How to Brief a Ghostwritten Executive Post: Get the Opinion Before the Draft
By Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, former CMO of Mozilla and BitTorrent ·
Brief a ghostwritten executive post around one opinion the executive will defend in public, quoted in their own words from a recorded 30-minute interview held before anyone drafts. Add the one story only they can tell and a short list of phrases they would never use. A recorded interview beats every other capture method for most executives, and a LinkedIn post or a contributed trade article rarely needs a keyword target at all.
A 200-person payments company wants its VP of Engineering to publish once a quarter. Marketing sends a freelance writer a brief with a target keyword (“platform engineering best practices”), a word count of 1,800, three competitor URLs and an H2 outline. The draft comes back in a week and it is clean. The VP reads it on a phone between meetings and replies with five words: “This doesn't sound like me.” Two rewrites later the post goes out, seven weeks after the brief, saying roughly what the top ten results for that keyword already said about golden paths and internal developer platforms. It collects 40 reactions on LinkedIn, most of them from coworkers. A month later, at a meetup, the VP tells a room of engineering managers that a company their size needs a platform team of two people and should resist growing it, and three of them ask for the slides.
Nobody had asked the VP what they thought.
Our view is that an executive post is worth publishing only when it carries an opinion the executive would defend to a peer who disagrees, and the brief exists to get that opinion out of their head and onto the page before a writer starts. The keyword comes second, if it comes at all. That is a strange thing for a company that sells SEO briefs to say. But a VP's post finds its readers through the VP's network and the publication that runs it, and in our experience search sends it very little.
What an executive brief decides that a normal brief does not
A normal content brief has one reader to satisfy, the person searching. A ghostwriting brief has two, and the second one can veto the whole piece with a five-word email. So the brief has to settle what the executive believes and how they sound saying it before the writer sees a word, and it has to flag the claims that need a second signature. Get the belief wrong and no rewrite will fix the voice, because the voice was never the problem.
Capture methods compared
Pick the method from how much of the executive's time you can actually get. Teams tend to ask for a rough draft, because it seems respectful of the executive's expertise, and then wait a month for it.
| Method | Best for | Executive time to plan for | Edit rounds to expect | Key trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recorded interview | Most executives, most posts | 30 to 45 minutes, plus one read of the draft | One or two | The writer has to turn talk into prose without sanding off the odd phrasing that makes it sound like a person. |
| Voice memos | Executives who travel, or who think best out loud on a drive | Two or three memos of 5 to 10 minutes each | Two | Often the best raw material you will get. Nobody is there to push back on a weak point, so the brief has to. |
| Executive writes a rough draft | The rare executive who already writes well and enjoys it | Two to four hours | One | Sounds most like them. Also the draft most likely to arrive three weeks late, or never. |
| Writer drafts from existing material | Executives with a backlog of recorded talks and all-hands notes | One approval read, about 20 minutes | Two or three | Easy on the calendar. The opinions are whatever they said last year, and they may have moved on. |
| AI draft from an interview transcript | Short LinkedIn posts cut from an interview you already ran | The interview, plus a line edit | Two | Fast. The model pulls every sentence toward the average post on the topic, which is the voice you hired a ghostwriter to avoid. |
Where each method fits (and where it does not)
Recorded interview. The default, and the one we would book first. Thirty minutes on a video call with the transcript turned on gets you more usable sentences per minute of executive time than anything else on this list. Run it the way our guide to interviewing a subject matter expert describes, with one difference: you are listening for how they talk as much as for what they know, so write down the exact phrases they repeat.
Voice memos. Good for the executive who will never sit still for a call. Send two prompts by text and ask for a memo on each. You lose the follow-up question, which is where interviews usually find the story.
Executive writes a rough draft. Only if they have done it before and the last one arrived on time. When it works, the editor's job is mostly cutting.
Writer drafts from existing material. Fine for a post that restates a position the executive took on stage last quarter. Risky for anything new. Check the date on every source, because executives change their minds and rarely announce it.
