In unscripted post, we don't have the luxury of pause.

Shoots wrap late. Notes come in later. Deliverables stack up. And when someone on your AE team goes down—or just needs a day—you can’t afford the whole pipeline pausing with them. The problem isn't that your people aren’t capable. It’s that the structure around them assumes they’ll always be available. And that’s a bad bet.

We learned that the hard way. Then we rebuilt our AE structure from the ground up to be flexible enough that if someone stepped away, someone else could pick up within minutes—not hours. It wasn’t about hiring better people. It was about structuring the work so no one became a single point of failure.

Let me walk you through it.

What Most People Get Wrong About AE Teams

The default model for AE team structure in unscripted post is built like islands.

Each AE is assigned to a show (or sometimes a group of specific editors) and becomes the de facto owner of everything for that slice of the universe. stringouts, groupings, exports, upres—it's all routed through them. That’s often seen as a win: they “know everything” about that show.

Until they’re out sick. Or they leave. Or they’re just buried on an overnight full of exports when something else breaks.

When every AE is their own silo with their own personal system, nobody else can step in cleanly. At best, someone pinches for them and loses a half-day re-learning a setup. At worst, things fall through the cracks, notes get missed, or outputs go wrong.

People assume this model is “efficient” because it gets things moving quickly in the beginning. But it’s brittle. It doesn’t scale. And it crushes the AE who lives as the only brain holding it all together.

What We Actually Built

We didn’t reimagine the team. We rebuilt the blueprint they work from. The goal was simple: no matter who was on shift, they should be able to open up a project and know exactly what needed doing—without five Slack messages and a scavenger hunt through someone’s downloads folder.

We implemented three core changes:

1. Shared Folder Structures Across Shows

Every show folder, regardless of network, genre, or team, uses the same naming conventions and structure:

Inside each, files follow consistent naming. Turnovers took one click. Relinking didn’t require a guess. And when an AE moved from Show A to Show B, nothing felt unfamiliar.

This one move killed hours of onboarding and confusion every week.

2. Clear Hand-off Logs and AE Work Trackers

Instead of relying on DMs and memory, we built digital “handoff sheets” for each AE task. They live in a central tracker—not someone’s desktop—with simple, human notes:

• What needs finishing

• What was done

• Where to find key files

• Any red flags or weird stuff to know

  
  

It read more like “AE-to-AE” conversation than paperwork. Which is exactly the point.

Whether it was a day-off sub or a swing-shift AE picking up late-night issues, they could jump in without disturbing an editor or backtracking work.

3. Role Fluidity with Soft Specialties

Every AE learned the core systems: ingest, grouping, turnovers, onlines. But we let them develop soft specialties. If Maria was amazing at helping editors with AMA relinks and color pipeline fixes, she floated to those issues naturally. But if she was out? Anyone on the team could still finish a turnover or prep an AMA bin, because they’d done it before too.

No one was “the ingest AE” or “offline turnovers only.” Everyone was cross-trained. That made scheduling tighter, coverage simpler, and burnout way lower.

What Changed (Emotionally and Operationally)

The immediate operational shift: coverage was no longer a puzzle every time someone needed time off. Sub swaps didn’t come with a week of lost velocity. Editors stopped micromanaging because they were no longer guessing who to ask or worrying whether their fixes would stick.

But the deeper shift? That was emotional.

AEs felt less trapped. Coverage didn’t feel like a favor—it was the norm. There wasn’t guilt around taking time to breathe, because the system didn’t collapse if they stepped away.

Editors trusted the system. They didn’t get thrown every time someone new dropped a cut. They knew the bins would be labeled the same, the sequences would make logical sense, and the bugs would be logged if not fixed outright.

And coordinators stopped chasing mystery answers about file names gone rogue, odd output locations, or unclear log notes.

The whole workflow smoothed out—not because the tasks got easier, but because the handoffs got seamless.

The Quiet Win

A lot of production leaders assume you can’t get that kind of fluidity without overstaffing—or that trying to make everyone generalists means work quality drops.

That wasn’t our experience.

People still had specialties. They still had ownership. But now, they weren’t forced to carry the whole thing solo. And the shows benefitted from something rare in unscripted: continuity that didn’t depend on a single overworked AE.

If you’ve been stuck trying to triage swaps or bring on temps without crashing a project, it’s not you. It’s the structure. Build the right one, and everything else gets lighter.

Not easy. But absolutely worth fixing.