Content manager

Spark Trajectory Intranet and Digital Workplace Roles and Teams > This role

What does the role Content manager do?

The Content Manager is responsible for the quality, governance, and lifecycle of content published on the intranet or digital workplace. This includes managing content standards, supporting and coordinating the network of content publishers, overseeing content review cycles, and ensuring pages remain accurate, owned, and findable. In the AI era the role takes on additional significance: unmanaged or poorly structured content creates direct misinformation risk when surfaced by AI retrieval tools.

Also known as

  • Intranet content manager
  • Digital content manager
  • Web content manager
  • Content editor
  • Intranet editor
  • Digital communications manager
  • Content strategist (internal)
  • Editorial manager
Widespread prevalence

This role is often found in larger organisations

Primary responsibilties

  • Governs the quality, accuracy, and lifecycle of content published on the intranet
  • Manages and supports the network of content publishers across the organisation
  • Defines and enforces content standards, templates, and publishing guidelines
  • Oversees content review cycles ensuring pages remain owned and up to date
  • Identifies and resolves content gaps, duplicates, and out-of-date material
  • Advises content owners on structuring content effectively for findability and AI retrieval

Related teams

We've known this role to be part of the following teams:
Intranet Team
Internal Communications

Skills profile

Note: This is what we documented as an exemplar. It's unlikely to always be the case and relates to a role's involvement with the delivery of digital employee experience and perhaps not everything they do. You can open this in the Skills Profile Builder if you want to customise it.

Apprentice

Limited but increasing capabilities based on learning and on-the-job experience, but guidance and mentoring is required to fulfil potential.

Practitioner

Good professional capabilities sufficient for many circumstances and roles. Able to guide and mentor apprentices.

Master

Abilities that are the best in the professional field, gained from significant experience. Able to teach and guide others in their development.
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Outline job description

The Content Manager is the person responsible for making sure the intranet's content actually works: that it's accurate, owned, well-structured, and findable. In the age of AI retrieval tools, that last point matters more than ever: poorly governed content doesn't just frustrate employees, it produces bad AI answers.

About the role

This is a specialist role focused on content as a managed asset. Most of the publishing on any large intranet is done by a distributed network of people across the organisation, and your job is to make that network function well. That means setting the standards, running the governance, and providing the support and coaching that helps publishers do their jobs properly.

The role appears in two common settings. In an Intranet Team it typically reports to the Intranet Manager. In an Internal Communications function the remit may extend to communication channels as well as the intranet content estate. Some organisations combine both in a single post.

What you'll actually be doing

Much of the work is about maintaining quality across a content estate you don't directly control. You'll be running review cycles, identifying pages that are out of date or poorly structured, and working with content owners to get things fixed. You'll also be developing and communicating the standards (templates, guidelines, tone of voice) that help publishers produce better content in the first place.

There's a coaching dimension too: a lot of the people in the publisher network aren't communications professionals, and helping them understand what good looks like is a real part of the job.

What we're looking for

Practical experience managing a content estate at scale: not just publishing content yourself, but governing a distributed network of people who do the publishing. The ability to influence without direct authority is central to this role.

Strong content judgement is essential: you should be able to spot problems with structure, accuracy, ownership, and findability, and know how to fix them. Familiarity with content management systems, intranet platforms, and how metadata and taxonomy affect findability is required. An awareness of how AI retrieval tools interact with content quality is increasingly important.

Typical background

Most people in this role come from web content management, editorial, or digital communications backgrounds. Enterprise intranet or CMS platform experience is normally expected. A library or information science background is less common but highly relevant.

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Errors? Disagreements? Omissions?

We have hopefully created these exemplars with thought and care. It is not the only way of looking at these roles and teams in the world, and relates specifically to the intranet and digital workplance profession. It therefore concentrates on some things and ignores others.

If you find an error, disagree wholeheartly or feel there is a glaring ommission we'd love to know.

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License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.