Process design — how brand work fits into a team.

Module 2 taught you how to execute three workflows. This module teaches you how those workflows fit into a team operating system — the cadences, intake forms, decision rights, escalation paths, and cross-functional handoffs that turn brand workflows from isolated activities into a maintained system. The discipline is what separates a brand assistant who completes tasks from one whose work compounds.

By the end of Module 3 you should be able to:

1. Design a brand-request intake form that screens out garbage and routes the rest correctly.
2. Set the four cadences that prevent both over-meeting and under-coordination.
3. Apply a DACI or RACI framework to assign clear ownership for any brand decision.
4. Recognize when to escalate vs decide-and-document, using the three escalation triggers.
5. Write a definition-of-done that prevents the most common rework patterns.
6. Map where brand sits in your org's process landscape and identify the two or three highest-leverage cross-functional handoffs.

3.0 The distinction: workflow vs process

The terms are often used interchangeably. They are not the same.

Workflow is the sequence of steps inside a single task — extracting a voice, running an audit, organizing assets. Workflows are what an individual contributor executes.

Process is the meta-system within which workflows happen — how tasks get assigned, reviewed, approved, archived. How the team coordinates. How exceptions get handled. Process is what makes a team's combined workflows produce reliable results across people, time, and shifting priorities.

A brand assistant with great workflows but no process discipline ships great individual artifacts that never compound into a maintained brand. A brand assistant with great process discipline but mediocre workflows ships consistently mediocre artifacts that gradually improve. The combination — both — is what makes a credentialed Brand Assistant durably valuable.

3.1 Brand-request intake — the front door

Every brand team — even a team of one — gets requests. "Can you review this email?" "We need a name for the new feature." "What's our position on this competitor?" "Is this slide deck on-brand?" Without a structured intake, requests arrive in fragmented form, get dropped, get duplicated, and create the impression that brand is a bottleneck.

The intake form is the single highest-leverage process artifact a brand assistant can create. A well-designed form does three things:

1. Forces the requester to clarify their own ask. Half of brand requests come in unclear because the requester hasn't fully thought through what they need. A required-field form turns ambiguity into clarity at intake time, not after the brand assistant has done speculative work.
2. Captures context that the brand work depends on. Audience, channel, deadline, stakeholder, prior assets — these always matter; capturing them at intake prevents the brand assistant from chasing them down case-by-case.
3. Sets expectations about response time and ownership. The intake form is also the place to set service-level expectations — "voice reviews return within two business days; naming requests take five; brand-strategy questions go to a strategist not an assistant."

Intake form structure

A working intake form has these fields at minimum:

• Requester name + team — for routing follow-up questions
• Request type — voice review · naming · audit · brand-question · other — drives routing
• The ask, in one sentence — forces clarity; "I need help with our brand" is not a valid one-sentence ask
• Audience — who reads/sees this
• Channel — where this will live (email, web, slide, social, etc.)
• Deadline + reason for deadline — distinguishes real deadlines from default-ASAP requests; the reason matters more than the date
• Prior assets or context — links to existing drafts, prior versions, related brand documents
• Decision rights — who needs to approve the final output (see §3.3)
• Definition of done — what does "complete" look like? (see §3.5)

Resist the urge to add more fields. Every additional field reduces the form's compliance rate. The eight fields above cover >90% of brand-request use cases. Edge cases get triaged via follow-up conversation.

What the intake form REJECTS

Equally important is what the form is designed to refuse:

• Verbal requests that bypass the form (politely redirect)
• Slack DMs that bypass the form (politely redirect)
• Requests without a one-sentence ask (return to requester)
• Requests without a deadline reason (clarify before queueing)
• Requests that should go to a different team (route, don't absorb)

The point of the rejection list is not bureaucratic gate-keeping; it is protecting the brand workflow from the chaos that informal request handling produces. A brand assistant who routes informal requests back through the form trains the organization, over a few months, to use the form as the front door. The team's throughput, measured in completed brand artifacts per week, typically doubles.

