# Design ### About this export | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | **content_type** | lesson | | **platform** | contentstack-academy | | **source_url** | https://www.contentstack.com/academy/courses/project-managing-a-contentstack-implementation/design | | **course_slug** | project-managing-a-contentstack-implementation | | **lesson_slug** | design | | **markdown_file_url** | /academy/md/courses/project-managing-a-contentstack-implementation/design.md | | **generated_at** | 2026-06-08T14:32:17.789Z | > Part of **[Project Managing a Contentstack Implementation](https://www.contentstack.com/academy/courses/project-managing-a-contentstack-implementation)** on Contentstack Academy. **Academy MD v3** — structured for retrieval; no quiz or assessment keys. #### Video details #### At a glance - **Title:** 02 Design - **Duration:** 7m 49s - **Media link:** https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/hWYnknX0 - **Publish date (unix):** 1764771256 #### Streaming renditions - application/vnd.apple.mpegurl - audio/mp4 · AAC Audio · 113482 kbps - video/mp4 · 180p · 180p · 199572 kbps - video/mp4 · 270p · 270p · 258257 kbps - video/mp4 · 360p · 360p · 305954 kbps - video/mp4 · 406p · 406p · 345813 kbps - video/mp4 · 540p · 540p · 472266 kbps - video/mp4 · 720p · 720p · 691808 kbps - video/mp4 · 1080p · 1080p · 1470269 kbps #### Timed text tracks (delivery) - **thumbnails:** `https://cdn.jwplayer.com/strips/hWYnknX0-120.vtt` #### Video transcript If the first clip was about alignment, this one is about architecture, creative, technical, and organizational. Here we'll talk about design, where your project starts to take shape. Now don't let the word design fool you. This isn't just about how things look, it's about how they work, how content is structured, what it does, what connects to what, and how your users will experience it all. This phase is a mix of strategy, user experience, technical architecture, and let's be honest, a little bit of healthy chaos. Teams work in parallel, ideas evolve, and the best results come from iterating fast and fixing early. So let's break it down. There are six core focus areas in the design phase. First, requirements gathering and analysis. Before you sketch a wireframe or define a content type, you need to create a crystal clear requirements document. That means sitting down with stakeholders, using tools like the five whys, and analyzing what content types, metadata, and workflows already exist. You'll also look at your current CMS integrations, content permissions, and localization strategy, like whether you're managing content centrally or regionally. This work defines the playing field. It helps surface edge cases, the technical constraints, and the content quirks you'll need to design around. Next is user roles, workflows, and publishing rules. Basically, who does what and when. You'll define user roles in content stack, editor, contributor, administrator, and the workflows they follow. Who creates, who approves, and who publishes. This section forces you to document it all, not just roles and permissions, but publishing rules, automation triggers, and content expiration policies. Think of it as designing the editorial engine behind your CMS. You want clarity now, not confusion when deadlines hit. Now we get into the technical bones of the project. The technical, architecture, and system design. You'll lock in your stack, identify integration points, and define your data flows. This includes connecting to things like marketing platforms, product catalogs, CDPs, DAMs, and translation services. Whether you're doing a lift and shift or a full redesign, you'll need to create an architecture diagram of your future state and make sure everything – content, APIs, the front end – all plays well together. Security, compliance, and continuous integration. Continuous delivery pipelines. This is where it all gets scoped and validated. Next, content modeling and UX design. This is where your content structure and user experience come together. You'll define your content types, global fields, modular blocks, metadata, and taxonomy. It's not just about building what you have. It's about planning for what you might need later and ensure maximum reusability as well. You'll align your content model with your wireframes and develop your design system from UI patterns to instructional text for editors. Don't forget accessibility, branding, and reusability. And yes, personalization can be part of this phase too, if it's in scope. If you're migrating from another CMS, this is where things get real. You'll assess the current system, inventory, your content types, and map that data into your new content stack model. This is where the ETL process kicks in – extract, transform, and load. You'll document how to handle parent-child relationships, taxonomy, assets, and metadata, and decide when to freeze content for a clean transition. Migration is often underestimated. Start planning it now before timelines get tight. Now, the Content Stack Migration tool. This helps users migrate content from a legacy CMS into Content Stack. It streamlines the process with an intuitive interface and a step-by-step workflow for importing content, mapping content types, and transferring data into a stack. Behind the scenes, it handles the heavy lifting of extract, transform, and load, standardizing data into Content Stack-friendly JSON, validating relationships, and catching errors early. But as smooth as this tool makes the process, success still depends on what you bring into it. Migration isn't just technical, it's editorial, it's procedural. On one project, a client insisted on skipping the content spring cleaning step. They wanted to move everything over as-is. Outdated articles, duplicate assets, broken links, all of it. Halfway through, their content creators couldn't find the right versions of pages, workflows broke, and their search results were full of junk. We had to pause, roll back, and redo weeks of work. Compare that to another client who invested time upfront in pruning and normalizing content. They built a project plan to track every migration step. They kept a manual feedback plan in case automation failed, and audited existing pages to ensure only relevant content made the cut. When we flipped the switch on production, their site went live smoothly and on schedule. The lesson learned. Clean first, plan thoroughly, and always have a fallback. Finally, you'll gather all the pieces, wireframes, style guides, workflow architecture diagrams, content models, and prep your handoff for development. You'll document any functional constraints, technical specifications, or exceptions that the teams need to know before they start building. This isn't about creating a binder that nobody reads, it's about giving developers and content authors the tools they need to move fast and stay aligned. So, to recap, the design phase is where clarity meets creativity. It's a mix of UX, systems thinking, and content strategy all working together. By the end of this phase, you should have a defined content model and design system, a full technical architecture diagram, user roles, workflows, and publishing rules, a plan for content migration, and documentation ready for development. This is your blueprint, your North Star, and getting it right now means fewer blockers later. This overview just scratched the surface. Make sure to download the design phase guide to walk through detailed workflows, documentation templates, and best practices to get your structure and strategy dialed in. #### Key takeaways - Connect **Design** back to your stack configuration before moving to the next module. - Capture one concrete artifact (screenshot, Postman call, or code snippet) that proves the step works in your environment. - Re-read the delivery versus management boundary for anything you changed in the entry model. ## Supplement for indexing ### Content summary Design. Design in Project Managing a Contentstack Implementation (project-managing-a-contentstack-implementation). ### Retrieval tags - Design - project-managing-a-contentstack-implementation - lesson 02 - project-managing-a-contentstack-implementation lesson ### Indexing notes Index this lesson as a primary chunk tagged with lesson_id "02" and topics: [Design]. Parent course slug: project-managing-a-contentstack-implementation. Use asset_references URLs as thumbnail hints in search results when present. Never surface LMS quiz content or assessment answers from this file. ### Asset references | Label | URL | | --- | --- | | Video thumbnail: Design | `https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/hWYnknX0/poster.jpg?width=720` | ### External links | Label | URL | | --- | --- | | Contentstack Academy home | `https://www.contentstack.com/academy/` | | Training instance setup | `https://www.contentstack.com/academy/training-instance` | | Academy playground (GitHub) | `https://github.com/contentstack/contentstack-academy-playground` | | Contentstack documentation | `https://www.contentstack.com/docs/` |