Show your work

Half of the job is delivering the thing you promised. The other half is giving context. It’s explaining why you did what you did the way you did it.

It’s showing your work.

(Note: I haven’t done the math, but half feels right 🙂

For products, a lot of this work-showing (all?) is done pre-purchase.

It’s listing features and benefits. It’s explaining what makes your product different from and better than competing products. It’s showing off the design and function decisions you made along the way.

But for services—and especially if you customize your offering—the most impactful work-showing happens post-purchase. And usually post-delivery.

Whether that’s explaining the mechanic’s decisions behind the way they fixed your car. Or a multi-page report on how the designer came up with your new colour palette and logo.

We want the result, and we want to understand it.

In my world (website and email copywriting/optimization), the gold standard for showing my work includes delivering:

1. An overview document/section/email explaining universal assumptions/treatments that informed the project.
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2. In-line comments explaining specific decisions and offering options where I wasn’t sure.
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3. A video walkthrough of the deliverable to give you a sense of “what you’re looking at” and explain 1 and 2 above.

Bonus points if you include some of the work that didn’t make the cut. It can be useful in other projects or places in their business.

(I sometimes include a “Headline Party!” on the last page of a deliverable, listing all the headlines and subheads I came up with during the project.)

Over to you. How do you show your work?

Workin’ it,
James