Qandal LTD is a full-service audio production house that crafts high-fidelity spoken-word entertainment, original scripts, and direct-to-consumer distribution. When I joined as their contract Head of Writing, the writing operation had four regular writers and one reviewer. The content was reaching thousands of paying platform subscribers weekly, but the systems behind it weren't built to sustain quality or growth.

The problems were structural. Scripts arrived with inconsistent formatting, which created downstream issues for production teams who needed clean, standardized files to work from. Writers lacked developmental guidance for writing in an audio-only format, where pacing, dialogue, and sensory language carry the entire experience without any visual support. Delivery timelines were unpredictable. And the content pipeline was thin, with no consistent flow of original, high-quality scripts to keep up with audience demand.

On the reviewer side, the situation was just as fragmented. One person served as the go-between for writers and reviewers, routing scripts without clear evaluation criteria. Reviewers received assignments with vague instructions and no shared understanding of what "good" looked like. Their feedback, when it came, tended to be line-level corrections rather than the developmental editorial guidance that would actually improve the writing. Revision rounds averaged four per script.

What I Inherited

The existing process had four separate reference documents for writers, all created at different times, none of them clear or comprehensive enough to serve as a single source of truth. Some writers used Trello for project management while others communicated with the head of creative directly via Discord, which meant there was no reliable way to track who was working on what, where a script was in the editing process, or when it was due. Paper trails were scattered across platforms, and accountability was difficult to enforce because the systems didn't support it.

The core problem was that nobody had built an editorial infrastructure. There were talented people doing the work, but no framework to help them do it consistently, efficiently, or at a level that matched the company's ambitions.

What I Built

I approached this as three interconnected problems – guidance, process, and feedback – and focused my first 90 days’ work on identifying the problems and finding solutions that would set us up for long-term success while also addressing pressing issues. To that end, I created:

• Centralized writer guidance. I consolidated the four existing reference documents into a single, comprehensive writer's guide. The goal was to be descriptive without being prescriptive. Writers needed to understand the standards, the format requirements, and the craft principles specific to audio storytelling, but they also needed room to bring their own voice and creative instincts to the work. The guide covered structural expectations, formatting standards for production handoff, and developmental principles for writing effectively in an audio-only medium. It became the single source of truth for every writer on the team.

• Centralized reviewer guidance. I created a parallel document for reviewers that defined the evaluation framework and editorial standards they would apply. This addressed the core complaint I heard from reviewers early on: they didn't know what the standard was, let alone how to hold writers to said standard. The reviewer guide established clear criteria for what constituted a script ready for production, what developmental feedback should focus on, and how to communicate edits in a way that improved the writer's craft over time rather than just fixing individual scripts.

• Project management standardization. I moved all project management into Trello and made it mandatory. Every writer, every script, every deadline, every stage of the review process was tracked in one system. This eliminated the Discord backchannels and email threads that had made it impossible to see the pipeline's state at any given moment. It also created accountability without micromanagement: writers could see their own deadlines and status, reviewers could see what was coming, and I could identify bottlenecks before they became delays.

• Feedback frameworks. I built structured feedback processes that prioritized developmental editorial guidance over surface-level corrections. The goal was twofold: faster turnaround on individual scripts, and genuine growth in writer capability over time. Writers received feedback that helped them understand not just what to fix but why, so the same issues didn't recur from script to script.

The Harder Conversation

One of the more significant changes I advocated for was a shift in how the organization evaluated its writers and their script performance.

When I came in, I learned that all four core writers felt constrained by a culture of metrics-driven evaluation. Script performance was treated as the primary indicator of writer quality, but content engagement is influenced by factors far outside a writer's control: economic conditions, shifting media trends, audience behavior patterns, and platform changes. Writers who felt handcuffed to numbers were less willing to experiment, less willing to take creative risks, and less likely to produce the distinctive, original scripts the audience actually responded to.

I raised this directly with leadership and made the case that writers needed room to experiment without every script being judged primarily on its performance data. This meant I took on the role of buffer between the creative team and the metrics conversation, advocating for a more holistic view of writer contribution that included craft growth, creative range, and pipeline reliability alongside performance. Leadership ultimately agreed, and the change gave writers the space to produce more ambitious work.

The Results

1. Within the first month, the content pipeline went from inconsistent to a reliable 3- to 4-week lead time. This meant production teams could plan ahead rather than scrambling to fill gaps, and the business had a predictable content supply for the first time.

2. Revision rounds dropped from an average of four to an average of two. The centralized guidance documents and structured feedback meant writers understood expectations upfront and received developmental notes that addressed root causes rather than symptoms.

3. I grew the team from 4 writers and 1 reviewer to 12 writers and 4 reviewers, bringing on 8 new writers who met the quality bar established by the new editorial standards. The onboarding process I had built, anchored by the writer's guide and the Trello workflow, meant new writers could ramp up quickly without the inconsistency that had characterized previous onboarding.

All of this happened within my first 90 days.

What Carries Forward

This project reinforced a few principles I bring to every editorial leadership role.

• Systems enable creativity. They don't constrain it. The writers on this team weren't underperforming because they lacked talent. They were underperforming because they lacked structure. Clear expectations, reliable processes, and developmental feedback gave them the foundation to do more ambitious work, not less.

• Editorial leadership includes advocacy. Building the systems was necessary but not sufficient. The writers also needed someone in the room making the case that creative work can't be reduced to metrics alone. That advocacy was as important to the team's output as any document or workflow I created.

• Guidance should be descriptive, not prescriptive. The best editorial standards tell writers what the bar is and why, without dictating how to clear it. Prescriptive guidelines produce uniform, safe output. Descriptive guidelines produce consistent quality with a creative range – and that is the ultimate goal.