3.2 Review cadences — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly

Brand work compounds when it runs on cadences. Cadences create predictability for both the brand team and its stakeholders. Without cadences, brand work either over-meets (everything is a synchronous emergency) or under-coordinates (drift accumulates between rare ad-hoc reviews).

A complete brand-assistant cadence has four layers:

Daily — request triage (15 minutes)

Once a day, the brand assistant reviews the intake queue, triages new requests (accept / clarify / reject / route), and updates the queue with revised priorities. This is solo work, not a meeting. The output is a queue everyone can see and a Slack/email summary if priorities materially changed.

Weekly — workflow sync (30-45 minutes)

Once a week, the brand assistant meets with their immediate manager (strategist or director) to review queue status, surface any blocked items, escalate decisions that exceeded assistant-level authority, and align on the next week's priorities. The agenda is fixed; only the contents change.

Critical: this meeting is for the brand team's internal coordination. It is NOT the place where cross-functional stakeholders (product, marketing, sales) get brand reviews. Those happen asynchronously through the queue or via dedicated review meetings (see monthly cadence).

Monthly — cross-functional brand review (60 minutes)

Once a month, the brand team meets with representatives from marketing, product, sales, and customer success. The agenda:

• What's shipped this month that needed brand input
• What's coming next month that will need brand input
• Cross-functional issues (e.g., sales decks drifting off voice; product copy generating audit findings)
• One strategic question for discussion (rotated; queued in advance)

The discipline here is the strategic question. Without a queued strategic discussion item, the meeting devolves into status updates that could have been an email. With one, the meeting earns its calendar slot.

Quarterly — brand health review (90 minutes)

Once a quarter, the brand team conducts a structured brand health review. Inputs:

• Latest brand-check audit findings (see Module 2 §2.2)
• Customer-facing surface inventory and audit-coverage map
• Voice document review — has anything material changed in the brand's positioning, archetype, or voice?
• Asset-lifecycle audit — what's deprecated, what's archived, what needs refreshing?
• Cross-functional satisfaction signals (informal survey of marketing/product/sales partners)

Output: a brand-health one-pager presented to the team's executive sponsor. This is the artifact that connects brand-assistant work to the equity-and-position concepts from Module 1. Without it, the brand team operates as a workflow factory; with it, the team becomes a strategic function with measurable trajectory.

3.3 Decision rights — DACI and the cost of unclear ownership

The single most-cited reason for process breakdown in cross-functional brand work is unclear decision ownership. Three people think they own a decision; none of them moves forward; the decision stalls. Or one person thinks they own a decision; two others think they should have been consulted; the decision ships and gets reversed.

Decision-rights frameworks make ownership explicit. The two most-used frameworks are RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) and the newer DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed). DACI is sharper for brand decisions because it separates the person who runs the decision process (Driver) from the person who makes the final call (Approver) — a distinction RACI conflates.

DACI applied to brand decisions

• Driver — the person who owns running the decision process. Schedules conversations, collects inputs, prepares the recommendation, drives toward closure. Typically the brand assistant or strategist.
• Approver — the single person with final-call authority. This is ALWAYS one person, never a committee. For brand decisions, the Approver is typically the brand strategist (for tactical decisions), brand director (for cross-functional decisions), or CEO/founder (for brand-identity-level decisions).
• Contributors — people whose expertise is required for a good decision. They give input; they do not have veto. Typically design, legal, content, sometimes engineering.
• Informed — people who need to know the decision once made but don't shape it. Typically the broader brand and marketing teams, sometimes adjacent functions.

The DACI matrix as an artifact

For recurring decision types, the brand team should publish a DACI matrix that pre-assigns ownership. Example rows:

The matrix is published, referenced by the intake form, and reviewed at each quarterly brand health review. A brand assistant who can hand a new manager the DACI matrix on day one accelerates the manager's effectiveness by weeks.

