Building a modern content practice inside a legacy organization
Overview
When I joined Medavie Blue Cross, the organization was in the early stages of a long‑term digital transformation. Its digital products were numerous, complex, and built for a different era of healthcare delivery. The UX team was new, the product practice was still forming, and content design as a discipline didn’t yet exist.
I was hired as Medavie’s first Content Designer — and the first UX team member with direct product‑team experience. My mandate was twofold: support active projects immediately, and help build the foundations of a modern content practice that could scale across the organization.
This is the story of how I helped grow a team, establish operational systems, and create the connective tissue needed for content to thrive.
The Challenge
Medavie needed to scale content design quickly, but the environment was not yet set up for it:
- No content governance or shared standards
- Siloed content teams (Marketing, Translation, Technical, Brand) working independently
- Waterfall development cycles that made collaboration difficult
- No tooling to support content reuse or version control
- A UX team still defining its identity and influence
The challenge wasn’t just to “do the work” — it was to build the conditions under which the work could be done well.
What I Did
1. Helped Build and Scale the Content Design Team
I helped shape the hiring strategy for Medavie’s first content design team. This meant:
- Writing job postings that were transparent about the organization’s maturity while still appealing to experienced candidates,
- Interviewing and selecting candidates who could thrive in a legacy environment,
- Onboarding new hires and establishing shared expectations and workflows.
Over time, the team grew from one to five content designers — a foundational step in Medavie’s UX evolution.
2. Created the Writers Room: Medavie’s First Content Community of Practice
To break down silos and unify content quality across the organization, I founded and led the Writers Room, a cross‑functional community of practice that brought together:
- Translation
- Marketing
- Technical writing
- Brand
- UX content design
The Writers Room became a space to:
- Surface shared challenges
- Align tone and voice
- Discuss risk management
- Share tools, patterns, and best practices
- Build relationships across previously disconnected teams
It became one of the first operational bridges between UX and the broader organization.
3. Implemented Critical Tools and Systems
To support a growing team, we needed infrastructure. I led the adoption and rollout of Frontitude, a content management system integrated with Figma.
This system:
- Centralized content across projects
- Reduced duplication and version confusion
- Improved collaboration between designers, writers, and developers
- Created a single source of truth for UX content
It also laid the groundwork for scalable content operations — a necessary step for any maturing product organization.
Outcomes
By the time the team was fully formed, Medavie had:
- A functioning, collaborative content design practice
- A unified voice across multiple content‑producing teams
- A CMS‑supported workflow that improved quality and consistency
- A UX team with stronger operational maturity and cross‑functional influence
Most importantly, content design became recognized as a strategic discipline — not just a service.
Reflection
This work taught me how to build systems that outlast individual contributors. It reinforced that content design is as much about operations, relationships, and governance as it is about writing. And it showed me that even in a legacy environment, you can create meaningful change by building trust, demonstrating value, and designing processes that make good work inevitable.