Writing
How to scale a video team without it becoming a ticketing system
You stop a video team turning into a ticketing system by first deciding, what it's actually for. Then protecting that with an intake process, which will vary depending on the company, but generally work can be sorted into tiers, with guidelines for each, an honest "no" and scalable formats or self-serve tooling for everything that doesn't need a maker's hands on it. A queue is okay, but the lack of a system that decides what enters the queue is the problem. Think about when you put in a request for IT or another department. They usually have a ticketing system, a clear timeline (that is non-negotiable), provide updates along the way and guide you through the experience. This is basically the same thing.
Almost everything written about this is written by agencies, and their answer is the same one they always give: outsource it. That solves a problem, but costs more and isn't a long term solution to deciding what should/ shouldn't be made. This is the in-house operator's version. What I've done to keep a creative team making the work only it can make, rather than becoming the place requests go to die.
If you're standing a team up from zero, start with how to build an in-house video team from scratch first. This piece picks up where that one ends: you have a team (or person), the requests are arriving faster than you can make them, and now something has to change.
What actually turns a creative team into a ticketing system?
Teams can cope with a lot of work. What breaks them is undifferentiated work — every request treated as equal, arriving through any channel, with no shared idea of what's worth doing.
It usually starts well. We're a keen bunch, particularly if the team is new, and we want to say yes, because saying yes is how you prove the function is worth having (and let's face it, we're not always seen as core to a business in the same way product or engineering is, plus we're harder to quantify). Then the requests compound. Several events need a sizzle reel. Someone wants an all-hands cut down. A product manager needs a screen capture with a voiceover ASAP. None of it is unreasonable on its own. All of it together means your senior producer spends the week topping-and-tailing other people's footage instead of making the thing that would actually move the brand. Nobody needs that.
By the time it feels like a ticket queue, the damage is already cultural: the makers have quietly accepted that their job is to service requests, not to make work. The requestors assume this is how it should be done. That's what you're really protecting against.
How do you define the tiers?
Tier by what the work is for, not by how hard it is to make. A thirty-second clip can be your most important output of the quarter, or it can be noise.
The way I think about it, most incoming work falls into three bands:
Hero. The work that only the creative team can make, tied directly to what the business is trying to be known for. Brand films, documentary-grade stories, formats you're trying to own. This is the work you're building the system to protect time for.
Repeatable. Valuable, recurring, and predictable — case studies, event recaps, a product explainer series, the podcast. The trick here isn't to make each one bespoke; it's to build a format and a template (and use tools and AI) so the tenth one costs a fraction of the first. Repeatable work is where a system earns its keep, because it's the tier that quietly eats all your time if you let every instance be a fresh negotiation.
Self-serve. Everything that genuinely doesn't need a maker: an internal update, a quick social cut, a talking-head someone can film on their phone against a decent background. This shouldn't enter the team's queue at all. It should be handled by recorded tutorials, templates, playbooks, and tools that let the person who wants it make it themselves, on brand, without you. I've built this with video and it works well for global scale without diminishing your brand. Also means you are never a real blocker. You can present a solution rather than saying no, and it's up to them to take it or leave it.
The tiers are only useful if the people sending you work can see them. Publish them.
What does intake look like?
One front door, usually a form in your project management tool, but with AI I'm seeing more cases of chatbots (Slack) or similar that make a form interactive (EG a Gemini Gem) to make it easier for the requestor, and to make sure you get all the info you need up front.
The most effective thing you can do is kill any other channels, a "quick favour" Slack DM or kitchen conversation - "can you quickly edit this".
Nudge them to your ticketing system and make no commitments until you have it! Not to add bureaucracy but to answer questions before anyone starts work (after all, they might realise they don't even need it). What's this for (the business goal, not the deliverable)? Who's it for, and where does it go? And when is it genuinely needed, versus when would you simply like it? Most "urgent" requests aren't urgent; they just never had to think about it in the context of other priorities.
