Writers in Tech

Episode Highlights:

• 02.10: May tells the listeners a little bit about her journey in tech as a founder.
• 02.22: May and her co-founder have been building tools for writers in some way or other during their whole entrepreneurial journey. 
• 04.11: Many teams are building their own quality content style guides, or some call it content design systems, which is the kind of product teams take for brand book but only for a digital product. 
• 05.45: The goal of the content strategy is that the person owning the systemization is to enable them to do good writing on their own. The best practice for setting up the system depends on where the team is, says May.
• 07.18: May explains that they are doing a templates library that their customers and their community is contributing, and they will be able to quickly build a very deep style guide in Writer, even if a user is starting from the scratch.
• 08.04: We have got teams that are taking 200 pages of style guides and getting them into Writer in one day, and then your end-user has that at their fingertips while they are writing, says May.
• 09.27: Yuval inquires from May, if we have 200 pages of a content style guide and people in the company would follow the guideline, how do you guys solve that issue and make the content accessible for everyone in the product team?
• 10.45: May explains that they have got a chrome extension that is a sidebar that kind of lives alongside various apps and underlines things while a user is writing in chrome, and the same works in Figma.
• 13.01: You have a content style guide connected to some database operated by the content style guide team, and then you could use it in your Figma because it is integrated with that in the frame of writing, says Yuval.
• 14.47: Yuval asks May, based on her experience and clients, how do people use Figma to work with their copy management these days?
• 18.57: Yuval asks May’s take on the future of AI and writers who think that all these AI tools would replace them at some point?
• 19.58: Everything on the market today on language generation piece is at best one layer of rules on top of the very broad-based API of GPT 3, affirms May.
• 21.38: An accelerant to your workflow has a lot to do with your native writing ability and creativity. At this stage, it is not an out-of-the-box solution that writers for a living think are great.
• 22.31: AI is not convinced to replace us this year, or even in the next few years, but the question is for writers or designers that oversee creating digital experiences, “what kind of challenges do you think they will have in the future?”
• 24.23: The quality input is what is required for anything that is helping you on the consistency side and under a scale on the enablement side, says Yuval.
• 28.29: Yuval has been reading a lot on strategy, design, content space, and rereading stuff. AMP IT UP is his favorite entrepreneurship book in general.
• 34.20: UX writers are real contributions to their product team because what they are doing is important and amazing. 

3 Key Points

1. With Writer, it is the first time that we have gone straight to put in the words on a page as a world, and it has been so extraordinary to get to know the community, whether they are knowledge-based writers, support writers, content strategists, content designers, UX writers, explains May.
2. When you load up a writer plugin, it just kind of shows up in your Figma app over to the side, and it lets you know when you run it on a frame or a component if there are errors in the writing, says May.
3. The Writer is an AI writing assistant where privacy is a big feature. We don’t save any customer data, and it is a big differentiator against the Grammarly release of the world. We are world-class at synthetic data creation, says May.

Tweetable Quotes

• “We still are kind of in the same place where overall leadership doesn’t understand the power that words can have to drive business objectives.” – May
• “If you don’t have a style guide, you can work with our support team and us or our CS team to use the writer product to define rules.” - May
• “The beauty of having everybody in Figma who’s writing and reviewing is that it has much higher fidelity. You don’t have to have iterations once it goes into development.” - Yuval 
• “I like the idea of leverage, and it is hard to internalize what leverage means and kind of nonlinear scenarios, especially in the startup world.” - Yuval

Resources Mentioned:

• May Habib: Website | Linkedin
• Podcast Editing