Amber Craig is a Lead Content Designer at Salesforce who believes that when a feature needs a lot of explanation, it’s a signal that clarity arrived too late. With 16 years of experience spanning technical writing, broadcast journalism, content strategy, and content design, she specializes in “logic-fixing” over “adjective-polishing.” Amber spent over a decade at IBM and Salesforce writing documentation before realizing her most impactful work happened upstream – collaborating with product teams to design clarity into the interface itself rather than explaining it after the fact. Today, she focuses on solving complex user problems at the source, keeping tooltips short and users sane.

How to Resign from the “Cleanup Crew” and Become an Upstream Design Force

If you’ve ever written a tooltip that turned into a “short novel” to duct-tape a confusing UI, you weren’t just writing—you were performing uncredited product design. Technical writers and content strategists are the detective agencies of the enterprise, finding the logic gaps everyone else missed. Yet, too often, we are cast as the “cleanup crew,” brought in at the final hour to sweep up the mess of shaky product logic. Drawing on 14 years at IBM and Salesforce, Amber Craig shares how to resign from the cleanup crew and become an upstream design force. This isn’t about changing your title; it’s about using your technical rigor as a strategic bridge to embed logic into the design phase before confusion is ever coded. Learn how to pivot your strengths into high-impact tools by moving upstream—where you can fix product logic instead of just symptoms—ensuring tooltips stay tiny, users stay sane, and AI scales clarity instead of confusion.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• The Skill Translation Matrix: Learn to reframe existing content strategy and technical writing skills as design logic to gain a seat at the table
• The Upstream Playbook: Apply tactical methods for inserting yourself into the discovery phase before the product logic is locked
• Logic as Influence: Use “Content Logic” to identify and fix product gaps during wire-framing rather than compensating later
• The AI Sanity Layer: Position yourself as the critical “logic layer” to prevent AI from scaling user confusion