Leading a remote content team from day one

The challenge

I was asked to act as the de facto leader of the copy team while still a senior copywriter, reporting to the then-head of content. The business need was straightforward to state and hard to deliver: a fully remote team with different motivations, abilities and backgrounds needed a leader who could run and scale it.

A management system wasn't in place yet. Nobody had mapped who did what, who each writer actually answered to for a given task, or what a good outcome looked like in their role. Without that, morale and turnaround suffered, and there was nothing solid to point to when the team's output got questioned from above.

The problem to solve: build leadership credibility, trust and a working governance structure for a team that had never had one, while still meeting the business's day-to-day needs and managing upward — with no runway to learn the role before delivery started mattering.

Gathering insights

Who is this team, really?

I first spent time understanding each team member individually: their motivation, their skills, their strengths and weaknesses, and where rapport was still missing. A fully remote team needed this groundwork before any structural change could land, as nothing gets adopted by people who don't trust the person asking.

What's actually blocking them?

From there, I understood each person's real blockers: who their stakeholders were, what frustrated them in the day-to-day workflow, and where requests arrived without enough context to act on.

Who are we actually working for?

I then mapped the full stakeholder organisation — who they were, what they did, what they typically needed, what tasks they handed off, and where they encountered blockers of their own. That mapping surfaced the real root cause: there had never been any governance boundaries or expectations set with stakeholders in the first place.

Ideation

Restructured the team into stakeholder-aligned squads

Using the stakeholder map, I divided the team into squads, each owning a defined set of stakeholders matched to that squad's skills and preferences. This replaced ad-hoc task assignment with a structure stakeholders could actually route through.

Built rapport through regular 1:1s

I set up management 1:1s with every team member, to build rapport individually, understand each person's motivations and needs, and find out what support they actually needed rather than assuming it.

Adopted a servant-leader mindset

I took an Agile servant-leader approach, focused on removing blockers for the team rather than directing their work. This was the fastest lever available for turnaround, given the team was already skilled and just needed the obstacles out of the way.

Built the first governance artefacts and stakeholder cadence

I put in place the artefacts that never existed: an SLA, a team manifest, and lead-time benchmarks per item type. Then, I also set up team retrospectives and ran a dedicated evangelisation session with key stakeholders and PMOs to introduce the new way of working from the start, rather than letting it surface informally.

Results

• Quicker, clearer turnaround on stakeholder requests
• Higher team morale, tracked through the new retrospective cadence
• Promoted twice within 2 quarters, from senior copywriter to Head of Copy and Translations

Related reading

Using a content designer's strengths to lead retrospectives and process improvements (Ditto); How to prevent content ops pain points (UX Content Collective)

Both on the governance and process discipline this role was built around

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