The Financial Times has a wide range of digital products, each tailored to different audiences and use cases. But over time, the way these products were described across emails, landing pages, in-app messages, and campaigns became inconsistent. This created fragmented experiences and diluted the perceived value of each product.
To solve this, I led the development of a centralised UX messaging toolkit. It brought structure and consistency to how we communicate product value, making it easier for teams to write clear, purposeful messaging, and for users to understand what’s on offer.
The toolkit was designed to be modular, flexible, and rooted in user insight. It supported faster marketing execution, more relevant messaging, and a stronger brand voice across all touchpoints.
The Challenge
As the FT’s digital product offering matured, the number of distinct subscription models and audiences grew. Each product team had its own roadmap, KPIs, and approach to marketing. Over time, this decentralised structure led to real inconsistencies in how we talked about value.
For example, FT Premium messaging might focus on exclusivity and expert insight in one campaign while another leaned heavily on breadth and access. FT Edit, a curated, mobile-first product, was sometimes framed with the same serious, weighty tone as our flagship offerings, which didn’t reflect its lighter use case or younger audience.
We saw:
Repetitive or generic messaging reused across touchpoints
Descriptions that conflicted between email, web, and app
Little emotional differentiation between products
Messaging that didn’t reflect real user needs or motivations
Because each team was writing in isolation, we were missing opportunities to build clearer product narratives and stronger emotional resonance. It wasn’t just a brand issue. It was a UX problem. When users can’t understand what makes a product right for them or how one offering differs from another, engagement drops.
We also lacked the infrastructure for scalable testing. Without structured variants or messaging themes, marketers struggled to run meaningful experiments or optimise based on performance data.
This raised three key UX questions:
How can we keep the FT voice coherent across multiple, very different products?
How do we turn strategy and segmentation into usable copy for emails, app banners, landing pages, and paid media?
Can we make the messaging system modular enough to support campaign testing and personalisation?
Approach
To start, I didn’t write any copy. I immersed myself in the source material, including master product documents, customer segmentation frameworks, persona research, and previous campaign reports. I also joined planning sessions with marketing, product, and acquisition teams to understand their workflow, needs, and pain points.
The goal was to understand not just what each product offered, but what it meant to different users.
From this, I mapped:
Which benefits matter to which segments, such as ambition, simplicity, depth, or speed
How tone and message framing needs to shift by role, industry, or content habit
Where product confusion was occurring in the user journey
What kind of language sparked engagement versus what caused fatigue or indifference
One key insight was that our users didn’t just want utility. They wanted identity. FT Premium readers valued messaging that positioned them as leaders or experts. FT Edit users responded to language that made news feel manageable and digestible.
Rather than writing toward a middle ground, we leaned into these differences.
Solution
The result was a centralised UX messaging toolkit. A structured, flexible content system created to serve multiple products and cross-functional teams.
We developed messaging frameworks for four core FT products. Each framework included:
A core narrative that captured the product’s strategic value
Testing themes to enable variation, personalisation, or experimentation
Copy modules formatted for actual use cases like banners, emails, app cards, and social ads
A breakdown of emotional and functional benefits that guided tone and CTA logic
Clear voice alignment so that all messaging sounded distinctly like the FT
Each product framework worked like a modular kit. For example, in a campaign targeting first-time readers in financial services, marketers could pair a headline focused on credibility with support copy about career value. This gave teams flexibility without losing clarity or consistency.
Example lines for FT Standard Digital and the app:
Essential: “Critical analysis of critical events.”
Confidence: “Your compass through complexity.”
Status: “What does your newspaper say about you?”
Global: “See what’s around the corner. From every corner of the world.”
Core theme: “Independent journalism for independent thinkers.”
Each theme supported a different use case or mindset. Together, they allowed us to shape experiences that were precise, relevant, and on-brand across every stage of the journey.
Impact
Even in early rollout, the toolkit changed how teams worked.
Copy was faster to produce, with strategic starting points instead of blank pages
Testing became easier and more structured, with predefined themes to measure performance
Tone consistency improved, as teams aligned around shared language and framing
Campaigns became more audience-relevant, using messaging that matched user intent
While it's still being adopted across the business, internal feedback has been strong. Teams report higher confidence in their messaging, and fewer inconsistencies across channels. Most importantly, users now see clearer, more focused value in FT products.
Learnings & Reflections
This project showed me that content systems are just as important as design systems. When you build frameworks that reflect strategy, audience, and brand tone, you create space for better, faster, and more effective communication.
It also confirmed how emotional insights can elevate product messaging. When we stopped trying to appeal to everyone and started writing for specific needs and mindsets, the copy felt sharper and more human.
Most of all, it reminded me that UX writing is not just about words. It’s about solving clarity problems, supporting user goals, and helping people connect with the product in a meaningful way.