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What I’ve learned about compliance as a content manager and what I know to do now…
Lucky for me, my parents never pressured me to become a doctor or a lawyer. They wanted me to be happy and use my creative skills. So I became a content manager!
In the past few years, I’ve managed content for very diverse topics (think anything from psychic reading to world travel). Being a content manager involves a lot of reading, writing, and planning, as well as understanding how people interact with content. It requires me to keep my finger on the pulse on how the internet is changing. In general, I wouldn’t say that content management is a stressful job (like being a surgeon or a pilot), but there’s one thing that really gets the tempo going in content work, and it’s compliance issues.
In my last role, I was in constant connection with the legal team and content being produced and published on our sites was under heavy scrutiny of different consumer regulatory bodies. And in the past few years we would see brand new regulatory bodies would sprout up like mushrooms after the rain. Opening up my work email in the morning would often mean seeing a brand sending my Bizdev colleagues a long list of compliance strikes with the necessity to fix them ASAP, or else lose partnerships, as the regulatory bodies could create huge financial and legal issues for all sides involved.
Yeah, having to reprioritize all my ongoing projects to take care of extremely sensitive tasks as quickly as possible was stressful. But what was more worrying was the fact that each day my content team and I had to face compliance processes with no proper project management or processes in place. Everything was about putting out fires. Nothing was about figuring out long-term ways to prevent compliance catastrophes.
What did I learn from these situations, then?
Speak Up Early. All teams get overwhelmed, but if you don’t raise a flag, especially if you are carrying a huge burden in terms of workload, it can be difficult to start the process of change.
Realizing how impactful compliance can be. Fines and penalties are only the visible part of compliance risks. Unaddressed issues can erode brand trust, drive audiences away, and trigger content takedowns. This creates a cycle of oversight and stress. Content teams must stay alert to compliance demands, while legal teams should recognize how manual processes drain their counterparts. Ultimately, everyone has to treat the problem seriously.
Document to create clarity. Without rules or guidance, processes fall apart. At a previous job, I faced a flood of compliance requirements without a single reference document to rely on—or share with freelance writers. Change began with conversations, then meetings, and eventually the creation of cheat sheets and evergreen guides. Documentation filled the gap where it was missing most.
Be there to educate and keep the movement going. Once trapped in compliance chaos, it’s easy for morale to collapse under the weight of endless tasks. But staying positive and reframing compliance as a solvable blind spot makes a difference. With the right tools and understanding, the workload becomes far more manageable.
Bottom Line
Overall, it’s not just about getting into the right workflow for managing tasks, or figuring out who’s should really be the starting point of compliance tasks. From my experience, figuring out compliance came out from within the content team - from the people who actually have to implement the changes. Legal and business teams helped guide the way.
Now that I work at Seibert, I actually have an even better idea of how using both Confluence and Jira can help break compliance issue cycles, and provide the right platform for handling so many different issues. I compiled more my thoughts on a more granular level on the Seibert blog; Read it and get specific insights on Atlassian apps that can help solve compliance –>
https://seibert.group/products/blog/common-compliance-issues-and-how-to-avoid-them/
And let me know in the comments - what’s been your biggest compliance challenge in content or project management, and how did your team handle it?