Episode 18: Most Production Problems Are Actually Alignment Problems, with Roma Ahi [Full Transcript]

This is the full transcript of episode 18 of Creative Ops Compass, "Most Production Problems Are Actually Alignment Problems, with Roma Ahi." Roma is the President of Makers, a production agency that works alongside in-house creative teams and agencies on everything from social content to national campaigns. She sits outside in-house teams but is inside their projects constantly, which gives her a rare vantage point on what actually works and what doesn't.

In this conversation, we talk about why so much of what gets blamed on production is really an unresolved alignment problem, why production so rarely gets a seat where that alignment should happen, and what separates in-house leaders who catch these problems early from the ones who don't.

Intro

Jesse Krinsky: Welcome to Creative Ops Compass, the podcast for in-house creative leaders who want to run tighter operations, improve stakeholder relationships, and position their teams as genuine strategic partners. I'm Jesse Krinsky, a creative operations consultant and the founder of In Focus Consulting.

Roma Ahi: Don't even start briefing the project if the main stakeholders aren't aligned. That's where we've seen a lot of time and money go to waste

Jesse Krinsky: Today I'm talking with Roma Ahi. She's the President of Makers, a production agency that works alongside in-house creative teams and agencies on everything from social content to national campaigns.

Roma sits outside in-house teams, but she's inside their projects constantly, which gives her a rare vantage point on what actually works and what doesn't.

We talked about why so much of what gets blamed on production is really an unresolved alignment problem, why production so rarely gets a seat where that alignment should happen, and what separates in-house leaders who catch these problems early from the ones who don't.

What Works About Living Inside a Brand, and What Doesn't

Jesse Krinsky: Roma, thank you so much for joining me today for the podcast. I wanted to have you on for a few reasons, partly because you have a unique perspective on the workings of in-house creative teams. As the president of Makers, you have the opportunity to see from the outside what works and what doesn't with in-house teams. So I wanted to get your perspective on what you think is working, what is not, and what can make things work better for those teams, and also for the collaboration with external production agencies like Makers.

Roma Ahi: I think when you work within a brand, and you live within the brand, if that makes sense, there's no time card telling you to clock in and out of the project, for everyone who's worked on agency side and things like that.

You build the brief, there's a very different collaboration internally, and I feel that it works really well because it does bring out some incredibly thoughtful work for the brand. Brands that are not necessarily striving for awards, and all these different objectives that can sometimes surround a business objective, that's just not present, and I think that works really well.

So I think maybe sometimes what doesn't work is because you are so immersed in the brand, you can lack some outside perspective. Like in any position, when you're just in those four walls, you can lack an understanding of what are maybe truly some other mediums that are being well used. It becomes very like, oh, this person is head of media, therefore we're only going to take that opinion, and this person is a CCO, therefore we're only gonna take that opinion.

Depth and Breadth: The Real Value Prop on Each Side

Jesse Krinsky: What you were just saying seems to align really well with a perspective that I put out there a lot, which is that I often say that the value prop, the main value prop at least, of an in-house creative team is depth, whereas the main value prop of an external agency, at least when they work with in-house teams, is breadth.

So on the depth side, they have, or they should have, the opportunity to get to know the brand really well, the individuals, the politics, the individual quirks of their stakeholders and leaders, better than an external agency usually would have the opportunity to. But an external agency has the ability to bring in a wide variety of different styles and the outside perspective that you don't get when you get tunnel vision when you're internal.

I think both of those are very valuable. What I think goes wrong sometimes is when those in-house teams and external teams misplace that. So for instance, I've seen a lot of external agencies say, "We can be an extension of your in-house team," whereas I think that undermines what to me is their real value prop. What are your thoughts on that?

Roma Ahi: I mean, I think you definitely just phrased everything much better than I did. But I do agree with those points. I think if you wanna root it in the value proposition between an in-house or an external creative team, I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head, just in terms of resources and personalities.

Listen, operationally of any business, you're up against FTEs and the skill sets that are in front of you, and sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to bend if you want to, where agencies don't necessarily sometimes have those limitations, and that's probably a little bit of the value prop there that you're differentiating between.

But what is also very common is typically ambition. The ambition on both sides is, everybody, I think for the most part, wants to do good work. It's until that producer comes along that tells you about money, time, and feasibility, where hearts are often, maybe not broken, but they have a little bit of a moment, in terms of what's possible.

Why Silos Undermine Stakeholdership

Jesse Krinsky: So what we were talking about in terms of the in-house team is really an ideal. Ideally they should be able to know the brand and know the individuals that they're working with, the stakeholders, and they should be able to understand what the drivers of the business are and how the work that they're doing impacts that.

Roma Ahi: Impacts all of it.

Jesse Krinsky: Right. But that's not always the case. In fact, so often I've seen it is not the case. So I'm really curious to hear from you what you see in that regard.

Roma Ahi: I'll tell you that I've seen two sides of different organizations. Often within a company, a lot of divisions are very siloed, and that's probably why you're not getting that interpersonal stakeholdership that you would maybe expect when you're working in brand.

