Unless you’re an agency constantly spinning up new projects, it’s tough to justify a full-time content strategist on staff. Their work often comes in waves, and they don’t always slot neatly into a traditional production calendar.
But when a site needs restructuring, when the CMS starts breaking under its own weight, or when the client has more questions than answers—a skilled content strategist can be the difference between a successful launch and a stalled initiative.
Not just any strategist, though. You need one fluent in development, design, client management, and project ops. These multi-skilled strategists spot problems early, plug into cross-functional teams quickly, and move projects forward with minimal friction.
We’ve worked on dozens of content-forward projects, and the pattern is clear: the most valuable content strategists aren’t just good writers. They’re confident contributors across multiple disciplines. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
The Modern Content Strategist: A Renaissance Professional
Yes, a content strategist should be a good writer. Their bare minimum skillset should include being able to write copy and content across any channel type:
- Microcopy
- Social copy
- Website content
- Articles
- UI text (tooltips, prompts, notifications)
- Information architecture and taxonomies
But writing is just the foundation – table stakes. What makes content strategists valuable is the broad, cross-functional skillset that enables superior collaboration, planning, and implementation.
In our opinion, every good content strategist can contribute as a developer, graphic designer, project manager, and account manager on a moment’s notice. They should have at least the core competencies needed to understand and execute work in those functions.
Each requires its own mindset and technical literacy. We’re not saying every strategist should be a unicorn, but they should know enough to:
- Spot misalignment before it becomes rework
- Talk shop with the dev team
- Participate in design critiques
- Keep a project on track
- Explain strategic decisions to a skeptical client
And ideally, they’ve practiced these skills in the wild.
Development: Why Content Strategists Need Technical Fluency
A good content strategist designs content models, workflows, and other deliverables with the technical framework in mind. That means:
- Knowing how a CMS structures templates and fields
- Writing content models with dev-facing field specs
- Understanding the implications of modular design
With this technical foundation, a content strategist helps teams grasp both the constraints and possibilities of various platforms.
Real-world scenarios:
- Preventing a CMS from Getting Bloated: A dev treats three page designs as separate content types. You spot the mistake because you understand how CMS architectures handle templates. You reframe them as one content type with layout variations, saving weeks of technical debt.
- Avoiding Rigid Authoring Structures: A developer sets required fields in the CMS that don’t align with real editorial needs. You explain the impact in dev terms, propose conditional fields, and improve the authoring experience without compromising validation rules.
- Anticipating Dev Bottlenecks in Modular Design: You notice that a designer’s stacked layout will require a new component. Because you know how component libraries are managed, you help revise the layout to reuse existing parts—saving the dev team sprint time.
- Writing Content Models Devs Actually Use: Your content model includes field names, data types, and validation logic—because you know devs will build directly from it. They implement without needing to “interpret” your intent.
- Getting Reuse Right in Headless CMS: You understand how reference fields work in Contentful. So when modeling product specs, you use nested references instead of duplicating data across content types—earning the dev team’s trust and future-proofing the build.
Design: Why Visual Literacy Pays Off
Design and content are inseparable. Content strategists should know how to:
- Evaluate visual hierarchy and readability
- Contribute UI copy that fits layout constraints
- Identify when a design can (or can’t) scale
This also includes competency in the tools used by designers like Figma, Adobe CC, and others.
Real-world scenarios:
- Flagging a Visual Hierarchy Problem Early: You see a homepage hero with multiple conflicting CTA styles. Because you understand visual hierarchy, you flag it as a usability issue—before it goes to dev and creates confusion.
- Improving Copy-Design Fit During Wireframing: During UX wireframes, you notice character limits are unrealistic for headline modules. Instead of adjusting content later, you collaborate with the designer to resize elements while staying on-brand.
- Aligning Design with CMS Constraints: You explain to the visual designer that their layout doesn’t support modular content reuse. Because you understand both design intent and CMS flexibility, you help rework it into a layout that can scale.
- Making the UI Copy Work Visually: You provide tooltip and button copy that doesn’t just fit the character count—it balances white space, avoids line wrapping, and feels native to the interface.