3.4 Escalation paths — when an assistant kicks a decision up

An assistant who escalates every ambiguous decision becomes a bottleneck. An assistant who never escalates and makes calls outside their authority creates downstream cleanup work. The right calibration sits between, governed by three explicit escalation triggers.

Trigger 1 — the decision affects voice or position

Tactical decisions (which of three on-voice phrasings to use; which of three on-voice colors to pair) are assistant-level. Decisions that would change the brand's voice or position — even slightly — escalate to a strategist. The test is reversibility: if the decision creates a precedent that future work will reference, it shapes voice or position and is therefore not assistant-level.

Trigger 2 — the decision involves cross-functional disagreement

If marketing wants one thing and product wants another and the brand assistant is sitting in the middle, escalate. The assistant's role is to surface the disagreement and the brand-equity stakes; the resolution is the strategist's or director's call, not the assistant's. Trying to mediate cross-functional disagreement at the assistant level produces resentment in whichever team feels overruled.

Trigger 3 — the decision has legal, compliance, or PR implications

If the work touches trademark, FTC disclosure, regulated industry claims, accessibility compliance, or anything that could become a public-relations issue, escalate. The assistant's judgment in these domains is structurally limited (no malice required — the assistant simply lacks the training and context to assess the risk surface). Escalation here is hygiene, not failure.

What good escalation looks like

An escalation note has three parts:

1. The decision in one sentence ("We need to choose between voice option A and voice option B for the new pricing page")
2. The trigger — which of the three above is in play
3. The recommendation + reasoning — the assistant's view, not a dump of all considerations. "I recommend B because it preserves the secondary archetype; A drifts toward Outlaw which we deliberately don't occupy."

The recommendation matters. An escalation that hands the strategist a blank-slate decision wastes their time; an escalation that hands them a defended recommendation respects their time and demonstrates the assistant's developing judgment.

3.5 Definition-of-done — the prevent-rework discipline

Borrowed from agile software development (the Scrum Guide formalized "Definition of Done" in the early 2000s), the principle is that every workflow step has a pre-agreed completion criterion. Without one, "done" is a contested moving target and rework cycles multiply.

The principle

For each common brand artifact, write a one-paragraph definition of what "done" means. Examples:

• Voice review of marketing copy: Done = scored against the 5 voice markers, line-level notes for any partial/fail items, returned to the requester within two business days. NOT done if the brand assistant has rewritten the copy themselves.
• Brand-check audit of a content surface: Done = all pages scored, findings severity-ranked, owners assigned, re-audit date scheduled. NOT done if the audit is "in spreadsheet form" but hasn't been handed off.
• Naming brief response: Done = 5-8 candidate names generated, each evaluated against brand voice and trademark availability (lightweight check), top 3 shortlisted with rationale, returned to requester. NOT done if names are generated but availability not checked.
• Voice document update (minor): Done = change drafted, peer-reviewed by one other writer, approved by strategist, dated and versioned in the brand-asset folder, change-log entry added. NOT done if the file is updated but the change-log is missing.

Definitions of done are the brand team's contract with itself. Without them, rework is normalized. With them, rework becomes the exception that signals a real problem.

The "NOT done if" pattern

Note the recurring "NOT done if" clauses in the examples above. This pattern is more useful than the positive criteria alone because it surfaces the failure modes the team has actually seen. A definition-of-done that only says what done looks like misses the patterns that historically caused rework. The "NOT done if" clauses prevent recurrence.

3.6 Cross-functional embedding — how brand fits the org

Brand never operates alone. Its work touches and depends on marketing, content, design, product, sales, customer success, legal, and (increasingly) data. A Foundations-tier brand assistant should be able to map where brand sits in the organization's process landscape and identify the two or three highest-leverage cross-functional handoffs.

The five typical adjacencies

The two-handoff focus rule

An assistant trying to perfect handoffs with every function fragments their attention and produces nothing well. The discipline is to pick the two handoffs that matter most for the current quarter and invest in those. The other handoffs operate on default templates until you have bandwidth to upgrade them.

