Designing and running the kind of content operations that ensure quality, scale to teams of any size, and protect culture.

The idea of the creative director that knows every detail of every piece of work happening in their content operations department, be it a department of 10 or 100, is an idea of a bad creative director.

It isn’t the job of a content leader to make the content (if it were, then what would be the job of everyone else in the department?), it’s their job to make the machine that makes the content. If built right, the machine can nearly run itself: the work gets done, quality stays high, and the culture doesn’t break under the weight of its own size.

There are lots of things that make the process of making that machine—tools, trust, and culture in particular, which I’ll get to—but all content machines of all sizes are built on three vital pillars: vision, structure, and flow.

Get those right, and you can handle any kind of content, scale, or business without burning out your team or breaking your culture.

Vision: Where are we going?

Vision is the north star for the entire department. If anyone on your team doesn’t know where we’re going, even at least generally, it should be treated as a Tier 1 operational issue. 

Consider a huge marine freighter with a crew of dozens. It only works if everyone from the captain to the pilot to the galley cook all know what the larger purpose of the boat is: get all of this stuff from Port A to Port B.

Without a common, shared vision, big teams drift. Silos form, quality drops, and confusion spreads. With it, you get alignment and momentum.

A few years ago, I worked with a leading global smartphone brand on a high-volume product content program. We kept running into the same snag regarding the messaging guides they would send us for each product. Sometimes they wanted word-for-word precision, other times they wanted creative inspiration, but we would only find out their expectations after we’d done the work, leading to rewrites and frustration on all sides.

Our problem was a vision misalignment: they had an idea of how they wanted us to use their messaging guides, but didn’t know how to effectively communicate it.

To solve this, I created the Messaging Spectrum: a visual tool that quantified how closely they wanted us to stick to the guide for each piece. One end was “copy-paste exact,” the other was “inspired and flexible.” With this visualization, we were able to effectively talk about how closely they wanted us to stick to the guides—and, more importantly, move a conversation out of the realm of vibes and into the realm of process.

Once we agreed on where a piece sat on the spectrum, the guesswork disappeared, along with an entire cycle of wasted revisions.

Not everyone on the boat needs to know what the engine crew is doing, but they do need to know where the boat is going. That’s vision.

Structure: How am I helping?

It’s easy to think the “content process” is structure: the org chart, the SOPs, the checklists. It’s not the whole story (you still need Vision and Flow), but it is the most visible part. Structure is the clearly defined lanes, roles, and decision points that let a department of dozens or hundreds move without collisions.

On the maritime freighter, structure is everyone knowing how their specific crew position contributes to getting the boat to its destination. In a content department, it’s how you make sure people know:

• What their job is
• Where to go for answers
• Who depends on their work—and who their work depends on

At scale, you manage through strong department heads who lead their own teams under one unified process.

I once worked with a Fortune 50 insurance company whose in-house team had plenty of talent but no shared system. Writers, designers, production, product, compliance and legal, and even project managers each followed their own process, leading less to team integration and more to collisions that took days of working time to sort out.

Their VP of Digital Marketing, knowing I had a content agency background, asked me to build a process that pulled every stakeholder into one system (as they sold a highly regulated product, insurance, stakeholder input was very important) without sacrificing efficiency, time to approval, or content quality. So I built a process from the ground up, one that pulled all stakeholders into a single, unified system and layered in a content governance framework to keep compliance tight without slowing the work.

By clarifying roles, creating a unified workflow, and setting consistent points of contact, I cut confusion and duplication without changing headcount. 

Fixing a process doesn’t mean replacing people. Most scale problems are system problems, not people problems.

Flow: What are we actually doing to get there?

Flow is the content workflow—the way work actually moves from intake to production to review to publication and finally, to optimization.

A good flow keeps quality high without bottlenecks or burnout, and it makes progress visible to everyone. Issues get caught early instead of in a last-minute scramble.

When I worked on major product launches for the smartphone brand, the old process was chaos: intake was just a dump of product messaging and assets, strict information clean room regulations hamstrung communication, and approvals were crammed into the last 48 hours. The result was predictable: stress, rework, and missed opportunities.

We rebuilt it into a “clean room sprint” geared to work with the tight information security restrictions of the product launch:

• Align and approve messaging and specs before any design or copy started
• Define lanes for each discipline so no one was second-guessing each other
• Hold live stakeholder check-ins at key milestones to prevent drift
• Move QA checkpoints earlier in the process, not just at the end

The launches went from unpredictable to drama-free. We hit every go-live deadline, and post-launch updates took weeks instead of months. 

Process doesn’t slow you down. The right content workflow is what makes speed possible in the first place.

Building Beyond the Pillars

Every successful content machine is built on vision, structure, and flow, but they’re not the only factors that shape a successful team. Trust, culture, and tools matter to a degree that they deserve their own blog post (tools alone could be its own blog entirely), but in the interest of keeping this entry under 1500 words, I’ll only touch on them here:

• Tools: The pillars work no matter what tools you use, but a clear process makes tools more powerful. Not only can AI work well in this framework (especially as part of AI in content marketing initiatives), it THRIVES in a well-defined content process. It’s a better process aid than a content-generation shortcut, and it’s at its best when it’s making your existing team faster and sharper, not replacing them.
• Trust: You can’t fix a process you don’t understand. Take the time to talk to people at every level, map the current state, and make it clear you’ve heard them. Building trust in teams isn’t a byproduct, it’s the foundation that makes change possible.
• Culture: Every company has its own DNA. Your process needs to fit the way the organization works and protect the parts of the culture that make it strong, or else either it, the culture, or both will crumble. Good process cannot fix culture, but it can smother it. You must understand the culture of a workplace before you develop a process for it.

A content leader’s job isn’t to make content. It’s to make the machine that makes the content, and to make it so well it keeps running when you’re gone. Build it right, and it will keep delivering results and protecting your team’s culture for years.

Ironically, the truest test of your content operations process is the hardest KPI for you to measure: you won’t know if you’ve succeeded until after you’ve left. Success means the system you built is still in use, still delivering results, long after you’re gone.

Blots and Drops

• Shout out to whoever chose the splash image for this: Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes
  • I've had a post cooking up about this for at least a year—and oh boy, have I only been proven right over the past year. More to come.
• I'm back! A big reason is that Ghost 6.0 has officially federated, which is awesome. A better internet is possible, and it starts with decentralized platforms.

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