The 5-step brief to ship process we run weekly

Most agencies take three weeks to plan a campaign. We do it in 48 hours. The difference is not speed of typing. It is that the same five steps run every week with the same shape, and nothing is ad-hoc.

Step 1. The board is preloaded before the week starts

On Monday morning the strategic queue already contains 30+ briefs in idea status, organised by specialist and pillar. Nobody walks into the week with an empty board.

How: a scheduled job runs Sunday night, scans the next 14 days of cadence targets per specialist, and seeds gaps with pillar-shaped templates. The director never starts from a blank canvas.

Step 2. Strategy as a 30-minute scan

The director scans the queue, approves briefs that match this week's direction, and rewrites the rest with a one-line note. Approved briefs route to the specialist who will draft them. Rewritten briefs route back into the queue with the new framing.

The whole week's strategic call takes 20 to 30 minutes because the brief shape is the same every week. The director is making decisions, not writing forms.

Step 3. The drafter writes

A specialist agent picks up an approved brief, reads the relevant context (audience, voice, prior work, sources), and produces a draft. The draft lands in a queue with platform, content, hook, and voice fields populated.

A voice gate scans every draft on entry. Clean drafts move into review. Drafts that fail the gate get rewritten automatically before any human sees them. Drafts that fail three rewrites park for manual editing. The operator never spends time on a draft the system already knows is broken.

Step 4. Human review at 90 seconds per draft

Review is keyboard-native. Up arrow, down arrow, approve, reject, request rewrite. Each draft shows the copy, the image preview, the source URL, and a voice-status badge. Average time on a clean draft: 90 seconds. The queue clears in 15-20 minutes for a typical week.

The job in this step is not to write. It is to decide what ships.

Step 5. Schedule, publish, monitor

Approval moves a draft to scheduled. A dispatcher checks every minute for due posts, runs one final voice scan as a publish-boundary check, calls the publishing API, and marks the row published. The activity feed updates in real time.

Total elapsed time from "we should write about X" to a live post: 48 hours, most of which is calendar wait time for the optimal slot. Total operator time: 30 minutes of strategy plus 90 seconds per draft of review.

What makes the loop work

Same brief shape every step. Voice contract enforced at every boundary, not just at the end. Logs around outcomes, not triggers. The moment any of these turns ad-hoc, the loop breaks and the process stops running itself.