It is no different maybe than an agency, because you're the in-house agency, your client is marketing, you're trying to mirror a bit of a traditional setting in an internal environment where you see these people every single day. But I also wanna say that I've seen some incredibly great brands nail it. I think it comes down to respect and trust of everyone's discipline, and when you see that come together, it really does work.

Don't Start the Brief Until the Stakeholders Are Aligned

Jesse Krinsky: So when you work with in-house teams, what have you seen makes the most difference between smooth collaborations with them and the challenging ones?

Roma Ahi: I would say alignment and ambition are often two things. If you're walking into already a marketing and media team, or a marketing and creative team, not aligned, that already sets you up for all sorts of issues.

I think objectives, every once in a while there are things that are best for the creative storytelling but might require a budget that then therefore needs to go to an asset. So there's sometimes these things of just, where do you put the money? Where do you put the money that's gonna drive for the brand and for the business objective the most? I think alignment is the biggest thing, and I know that we've talked about this before, and I know that you've helped brands try to find inner alignment when they're trying to get to a business objective.

But don't even start briefing the project if the main stakeholders are not aligned. That's where we've seen a lot of time and money go to waste.

Jesse Krinsky: I can't agree more. The amount of waste that happens because the project starts before it should, before you have that alignment, the downstream effects are absolutely massive.

Production Is Not an Execution Layer

Jesse Krinsky: So moving on, I know you said that one of the biggest missed opportunities in in-house environments is that production is not a part of leadership. What have you seen that costs organizations in practice?

Roma Ahi: Well, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that production is just an execution layer. The people you bring in once the important decisions have already been made. But production is actually where ambition, money, time, and feasibility all have to meet together.

So I think if that perspective isn't represented at the leadership table, you're making decisions about all four without one of the people who understands how they interact. The cost shows up everywhere: briefs that don't match the budgets, timelines that don't match the ambition, teams solving the same problems repeatedly, agencies being asked to bid against assumptions that were never realistic, and then the producer comes in at the end being told, "Make it work."

Jesse Krinsky: Yep.

Roma Ahi: So great production leadership isn't there to tell creative teams what's impossible. If it's there early enough, it's there truly to figure out how to make the, call it the ambitious thing, possible.

The Case for a Chief Production Officer

Jesse Krinsky: So practically speaking, in an enterprise-sized company, where do you think that actually should live? Should there be somebody who is in the C-suite, who is a chief creative officer? Or should the CMO take on more of that role?

Roma Ahi: If an organization happened to have a CPO, a chief production officer, that would be sitting alongside a CMO and a CCO, I think you actually fundamentally change the entire conversation in the C-suite. The CMO, I think, is thinking about the business and the audience. I think the CCO is protecting the creative ambition, or maybe instilling more creative ambition. I see it a lot at leadership tables: "Push the brand." "Get out of some comfort zones."

And I think a CPO would be asking, "How do we actually build an organization capable of delivering this?" What capabilities should we own? Which ones should we outsource? Where are we overspending? Where are we under-investing? How should AI change our workflows? What partners do we actually need? How do we build infrastructure that works across markets and channels?

Production becomes an organizational capability rather than just a series of individual projects, and I think that's the shift that we're beginning to see, which is probably why companies like Makers are now existing, because we live in all of those questions every day.

The Qualities That Make In-House Creative Leaders Effective

Jesse Krinsky: I read that you had said, and I'm gonna quote you here, "The producers who stand out today are the ones who can connect creativity, operations, technology, and people." So I agree, but it's also a very tall order. There aren't a lot of people who can do all that well, who can seamlessly move between all of them.

So among those, creativity, ops, technology, and people management, knowing that they are not mutually exclusive at all, what qualities do you think are most important for successful in-house creative leaders?

Roma Ahi: I would say stakeholder management, I think, is one of the biggest things.

I also think some of the strongest creatives are very much attached to business objectives, and they understand that their role above all roles is for the brand, for whatever the initiative or the brief might be, for the brand to perform well and hit a sales target, hit some target. Just to keep it broad right now, very specific KPIs.

And I think the more that you can take that business objective into the brief building, into the execution even, when you're really trying to make the decision on where that $100,000 or $20,000 should go, it should always be mapped back to what the objective of the campaign is.

Creative Teams Exist to Deliver Value to the Business

Jesse Krinsky: I absolutely agree that stakeholder management is important, is key to successful in-house creative leadership. I think that's a subset of the second thing you said, which is understanding what the purpose of the actual in-house creative team is.

So what I often will say is that the purpose of an in-house creative team is really in essence no different than an HR team or an IT team. People who've heard me have heard this ad nauseam, which is that the purpose of any of these departments is to deliver value to the business. The vehicle for that for a creative team is creative assets.

But that is a mentality that is kind of anathema to a lot of creatives, because they often think of their value as being able to tell great stories, to impact people, to create beautiful visuals. It can sound very mercenary to a lot of creatives, and they can push back on that a lot. But I've also seen a lot of creative leaders who understand that and they want to change that view. Outside the team, though, they're still viewed as executors, and getting the stakeholders, especially stakeholders, but also leadership, to understand that they are more than that, and that by viewing this team as primarily executors, they're leaving massive amounts of value on the table.

