cf #88: a day in the life of a Content Lead

or: what I did at work yesterday

You are reading contentfolks—a fortnightly sporadic blend of sticky notes, big content ideas, and practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio

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Hey there 👋

Yesterday I read the best Content Lead job post of 2024. Hat tip to Anum Hussain, who painted a candid, accurate, and in-depth picture of the many things you may do in a senior content role.

And in the same spirit, I thought: how about *I* paint an equally candid, accurate, and in-depth picture of the many things I do in a senior content role?

November 26, 2024:
a day in the life of a Content Lead

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A note: the ‘Content Lead’ label means vastly different things depending on company size, funding model, and growth stage. At Float, a B2B SaaS under 100 people, bootstrapped, and in the scale-up phase, it means I am a high-level individual contributor (IC), both strategist and tactician, with up to two direct reports.

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This is more or less what happened at work yesterday.

• Float is a remote, distributed company where async communication is the default. So I started the day as I always do: scanning through email + Slack notifications to get a sense of where everybody was at and whether anything needed my attention.

  • Pro tip: I use a colour-coded filtering system that gives me an at-a-glance read of which buckets may need to be tackled first.

some of my (many) gmail labels. a brain-saving feature, that one.

• Next, I had an hour-long sync with my manager Siobhan who lives on the other side of the planet—I was just done with breakfast, she was already post-dinner! We discussed my proposed approach to content in 2025, and our conversation was a mix of top-level vision and the tactical plan of how to actually get some of it done.
  

• I then spent the next hour and a half reviewing a product marketing board in FigJam, where my task was to make sure the language stayed true to how folks speak during sales and support calls.

  • Here, I first gave myself a quick refresher on customer language by watching bits of the most recently recorded sales calls in Gong. Then, I uploaded a batch of customer interview transcripts into Lex.page and asked it to highlight any tweaks we could make to the product marketing board. This is a good example of where AI tools can be effective assistants (provided you know what to ask them, and how).
    

• From there, I switched to the content board where I do all of my async brainstorming, retrospectives, and top-level planning—definitely one of my favourite boards to jump into. I went to the 2025 section and recorded a Loom walkthrough for the Customer Success team, in which I explained my approach and asked from their thoughts and feedback.

• At this point, I had lunch followed by a jigsaw break¹ because, hey, we all eventually need to stop staring at screens and look at something else 🧩

the sky in this jigsaw has been driving me bonkers

• I eased myself back into work by checking our LinkedIn account. This is where I noticed a semi-urgent DM from a customer, so I got in touch with the Support team and workshopped a solution with them for the next 15 minutes.
  

• The next thing on my list was building a light version of a dashboard inspired by this SparkToro blog post about measuring ‘impossible-to-measure’ marketing activities. This what theirs looks like (mine was about a third of the size):

thank you @SparkToro

• By now, I’d made a lot of progress on multiple fronts though none of it was visible to the most important stakeholder: our customers. So I switched gears into ‘traditional’ content work and updated an article in dire need of new screenshots, a shorter introduction, and some serious H2 and H3 love; I also proofread a LinkedIn post created by my teammate Stella.
  

• I mentioned earlier that I’m an IC with up to two people reporting into me. At this point, my calendar was blocked for half an hour of thinking time to prepare for the next day’s 121.
  

• Then, our dev/designer and I back-and-forthed a bit to solve some remaining questions on a content design brief I’d submitted the previous week. So much goes into developing a new website section, and we needed to think through several implications: information architecture, SEO best practices, long-term maintenance and sustainability of the build.
  

• One more round of checking through notifications—including the very, very important task of setting 24-hour reminders on several Slack messages—and it was a wrap on my Tuesday at work.
  

That was one day in my life as a Content Lead. I think the spread and variety of what I did was representative of a typical day at work—but the tasks themselves were not. No two days have ever looked the same, which I admit can be both 🤩 and 🫠 at times.

What does a day in YOUR life as a content person look like?

1. In case you missed it when it first came out, this was a fun jigsaw-themed piece about strategy vs. tactics:

cf# 79: all the pieces must fit together