Every content engagement I have ever run has had two deliverables.

The first one is obvious: the content itself. The audits, the calendars, the briefs, the posts, the strategy documents. The stuff you can point to.

The second is the thing nobody puts in the scope of work, nobody invoices for, and nobody talks about in case studies — because it’s harder to explain and even harder to claim credit for.

It’s the approval process.

Not improving the approval process. Not streamlining it. Building it. from scratch, usually, because in most organizations it either doesn’t exist in any functional sense or it exists as a series of informal, undocumented, inconsistently applied gut checks that masquerade as a process.

Let us posit that the approval process is, in most cases, the actual product. The content is merely what it produces. 

(See also: what you’re actually getting approval for.)

It’s the process that determines whether you can produce more content again next month, and the month after that, at scale, without everything catching fire.

What Most Approval
Processes Actually Are

This is something you have almost assuredly experienced:

A piece of content is finished. It is good. It goes to the stakeholder for approval. It sits for a week — they’re very busy and they do not read. 

A deadline is missed. Someone follows up. The stakeholder reads it quickly and gives three comments. Two of the comments are stylistic preferences with no strategic basis. One is a legitimate concern that should have been surfaced three weeks ago in the brief, but the brief wasn’t thorough enough to surface it. 

The piece goes back for revisions. More time passes. By the time it publishes, the moment it was written for has passed, the writer is demoralized, and the person who commissioned it is wondering why content takes so long.

This is not a content quality problem. It is clearly a process problem. Which will repeat, identically, forever, until the process is purposively changed.

What makes this so hard and awful is that the approval process lives in the seam between content and politics. It requires buy-in from people who did not build it and do not care like you do. 

Worst of all, it requires clarity about who has final say on what: a conversation most organizations actively avoid because it requires admitting that the current, informal system produces rough outcomes.

What a Real
Approval Process Does

A functional approval process does four things.

1. It defines who is approving what.

Not “leadership reviews all content” — who, specifically, has final approval authority over which content types, and what that approval means. Legal reviews legal claims. Brand reviews voice. The CMO reviews strategy, not copy. These are different roles with differing expertise, and conflating them produces the worst outcome of each.

2. It specifies what feedback looks like.

The plural of feedback is not subjective preferences. I’m not even being snotty, for once: “I don’t like this” is simply not actionable. A functional approval process distinguishes between strategic feedback — this doesn’t serve the goal we set — and stylistic preference, which the approver may have strong feelings about but which is not, in most cases, their call to make.

3. It sets time windows people are actually held to.

Feedback within 48 hours, or the piece moves forward. Which sounds harsh until you calculate what a two-week review cycle costs in delayed publishing, missed opportunities, writer turnover.

4. It creates a record.

Every revision should be traceable to a specific piece of feedback from a specific person. This is not about blame, it’s about learning. It’s about efficiency. Over time, a record of what got changed — and why — tells you more about your organization’s content culture than any survey you could run.

The Politics Problem

Here is why this doesn’t happen more often: building a real approval process requires someone to tell a senior stakeholder that their current behavior — reading things late, providing vague feedback, reopening decisions that were already made — is costing the organization real money.

That is not a comfortable conversation. It is especially uncomfortable coming from a content team, which rarely has the perceived standing to critique executive behavior.

This is where I have found the most value in coming in as an outside partner, rather than an internal hire. I can have a conversation about what the approval process is actually costing — in dollars, in delayed campaigns, in staff attrition — with a directness someone inside the organization maybe just can’t afford.

But here’s the thing: internal teams can do it, if they frame it as a data problem rather than a feelings problem.

Document the current process for sixty days: track every piece of content, when it was submitted, when feedback came back, how many revisions it went through, when it published, whether it hit deadline. 

Make the cost visible. Present your numbers without editorializing. The numbers will editorialize themselves.

Alignment Is
a Problem of Craft

The deeper thing is this: getting organizational alignment around content is a craft problem, not a politics problem.

You have an audience. They have needs, preferences, blind spots, competing priorities. You need to move them from one position — “content is a cost center that produces unpredictable output on an unclear timeline” — to another: “content is a predictable system with clear inputs, measurable outputs, and a defined process for getting from one to the other.”

That is a content problem. You are in the content business. You know how to solve content problems.

Apply the same rigor as you do external content. Understand your audience. Meet them where they are. Offer evidence in a format they will receive. Build trust incrementally. Make the small ask before the large one.

The approval process is not a bureaucratic imposition, it is the infrastructure that makes good work ship. Build it with the same care you build everything else, and everything else gets easier.

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