The 'If I Could Have Written It' Content Bar
A one-question filter for whether technical content will earn credibility or be ignored.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Butler's test for whether a piece of content is deep enough for a technical audience: if she — a marketer, not a designer — understood it easily or could have written it herself, it was too basic to ship. The bar forces content to be authored by practitioners on the team and to go deep enough that the target IC learns something they could not have found elsewhere.
Origin
Devised by Claire Butler at Figma in 2015-2016 as the only marketer, working with the engineering and design teams to produce the pre-launch content that established Figma's technical credibility.
Core principles
- 01The credibility of the author matters as much as the content — a marketer can never have a designer's credibility with designers.
- 02Depth is the proof of care; care is what a craft-obsessed audience buys.
- 03Content is also a re-engagement mechanism: each deep piece is a reason to come back into a product that isn't yet good enough to switch to.
How to run it
- 1
Draft the piece with a practitioner on your team
Pair with the engineer or designer who actually made the decision, and have them explain the reasoning and the craft trade-offs.
Pro tip The topic should be a product decision you made differently from convention — grids, vector networks, the pen tool.
Watch out Marketers cannot fake this; the audience detects it instantly.
- 2
Apply the bar
Ask: could I, a non-practitioner, have written this? Did I understand all of it without effort? If yes to either, it is too basic — push it deeper.
Pro tip Hitting a reference you had to Google (Josef Müller-Brockmann on grids, for Figma) is a good sign you cleared the bar.
Watch out This bar means low volume — about ten pieces in six months. Accept that.
- 3
Attach a reason to come back into the product
End each piece with a concrete nugget that pulls the reader back into the tool to try the thing you just explained.
Pro tip This is how you retain interest in a product that is not yet feature-complete enough for them to switch to full-time.
- 4
Distribute where the practitioners already are
Push it into the community channels the audience actually reads — for Figma, Hacker News, Designer News and Twitter — not your own owned properties.
Pro tip One post going to number one on Hacker News did more for credibility than a marketing campaign.
In the wild
Figma published a deep piece on how it built grids, going into Josef Müller-Brockmann's influence on the discipline. Butler had to Google who he was — which is exactly why she knew the piece was deep enough to ship.
→ Content that cleared the bar became the credibility engine for a product that was still missing its core differentiator.
Figma had Evan Wallace write technical content about how the tool worked — the first design tool built on WebGL, effectively video game technology in the browser.
→ The post reached number one on Hacker News, generating engineering credibility and interest before the product itself was competitive.
Common mistakes
Having marketers write the technical content
A marketer will never have a designer's or engineer's credibility with that audience. The author's practitioner status is part of the payload.
Optimizing for publishing cadence
Quantity destroys the bar. Ten excellent posts in six months beat a weekly blog of shallow ones.
Is it for you?
Best for
Marketers producing content for craft-obsessed technical audiences (designers, engineers, data practitioners) who have a high BS meter
Not ideal for
Broad consumer audiences or SEO-volume plays where reach matters more than credibility
From the transcript
“if I could have written it it's not good enough”
“so I got him to like make technical content and that I think went to number one on Hecker news”
“so we kept giving them these nuggets of reasons to come back in”
From the episode
An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion
Claire Butler (first GTM hire)