I accepted a role as director of content for a startup and 6 months in, I'm not feeling as badass as I did in the beginning. I'd love some feedback/insight into how you all view the role of director in today's market and any advice you might have.

Would like to help, but I don’t understand this question. It seems way broad or vague.

How has the role of director of content evolved and how do you have to show up in order to be successful? Each company has its own special blend for measuring success but what are the key ingredients? @white-potato-56800

@green-megabyte-96926 Below is generically what I’d expect a director of content to do, baseline. • Come up with strategy that can deliver meaningful business results (which you can measure quantitatively and qualitatively, as appropriate) and figure out how to execute. 1. Explain strategy to noncontent people and make a solid business case, so you can get buy-in, support and resources as needed. (Need to consistently do this to add significant business value and to derisk for people joining your team.) 2. Connect dots for your team and guide them on how to execute. (They’ll need to understand the why, and how things fit, to produce optimal results.) • Recruit and hire people in ways that align with business needs and company culture. (This doesn’t mean hire people you know; it means hire agnostic of your network and instead focus on what best fits the company’s needs.) Identify who’s best in class for your business goals and how you’ll get them to work with you and stick. • Manage people and help bring out the best in them, including those unlike you. • Develop people so they grow more valuable at your company and in the job market. Otherwise, you won’t be able to retain, which will cost your company business momentum and actual dollars in hiring, onboarding, training, developing domain expertise and institutional knowledge. • Coach up underperformers at business speed, as well as fire and manage out if their gaps remain too large beyond a reasonable time box. • Manage initiatives and projects that deliver significant business value that you can quantify and otherwise document. • Build processes from scratch and change or scrap them to begin anew as the business evolves. • Influence those whom you have no authority over, including cross-functional partners. • Collaborate with stakeholders with competing priorities and POV. If needed, get them to compromise and collaborate. • Prioritize and reprioritize as needed, understanding trade-offs and communicating clearly with your team and stakeholders. • Know when to say “no” and push back in ways that keep things collaborative and professional. This includes dealing with execs and other key stakeholders, and being able to explain why “no.” They don’t need to agree; they just need to be able to follow your rationale. • Earn the respect of your peer cohort and higher-level execs. • Know how to help interview cross-functional partner candidates, including helping to close ones who are in demand. • Exercise solid judgment, including solving various one-off problems, such as personnel issues, business conflicts and trade-offs, ethical questions, standards and practices, stakeholder management. • Make decisions at business speed, often with incomplete info, because that’s a reality of many business and competitive circumstances. You don’t need to be perfect (not humanly possible); you just need to get most decisions right and to correct what’s wrong, as possible. Over time, your batting average should get stronger and stronger. • Some director titles are inflated. Actual director-level roles mean you’ll also manage managers. Knowing how to develop them and to coach them to coach others are necessary in those cases. • Serve as a role model, someone whom team members aspire to be like. Not clones — because individual styles can vary — but learn similar abilities to lead, think strategically, connect dots, grok business, collaborate, etc. • Help build bench and avoid or eliminate key points of potential failure that could disrupt business continuity or momentum. • Depending on the employer, you also might need additional skills. Like if your work is in health care, personal finance or security, you might need know-how in laws, regulations, compliance, privacy and such. You don’t need to be an expert, but at director level, you should be able to grok that line of thinking and anticipate various scenarios or problems, and ask the right Qs when you work with cross-functional folks such as lawyers and security experts. • Some jobs will involve SEO or such, but you can hire for that and learn as you go if needed. Directors and above do not typically get into the weeds unless their titles are inflated. For instance, at NerdWallet, we became among the world’s best at SEO in a highly competitive space, but I never required that know-how when hiring, because we could always teach that. The stuff above, not so much at business speed.

This is a lot to dig @white-potato-56800. You're incredible.

can we send Maggie that bottle of whiskey now @purple-monitor-35762 🥃 😉

@stocky-zebra-68352 No, I don’t. I like commenting when I feel like it, no obligations.

fair! I'll just keep looking for you on Slack then 🙂

we could do that 👀

@stocky-zebra-68352 thanks for asking @white-potato-56800 that question. I couldn't find any so I went on LinkedIn to read almost everything I could written by Maggie. Then I typed "Maggie" in the search function and since then, I just come in here and through the previous search function read everything and anything she's commented after my last search.