Welcoming Carrie Hane to lead our new Content Strategy Relations team (ssr)

Written by Magnus Hillestad, Even Westvang, Simen Svale

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Today, we're thrilled to welcome content strategist Carrie Hane to the team as we launch a new department at Sanity: Content Strategy Relations. Carrie pioneered much of today’s thinking around modern connected content (she literally wrote the book on it!), and is fully aligned with our vision for the future of digital experience.

At Sanity, we believe Content is Data, and that philosophy has always encompassed far more than software. We believe Structured Content is a core component driving how modern organizations accelerate digitalization and create amazing product experiences. As a developer-led software company, our primary goal to date has been empowering developers to get more value out of the content they have in their organization, content their colleagues are spending many hours working on and want to shape for many different experiences.

But this Structured Content wouldn't exist without the collaboration of the content creators themselves. Many of them are ready to break content out of the silo of a traditional CMS and into a modern era of interoperability across a diverse array of mediums.

CMSes as a whole have failed to innovate the way organizations leverage content. In today’s world, content needs to flow seamlessly across departments, applications, and use cases. This is the future that Sanity enables through our software, but it also requires understanding and buy-in from people across the organization. This new approach to content changes how we think about building digital products, and adoption of this mental model is necessary to success.

We asked ourselves: How do we build a cross-disciplinary community of people, not just developers, that care about this modern approach to content? An emerging role, sometimes explicit, oftentimes carried informally by a product manager, an editor, or a developer, is the content strategist.

A content strategist understands that content is a living, breathing ecosystem that should be managed holistically across the organization. They apply systems thinking to build a map of content needs, breaking content into pieces that can be used anywhere and anytime. Most importantly, they are advocates that persuade the organization to adopt this new way of thinking, removing bottlenecks and creating better end-user experiences for customers.

We believe developers and designers have a lot to learn from content strategists. They often think about the same problem from different angles and with different motives and perspectives. Cooperation between them is crucial for enabling the right content philosophy inside an organization.

Carrie Hane has led the way on this groundbreaking approach to framing content strategy. In 2018, she co-authored the book Designing Connected Content, which was informed by her 20+ years of spearheading content strategy and advisory for organizations. She’s been known to characterize herself as a “creative problem solver and connector of people, processes and technologies.” Unsurprisingly, her worldview was an immediate match with us at Sanity. Bengler, the digital agency that was the predecessor of Sanity, was formed with an almost identical mission: to push the boundaries of technology and human communication through content.

When first meeting Carrie and discussing our ambition for this initiative with her, we were thrilled by our shared vision, and together we started hashing out what a "Content Strategy Relations" team could be doing. Given that this term returns about five results on Google, zero of which make any sense, this is clearly a term we have an opportunity to define and lead in the years to come.

Carrie’s new role as Head of our Content Strategy Relations team will enable her to be a driving force in defining how organizations use Structured Content to achieve their goals, building bridges and understanding across disciplines. She'll also help our community and customers achieve more from their content stack. Together, we will scale the knowledge within and outside our platform.

We can’t wait to broaden Sanity’s reach across disciplines and departments to further help you accelerate your content velocity.