Every enterprise content leader knows this moment: Another “urgent” request lands in your inbox from a colleague. “Can you do a blog post on this?”
Now you’re stuck in a tough spot. Do you respond with a firm “no” and stay focused on your carefully built roadmap? Or do you begrudgingly agree? Neither feels great. Declining too often breeds frustration or backfires because you don’t “look like a team player.” And your “yes” sets a bad precedent that reduces your role to order-taking.
The solution isn’t to stop requests from coming in but to reframe how your colleagues view content's role and yours: as a strategic partner.
So, how do you do that?
This playbook shares four tactics from enterprise content leaders at companies like Dropbox, Klaviyo, and Adobe — leaders who collaborate on their companies’ biggest priorities, rather than acting as content vending machines.
Before You Start: Get Clear on Strategy
These tactics only work if content has a clear strategic mandate. Without it, every request looks urgent and you’ll always be stuck in order-taker mode. Here’s how to get clear on strategy:
Identify the company’s top priorities. Pin down what the business cares about most right now: revenue growth, product adoption, retention, or another clear goal.
Map content’s role directly to those needs. Are you primarily a growth driver, a storyteller, or a center of excellence for quality and consistency? Articulate how content helps the company get to its goal.
Connect content to revenue impact. Build simple dashboards, track how your work influences revenue, pipeline, adoption, or retention, and share results in business language. Regular updates — quick weekly wins plus deeper monthly reviews — prove content is a growth lever and earn you the right to protect your roadmap.
Set a quarterly planning cadence. Align content planning to major launches and campaigns, and make it a collaborative process with other teams. This shows stakeholders that you’re prioritizing strategically and helps you anticipate and plan for requests in advance.
Tracey Wallace, Director of Content at Klaviyo, says quarterly planning is the intake process for content requests, where other teams can ask for content as part of the broader cycle. It’s also a chance to check whether resources are in place for upcoming work: “We need to understand our resources, our budget, and resources here aren’t just content resources,” says Tracey. “Can we produce? Can we edit? Do we have enough PMMs to review?”
1. Talk to Your Colleagues Instead of Using a Form
To stop order-taking without eroding trust, content leaders use strategic discovery conversations instead of relying on passive intake forms. The goal is to reframe requests around business outcomes rather than content outputs.
“One of the first things you should discuss with team members is distribution strategy,” says Aditya Vempaty, VP of Marketing at MoEngage. “If you can’t tell me how you’re going to distribute it, you’re not doing it.”
Tracey takes the same approach: When people ping her on Slack with requests, her first response is always, “How are you going to promote it?” Nine times out of 10, she says, the answer isn’t strong, which makes it clear the request needs more thought.
When the answers reveal gaps, the role of content isn’t to block the request, but to guide it. Strategic discovery gives you the chance to redirect, improve, or reshape asks so they align with business goals while making it clear they can’t succeed without those pieces in place.
Here are some questions to ask your team:
What problem are you trying to solve? → Maybe there’s already another asset in the pipeline that covers this.
What business goal does this support? → If it doesn’t map to current priorities, it may need to be shelved in favor of higher-impact work.
Do we have the right resources and stakeholders to make this work? → Let’s get those lined up before starting the request to avoid delays later.
Handled well, these conversations help stakeholders make better requests in the future.
And a quick note on the “form or no form” debate: You don’t have to ditch intake forms entirely. They’re obviously useful, especially if you build these discovery questions right into the form. But the follow-up conversation is the critical step. Without it, the form can give stakeholders the impression that their request is already approved. At Animalz, we’ve seen orgs where just submitting a form auto-populates the content roadmap, even if the form isn’t fully filled out. Suddenly, you’ve got an asset with a random title and no context on your roadmap, and you’re chasing people down to figure out what the request even is.
2. Implement Tiered Resourcing Models
Not every piece of content deserves the same treatment. Kate Pluth, former Head of Content Strategy at Dropbox, says, “You want [your in-house team] prioritized on the most highly visible things…homepage, those types of surfaces.” To do that, prioritize content by tier: Give the most strategic work full attention, and handle lower-value requests with lighter support:
Tier 1: Strategic, high-visibility content (like homepage messaging, thought leadership, or flagship campaigns) gets full in-house treatment.
Tier 2: Important-but-not-critical projects can be handled with agency support, backed by strong onboarding and quality guardrails.
Tier 3: Lower-value asks are handled through self-service tools and templates so teams can create what they need without pulling content leaders into every request.
This approach also lets you aim for balance: for example, 70% of your team’s time on strategic initiatives and 30% on reactive support.
3. Own Content Standards Across the Company
Standardize the company voice, and make it easy for every team to follow. This shift both reduces low-level requests and ensures that everything produced — whether it comes from product, support, or marketing — feels consistent and on brand.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Define messaging standards so everyone knows what the company sounds like. Make your editorial guidelines clear and easy to digest for folks who aren’t on the content team.
Create templates and playbooks that make it easy for other teams to produce content on their own.
Offer training and office hours to help colleagues write confidently in the company’s voice.
At Dropbox, the Writing Studio runs pods dedicated to copywriting, content design, AI communications, and thought leadership. It owns company-wide training, guidelines, and resourcing standards. This structure raises the floor for every piece of writing Dropbox publishes.
4. Build Your Own Research and Customer Intelligence Program
Owning customer and market insights helps you move beyond the vending-machine role. When you know what customers need and how they behave, you can collaborate with product, sales, and strategy teams on what to build, how to position it, and how to reach customers.
A “research and intelligence program” doesn’t have to mean spinning up a full research department. It can be as simple as putting a few habits in place.
Do your own research. Run quick surveys, scrape industry reports, or analyze search data.
Talk directly to customers. Join sales calls, host interviews, or listen in on support conversations. Aditya’s team at MoEngage spends time every week listening to customer calls together.
Document patterns and insights. Track what problems come up repeatedly, what features customers love, and where they struggle.
Once you’ve gathered insights, put them to work in two ways:
Create unique, data-backed content that competitors can’t copy.
Feed insights back into the business so sales, product, and leadership benefit too. As Kirti Sharma, Director of Product Marketing at Adobe, says: “Let’s learn something that can then also bubble up into the product.”
Pick Your Strategic Starting Point
You won’t become a strategic partner overnight, but if you feel like an order-taker, start putting the systems in place now. And if you’re a small team (or a team of one), choose just one of those tactics to create momentum for your pivot. It might mean mastering strategic discovery conversations or building a rock-solid content governance framework. The key is identifying your biggest point of friction and addressing it first.
At Animalz, we've helped dozens of enterprise content leaders make this transition. If you're ready to move beyond reactive content creation and build a strategic content operation, let's talk about how we can help.