When Content Strategy Looks Like Project Therapy

Because sometimes your job is aligning six stakeholders who low-key hate each other.

There are two kinds of content strategy: the kind you present on a slide, and the kind where you mediate a silent war between Product and Marketing over a headline.

You think your job is about voice, structure, UX clarity.

It is.

But it's also about navigating the emotional terrain of product roadmaps, brand visions, and stakeholder politics—while still shipping something that makes sense to the user.

Welcome to project therapy, where your soft skills carry more weight than your style guide.

In my work across SaaS, e-learning, and nonprofit platforms, I’ve often found myself playing therapist as much as strategist. Not because it’s in the job description—but because content work lives in the messy middle of cross-functional teams.

1. What They Don’t Tell You About “Soft Skills”

Here’s what strategic content work actually looks like on the ground:

• Facilitating alignment.

At OpenUp, I worked with designers, psychologists, and marketers to build a full e-learning offer. Everyone spoke a different language—so I built shared content frameworks, mapped user journeys, and ran reviews that didn’t devolve into chaos.

• Translating feedback.

On SaaS projects at Exact, I often rewrote UI copy mid-sprint while balancing input from localization, UX, and product. That meant decoding vague comments like “It feels off” into actionable iterations—without losing the thread.

• Holding the vision.

At RNW Media, I led multilingual content strategies across multiple youth platforms. That required keeping brand, audience, and editorial coherence intact—even as formats, teams, and partners changed.

2. The Actual Strategy Behind the Scenes

Here’s how I turn chaos into clarity:

• Create artifacts everyone can agree on.

Content principles, tone examples, annotated mockups—whatever makes the abstract concrete.

• Build review processes that respect people’s time (and sanity).

Think: clear deadlines, fewer meetings, no Google Docs with 47 unresolved comments.

• Focus on the user when politics get loud.

When in doubt, I bring it back to the experience. Does the content help someone do what they came here to do? If not, we rewrite.

3. Strategic ≠ Neutral

Being strategic doesn’t mean being passive. It means knowing when to push back, when to zoom out, and when to write the microcopy yourself because no one else will.

Sometimes the most impactful work happens before the first word is written. In that space, I do some of my best content design: listening, guiding, and making things that actually work.