One of the most startling effects of this process occurs when it all starts to work. One day you will wake up to an embarrassment of riches. You’ll have multiple requests for content help, and it will all be of the kind you’ve been wanting to do. High-level, early-stage, strategic work. Full-on structural overhauling and rebuilding of an existing system or service. Gloriously engaging voice-and-tone work for a flow that serves a key user need.

Once you show people what you can do—and clearly demonstrate to them how it impacts the success metrics they care most about—the floodgates will open, and you’ll suddenly have way too much work.

Wait. What? Wasn’t this book supposed to help you scale what you do? Become more efficient, more selective, and not spread so thin?

Yes, and it absolutely will do all of that. But once you reach this inflection point—where you’ve officially teetered over from not-enough-of-the-right-kind of work to wanting to hide on a small island somewhere with an unlisted number—you’ve got a totally different problem on your hot little hands.

It’s at this point that I would urge you not to start arguing for headcount. I know, I know, I’m such a buzzkill. But this is probably the most delicate stage of the proceedings, and it’s so important that you don’t rush. You’re the one who promised you could do all this great work—so, at least for a while, you’re the one who has to deliver the goods.

Now you need to get serious about how you’ll prioritize the work.

Picking Your Prioritization Plan

The great news is there’s no lack of handily acronymed prioritization protocols out there. You can take your pick. It’s possible your team already uses something to prioritize their projects, but you might find it wasn’t designed with full-stack content work in mind.

Don’t be shy about developing your own approach to prioritizing your work. Remember, you’re in charge of your own story. You get to decide if the narrative is “I have too much work” or “I have so many valid requests for work that I triage and support them in several different, equally effective and appropriate ways.” I know which story I’d rather be in. But, hey, you do you.

For my money, any prioritization system that gives you a clean, numerical score is a workable plan. You may be quantifying highly subjective information, but you’re not just conjuring numbers out of thin air; ideally, you’re developing them in consultation with the stakeholders who want your help with something.

Start with a full and frank exchange of views with your stakeholders. How do they prioritize their own work today? If they already use a clear prioritization plan, see if you can extend it to the work you do. What considerations do they weigh when prioritizing projects? It might be a combination of things like how many users this project will impact, to what extent, how much effort and time it will take, and what the payoff will be. Maybe they already weigh considerations like these, and you can work together to figure out where this project falls on each sliding scale.

Maybe they go more on gut feel, or whichever project has the loudest voice arguing for it. Hey, it happens. That might be a great opportunity to gently suggest factoring in more quantifiable aspects, too. The important thing is that you work alongside your partnering teams to come to an agreed-on and shared prioritization plan. You’re setting expectations in terms of value, impact, and timeline, so it’s worth taking the time to get it right—and in writing.

It has to be a collaborative process. Disappearing into a dark room somewhere and emerging hours later with a carefully ordered list of how you’ll prioritize your work will get you nowhere fast. Working through the concerns, needs, goals, and fixations of your partnering teams, on the other hand, will keep your work—and its impact on their success—top of mind.

Remember what they used to say in math class: show your work. Getting to the right answer is no victory at all if we don’t get there together.

When priorities attack

When you need to choose between a variety of projects that are all clamoring for your attention and you simply don’t have the bandwidth to do them all, it’s time to take a different approach. Maybe for a while you’ve been able to use your prioritization simply as a method of ordering when you’ll do each project and how much time you’ll commit to each one. But at some point, you’ll realize you can’t do it all. That’s when it’s time to call in the cavalry and outsource some of your work to other people and tools.

Surface work can sometimes be handled by someone on the team who has attended your Surface workshop (see how that works?) or by some form of automation to smooth out the rough edges. If nobody on the team has taken your Surface workshop, you might book one for them now.

At HubSpot, we created an internal editor tool that applies the rules of our style guide and offers suggestions and corrections when it finds a mistake. Content creators simply paste their content into the tool, and the tool highlights the errors, offers hints and suggestions for revision, and links to the relevant part of the style guide for more detail.

This tool was based on an earlier, open-sourced version of something similar that’s still available today, so building your own version might not be as much of a pipe dream as you think. It’s fully worth the time required to create and maintain it, since it takes the most repetitive Surface corrections (spelling, punctuation, clichés, jargon, and so on) off your plate. Check out the Resources section for more ideas about building your own editor bot.

Surface work can also, in a pinch, be handled by a free tool like Grammarly or Hemingway. Are free tools ideal? Will they strictly follow your own style guide? Probably not. But asking people to use available tools before coming to you can free up an enormous amount of your time. Remember, since your time is best spent on the deeper layers of the stack, your job is to:

1. teach and empower other people in your organization to do more Surface work themselves, and
2. establish which tools they can use to check their Surface work without your help.

It takes a little time and effort to get the machinery in motion, but you’ll soon be able to teach, delegate, and automate your way out of the morass of Surface work.

The hardest part of this process is actually letting the Surface work go. It is hard, in the moment, to say no to someone who asks you to give something a “quick look.” But acquiescing not only keeps other people from learning and applying these skills and becoming more self-sufficient; it also reinforces in their minds that this is the only kind of work you do. Let it go.

Finding support

At some point, even the number of high-priority projects you’re able to handle at the speed they need to be completed will become too much. Everyone will agree that your bandwidth has reached its limits. And this is where the conversation about headcount usually starts.