Marketing and Creative Alignment Is the Fault Line

Jesse Krinsky: What part of stakeholder management do you think is really key, if you can narrow it down to a couple of things, that makes some of the best in-house creative leaders really effective?

Roma Ahi: It's marketing and creative alignment. It's managing that stakeholdership. If marketing has one objective and the in-house creative team has another, I think there's some excusable things when there's an external agency. It could be like, "Ah, the brief, that's what we took away from the brief." When you're in-house, you can't cut away to that. I think they tend to have deeper understandings about what brands' objectives are. So if marketing and creative show up not aligned, it's very quickly apparent.

That whole stakeholdership, whoever is managing the differences or whoever is right up at that top decision-making to decipher who holds the weight there, I think that's where I often see most things fall apart.

The Tells That Show Up in the Brief

Jesse Krinsky: What are some of the ways that you and your producers, when they're working with in-house teams, what are some of the clear cues that there isn't that alignment between the in-house teams?

Roma Ahi: It's blunt, Jesse. It is blunt. I would say for the most part, producers can usually see it pretty quickly, because most of the contradictions land in the brief. I probably have a good half a dozen projects that didn't make it to air just on that contradiction in itself.

You'll see a huge creative ambition paired with a budget that just couldn't possibly support it. Then it has 20 deliverables that are all hero assets. A launch date that hasn't moved even though creative approval moved three weeks. Or there's five stakeholders, maybe there's product and PR, or however the in-house infrastructure works, that are all giving slightly different versions of what success looks like.

So one of my favorites is probably when the brief essentially says, "Here's what we want. Now tell us what it costs," but somewhere else in the organization, someone already knows exactly what they're willing to spend. Those aren't really production problems. Those are alignment problems that travel downstream until they become production's problem, and the later you discover them, the more expensive they are to fix. And I will always give kudos to producers, because producers walk away with that weight.

How Producers Navigate Alignment They Can't Control

Jesse Krinsky: So how do your producers manage that, when you're walking into a situation where you cannot control that alignment? You can try to get them to align, but you don't have, for whatever sway in-house creative teams have, which is usually not enough. How do you and your producers navigate that kind of relationship, or those kinds of challenges?

Roma Ahi: I think one of the best things about Makers is all of us can understand everyone's problem.

And I believe that the best producers do have to live in a sense of ambiguity and just understand that that is the role these days. For Makers, what works is because we have so many producers and a very sort of hive mind approach, there is someone here internally who has probably gone through that problem multiple times, who can maybe help you manifest and merchandise a way that you need to get your point across without it being that producer that shows up like, "Well, you don't have time and you don't have budget, so don't call me."

So the best way that we try to manage it, honestly, is honesty. It's like, do you want the honest version, or we'll just tell you what can be done. And I'm also okay to walk away from a job, go look elsewhere. Because, back to production being a part of creative, if I see the creative ambition, I don't wanna water it down either. But I wanna give you the realities.

Why In-House Teams Rarely Get to Walk Away

Jesse Krinsky: What you just said about being willing to walk away from a job, that can be difficult for anybody to do, but you have the luxury of being able to do that. Whereas in-house teams often feel like they don't, because they don't have a tiering system or prioritization system. They don't have a way of saying to stakeholders, "I know you think this is important, but if you can't connect this to goals or anything, then this is not important, so we're gonna say no to this."

Roma Ahi: That's few and far between probably in-house. But you know what? It shows up then in the metrics. It shows up in the performance. It's gonna show up somewhere.

Jesse Krinsky: Roma, thank you so much for speaking with me today. I loved hearing your perspective, not from the outside exactly, because you work so frequently with these internal teams, but a step away, to see what works well, what isn't working, and what could happen when things work well, which really comes down to, as you said from the very beginning, very often about alignment from the first step. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you being here.

Roma Ahi: Thank you, Jesse. I appreciate it.

Outro

Let's recap the key insights from today's conversation.

First, alignment has to happen before the brief goes out, not during production. As Roma said, “don't even start briefing a project if the main stakeholders aren't aligned.” That's where the real time and money get wasted, and by the time it reaches production, it's far more expensive and aggravating to fix.

Second, that same discipline needs to live inside your own team, not just with your production partners. Roma talked about being willing to walk away from a job rather than water down the work. Most in-house teams don't have that luxury. But what you can build is a tiering or prioritization system, a real way to tell a stakeholder that if a request doesn't connect to a goal, it doesn't get the same priority. That's what gives you the standing to push back before you're the one stuck delivering an impossible brief.

And third, that keeps happening because production so rarely has a seat where those decisions get made. Roma's case for a Chief Production Officer, sitting alongside the CMO and CCO, is really an argument for putting the person who understands ambition, money, time, and feasibility in the room before those decisions are finalized.

If you're not sure whether your team is actually aligned with your stakeholders before a brief goes out, you can find out with my free Creative Ops Assessment. It takes three minutes, and it'll show you where you're reactive and where you're already operating strategically. You can find it at infocusconsulting.net/assessment. The link is also in the show notes.

Thanks for listening.