For most brand teams, the two highest-leverage handoffs are with content (because the volume is high and drift is most visible) and with sales (because the audience matters most and sales-deck copy is the most-drift-prone surface in the org). Your team's mileage will vary; surface the choice to your manager at the quarterly cadence.

Sample artifact — brand intake form

QUARTZ BRAND TEAM — REQUEST INTAKE
Form lives at: quartz.example/brand-intake (Google Form)

REQUIRED FIELDS

1. Your name + team
2. Request type [dropdown]:
   - Voice review of existing copy
   - Naming (product / feature / initiative)
   - Brand-check audit of a content surface
   - Brand strategy question
   - Tagline / messaging help
   - Other (describe in #3)
3. The ask in one sentence
   (Example: "Voice review of the new pricing-page headline
   and subhead before Friday's launch")
4. Audience [dropdown]: existing customers / prospects /
   internal / partners / press / other
5. Channel [dropdown]: web / email / social / sales deck /
   product UI / print / other
6. Deadline + REASON for deadline (the reason matters
   more than the date)
7. Link to draft / prior version / related brand docs
8. Who approves the final output? (name + role)
9. What does "done" look like for this request?
   (One sentence; if you don't know, schedule a 15-min
   scoping call instead of submitting)

SLA EXPECTATIONS (shown on form)
- Voice reviews: 2 business days
- Naming requests: 5 business days
- Audits (≤20 pages): 5 business days
- Audits (21+ pages): 10 business days; if urgent, escalate
- Strategy questions: routed to strategist; 1-week response

WHAT THIS FORM REJECTS (also shown)
- Verbal-only requests (please use the form)
- "Quick eyes" requests via Slack DM (please use the form)
- Requests without a 1-sentence ask
- Requests where #9 is "you'll know it when you see it"

QUARTZ BRAND HEALTH — 2026 Q2
Audience: exec sponsor + brand director
Owner: brand assistant
Date: 2026-06-30

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (2-3 sentences)
Brand voice consistency improved this quarter (avg score
4.2/5 across 47 audited pages, up from 3.8). One P0 finding
remains open (pricing-page subhead). Strategic question
for Q3: how aggressively to enforce brand-check pass on
sales-deck templates.

VOICE + POSITION
- Voice doc reviewed; no material changes warranted
- Position statement unchanged
- One archetype-drift signal observed in 3 social posts;
  recommend content team training touch-up

AUDIT COVERAGE + FINDINGS
- 47 pages audited (full marketing site + 12 help-center
  pages + 8 in-product copy contexts)
- P0: 1 remaining (down from 4 at quarter start)
- P1: 6 remaining (down from 11)
- P2: 18 (steady)
- P3: 24 (steady; will roll into Q3 style-guide refresh)

ASSET LIFECYCLE
- Active: voice-doc v3.2, brand-check rubric v2, tone matrix v1
- Deprecated this quarter: tagline v2 → replaced by tagline v3
- Archived: brand-mark draft files from 2024 refresh
- Needs refresh: brand-guideline PDF (last touched 2025-09)

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL SIGNALS
- Marketing: high satisfaction, weekly handoff cadence working
- Content: high satisfaction; one process tweak proposed
  (definition-of-done for help-center copy)
- Product: medium satisfaction; in-product copy reviews
  delayed too often; investigate root cause Q3
- Sales: low satisfaction; sales-deck reviews still ad-hoc;
  PROPOSE: dedicate one hour/week of brand-assistant time
  to sales-deck queue starting Q3

STRATEGIC QUESTION FOR Q3
How aggressively should brand-check pass be a release gate
for sales-deck templates? Currently advisory; proposal is
to make it required for all customer-facing decks. Trade-off:
slows sales-team velocity vs. reduces brand drift in the
highest-stakes customer-facing surface.