Why is strategy hard to explain? (Part 2)

Working with a strategist can require a leap of faith — from the producer, the creative team and other strategists. Sure, there are the expected deliverables (write a brief! make a persona!). My most helpful strategy work is unpredictable. It’s also the work I’m most proud of (lead a workshop! tell me about storytelling arcs!)

Let’s say a producer is trying to scope a project and she’ll ask how long the strategy will take. Well, that depends…what do you want to know and how much do you have to spend? My smart ass answer is that you’ll get three weeks of “strategy” if you budget three weeks of a strategist’s time.

For example, I’m currently working on a project where they knew they’d need strategy. I set aside twenty hours and off we go. I wrote a brief , two hours. I met with the team and did a ton of research (consumer, brand, competitors, vertical, channel), six hours.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I realized that giving the designers user journeys with real content would be the most helpful. If you would have asked me last week if that’s what was needed for the project, I wouldn’t have been sure. So I whipped those up, six hours.

Was it helpful? I would argue yes — we have a common language to talk about the project and the designers have strategic (not just placeholder) content to work from.

Six hours to go…what else will be helpful?