A Content Design Leaders Working Group

Content design isn’t going away. It’s moving upstream.

Upstream is an invite-only working group for content design leaders who are actively figuring out what UX content work becomes in an AI-driven world. Let’s build the blueprint together.

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Free · Applications due August 7 · Sessions run August–November 2026 · Limited to ~12–15 members

Three people in a working session, mapping a flow of connected screens and ideas on a whiteboard

The work changed. Most orgs haven’t caught up.

For twenty years, content designers crafted the actual strings in the product. That’s where the judgment lived — a person making a call, one string at a time.

Now many of those strings will be generated. The judgment didn’t disappear. It moved upstream — into content design systems, model behavior, evals, and guidelines that machines can follow too. Voice and tone is no longer just how a product communicates. It’s how a product behaves. And behavior carries legal weight that a style guide never did.

This goes well beyond writing a skill for UX writing or feeding a style guide to a model. It’s a different kind of work — and most design leaders don’t yet see that new and redefined content roles are where much of it has to happen.

Those of us who are already doing this work can’t get the full picture alone. Some of us can get to engineering. Some of us can get to the right designers. Almost none of us can get to all of it. Together, we can.

A working group, not a community.

Content Design Leaders membership is where leaders come to be sustained — peer support, professional development, a weekly hour that holds the isolation at bay. That’s not this.

Upstream is a commitment to produce shared work. Members bring what they’re building inside their own orgs — the experiments, the dead ends, the wins — and we combine those partial views into frameworks and published artifacts the whole field can use.

Membership here is free. It costs work instead.

This is:

A small group of practitioners comparing live fieldwork, pressure-testing each other’s approaches, and each building a strategy for what comes next — sharing what we learn along the way.

This isn’t:

A place to come for the answers. We’ll share those out later, publicly, when we’ve built them. If you want to learn from this work rather than do it, the Content Design Leaders newsletter and community are for you — and we’d love to have you there.

How it works

Around 12 to 15 people. Small enough that everyone’s work is known to everyone else. Large enough to cover the territory.

Fixed-term runs. The first: August through November 2026. At the end we publish, then re-commit or roll off. No indefinite obligations.

An hour every other week. Live, facilitated working sessions with an agenda built from what members bring.

Async between sessions. Updates, questions, and discussion in the app, so the thinking keeps moving.

You leave with your own draft. Each member works toward a strategy paper or vision, sharpened by the room.

Chatham House Rule. What’s shared informs your work. Who said it, and where they work, stays inside. Nothing goes public without its contributor’s OK.

Start with the map.

Before anyone can build the blueprint, someone has to name the territory precisely. That’s where the first run starts: our opening session is a working brainstorm where we map the major topics together. Each one gets its own page in our shared FigJam — a place where the work on that topic accumulates across the run. From there, each of us works toward a draft of our own strategy or vision, and we share what we learn along the way.

Likely topics:

✔︎Content design systems for generated language — the upstream judgment layer that replaces a person placing strings
✔︎Evals as content design work — who defines “good” for model output, and how voice, tone, and behavior get tested
✔︎Voice as behavior — guidelines that govern how a product acts, not just how it reads
✔︎Legal and risk — what generated interface language exposes companies to
✔︎The org question — where this work sits, what roles it requires, and how content leaders work their way into the rooms where model behavior is decided

Who is Upstream for?

Seniority is deliberately absent from both lists — and so is managing a team. You might lead an org, or you might be a senior content designer deep in this work. Titles don’t gate this group; work does.

Upstream is for you if:

✔︎You’re actively working on some piece of this now — inside your org, in a side project, in research. Work in motion, not interest.
✔︎You have a question you can’t answer from inside your own walls, and something real to trade for the answer.
✔︎You can commit to an hour every other week, plus staying active in the app between sessions, August through November.
✔︎You want to leave with your own strategy on paper, not just good conversation.

Upstream is NOT for you if:

✘︎You’re looking for answers, best practices, or a course. (We’ll publish what we build — join the newsletter and you’ll see it first.)
✘︎You can’t share anything about your work. Employer confidentiality is real and we work around it constantly, but if nothing can leave your building, there’s nothing to combine.
✘︎Your interest is in following this shift rather than shaping it. That’s a fine place to be — it’s just not what this group does.

Come ready to work.

Roughly 12–15 seats, selected for coverage of the territory — a mix of industries, org models, and proximity to the model layer.

Applications close August 7. Invitations go out August 10, and sessions start the week after.

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Questions? Answers.

Is it really free?

Yes. The membership fee is contribution — biweekly working sessions, staying part of the discussion between them, and real work toward your own strategy draft. If that trade sounds backwards, membership probably isn’t the right fit.

Do I need to be a Content Design Leaders member?

No. Upstream and Content Design Leaders membership are separate. Plenty of members will belong to both, but the filter here is the work you’re doing, not a subscription.

What’s the relationship to the paid Content Design Leaders community?

Content Design Leaders membership is ongoing weekly peer support for content design leaders. Upstream is a fixed-term working group where each member builds their own strategy for what comes next. Different rooms, different purposes, same roof.

How much time does it take?

Plan on 3–5 hours a month: two one-hour sessions, async updates and discussion in the app, and whatever you take on in the FigJam between sessions. The real work happens inside your day job — this group is where you bring what you’re learning from it.

What if my employer limits what I can share?

Almost everyone’s does. We operate under the Chatham House Rule, and anything shared publicly uses only what contributors explicitly clear. Tell us where your line is — the group is designed for partial views.

What happens at the end of a run?

Each member leaves with a draft of their own strategy or vision, we share what we’ve learned publicly — think carousels and an article or two — and then each of us decides: re-commit for the next run or roll off.

I want to follow this work but I’m not doing it yet. What should I do?

Join the newsletter — everything we publish goes there first. And when your work catches up to your interest, apply.

Who’s hosting?

Hi, I’m Kate Agena.

I lead content design at SAP, where I spend my days on exactly these questions — what governance looks like for generated content at enterprise scale, and how you build systems where quality is the default instead of something enforced through review cycles. I don’t have the whole picture. Nobody does. That’s the point of this group.

I started Content Design Leaders because leaders in this field needed a place to be sustained. I’m starting Upstream because some of us also need a place to build.

If you’re already digging in, I want you in the room.

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