When the teams you’re working with have had a direct hand in helping you build out your roadmap, yet there are still plenty of high-complexity, high-risk problems that need content support, that’s usually when the teams themselves start advocating for headcount. The stakes are simply too high not to invest resources now. They’ll move heaven and earth—and often, their very own headcount allocation—to get the content support they now know they need.

It’s also possible you’ll just have to work with what you have. Not all organizations will be able to hire new dedicated content people, no matter how much they’d like to. This may be due to economic hardship, the growth stage of your company, or a million other things that have nothing to do with how respected or valued you and your abilities are.

Whoever your organization is equipped to empower with content responsibilities can be your new team of content designers. Maybe it will be a cross-functional group that wants to run point for content needs on their team. Maybe it will be a blend that will evolve over time. The point is not to get too tied to a particular mechanism, job title, or organizational structure for improving the quality of content work overall. It’s almost always more effective to take a pragmatic approach and work with what you’ve got.

Of course, by now, you’re doing a lot to add more arrows to this particular quiver. By getting good content in front of people as often as you can, by running workshops that teach them how to help themselves as much as they can, you’re building your organization’s content capabilities by leaps and bounds. Not by fighting for headcount or by adding complexities to anyone’s process—just by leading the way, showing your work, trusting the capabilities of others, and cultivating content champions wherever you can.

Even if you’re the only content person in your organization, you can have an outsized impact by working with others who can share the load, and by focusing your efforts more and more on the deeper layers of the full content stack.

Supporting a Content Practice

Regardless of job title, people all over your organization now care deeply about content because they’ve seen how it affects the work they do. How can you keep cultivating this newfound culture of content? How can you keep your new army of content folks interested, engaged, and sharp?

Whether you hire people from outside or just work with the people already on hand, you’ll need the same systems to support them and keep them in tune. There are a number of ways to support the practice of content at your organization, no matter which or how many people are involved in the pursuit.

Content critiques

Give colleagues a chance to teach and learn from one another by setting up a regular time for them to share their in-progress content work, ask for feedback, and improve their skills in the context of a lovingly rendered content critique.

Peer-to-peer learning doesn’t just improve the content under scrutiny; it also helps content creators think more deeply about their writing. Perspectives from other writers on other teams operating in other business contexts can lead to new approaches and results. And inviting people from all over the company to attend can widen the circle of colleagues who understand the scope of full-stack content design.

Most people will get heartburn at first when you suggest they put their rough drafts in front of their peers for feedback, so it’s helpful to set some ground rules that will put people at ease. A good content critique follows much the same format as a good design review, so consider running yours along the same lines. Look in the Resources section for more help with running good critiques.

Content book club

Books clubs are perennially popular ways to get people engaged in a subject, talking about issues, and staying up to date with the latest thinking in the field. I’ve seen people get scared off by the level of commitment involved in a traditional book club, however, so you might consider framing this as more of a reading club that shares and discusses briefs, articles, talks, blog posts, or books.

But don’t just set up a Slack channel to share links; without accountability of some sort, few will take the time to read most of what’s shared, so make sure you plan regular opportunities to discuss as a group. You can set up recurring reminders to help people remember what you’ll be discussing next, and who will be responsible for leading the conversation. It’s often a good idea to rotate responsibility for facilitating the discussion so no one person is always on—or off—the hook every time.

Content networking

Set up time to chat with content people at other companies you admire. This can be a mutual “ask me anything” session where you talk about things you’ve learned or are still struggling with. How do they approach project prioritization? How do they do content work across the full stack? What has worked for them as they’ve scaled and grown their content practice over time? What hasn’t worked out so well?

Not sure where to find such lovely people to chat with? You can start with the people you talk about in your book club. Authors, podcast hosts and their guests, people doing interesting work mentioned in books and articles, conference speakers you’ve seen in person or on YouTube, people you’ve connected with (or would like to connect with) on LinkedIn—the list goes on. If you don’t feel you have the network required for this sort of thing, that’s kind of the point. Forcing yourself to reach out to people in the industry you’d like to learn from is how they all started, too.

Thirty-day writing sprints

For the people who ask you how to get better at writing, the answer is: practice. Challenge these folks to a thirty-day sprint of writing for fifteen minutes every day, with the goal of getting to what the writer Anne Lamott calls a “shitty first draft.”

You can set up an informal sprint group and support each other with daily prompts. This will keep folks from trying to get too fancy (developing fully fleshed-out blog posts, or writing the Great American Novel, for instance) when the goal is to get comfortable with the practice of dumping words out of your brain. Tell them they can worry about the editing and shaping of it later.

The stripped-down version of this writing sprint practice is really:

1. write like crap
2. every day
3. about not much at all

And it actually works. In fact, it’s the only way to get better at writing, as we writers know. If you can recruit content creators when they’re on fire with enthusiasm for writing and content—and many will be after attending one of your fabulous workshops—they’ll have a real shot at developing their writing skills in this way. Even if they only stick to it for a couple of weeks, they’ll learn very quickly how to keep typing through thick and thin.

The Big Picture

Imagine no longer seeing your job as a series of battles to be fought, no more us against them, no more peering over your reading glasses at the philistines who just don’t get how you feel about exclamation marks, and never will. A healthy, full-stack content ecosystem creates a culture in which not just content professionals, but everyone who touches content, can truly grow, expand their impact, and thrive.

Once you commit to establishing a full-stack content practice in your organization, once you shift your focus to educating and empowering all the non-writers in your company to step into their power as content superheroes, that’s when it happens. That’s when the mindset shift starts to take hold. And that’s when people start asking you to contribute in the very ways you’ve been hoping to.