[INTRO PARAGRAPH — 2-3 sentences. Sets up the situation: leading a small team of writers through a CMS transition that broke the workflow they'd built their craft around. The work wasn't writing — it was figuring out how to keep a team functioning when the system around them was unstable. Final draft will be ~75 words.]
The situation
[SITUATION SECTION — 200-250 words. Describes the CMS transition from the writers' perspective. What the old system rewarded. What the new system required. Why the style guide stopped being authoritative during the transition. This is the section that establishes why a smart, well-trained team started having trouble with work they used to do easily. No need to defend Google or Accenture — just describe the conditions honestly.]
What I noticed first
[OBSERVATION SECTION — 200-250 words. The Google News "how to" writer vignette. Render it as a moment: a writer pushing back on a specific snippet decision, the pattern you saw underneath the pushback (not stubbornness — confusion about which rules still applied), the realization that the team needed judgment criteria, not new rules. Told in scene, in first person, specific.]
The framework
[FRAMEWORK SECTION — 250-300 words. Walks through the decision framework you built: when writers should absorb a fix locally vs. when they should escalate it for PM coordination. Describes the framework in your own words — you don't need to reproduce internal documentation. The point isn't to publish the framework. It's to show how you think about coaching writers through ambiguity. Two or three example decisions help.]
What happened
[OUTCOME SECTION — 100-150 words. Brief, factual. The team hit every deadline through the transition. They were one of the few content groups available to absorb additional work during the instability. This is the proof section — short, specific, no overclaiming.]
[CLOSING LINE — 1-2 sentences. The principle: when the rules stop working, the answer is rarely new rules. It's judgment criteria. Or whatever closer feels true to how you actually think about leadership.]