AI draft from a transcript. Useful for cutting one interview into four or five LinkedIn posts, and a poor way to produce the long piece. Give the model the transcript and the never-say list described below, keep its draft short, and have a person put the executive's odd phrasing back in. Our guide to a content brief for AI writing covers the rest of that setup.
And one honest concession. If the executive will not give you 30 minutes a quarter, do not run a byline program for them. Publish under the company's name, or give the byline to the engineer or the support lead who actually wants it. A post the named author never read is worse than no post, because the first person to quote it back to them in a meeting will find out.
The venue decides whether a keyword belongs in the brief
| Venue | Who reads it | Keyword target? | Length to brief for | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Company blog | Search visitors, plus whoever the executive shares it with | Yes, if a real query exists for the opinion | 1,200 to 2,000 words | What the top 10 results already say, so the opinion is not one of them |
| LinkedIn post | The executive’s followers and the people who reshare | No | LinkedIn caps posts at 3,000 characters. Most good ones use half. | The first two lines, which are all anyone sees before the “see more” cut |
| Contributed trade article | The publication’s subscribers | Rarely. The publication’s editor usually rewrites the headline. | Whatever the contributor guidelines say | Exclusivity terms. Many publications refuse anything already published, including on your own blog. |
| Newspaper or business-press op-ed | A general reader who has never heard of your company | No | Whatever the opinion desk asks for, usually well under 1,000 words | Whether the piece still works with the company name taken out. Opinion editors cut product mentions. |
The company blog is the one venue where search matters, and there the executive's opinion has a job: to say something the ranking pages do not. Before the interview, run the target phrase through the ContentBrief.io brief generator. It is free, takes about 30 seconds, and returns the headings and word counts of the top 10 results along with the People Also Ask questions. Bring that list to the interview and ask the executive which of those headings they think is wrong. The VP above would have pointed at the one about scaling the platform team with the company. That is where our tool stops, though. It cannot interview anyone or tell you what your executive believes, and a brief built only from its output will produce the seven-week post from the top of this page.
Fields a ghostwriting brief needs
- The opinion, as a sentence the executive actually said. Quote it from the recording with a timestamp (“14:20”) so the writer can go back and hear the tone. One opinion per post. Two is a newsletter.
- Who disagrees. Name the position: “Most platform engineering guides say a company of 200 needs a platform team of six or more.” If you cannot find anyone who disagrees, there is nothing to publish.
- The story only they have. One incident with a date and a number they are allowed to share. “We cut deploy time from 40 minutes to 9 in the spring of 2025, with two people” is a sentence a competitor cannot write.
- Two voice samples they wrote without help. Slack messages and all-hands notes count, and they are usually better than the executive's LinkedIn history, which someone else may already have been ghostwriting.
- The never-say list. Words that sound false coming from this person. One executive's list might read “leverage,” “journey,” “excited to share” and any sentence that starts with “As a leader.” Build it from their red pen on the first draft and keep it for every post after. It belongs next to the editorial style guide, as a page per executive.
- Claims that need a second approver. Customer names, revenue and headcount, plus anything that sounds like a forecast. At a public company, send every executive post past investor relations before it goes out. Regulation FD governs how a public company discloses material information, and a VP's LinkedIn post is a public statement.
- Venue and length, from the table above, and the contributor guidelines if it is going to a publication.
- The approval read, on the calendar. A 20-minute hold in the executive's calendar for reading the draft, booked when the interview is booked. Without it the draft sits in an inbox for three weeks.
- The success measure. For a LinkedIn post, comments from people outside the company. For a blog post, the usual search and conversion numbers. Reactions from coworkers measure loyalty.
When the feedback is “this doesn't sound like me”
Ask which sentence, then ask them to say it out loud the way they would say it to a colleague, and type exactly what comes out.
Before it goes out under their name
Ghostwriting is ordinary, and most readers assume an executive had help. The line we hold is narrower: the executive reads every sentence under their name and approves it, and the brief records the date they did. Treat that as one more line in the pre-publish QA, checked the same way as the links and the numbers. If the notes from that read come back vague, our guide to giving editorial feedback works in reverse, as a way to ask the executive for notes a writer can act on.