I want to describe a hiring pattern I have seen play out at least a dozen times in the last few years. A company decides they need to level up their content. They write a job description for a "Content Strategist." The listing talks about editorial vision, audience research, content calendars, SEO strategy, and thought leadership. They hire someone smart. Someone with a portfolio full of campaigns that drove real results.
Then, on day three, someone asks them to fix 47 broken redirects.
By week two, they are updating meta descriptions on old blog posts. By month two, they are exporting HubSpot data into spreadsheets, cleaning up author tags, and trying to figure out why half the landing pages still reference a product name that changed in 2023.
This is not content strategy. This is content operations. And the failure to distinguish between the two is costing companies real money and burning out talented people.
The Two Jobs Living Inside One Title
Content strategy is about decisions. What topics should we cover? Who are we writing for? What does our brand sound like? How does content support the sales pipeline? Where should we be publishing? These are high-level questions that require research, judgment, and time to think.
Content operations is about execution at scale. How do we update 200 page titles without breaking anything? How do we manage redirects when we retire old campaign pages? How do we keep metadata consistent across a site that has grown to 500 pages over four years? Who tracks what changed and when?
Both are essential. Neither is optional. But they require completely different skill sets, completely different tools, and completely different mindsets.
The problem is that most companies hire for strategy and then hand over operations. Not because they are cheap or clueless, but because they do not realize how much operational work their website actually requires until someone is sitting in the seat.
Why CMS Tooling Creates This Problem
Here is the thing most people miss. The reason content operations work consumes so much time is not because the tasks are complex. It is because the tools make simple tasks slow.
Take HubSpot as an example. If you need to update a meta description on one page, it takes about two minutes. Click into the page editor, find the settings tab, make the edit, save, publish. Fine.
Now multiply that by 150 pages. Suddenly you are looking at five hours of clicking through the same interface, doing the same two-minute task over and over. That is a full day of work that requires zero strategic thinking and maximum tolerance for repetition.
Redirects are even worse. HubSpot lets you manage them, but doing it one at a time when you have hundreds to review is the kind of work that makes people question their career choices.
The CMS was not built for bulk operations. It was built for creating and editing individual pages. So anyone responsible for site-wide maintenance is stuck working against the tool instead of with it.
This is exactly why tools focused on bulk operations exist. Smuves, for example, has been shipping features specifically designed to eliminate the repetitive CMS work that eats up content team hours. The product updates page shows a clear focus on this: in-app bulk editing, find and replace across entire sites, advanced filters, and activity logging. These are operations features, not strategy features. And that distinction matters.
The Real Cost of Role Confusion
When you collapse strategy and operations into one role, three things happen.
First, strategic work does not get done. The person you hired to think about audience segmentation and content differentiation is instead spending their afternoons in a spreadsheet updating alt text. The strategic thinking you are paying for never actually happens because the operational backlog always feels more urgent.
Second, operational work gets done badly. A strategist doing operations work is like a software architect doing QA testing. They can do it, but it is not their strength, they do not enjoy it, and they will cut corners to get back to the work they were actually hired for.
Third, the person burns out and leaves. I have seen this pattern repeat consistently. Someone takes a content strategist role, discovers that 70% of the job is CMS maintenance, spends six months trying to push through it, and then quietly starts interviewing elsewhere. The company loses the person and the institutional knowledge, then posts the same job listing and starts the cycle again.
What the Fix Actually Looks Like
The fix is not complicated, but it does require admitting that content operations is a real discipline that deserves its own resources.
Step one: audit how your content team actually spends their time. Not how you think they spend it. How they actually spend it. Track it for two weeks. You will almost certainly find that operational tasks (metadata updates, redirect management, broken link fixes, CMS cleanup) consume 50% or more of what was supposed to be a strategy role.
Step two: separate the responsibilities. You do not necessarily need to hire a full-time content operations person. But you do need to explicitly name the operational tasks, assign them, and give whoever owns them the right tools. A detailed guide like The Ultimate Guide to Bulk Editing Your Website in HubSpot lays out the specific workflows and pain points that fall under operations, not strategy.
Step three: invest in tooling that eliminates the repetition. The reason operations work takes so long is not that there is too much of it. It is that the tools require manual, page-by-page work for tasks that should be bulk operations. Fix the tooling layer and you can compress what used to take days into what takes an hour.
A Quick Checklist: Is Your Strategist Actually Doing Ops?
If the person in your content strategist role regularly does any of the following, they are doing operations work:
Updating meta titles or descriptions across multiple pages. Managing URL redirects (creating, reviewing, or cleaning up redirect chains). Fixing broken internal links. Editing author profiles, tags, or categories in the CMS. Exporting CMS data to spreadsheets for bulk review. Re-publishing pages after making settings-level changes. Auditing alt text on images across the blog.
None of these tasks require strategic thinking. All of them require time. And all of them are things that a proper operations setup, backed by the right tools, can handle far more efficiently than a person clicking through a CMS one page at a time.
The Takeaway for Technical Teams
If you work in engineering or DevOps, think about it this way. You would never ask a solutions architect to also handle ticket triage, server monitoring, and patch management full-time. You understand that architecture and operations require different tools, different workflows, and different people (or at least different time blocks).
Content teams deserve the same respect. Strategy and operations are both essential. But they are not the same job. And the longer companies pretend they are, the more strategic talent they will burn through doing work that a better tooling setup could handle in a fraction of the time.
The next time someone on your team says "our content is not where it should be," ask the follow-up question: is that because the strategy is wrong, or because the person responsible for strategy is spending their days fixing redirects?
The answer will tell you everything about where to invest next.
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