A Good Producer

Recently, the Executive Producer and Co-Founder at The Science Project, Dave Skaff, wrote an article about what makes a “good producer.” We’re sharing it on our blog. It’s that good.

It’s more than a job description.

I loathe traditional job advertisements and job descriptions. After reading the essay “Good Product Manager Bad Product Manager” in Ben Horowitz’s excellent book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” I began to see a better way forward in my own field of advertising, film, and digital media. Our professions are vitally important to each of us. The need for clarity about them is equally important. What follows is inspired by Ben’s essay. It’s too long and yet also too short — but I’ll take it over the usual fare any day.

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A good producer is a great project manager… and also a guiding creative force, firm and fair client liaison, reliable and sensitive team leader, alert coach and part-time clairvoyant.

A good producer hates surprises, surprised clients, and surprised team members. A good producer knows that the quality of production is directly related to the quality of pre-production. To ensure success, a good producer goes out of their way to ensure that a project is scoped and bid appropriately, meticulously documented, reviewed, and modified in concert with key internal team leaders and all client stakeholders.

A good producer also expects surprises and understands that preparation and anticipation are the only ways to minimize their frequency and severity. These tools allow a good producer to handle all surprises with calm and professionally work the problem to resolution. S%*t happens; it’s how a good producer prepares and reacts to it that matters.

A good producer catalyzes ideas and solves problems creatively. A good producer didn’t go to school for this, but it is their discovered gift to be able to synthesize the right and left brains and become the hub that connects all spokes: client teams, agency teams, agency partners and third parties. A good producer loves the satisfaction of building a great working machine and maintaining it to reach their daily nirvana: smooth operation.

A good producer carries an innate sense of fairness and uses this sense constantly to weigh the needs and wants of their clients and all other parties. A good producer constantly integrates new ideas and information to find inventive ways of elevating the work. Their ingenuity and innate sense of fairness, exhibited constantly with clients and internal teams, combine to create the unrelenting force that the good producer uses to build their most valuable asset: trust. This trust comes in handy when a producer must ask for more: more hard work from the team, more understanding from management, more time or money from clients, and many other mores.

A good producer is comfortable discussing money. A good producer understands that the agency and the client are both running businesses and that businesses are hard to run, and that every dollar must be maximized for client and agency alike, and that the producer is the primary person who is bearing this responsibility on a project every single day. Fairness, ingenuity, and experience work together while a producer negotiates with their internal teams, their clients, and their partners to create agreements that are fair to all parties and ensure that the excellence of the work.

A good producer’s best weapon is documentation. A good producer knows that when trust fails, documentation is the only thing that will return order to the universe. A good producer takes great care at the beginning of a project to build great documentation and obsessively prepares, documents, and shares internal and external communications throughout the project lifecycle.

A good producer makes meetings count. A good producer prepares for their meetings by issuing a well-prepared agenda the day before the meeting, takes exceptional meeting notes during the meeting and issues them within 24 hours of the meeting, without fail. Their meeting notes are not a stenographer’s account of the proceedings, but a simple accounting of discussion topics, decisions made and action items that make it perfectly clear who will do what and when. A good producer understands that meeting preparation ensures productive time spent, and that the meeting notes afterward constitute a critically important record for all parties. This ensures alignment, fosters smooth operation and builds trust. A good producer probably tried doing this some other way earlier in their career before learning that there is no other way.

A good producer has good taste. A good producer understands that great creative work is the responsibility of every team member and contributes to this by catalyzing new ideas, organizing creative discussions, bringing new thinking and trends forward from their own experiences, and shaping the complete trajectory of a project from beginning to end. Good taste matters, and a good producer exhibits this daily.

A good producer has good judgment and understands that good judgment comes from a mix of instinct and experience. A good producer uses their good judgment to respond appropriately to the mood and tone of their teams and their clients, make important decisions with imperfect information, and to recognize the relative size and importance of project variables in order to ask the right questions at the right time.

A good producer leads by example with impeccable work ethic and attention to detail and exhibits these qualities in numerous invaluable ways: double and triple-checking client deliverables before issuing them; anticipating when night or weekend work may be required by their teams and informing them as early as possible; managing their own time, energy, and work-life balance to effectively manage multiple projects simultaneously.

A good producer has seen the movie before, knows how it will end, and uses their experience to guide their teams skillfully through the suspenseful parts in the middle. A good producer is, ultimately, the central driving force behind each of their projects, serving as a spark of inspiration and an informed authority for clients, management, and team members on every aspect of their work. It is a crucially important role — and one that is immensely satisfying to those who enjoy the journey more than the destination and prefer to chart the new map instead of following the old one.


Do you have any thoughts on what it takes to be a good producer? Let us know in the comments below!

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The Science Project

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