Before you invest in case studies

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Before you spend anything on case studies, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Problem, approach, result, in that order
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Numbers make it credible. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Name the client if they will let you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

In practice

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about case studies before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Problem, approach, result, in that order — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.