How can you optimize your podcast team's productivity?

Maximizing your podcast team's productivity is key to delivering exceptional content and achieving your business goals through podcasting. But let me add another layer of insight: It's not just about "defining" roles; it's about understanding each team member's unique strengths and utilizing them to their fullest potential. Leverage the host's expertise, harness your editors' creative flair, and empower your producers to streamline the workflow. Consider implementing project management tools like Asana, Trello, Monday, Notion or Clickup to enhance collaboration and ensure deadlines are met consistently. Regular team check-ins and a shared editorial calendar can also work wonders in keeping everyone on the same page.

Get out of the do-it-all-yourself mentality as quickly as possible. As you consider/create/assign roles, identify which tasks are talent-dense and which are tedious-dense. No one likes to talk about it (which is why we waste inordinate amounts of time and money), but some tasks can be done by virtually anyone, while others require exceptional talent to do well. For example, the creativity necessary in developing concepts, premises, new ideas, episode flow, etc. are high-talent items. Things like uploading the episode, file management, and notification e-mails are not. Setting up an efficient workflow isn't just about doling out responsibilities and tasks. It's about having the right person doing the right thing as often as possible.

I would say, "Define your road" first. Myself and a group of others here have been podcasting alone, handling all the steps from creating, scheduling, interviewing, and editing to releasing and promoting. The key here is to know where you start, the steps involved, and where you finish. If you have a concise roadmap, a playbook, it becomes much easier to find the right people to help you, continually improving their skills so that podcast production runs smoothly like a well-oiled machine. Otherwise, it's not a good idea if you have to resort to micromanaging people

Depending on the size of your team, whether you work remotely, and if your post-production is in-house or not, different specific tools can be more appropriate choices. Notion has several podcasting templates created by its community, which work really well. It would dare say that Trello is probably too "simple" for the scope of a serious podcast with several deliverables and serious repurposing. For cloud storage, I prefer Dropbox, even though it is not the most inexpensive choice.

For my own podcasts, I do minimal scripting - just an outline with bullet points on the specific points I want to touch upon during the episode. However, as a producer, I have seen that different people need different levels of preparation and scripting for their podcasts. So, just do what feels more natural to you. If you want everything scripted, just do it this way.

Skip the script and spend your time on hooks, key ideas or themes, and premise development. Especially for the untrained, scripts will end up being robotic or rigid. Part of the power of podcasting is in the free flow of ideas (the bad ones you edit out later!). You set the parameters for the discussion –?whether with a guest or not – and let the magic happen. Instead of memorizing a script or reading it (please, please don't), you can memorize a few key hooks or core concepts and deliver them at opportune times (outline). Definitely use tools. But don't get caught up in the rat race of paying for a gazillion tools while your team or podcast is still small/simple. There are tons of free options out there that are sufficient.

Remarkably good recording results can be obtained with just a cell phone with a decent USB microphone attached. The results can sound very professional while investing less than 100$. A good microphone to try is Samson Q2U USB/XLR. This will cost around 70$ and it is an extremely good value for money!