The whole package!
The whole package!
That is why I think having people who understand the whole production process matters so much. You need people who can look at a problem from different angles and understand how one decision affects everything else. A beautiful design is not particularly useful if it cannot be produced efficiently. A technically perfect system is not much use if the creative team cannot work with it. And a clever automation is pointless if the final campaign no longer feels like the brand it was created for. It all leads to the cohesion of the system, so that total efficiency is achieved, which might include less mistakes that the QA team has to go through, faster render times for the render farm, quicker previews for the advertising teams and correctly presenting the final product so that the audience connects with it and gets actual value from it.
We don't and can't just build the machine and walk away. We help think through the campaign, prepare the scenarios, create the systems, test the outputs, solve the strange little problems that inevitably appear along the way, and make sure that the final result still feels like it came from the brand in the first place. Sometimes that means writing code. Sometimes it means fixing a template. Sometimes it means going through data. And sometimes it means sitting down with someone and asking a few more questions before building anything at all.
There is something particularly satisfying about watching a team go from worrying about how they are going to produce everything to calmly discussing what they want to produce next. At the beginning, there is usually a lot of uncertainty: Can we do this? How long will it take? What happens if the number of versions doubles? What happens if the client changes something? But once the system starts working and people begin to trust it, the conversation changes. Suddenly, instead of worrying about production, everyone can start thinking about the work itself.
That is probably my favourite part of this job. The automation is impressive, of course, and there is something very satisfying about seeing a complicated process become simple and repeatable. But seeing people relax because they finally have a system they can trust is even better. When a team stops worrying about whether something can be produced and starts thinking about what they could create with that freedom, you know the system is doing what it is supposed to do.
So, a (not so) small appreciation post for the people who make the complicated things look simple. The people who jump between creative, technical and operational problems without making a big deal out of it. The people who keep asking questions, finding solutions, testing things, fixing things and somehow making the whole process feel a little easier than it did yesterday.
You know who you are.
Sometimes the problem is design. Sometimes it is data. Sometimes the client has everything they need, but the information is spread across several different places, in five different formats, and nobody quite knows which version is the right one. It happened to me several times on projects where the London and offshore teams in Croatia and Macedonia wanted to catch up on a few projects but due to differences in their naming logic, all three teams worked on a different version of the same project. When we tried to align ourselves there was a bit of manual work that needed to be done to get everything up to speed. But merging the projects and sorting them out took a collective effort of all teams, which even though is part of the job, it still is time spent not doing the actual work. Sometimes a template works beautifully until someone asks for a language that reads completely differently and suddenly the whole thing needs to be reconsidered. Doing Arabic or Hebrew sometimes required designing the whole template from top to bottom so it works for the specified markets. And sometimes, after all the technical conversations, the client simply says, "We need more ideas." Those are the moments that remind you that this work is about much more than building automated systems.
That is why I think having people who understand the whole production process matters so much. You need people who can look at a problem from different angles and understand how one decision affects everything else. A beautiful design is not particularly useful if it cannot be produced efficiently. A technically perfect system is not much use if the creative team cannot work with it. And a clever automation is pointless if the final campaign no longer feels like the brand it was created for. It all leads to the cohesion of the system, so that total efficiency is achieved, which might include less mistakes that the QA team has to go through, faster render times for the render farm, quicker previews for the advertising teams and correctly presenting the final product so that the audience connects with it and gets actual value from it.
We don't and can't just build the machine and walk away. We help think through the campaign, prepare the scenarios, create the systems, test the outputs, solve the strange little problems that inevitably appear along the way, and make sure that the final result still feels like it came from the brand in the first place. Sometimes that means writing code. Sometimes it means fixing a template. Sometimes it means going through data. And sometimes it means sitting down with someone and asking a few more questions before building anything at all.
There is something particularly satisfying about watching a team go from worrying about how they are going to produce everything to calmly discussing what they want to produce next. At the beginning, there is usually a lot of uncertainty: Can we do this? How long will it take? What happens if the number of versions doubles? What happens if the client changes something? But once the system starts working and people begin to trust it, the conversation changes. Suddenly, instead of worrying about production, everyone can start thinking about the work itself.
That is probably my favourite part of this job. The automation is impressive, of course, and there is something very satisfying about seeing a complicated process become simple and repeatable. But seeing people relax because they finally have a system they can trust is even better. When a team stops worrying about whether something can be produced and starts thinking about what they could create with that freedom, you know the system is doing what it is supposed to do.
So, a (not so) small appreciation post for the people who make the complicated things look simple. The people who jump between creative, technical and operational problems without making a big deal out of it. The people who keep asking questions, finding solutions, testing things, fixing things and somehow making the whole process feel a little easier than it did yesterday.
You know who you are.
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