Methodology
Deliberate Production™
A methodology built under pressure.
Refined through years of application.
The Origin
It started with a crisis.
A small design studio had landed a contract to handle overflow newspaper ad production for the Los Angeles Times. Within months, the contract expanded. Then it expanded again. By the time I was running operations, we had 150+ staff delivering more than 2,600 ads every week — under daily deadline pressure, with zero tolerance for error.
There was no playbook for this. No existing system that could handle the volume, the complexity, the mix of skill levels, and the unforgiving daily deadlines simultaneously. So I built one.
The system I designed managed intake, triage, routing, skill-based assignment, QA, training, reporting, and performance tracking — all in real time, all integrated, all tied to a single principle: the work should flow to the right person at the right time with the right support, automatically.
We hit 99.98% accuracy. And we stayed there.
That system became Deliberate Production™.
What It Is
Deliberate Production™ is a workflow methodology built on one idea:
Systems should make people better at their jobs.
Not faster at following rules.
Most workflow systems are designed by people who understand process. Deliberate Production™ was designed by someone who understood people first — and used process as the tool to help them.
The methodology covers how work enters a system, how it gets prioritized, how it's assigned based on skill and capacity, how quality is measured without creating fear, how training is embedded in the daily workflow rather than treated as a separate event, and how the system improves itself over time through honest feedback loops.
It has been applied to newspapers, ad agencies, publishers, nonprofits, healthcare organizations, and creative departments nationwide.
What It Is Not
Deliberate Production™ is not a rigid framework that gets installed and enforced.
Systems that depend on compliance fail. People route around them, ignore them, or abandon them the moment management stops watching. A system nobody uses is just documentation.
Every implementation of Deliberate Production™ is designed around the specific people, culture, and operational realities of the organization it's entering. The principles are consistent. The application is always custom.
The Core Principles
Every installation is different.
The principles never are.
A video production pipeline looks nothing like a print production workflow. A 10-person creative team operates differently than a department of 150. The tools, the culture, the people, the pressure points — all different.
What doesn't change: how work should enter a system, how it gets prioritized, how quality gets measured without creating fear, how training gets embedded in the daily flow rather than bolted on afterward, and how the system learns to improve itself.
Deliberate Production™ applies the same governing principles to every environment — but the implementation is always built from scratch around the specific organization it's entering. That's why it gets adopted. That's why it lasts.
The best way to understand what it would look like for your team is to talk about your team specifically.
What People Said
The skills I learned while I was with AdOut have allowed me to totally rock at every position I accepted since.
Michelle Bohn — Former AdOut Staff
I don't think I've ever had such a good instructor. I don't think I've ever learned a program so quickly — I think it's because you took the time to show us correctly and efficiently and with great patience.
Rubisel Ramirez — Production Artist, AdOut