Creative Producers: What Do We Do?
“What do you do for work?”
The question comes up in most casual conversations when you meet someone new or are just catching up with an old friend. It’s always interesting explaining what we do at Human Design as Creative Producers. Each company probably has a different version of what this role means to them, but here is how we do things at Human Design.
MANAGING THE DETAILS:
As Creative Producers, we work directly with our Design, Development, and Strategy teams to see projects through from beginning to end. We deal in details using tools like Trello, Assembla, and Slack (among others — a favorite of mine is Things) to track progress, keep deadlines in front of our teams, and manage overall in-house communications. We also work with our Experience Coordinator, Elena, to make sure invoices and SOWs are going out at the right times. Having an eye on the details is an incredibly important aspect of the work that we do each day. A lot of people might call it “project management,” and that is certainly part of our job, but it’s not all of it.
TAKING CARE OF OUR CLIENTS:
We also work closely with our clients and always aim to provide them with the best client experience we can offer. There are the normal email and phone call exchanges, along with the meeting planning, but our production team is always talking about creating an “Uncommonly Good” client experience (kudos to Mike Taylor for that phrase) on top of the everyday interactions. We don’t just want our clients to walk away feeling like they got a great product from our team, we want them to feel like we were invested in their vision and in their product during the duration of project. Creative Producers tend to be the face of Human Design to our clients and that is a responsibility we don’t take lightly.
CREATIVE INPUT:
I always like to tell people that as Creative Producers, we have creative input into projects. One of the themes of Human Design is, “A good idea is a good idea.” For us, this means that anyone in the room can present their ideas and while it won’t always be the final choice, we encourage everyone to speak up and make their thoughts heard. Obviously, there is respect for designers and developers and the incredible work they do, but there should always be room for team members to speak into a project and offer up an idea. You never know, it just might stick.
Working as a Creative Producer is a lot of fun and, at times, challenging. When we are juggling multiple projects, the challenge is to keep sight of the details of each individual project, to make sure that our clients are taken care of, and to bring our best to each project we lead. It is incredibly fulfilling work to take care of our clients and our internal teams. People are not projects and the relational aspect of our work is something that we take great pride in at Human Design.
