The five stages of content debt

From Content Operations by Scriptorium - The Content Strategy Experts

November 3, 2025 · 27 min

About this episode

The episode discusses the five stages of content debt and how to navigate them for better content operations.

Your organization’s content debt costs more than you think. In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Dipo Ajose-Coker unpack the five stages of content debt from denial to action. Sarah and Dipo share how to navigate each stage to position your content—and your AI—for accuracy, scalability, and global growth. The blame stage: “It’s the tools. It’s the process. It’s the people.” Technical writers hear, “We’re going to put you into this department, and we’ll get this person to manage you with this new agile process,” or, “We’ll make you do things this way.” The finger-pointing begins. Tech teams blame the authors. Authors blame the CMS. Leadership questions the ROI of the entire content operations team. This is often where organizations say, “We’ve got to start making a change.” They’re either going to double down and continue building content debt, or they start looking for a scalable solution. — Dipo Ajose-Coker Related links: Scriptorium: Technical debt in content operations Scriptorium: AI and content: Avoiding disaster RWS: Secrets of Successful Enterprise AI Projects…

People in this episode

Host: Sarah O’Keefe

Guest: Dipo Ajose-Coker

Topics covered

content debt
content strategy
AI in content
organizational change
scalability

Keywords

content debt
AI
scalability
content operations
organizational change

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Scriptorium