The form does the triage. A request that clearly maps to hero or repeatable gets routed and scheduled with an honest turnaround. A request that's self-serve gets pointed at the toolkit, warmly, with the template attached.
Then set expectations and be consistent. A clear turnaround for each tier is better than any single fast delivery, because the thing people resent isn't waiting, it's not knowing. A team that reliably says "you'll have it in two weeks" and then does is trusted. A team that says "yes, soon" to everything and delivers erratically is a ticketing system with good intentions.
What do you say no to, and how?
You say no to work that has no purpose, no owner, or no place to go. And no to being the default team for work someone could do themselves. Sounds a bit harsh, but say it nicely and make the reason clear, and it's useful, because every no to low-value work is a yes to work the business and the teams want you to do. Sorry Paul in marketing, sometimes your bespoke animation for a 20 person event in Madrid isn't worth it.
A flat "no" reads as the team being precious. What works is something like
"We're not going to build this one as a full production, because it's really an internal update and the turnaround you need is faster than our queue — but here's a template that'll get you 90% of the way there."
Do it consistently and people start to pre-sort, because they've learned what the team is for.
The nos you'll find hardest are the political ones. A senior stakeholder who wants a vanity piece with no real audience. You won't win all of those, you shouldn't die on every hill and sometimes you'll need higher level support. But the intake form helps even here, because "what's this for and where does it go?" helps the stakeholder articulate why they want it.
What breaks as you scale?
Different things break at different points and it depends on the company.
One person with little written down (because it doesn't need to be) means it's all in one person's head. This works up until that person is a bottleneck for getting things done, goes on holiday or leaves. There's no continuity at this point. The fix is to start externalising the system while it's small: the intake form, a couple of templates, a simple record of what's in flight (project management tools do this).
A small team. The challenge is consistency. Three people making the same kind of video three different ways, and quality that depends on who caught the request. What breaks is the brand's coherence. The fix is formats and templates for the repeatable tier, and a shared definition of "good," so the output is recognisably yours regardless of who made it.
Multiple people, higher volume. Prioritisation stops being obvious. Everyone's busy, everything feels important, and without a triage step the loudest request wins instead of the most valuable one. What breaks is your ability to protect hero work. It's always the thing that gets bumped for something urgent-but-small. The fix is a real weekly triage: someone whose actual job is to hold the tiers, absorb the noise, and defend the calendar for the work that matters.
Multiple regions or teams. The risk is no longer a bottleneck (hopefully); it's fragmentation — every region reinventing the process, the brand drifting, no shared floor. When I was running video across EMEA at Google, and later managing producers across the world, the job stopped being "make the videos" and became "make sure a good video can be made reliably, anywhere." That's playbooks, shared toolkits, consistent process across disciplines (EG producer > recording studio > editor), onboarding docs, internal training. The system doing the remembering.
At a small scale you're fighting to write the system down, and at large scale you're fighting to keep it coherent. It's the same system the whole way.
How is this different from gatekeeping?
A triage system done badly is gatekeeping. The video team that says no to guard access to itself doesn't work.
A gatekeeper spends its energy defending the queue. What you actually want is to spend that energy removing the queue: pushing as much work as possible out to self-serve tooling so people don't need you for it, bucketing requests into repeatable formats, and reserving the team for what genuinely does. Democratise, don't gatekeep: the tiers exist to raise everyone's floor, not to make you the only people allowed to make video. Do it right and the team is more open, not less, because the lower-value work has somewhere else to go.
The TL;DR
A video team becomes a ticketing system when work arrives undifferentiated through every channel. Fix it with an intake form that forces purpose to be stated, and three tiers sorted by what work is for: hero (protect it), repeatable (systematise it), self-serve (hand it off). Build the system down while the team is small and keep it coherent as the team grows. Do that and you're freeing your best people to make the work that was the whole point of hiring them.
Written by Ben Jay, who is building Trustpilot's global video function from scratch. He was previously at Google, where he grew from shooting producer to leading the video department — ultimately managing 26 producers across the US and Europe — and where his campaigns won two Webby Awards. Full bio → · Get in touch →