Alli Mooney: Executive-level Content Design Leadership – Episode 160

Alli Mooney Content leaders are beginning to ascend the corporate org chart. Alli Mooney is VP of Content Design at Mastercard, where she leads a large team of content designers and guides big organization-change initiatives. Like many content professionals, she began her career in publishing and journalism, but her path also included a stint in trend reporting, which lead to a variety of leadership roles at Google. We talked about: her work as VP of Content Design at Mastercard her transition from publishing and journalism to trend reporting and how that led to her 11-year stint at Google her leadership style, which began developing at Google and which coalesced in her work with a leadership coach how to peer into the future by applying the mindset she adopted as Head of Trends and Insights at Google important lessons she learned in her journalism career: simplifying and storytelling how good storytelling skills help you be a better designer her advice about getting a seat at the table: be proactive, make sense, make it easy for people to say yes, and show your impact the dimensions by which she measures impact: efficiency, effectiveness and excellence ways to show the value of your content work, both quantitative and qualitative the importance of change management, especially working with people the stakeholder alignment work she did at Google to align different content practices around a new headless CMS implementation the importance of creating incentives that align OKRs and similar management mechanisms with the content work that needs to be done Alli's bio Alli Mooney is Vice President of Content Design at Mastercard. She's a self-described "publishing survivor" whose background includes 11 years leading teams at Google. Connect with Alli online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/ikXtnpyElYI Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 160. Like many content designers, Alli Mooney began her career in journalism and publishing. Her unique path into the tech world included a stint in trend reporting and then to a role as the Head of Trends and Insights at Google. After 11 years at Google in a variety of leadership positions, she brought her design, leadership, and management skills to MasterCard, where she leads a large content design team and manages big organization-change initiatives. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 160 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Alli Mooney. Alli is VP of Content Design at MasterCard where she leads content and CX teams. Welcome, Alli, tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to. Alli: Hi. Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. So I joined MasterCard maybe a year and a half ago at this point to, as you said, lead a content design team. We work within the innovation group called the Foundry at MasterCard. So we do content design for new and emerging products in the payment space. Larry: Oh, interesting. So innovation, I mean, we all hope to be innovating, but in the payment space, that's something that I've had a couple of guests recently talking about trust in financial products and things like that, and that's a place where like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't innovate with my money." Any interesting challenges coming up in that? Alli: Oh, where to start? Yeah. We are always looking at how we can be empathetic towards how people feel about money and payments and very sensitive. So the empathy skill in design comes in really handy there because money is a sensitive topic. MasterCard's products can be quite complex even if you are a payments expert. So our job really is to simplify and approach things - meet people where they are. Larry: Got it. Yeah and that's a lot coming together in that,