nicole leblanc is a Content design leader. She’s currently managing teams across buying, renting, and managing rentals at zillow.

A selection of strategic efforts between 2022 — present

Building a Product Communications Strategy at Zillow

(IN PROGRESS)

Challenge
Zillow’s product communications (emails, push) often lack the level of personalization and consistency that people expect today. This was leading to fragmented messaging touchpoints, missed opportunities, and ultimately, limited engagement.

The team was working fast to test and iterate, but not taking a moment away to look at the full picture. Without a foundational and structured approach, messaging was often reactive rather than proactively designed to enhance the customer experience.

Solution
In 2025, my team is the first to lead the development of a Product Comms Content Design Strategy, a structured framework to align, personalize, and optimize user communications across the Zillow ecosystem.

This initiative includes:

  • Customer journey mapping to identify communication gaps and redundancies

  • A cross-functional alignment strategy bringing together Product, Design, Marketing, and Engineering to create a shared vision for communications

  • A unified messaging framework with content principles, tone guidance, and personalization strategies

  • Data-driven testing and optimization through A/B and multivariate experiments to measure engagement, retention, and customer satisfaction

Key workstreams

  • Personalization strategy: Using customer data to create more relevant, timely, and contextualized communications

  • End-to-end messaging consistency: Standardizing voice, tone, and content strategy across emails, push notifications, and in-app messaging

Impact

  • Improved cross-team collaboration by aligning multiple teams around a centralized content strategy

  • Creating a foundation for future scalability and continuous improvement

This work has positioned Content Design as a key strategic partner in customer communication, influencing how Zillow interacts with millions of users daily.

Driving AI Innovation in Content Design: Implementing writer.ai

Challenge

Content designers were spending a lot of time updating content and making their own copy. This made it hard for them to focus on more important strategic work.

Solution

With the support of executive leadership, I ran a pilot program and secured implementation for Writer.ai, an AI-powered content generation LLM, to increase team efficiency and content standardization.

My approach included:

  • Spearheading and leading a multi-month, structured pilot, measuring effectiveness in real workflows

  • Running training and change management sessions to drive adoption

  • Continuously communication updates and developments with executive leadership and in cross-functional, all-team forums

Impact (at pilot end)

  • Reduced content creation time by up to 50% for routine tasks

  • Estimated $85K+ in cost savings within the first year

  • Increased content quality scores by 71.5% based on heuristic evaluations

This focus on dynamic governance has positioned Zillow as an early adopter of AI in UX writing, influencing leadership buy-in for future tooling investments.

Creating Levels of Engagement For content design

Challenge
As Zillow’s Content Design team expanded, managing workload distribution and setting clear expectations for engagement became increasingly complex.

Content designers were stretched across multiple projects, often without clear alignment on how deeply they should be involved. This led to misaligned expectations with partners, unclear prioritization, and inefficient resource allocation.

Solution
As one of my earliest managerial efforts, I developed our Levels of Engagement, a scalable framework that clarified how and when content designers should engage in projects, based on scope and strategic impact.

This model created a shared language between Content Design and cross-functional partners, helping teams:

  • Prioritize competing demands and allocate resources efficiently

  • Set clear expectations for content involvement at project kickoff

  • Align engagement levels with business priorities

The framework includes four levels of engagement:

  1. Leading – Content Design owns the strategic direction and is the primary stakeholder

  2. Co-designing – Content Design partners closely with UX and research to shape solutions

  3. Standard practice – Content Design provides limited, targeted support for XS/S projects for teams without embedded content designers

  4. Unsupported – Content Design doesn’t engage due to capacity constraints, lower strategic priority, etc.

To ensure adoption:

  • Piloted the model with RentalsXP in Q1 2024, refining it based on feedback

  • Created training materials and completed roadshow presentations to align manager partners

  • Rolled out the framework across all Zillow product verticals by Q2 2024, with support from Content Design and DesignOps leaders

  • Integrated the framework into a larger DesignOps program for standardized working norms

Impact

  • Content Design can now prioritize high-impact projects with a deeper prediction of overextending

  • Project intake and planning discussions are streamlined and faster

  • Product and design teams now understand what level of support to expect or solicit from Content Design

  • Gives Content Design stronger influence on how they can best engage new initiatives where solutions are unknown

This framework operationalized content design engagement at scale, ensuring the team could focus on the highest-impact work while maintaining sustainable workloads. It also strengthened Content Design’s role as a strategic function within Zillow’s UX organization.