There's a question that haunts production work. Not about quality — the quality is usually fine. The renders are clean, the music is emotive, the edit is tight. The question is: what is this for?

Your company has more content than ever. The agency delivered a brand film. The in-house team is shipping three posts a week. There's a launch video, a product explainer, a careers reel, a podcast clip series. Every piece is competent. And pipeline hasn't moved. Investor conversations still stall at the same point. Enterprise buyers still can't explain your product internally. The careers page still attracts the wrong people. More production didn't fix it — because production was never the problem.

Early in Lotus's shift from petrol to electric, we produced the Emeya launch film. Clean CG, emotive pacing, Lotus yellow woven through every frame. It could have been for any premium EV on the market. Swap the badge and nothing changes. The film wasn't bad. It was orphaned — good craft with no architecture to give it meaning. Then came "Are you a driver or what?" Same pipeline, same tools, same team. Everything changed. Architecture didn't constrain creativity — it unlocked it. Every asset in the pipeline suddenly had a reason to exist.

Production is getting faster. Much faster. Boris Cherny, who leads Claude Code at Anthropic, compared this moment to the printing press.¹ Once printing became easy, Europe was flooded with books — more in fifty years than in the previous thousand. The skill didn't stay with the printers. It shifted to identifying what was worth writing and reading. The same shift is happening in brand production now.

Production was never the scarce resource. It felt scarce because it was hard — but hard and scarce are not the same thing. AI is proving that by compressing timelines so fast that the real bottleneck becomes visible. It was always the layer above: the diagnosis, the architecture, the strategic frame that tells production what to be and why. Without that, faster production is just noise at higher velocity.

I left production — ten years across seven studios and a string of direct clients — because I watched it fail without architecture and succeed with it enough times to know where the leverage lives. Not a prediction about the industry. A bet I already placed.

Can you answer "what is this for?" for every asset in your pipeline?

If not, the problem isn't production. It was never production.