Writers of Silicon Valley

Tamara Hilmes is a UX Writing Manager at Spotify, and she and I spent some time talking about her background, what makes working at Spotify so great, and the skills she needs to succeed at a major company there - and how to succeed as a UX writer, specifically.

Dropbox is one of those fascinating companies. Steve Jobs wanted to buy it at one point. Now it's huge. HUGE. With that growth comes a need for UX writing, and that's why Angela Gorden is here today. Angela Gorden is all about making big ideas easy to absorb. Currently a UX writer and manager at Dropbox, she studied design thinking at Stanford University and creative writing at the University of Iowa. Angela blogs about product, design, and writing on Medium.

Yep, I get it. You signed up to listen to other UX writers, not me. In that case I say, skip! Delete! Burn! Destroy your phone, even. Last week I gave a presentation to Content Melbourne, at General Assembly. I spoke about how journalism skills can help you as a UX writer. It’s just a piece of bonus content, so I hope you enjoy it.

We spend so much time and effort thinking about UX writing that’s “delightful” we often miss the point: form over function. Good UX writing should be…pretty boring, actually. Ryan Farrell is a content strategist at GoodRx, but you might very well know him as the creator of the Daily UX Writing Challenge. We talk about the newsletter, the skills we think are underrated in the UX writing community, and whether Neil Armstrong should have been told “good job” by his onboard computer when landing on

At the time we spoke. Annie Adams was working as a UX writer in the fashion industry (she’s still a UX writer, just in a different industry now). Our conversation covered so much - best practices for testing copy, the nuances of the fashion industry, and much more.

Yo, chatbots. They’re all the rage, but are they actually going to be a necessary tool for UX writers and content strategists in the future? How essential are they to your arsenal? If they are, what skills do you need to learn? That’s the crux of today’s interview with Hillary Black, VP of Strategy & Conversation Design at Black Ops.

Kathryn Strauss is currently a Senior UX Writer at Square, but her background extends far beyond that with roles at Wells Fargo, US Bank, WebEx, Glassdoor and Weebly. It would take hours to speak about everything she’s done at those roles, so I tried to keep our conversation high level. We spoke about how writers can participate in UX research, the future of the industry, and the types of skills it takes to be a really, really good UX Writer and Content Strategist.

Working remotely is something most people dream of. For Sophie Tahran at Invision, it's a lifestyle. I spoke to her about what it's like to work for a fully remote company, how her time at Lyft impacted her design sensibilities, and what it's like to work for one of the biggest software companies in UX. Writers of Silicon Valley is hosted by Patrick Stafford, senior digital copywriter at MYOB.

Welcome to Writers of Silicon Valley! This podcast interviews UX writers and content strategists about their craft. This first episode features Roy West, design director of UX Writing at Uber. We speak about his history at Uber, Google and even at Next during the early 1990s.