Standardized our brief into one template. Cut time-to-publish from 18 days to 6.

Standardized our brief into one template. Cut time-to-publish from 18 days to 6.

Our bottleneck wasn't writing, it was the back-and-forth. Writers guessed, editors rejected, repeat.

We built a non-negotiable brief template:
— Target query + 3 secondary terms
— Exact H2 outline (pulled from SERP)
— Word range, intent type, 2 must-cite sources
— One example of the angle we want

First-draft rejection rate dropped from ~70% to under 20%. Time-to-publish went 18 days to 6.

Vague briefs are the real cost center. Tighten the brief and the whole pipeline speeds up. Build the template once, reuse forever.