The Framework
Technarrate™
A framework for making technical complexity land.
It's not about making better videos. It's about making better decisions about what to say, when, and why.
The Process
Five steps. One system.
Define the Problem
What are we actually trying to say, and what business outcome does it serve?
Every engagement starts here. Before formats, timelines, or creative approaches, we need to understand the business problem driving the need for communication.
That problem might be external: content not landing, research nobody reads, a launch failing to gain traction. Or it might be internal: departments not sharing information, teams producing inconsistent messaging, valuable work happening in one part of the business that other parts don't know about.
I spend time with you and your team to surface the real challenge — not just the brief you've been handed, but the underlying business problem it's trying to solve.
What goes wrong without it
Teams spend months producing beautiful content for the wrong objective. The video looks great, the website is polished, but nobody can explain what business outcome it was meant to achieve.
Know Your Audience
Who is this for, what do they need, and how do they decide in seven seconds whether it matters?
Knowing what you want to say is half the equation. The other half is understanding how the audience receives information — what they already know, what they care about, what makes them stop scrolling or lean in.
A CTO scanning content on her phone during a commute is fundamentally different from an analyst reading a research report at her desk. A potential investor evaluating credibility needs different things from a developer assessing technical capability. The format, tone, length, entry point — all of it shifts depending on who's on the other end.
This step maps the gap between what the organisation wants to say and what the audience actually needs to hear.
What goes wrong without it
Content talks at the audience instead of to them. Technical brilliance gets lost because nobody considered how the viewer makes decisions. The result is accurate but irrelevant to the person who needs to act on it.
Reveal the Story
How do we shape what your experts know into something the audience can absorb?
This is the discovery phase. It's where the substance for everything that follows gets surfaced — and where most engagements turn up material the client didn't realise they had.
I run a series of structured conversations with the people who know the business: owners, engineers, designers, MDs, technical leads. These are off-camera, recorded for analysis, and deliberately conversational rather than questionnaire-driven. The aim is to let people talk freely about what they actually know and care about, rather than what they think they're supposed to say.
Alongside the internal conversations, I look at the landscape the business operates in: what peers and competitors are talking about, what the audience expects to find, where the conversation is moving, and where there are gaps the business could be occupying but isn't. Sometimes the strongest opportunity isn't in what the client is already doing — it's in what the wider market is failing to address.
Working through the recordings — with the help of modern transcription and analysis tools — I cross-reference what surfaces against the audit, the audience profile, the landscape view, and the original brief. The result is a clear picture of where the strongest material lives, what's being underplayed or going untold, and what the actual story is.
Think of it as the role a researcher plays on a chat show or a documentary. They go in first, find what's worth pursuing, and shape the brief that whoever fronts the piece then works from. By the time anything gets produced — written, filmed, designed, built — every decision is grounded in real insight from inside the business and the wider environment it operates in, not assumption from outside it.
What goes wrong without it
Production happens on assumption. Briefs get written from the outside in. The client's strongest material — the differentiator, the story they couldn't see from inside the building — never makes it onto the page or onto camera, because nobody asked the right questions early enough. And opportunities the business could be seizing in the wider market go unnoticed, because nobody stopped to look.
Design and Deliver
Is video even the right medium? If so, what kind? If not, what is?
Only after the business problem is clear, the audience is understood, and the discovery work is done do we decide what to actually build.
The medium depends on what the discovery reveals. It might be a video series, a written piece, a website, an internal communications strategy, a content system, or a combination. The format follows the strategy, never the other way around — and rarely is the answer just one thing.
When the answer is video, I take a documentary-first approach. The discovery becomes the brief: I know exactly what to ask, who to ask, and what to listen for, because the off-camera research has already surfaced it. Filming is conversational, on location, and unscripted. No corporate talking points, no rehearsed answers — just the people who know the business, talking about what they know. The strongest material almost always comes from the unguarded moment, the tangent, the thing someone says when they stop performing and start thinking out loud.
When the answer is writing, the discovery does most of the heavy lifting. Articles, case studies, founder essays, technical explainers — the raw substance is already there in the recordings. The work is shaping it into language the audience can absorb without losing the texture of how the experts actually think and speak.
When the answer is a website or web application, there are two routes. For smaller jobs — landing pages, microsites, simple tools — I build it directly using modern AI-assisted development. For larger or more complex builds — bespoke platforms, integrated systems, anything with real engineering heavy lifting — I lead the strategy, UX, and content, and partner with experienced developers from a trusted network. We decide which route fits during discovery.
When the answer is something else — internal communications strategy, photography, an investor deck, a content system for a distributed team — I bring in the right people from a trusted network and lead the strategic side myself. I won't pretend to be every kind of specialist, but I know who to call when a job needs one.
Whatever the medium, every creative and production decision traces back to the discovery work. Nothing is produced on instinct or assumption.
What goes wrong without it
Someone defaults to "we need a video" without asking whether video is the right answer. Or the right format gets chosen but executed without strategic intent. Or the work goes to a generalist who can do the production but doesn't know enough about the strategic context to make the right calls along the way. It looks good. It doesn't do the job.
Make It Repeatable
How do your teams maintain quality and consistency without depending on a single expert?
This step doesn't happen at the end. It runs through the entire engagement. From the first conversation, I'm working alongside the team, not just delivering to them. The diagnostic thinking, the strategic decisions, the reasoning behind every creative choice — all of it is shared and transferred as we go.
For organisations with distributed or global teams, this matters most. It's about establishing communication principles that work across regions, so teams in different offices maintain brand integrity, production quality, and strategic alignment without every decision flowing through a single bottleneck.
The aim is always the same: leave the organisation stronger than I found it. When I move on, the system keeps running — not because I've written a manual, but because your team now thinks differently about how they communicate.
What goes wrong without it
The organisation becomes dependent on one external person or one internal champion. When that person moves on, everything falls apart. Content quality drops, messaging drifts, and the investment in getting it right the first time is gradually undone.
Questions
Things people ask.
If your message isn't landing, the framework can tell you why.
Or reach me directly: hello@eddradcliffemedia.org | +44 7852 110379