✍️ before you say, "we'll just do it ourselves"

We long for a simpler time, when finding yourself meant taking a quiz.

Not a serious one. The kind you tore out of Cosmopolitan or clicked through on BuzzFeed when you were supposed to be doing something else.

What pasta shape are you?

What color is your soul essence? 

What will your One Direction wedding look like? 

Most quizzes are harmless fun.

And every once in a while, a simple set of questions does something incredibly useful—like make a decision obvious. 

For example: How to staff that big ol’ tentpole project. 

Most marketers we know are defaulting to: “I will just handle it myself.” So we put together a quiz that can help you decide what to handle in-house, when to hire a freelancer, and when you need a whole agency. 

Let’s get into it.

Most marketing teams don’t actually talk about how to staff big projects. 

The project lands. The timeline tightens. And someone says, “We’ll just handle this internally.”

It sounds efficient, and it feels like control—but that decision often gets made before anyone steps back to ask a more important question: Should we be doing this ourselves?

And once the work is in motion, it’s much harder to rethink who should own it.

There’s a cleaner way to decide.

Instead of committing early and adjusting later, start with our staffing diagnostic—four questions that make the trade-offs clear before you’re too far in.

1. Do you actually have the bandwidth?

Not just on paper. In reality.

Who’s doing this work, and what are they not doing because of it? If this project slips, what else slips with it?

Most teams overestimate what they can absorb without something else breaking.

2. How many moving parts need to work together?

A single deliverable is one thing. A coordinated push across web, email, social, PR, and events is something else entirely.

The more channels involved, the more this becomes a systems problem, not just a resourcing one.

3. How fast does this need to move?

Some projects can stretch. Others can’t. If timing is critical, you’re not just staffing for execution, you’re staffing for momentum. And that often requires more hands (or different ones) than expected.

4. Do you have the right expertise?

This is where most teams get tripped up.

You might have strong generalists. You might even have specialists. But do you have the specific experience this project demands?

If not, you’re not just doing the work—you’re learning how to do it at the same time.

Take the quiz

We bundled the above up into a quick 'n' simple quiz, then ran this staffing diagnostic when we were planning our 2026 AI Report. Our actual result: 

→ Survey design and data collection stayed in-house. 

We’ve done that work before, and speed mattered. We knew how to structure the questions, distribute the survey, and turn around analysis quickly without adding overhead.

→ Design was a different story.

We had big dreams, strong opinions, and limited in-house resources—so we brought in some brilliant freelance designers to help us cross the finish line in style.

Staffing gone right 

This is the same logic the Head of Marketing at HR tech firm Fountain used when she ran a major rebrand at lightspeed. Facing a full repositioning on a tight timeline, Hope Weatherford worked through the same questions, brought in external support where she needed it, and coordinated a multi-channel rollout in just a few weeks.

Within 100 days: 4x increase in form fills, national press coverage, and competitors echoing their messaging back to them.

Not because they outsourced everything. Because they staffed the work intentionally.

If you’re in the middle of something like this right now, run your project through our staffing diagnostic.

Campaigns that got us talking: 1,000 engaged readers > 10,000 passive ones. Turns out the moat isn’t more content, it’s community. (Which reminds us … where should we gather IRL this year? We think it’s high time we do some in-person hangs with the ‘arb community.) 

Also, s/o to Taylor, our newest FT copywriter, and the voice behind the Creator Diaries.

AI spotlight: If we don’t know what consciousness is, how would we know if we built it? Anthropic’s CEO says their AI model might be conscious—and they’re taking a “precautionary approach” just in case.

That’s … one way to handle it.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Michael B. Jordan, fresh off an Oscar win, lined up at In-N-Out. No formal partnership. Just the best advertising In-N-Out didn’t pay for. 

Cultural moments > planned distribution.

Curious whether storyarb’s flywheel is the right fit for running your full-funnel content program? (It is.)

Meet b’arb, our content connoisseur (NOT a receptionist. And don’t even think about calling her “Barbie.”).

You’ll find her in the bottom right corner of our site, ready to answer questions, talk strategy, and offer a take or two.

P.S. You can also find her … running our Twitter account? (It’s been so long since we were there, we still call it Twitter.)

“World-class” does a lot of work for a phrase that doesn’t mean anything. 

It’s usually a placeholder for real detail—the kind that actually tells you why something matters.

But you do you.

We’re at that point in the year. 

January had that new year momentum. We were all rarin’ to execute our new 2026 plans. Now it’s late Q1, and that energy has quietly worn off.

You’re in the middle of it—testing things, waiting on results, trying to remember what the original plan actually was. This part doesn’t get talked about much. (Because it’s a little bit boring, and a lot bit hard.) 

But it’s not a bad place to be.

The middle is where you find out what’s real. What’s working. And what was just January optimism dressed up as strategy.

The teams that make the most of the long mid-year slog aren’t trying to rush through it.  

They’re getting more intentional.

That’s exactly what our staffing diagnostic is for. 

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... BuzzFeed quizzes were addictive for a reason. They promised quick self-knowledge—a few questions, one clear answer. 

By the way, b’arb is a true winter, a bucatini, and a Liam Payne girl.