Best Practices

Having done literally hundreds of projects at this point, we have a pretty informed understanding about what contributes to mutual success.

Projects

First, every project benefits from us knowing three big things:

  • What’s the main goal of this piece and how will it be used?
  • What’s the main thesis (if already known)?
  • Who are the target audiences (in priority order)?

Second, we’ve found that it’s best if we have direct relationships with:

  • Project owner, project organizer, project lead (maybe one person has all these roles, maybe multiple people are involved)
  • People responsible for data (e.g., telemetry, survey results, metrics and KPIs, etc.)
  • Subject matter experts

Third, we like to be provided with:

  • Content briefs (just the basics)
  • Any applicable guardrails, parameters, etc.
  • Any strict requirements
  • Any applicable positioning and messaging guides

Fourth, overwhelm us with information — we’d rather receive the same thing twice, or in multiple forms, than not at all.

Finally, we’ll note that while we’re happy to follow tone-of-voice and similar high-level style guidelines, applying specific style rules (e.g., your position on Oxford commas, whether or not you put periods on the end of bullets, preferred grammatical elements) is best left to your internal team as part of final review.

Operations

At a minimum, guest access to your collaboration tool (e.g., Slack, Mattermost) is handy.

Your team probably doesn’t use email all that much nowadays, and being on Slack helps to maintain a record of communications (as opposed to falling back on something like text, Signal, WhatsApp, etc.).

If we’re going to have a longer working relationship or if we’re going to be working on larger, more complex projects, then it’s best to:

  • Issue us a hardened and managed laptop (we’ve got several on the go at the moment)
  • Onboard us (we’ve done many, many training modules)
  • Provide access to required apps, ideally managed through a central dashboard (e.g., Okta or similar)

In other words, just treat us like an employee.

One more thing…

The more projects we do for you, the better:

  • We get to know and build strong working relationships with your people
  • We develop a deep understanding of your solutions and technology
  • We learn more about your industry, customers, etc.

Yes, we know it sounds self-serving — but it’s the reality!

Following these best practices...

  • Gives us room to be creative and leverage our domain expertise, while limiting the solution space with known and practical constraints
  • Keeps projects moving by preventing delays in communication
  • Prevents distortions, errors, and delays that can result from the ‘telephone game’
  • Helps us to diagnose and understand genuine issues (e.g., process gaps, ownership confusion, data limitations, etc.)
  • Can actually bring your teams and people closer together, as we operate as an impartial participant interested only in the best outcomes