The In-house Paradox: Strategy Is Moving In. Production Is Staying.
ZITE / The 2026 In-House Barometer / Insight 02
In-house teams want to shape more of the work upstream. At the same time, production demand, unplanned requests and everyday delivery are not disappearing. That tension is becoming the operating challenge.
The short version
What you need to know.
- The share of teams spending more than half their time on strategic Tier 1 work is expected to rise from 23% to 32%.
- The share spending more than half their time on Tier 3 production is not expected to fall, moving from 35% today to 37% in future expectations.
- 56% of in-house respondents say workload increased during the previous year.
- 39% of in-house work was outside the original plan.
01 / Analysis
Strategy wants more of the week
A familiar ambition runs through the 2026 data: internal teams want to contribute earlier. Among respondents answering the allocation questions, 23% say strategic and high-level creative Tier 1 work currently occupies more than half of their team’s time. Looking ahead, 32% expect that to be the case.
That matters because strategy is not simply another deliverable. It needs uninterrupted attention, access to the business problem and people with enough authority to challenge what has already been decided. Moving strategy inside can reduce handovers and keep more context close to the work.
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More strategy. Still production.
Today
Share of teams spending more than half their time on each tier. Not average time allocation; future figures are expectations.
Expected future
Share of teams spending more than half their time on each tier. Not average time allocation; future figures are expectations.
02 / Analysis
Production did not get the memo
There is a catch. Production is not packing its bags. Thirty-five per cent currently report spending more than half of team time on Tier 3 production, and 37% expect the same in the future. These figures describe shares of teams, not an average division of everyone’s working week. But the direction is revealing: strategy is being added without a corresponding expectation that production will disappear.
This is where many teams get squeezed. The same people are asked to contribute to the brand platform, make the campaign, adapt the assets, fix the last-minute product change and help the local market that needs something by tomorrow. All of those requests can be reasonable. Together, they create a system that needs more than goodwill.
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Read the change correctly
Tier 1: from 23% today to 32% expected.
Tier 3: from 35% today to 37% expected.
Percentage-point changes in shares of teams. Not a forecast of individual workloads.
03 / Analysis
Success creates demand
Fifty-six per cent of in-house respondents say workload increased during the previous year. That is one of the less glamorous consequences of becoming useful. Once colleagues discover that an internal team is fast, close to the business and able to deliver, more people use it.
At the same time, 39% of in-house work arrived outside the original plan. This is a share of tasks, not a measured share of working hours, so it should not be translated mechanically into two days of every week. But it is still a substantial amount of work entering after the plan was made.
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The work that was not in the plan
of tasks were unplanned.
Each square represents 1% of tasks. This is not a measure of working hours.
04 / Analysis
The bottleneck is not always headcount
Resources are the most frequently reported barrier to better creative work at 29%, followed by talent at 26%. But time and planning, clear process and brief quality are also part of the picture. That is important because hiring can solve a genuine capacity gap while leaving the system that created the pressure untouched.
A new designer does not decide which of five urgent requests should go first. Another project manager does not automatically improve a vague brief. More production capacity does not protect strategic time if every new request can still enter the same queue with the same priority.
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Capacity is more than headcount
Reported barriers. These are separate responses, not portions of a single whole.
05 / Analysis
From project management to orchestration
The practical answer is to separate different kinds of work and make the trade-offs visible. Strategic development, specialist creative assignments and recurring production do not need identical routes. They need different levels of senior attention, different review patterns and, often, different combinations of internal and external capability.
This is where Creative Orchestration becomes useful as a discipline. It is not a prettier name for moving cards around a project board. It is the combination of creative leadership, operations, intake, prioritisation, capacity, routing, governance and the tools that make those decisions visible.
For a team under pressure, five things are worth making explicit:
- Which work deserves protected strategic attention?
- Which recurring work should follow a faster production route?
- How much capacity is deliberately left for the unexpected?
- Who can change a priority when two stakeholders both arrive with number one?
- Which work should move to a specialist, partner, offshore resource or automated route?
The goal is not to make marketing less responsive. It is to stop responsiveness from consuming the work that matters beyond the next deadline.
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A route for every brief
Editorial framework based on this article.
Go a little deeper
Questions worth asking.
Definitions and context for reading the figures.
Does 32% mean teams will spend 32% of their time on strategy?
No. It is the expected share of teams spending more than half their time on Tier 1 work. It is not the average proportion of time spent on strategy.
Does 39% unplanned work mean two lost days every week?
No. The figure refers to tasks, not hours. Tasks vary in size, so it cannot be converted into working days from these data.
Are the future figures measured results?
No. They reflect respondents’ expectations. They should not be presented as realised outcomes or a guaranteed forecast.
