Content governance for small teams

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Most advice about content governance assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What to keep

Someone must own each page or it rots. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

How we handle it

Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The short version

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about content governance before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.