Jeff Eaton: Content Observability in Complex Systems – Episode 212

Content Strategy Insights

Jeff Eaton Modern content systems are complex and abstract, presenting problems for managers who want to understand how their content is performing. At Autogram, Jeff Eaton and Karen McGrane have developed a content observability framework to address this complexity. Their framework evaluates the composition, quality, health, and effectiveness of content programs to help enterprises measure the return on their content investment. We talked about: his work at Autogram, the consultancy that he and Karen McGrane operate his high-level take on the notion of content observability how the growing complexity of content systems drives the need for content observability how content observability connects with content strategy the inadequacy of current analytics and other tooling to permit true content observations the role of content intent in discerning content performance the content ecosystem insight that led to their explorations in content observability the four pillars of Autogram's content observability framework: composition - the make-up of your content assets quality - organizational standards, regulatory compliance, voice and tone, etc. health - is the system working (regardless of the quality of the elements in it) effectiveness - is the content achieving the intended outcomes the ability within the framework to account for different content intentions in order to evaluate the ROI of the whole system some of the inspiration for his content observability work the talk that he and Karen are giving on content observability at the 2025 IA Conference Jeff's bio Jeff helps large organizations understand, model, and manage their content. Whether he’s fixing problems with CMS architecture or editorial workflow, his solutions sit in the overlap between design, communications, and technology. Connect with Jeff and Autogram online LinkedIn Bluesky Eaton, FYI Autogram Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/HMm5UhDKQiY Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 212. As content systems have become more complicated and abstract, understanding the effectiveness of your content efforts has become a real challenge. At Autogram, Jeff Eaton and his business partner Karen McGrane routinely work on very complex content projects. To help their clients understand the impact of their content, they have developed an observability framework that measures the composition, quality, health, and effectiveness of their content programs. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 212 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted to welcome back to the show, Jeff Eaton. Jeff, I think is one of the few three-time guests I've had. Maybe Preston So was the other. That's right. Might have had one other, but welcome back, Jeff. Oh, and for folks who don't know, Jeff is a partner at Autogram, the legendary consultancy. And he's also probably, it's safe to say the most famous, infamous, renowned content nerd out there. Welcome back, Jeff. Jeff: Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Always fun to come and talk shop and exchange news about what wild stuff we've all been working on and thinking about. It's great to be here. Larry: No, and one of the things, the reason I wanted to get back on, we were talking a while back a few weeks ago about this notion of content observability, which immediately to me was like, yeah, thank God. Let's do that. And thank God Jeff is thinking about it. But I think a lot of folks, it's a pretty well-known concept in the tech world, especially the dev ops and those kinds of worlds. But I think to a lot of our listeners, it might not be a familiar concept, so can you walk through the notion of observability and its application that you see it in the content world? Jeff: