Good Content Strategist vs. Bad Content Strategist

If you’ve run content for more than a year or two, you’ve sat in the meeting. Someone senior asks why the blog isn’t growing, or why you aren’t on whatever platform their kid uses, and you have about ninety seconds to answer in a way that either buys you another two quarters of runway or starts the clock on your replacement.

Ben Horowitz wrote “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” at Netscape back in the nineties, and it has outlived almost everything else written about that job. The format is his and I can’t take credit for it. But I’ve spent over a decade watching content strategists thrive and stall out across media, education, and tech, and the same split keeps showing up in the room, so here is my version of it.

One thing before the list. Almost none of this is about talent. The bad content strategist in these pairs is usually a smart, hardworking person who inherited a calendar and was never given permission to ask why it existed.

Good content strategists think in systems. Bad content strategists think in assets. The tell is what they show you when you ask what they’re working on: one of them pulls up a calendar, the other pulls up a diagram.

Good content strategists ask “should we be doing this at all?” before “how do we execute this better?” Bad content strategists execute whatever the last content leader set in motion, because it’s already on the calendar and nobody has told them to stop.

Good content strategists spend twenty minutes a day inside the media their ICP (ideal customer profile) actually consumes, which means their browser history and their YouTube ads are riddled with it. Bad content strategists read a third-party trends report and call that audience insight. The daily practice is what told me that the audience at Udacity, the online education company where I ran B2C content, wanted long, dense, technical pieces, at a moment when every industry report was warning about collapsing attention spans.

Good content strategists look for the work competitors aren’t willing to do by hand, what I call the Human Touch Advantage. Bad content strategists try to out-scale competitors using the same tools everyone else has. Video is the cleanest example going right now: far more brands will ship an AI-drafted article than will commit to producing good video, which is exactly why YouTube is turning into the new blog SEO. Scale was once a competitive edge. Today it’s table stakes. They can also tell when a format has aged out, which I’ve mapped in The Trendy-to-Tacky Lifecycle.

Good content strategists can tell you what share of the calendar is proven, what’s an experiment, and what’s a moonshot, and why each number is what it is. Bad content strategists either run the same three formats until the feed goes stale or chase every trend with the same budget.

Good content strategists know exactly why they are or aren’t on a given channel, and can defend it with their own first-party data. Bad content strategists panic when someone senior asks why they aren’t on whatever platform their kid uses.

Good content strategists get the definition of success agreed to in writing before they start. Bad content strategists start making things and hope the value becomes obvious later. It doesn’t.

Good content strategists can draw a line from a piece of content to revenue, out loud, in a room full of people who don’t care about content. Data, then insight, then implication: what the numbers show, what they mean, what we should do about it. Bad content strategists bring impressions.

Good content strategists measure on three clocks, weekly for tactics, monthly for strategy, quarterly for business impact. Bad content strategists either track everything or track nothing that would ever change a decision.

Good content strategists narrow the aperture until they can honestly claim the most valuable thing on the internet about one specific topic. If you can’t be the best pizza shop in town, be the best mushroom pizza shop in town. Bad content strategists go after a broad topic and end up distinctive nowhere.

Good content strategists direct AI the way a creative director briefs an illustrator: in the style of early Malcolm Gladwell, structured like a Pixar arc, and they can say why. Bad content strategists either refuse to touch the tools or use them to make more of exactly what they were already making.

Good content strategists know which building they’re standing in. In a media company, content is the product and the writers are the engineers. In a tech company, content supports the product, and you will be asked to justify its existence on a regular basis. Bad content strategists carry the media playbook into a tech company and get blindsided.

Good content strategists expect to prove their worth over and over, and keep a running file of receipts for the day someone asks. Bad content strategists get defensive, because the question landed like an insult instead of a Tuesday. The seven versions of that question you’ll actually get are in Proving Your Worth As A Content Strategy Leader.

Good content strategists treat the community as co-creators and give them something to build on. Bad content strategists treat an audience as a set of eyeballs to be reached. Greatness Media, the podcast and media company where I led content, made this obvious to me: what its community valued most was being handed part of the work.

Good content strategists build for depth before reach, following Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans, the idea that a creator needs a small number of genuinely committed people rather than a large number of passive ones. Bad content strategists post and pray for organic reach. Taking their site from zero to 100,000+ monthly visitors, that threshold was the moment the sharing stopped being something we did and became something the audience did.

Good content strategists read their copy out loud, at normal speaking volume, before it ships. Bad content strategists write like a term paper and wonder why nobody finishes it.

Good content strategists connect people who wouldn’t otherwise be in the same conversation, and the work keeps running after they leave. Bad content strategists make themselves the bottleneck and call it ownership.

Good content strategists assume the reader is smarter than the tactic. Bad content strategists reach for the thing that gets the click and costs the trust.

Good content strategists are architecting the systems that make great content inevitable. Bad content strategists are managing an editorial calendar and hoping.

Maybe you read that and recognized yourself on the wrong side of a few. So did I, writing it.

Pick the one that made you wince and change it this quarter. Fair warning: it will make your next monthly report look worse before it looks better, because the vanity metrics drop immediately and the business metrics take a quarter or two to show up behind them. Sitting through that gap, and being able to explain it to the person asking, is most of the job.