I think we have an opportunity here to sort of fix this properly." There'd always been a great investment in the presentation of content, how it looked beautiful, images, but almost none in the semantic layer or the metadata of the content. So I said, "If we're doing the headless CMS, let's get a taxonomist involved and so we can start to build that layer underneath as well."
Larry:
You know-
Kate:
So we went into-
Larry:
Yeah, I was going to say that, you know, when we talked before we went on the air we thought, yeah, we should set out kind of exactly what structured content is before we get going. But you just did it. I mean, I didn't ask the question, but you kind of did it anyway. Because you set out all the, you know, the need to structure it. It just kills me that people are still hand building webpages in the 21st century, but you know, that need to like systematize the page building and all the management that goes with that. But then you added in the last piece there, the hiring the taxonomist and ascribing the semantic meaning to the content. Tell me about how, and I have my thoughts about this, but I'm curious how those two work together for you, how the structure of the content and the metadata, the taxonomies, and other stuff that describe it, how those work together.
Kate:
Well at the moment, how it will work is I've defined the model and identified the content types we need. We've got a bunch of content types. We know what kind of content they're delivering and we've got a taxonomy for those, for that content. We'll be using a third party to knit these two things together at the end. And what this means for us is that we have really a source of truth that we've never had before for all of our content. We can track and manage it more easily. We also long term can then do more with that content. At the moment, the taxonomy is pretty straightforward and basic, and it's really delivering internal benefits for us so we have a better sense of what we've got and some SEO benefits as well, obviously, because we're being far more kind of thorough and consistent with our language and what we're calling things, and we've worked very closely with the SEO team on that.
Larry:
When you mentioned SEO, I think all of a sudden I'm wondering like, that is the classic use case for structured, especially marketing content, you know, to better do that. But there must be other cases, like you also mentioned, alluded anyway, earlier to like the kind of operational, not exactly optimized thing about hand building webpages. Can you run through sort of the list of reasons you moved to structured content?
Kate:
Well, mostly because we want to scale as a business. I mean, PayPal is already hugely successful, but there's plenty of people, plenty of companies rather, nipping at our heels. So the business brains at PayPal want to stay cutting edge and want to continue to be at the forefront of these things, which we cannot do if it takes us 30 to 35 days to publish a page, which it does in the old way, because the brief has to go to someone, scrum team has to build it by hand. It's like tedious QA, you know, so we could not continue with that. So speed to market was the main reason why we moved to structured content, but also because localization, as I said, we're in multiple languages and there were some services that we did have third party localization services,