Project + Client Management: Keeping Projects on Track
Content strategists interact with clients and stakeholders all the time. Success requires tact, building rapport, and not accidentally promising something out of scope. Remember that clients need to feel confident in their decision to hire you.
This last point is crucial. External vendors—agencies, contractors, or service providers—are often hired to solve confidence problems. Clients doubt their internal resources can match external expertise. They pay a premium for confidence that the project will succeed.
That means a big part of our job is reassuring the client: “Yes, it is going to be okay. We’re working together with the data, skills, and experience we bring to this project.”
Of course, content strategists need to actually bring said experience and skills to the project. Content strategists often sit between teams, which means they need to:
- Communicate priorities and trade-offs clearly
- Defend scope without defensiveness
- Plan content work around real project constraints
Real-world scenarios:
- Timing Strategy Work to Support Sprints: You’re planning the content model and see that devs are sprinting on backend setup while designers are still finalizing templates. You hold off on finalizing field specs until both are ready—ensuring your deliverables land when devs can build and QA immediately, not weeks later.
- Protecting Strategy from Scope Creep: A stakeholder wants to add a new section midstream. You reference the content strategy, explain how it would affect the narrative structure, and propose it be part of a future iteration. Your framing protects both the strategy and timeline without sounding defensive.
- Connecting Content, Design, and Dev: You lead a working session where you walk through each content type and show how it maps to both the CMS structure and the design modules. Because you’ve already translated the editorial needs into technical specs, this becomes the go-to artifact for aligning future work.
- Mediating Design–Dev Misalignment with Content Logic: Designers want a visually distinct block; devs call it technically redundant. You point out where the existing content structure can support both needs by reusing components with adjusted styling rules—grounding your case in the model you’ve already defined.
- Framing Structured Content as Editorial Empowerment: The client wants total layout freedom. You show how structured content lets their team focus on storytelling and performance, not pixel-perfect layouts. You reframe the model as a way to scale great content without sacrificing brand voice.
- Turning Tech Concerns into Content Outcomes: Leadership is wary of headless CMS jargon. You position the move in terms of what it unlocks: faster campaign launches, personalized landing pages, and less back-and-forth with devs. Because you understand the tech and the content goals, you make the case stick.
- Facilitating Cross-Team Content Alignment: Product wants deep specs, marketing wants storytelling. You run a session to map each stakeholder’s content needs against the site architecture. Your taxonomy work becomes the bridge—helping each team see how their voice fits into a coherent system.
- Calming Stakeholders with Content Roadmaps: A technical blocker stalls the build. You step in—not to fix the tech, but to adjust the content rollout plan. You show which pages can still move forward, where messaging can flex, and how the team can use the delay to improve internal content workflows.
The “Fat I-Shaped” Content Strategist
You may have heard of being a T-shaped contributor: a broad skillset with area-specific depth. What we’re advocating is for content strategists to be shaped more like a fat, art deco “I” than a “T”: possessing deep expertise across their broad skillsets.
If you’re a content strategist feeling overwhelmed at what a content strategist is supposed to bring to the table – we get it. It’s a lot. But remember, it’s not like content strategists have to know all of these skills on day one. The natural curiosity that brought you to this practice will drive you to continuously learning new skills. (We live in the age of YouTube where you can learn anything and for free!)
Fat-I Content strategists:
- Solve problems before they escalate
- Reduce reliance on extra layers of management
- Improve quality by understanding every moving part
And they tend to be the ones clients trust the most.
Need Someone with These Skills?
If you’re facing messy content models, CMS bottlenecks, or cross-functional confusion, it’s probably time to call in a strategist who can see the whole field.
At Common People, this is exactly the kind of strategist we hire—and the kind we’ve become. We’ve learned After Effects to improve narrative storytelling. We’ve built automated newsletters for the US FDA using modern development and AI tools.
If you need a strategist who can drop into a project and bring clarity, confidence, and multi-skilled execution, we’d love to talk. Read about our senior content strategist on demand service here.
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