If you serve as an internal consultant or advisor on a cross-functional project, creating Advisory Artifacts can significantly benefit you and your team.
An Advisory Artifact is a separate, stand-alone document that summarizes your advice for a specific project or initiative. They serve multiple purposes beyond just recapping your advice: they enrich the team’s knowledge base, showcase your value and impact, and protect you (and your team) when your recommendations are not followed.
When do we need Advisory Artifacts?
In large, knowledge-based organizations [1], most cross-functional projects require input from multiple individuals, each with their own area of expertise.
As an internal Advisor or Consultant on such a project, you’re typically invited to review and comment on a draft document from another team (e.g., a product brief, a technical design document, or a privacy policy update). Any online comments and proposed edits that you leave on these drafts will disappear from view as the document is finalized and the comments are resolved. Thus, your input will no longer be readily visible in the final deliverable.
An Advisory Artifact — a separate, stand-alone document that summarizes your insights and recommendations — addresses this challenge. Even if it’s just a one-pager, the artifact is evidence of your contributions, be they risks you’ve flagged, action items you’ve suggested, or recommendations you’ve made to improve the project’s chances of success.
Wherever appropriate, use this separate document to provide more context and elaborate on the rationale behind your recommendations. Submit your document and ask that it be attached as an Appendix to the main deliverable. This separate document bears your name and persists as a distinct artifact of the project, independent of the primary document.
What pitfalls do Advisory Artifacts help avoid?
Beyond recapping your advice, Advisory Artifacts help you avoid several career-limiting pitfalls. Without a persistent record of your contributions, you face the following problems:
- Your advice may be ignored, but you are still listed as an advisor on the main document. The document’s owner may dismiss your comment or proposed edit (e.g., a recommendation to reduce risks to customer safety in a new product brief) or deem it irrelevant. Meanwhile, your name appears on the document as an advisor or contributor, thus implying by association that you agree with the document’s contents.
An Advisory Artifact serves as a persistent, referenceable record of your advice — including your recommendations that had not been implemented. This “paper trail” will come in handy later when the risks you had warned about eventually materialize. - You have no work products to point to during your performance reviews. Without Advisory Artifacts, you have no easily referenceable evidence of your contributions. While you could try pointing to the actual, resolved comments in documents, this approach is clunky and tenuous at best because the working document may be deleted by its owner, or your access to it may be revoked. Your Advisory Artifacts, in contrast, are owned by you (or your team) and persist as evidence of your contributions. They provide clear evidence of your involvement and the value you’ve added to projects.
- You fail to create institutional knowledge, which may hinder your chances for promotion. Many knowledge-based organizations consider contributions to the team’s knowledge base a prerequisite for promotion, especially to senior levels. Advisory Artifacts are a simple and valuable way to meet this prerequisite.
How can my team maximize the value of Advisory Artifacts?
If you’re on a team whose primary duties include advising other internal teams in the organization (e.g., Product Counsel, Risk Management, Compliance, Product Trust, Responsible Innovation, Privacy, Information Security), consider adopting these practices to get the most value from your team’s Advisory Artifacts.
- Produce a single document as the team artifact. When several team members are tasked to provide joint input for a specific project, create a single artifact with your team’s collective input. Assign one person as the artifact owner and make them responsible for ensuring the document is cohesive and self-consistent. Use the document to surface and resolve differences of opinion within the team and submit a final artifact that speaks in one voice. You don’t want to damage your team’s credibility by providing conflicting advice.
- Use a template for each type of artifact. If the team’s input is solicited regularly, use a standard template for each type of artifact or advisory service. Let’s say your team is routinely asked to review new software features to assess compliance with privacy regulations. You’ll want team members to all use a standard New Feature Privacy Assessment template. Using a template improves the consistency of your team’s outputs, and your internal clients will quickly become accustomed to the standard format your team uses, thus improving the readability and usefulness of your work products.
Tip: If you don’t already have a template, create one by reviewing your last five major artifacts and ensuring that the critical sections of each document are represented in the new template. Optionally, you can use a Language Model to get ideas (see examples of how to use ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) to supplement your first draft template. Consider asking your internal clients for feedback on the template to improve its usefulness. - Use a dedicated team folder to store all artifacts. Because different Advisory Artifacts have different owners, you’ll want to store all artifacts in a centrally managed team folder or server. Do this to improve continuity — you don’t want your team’s recommendations scattered across personal drives or delivered via email because each artifact will be available only to some employees and will result in information loss when team members eventually leave the company. By giving all team members a central place to submit new artifacts and indexing them to make them easily discoverable, you preserve institutional knowledge and make them available to new team members.
- Update the team’s job descriptions, work goals, and performance evaluations to include the creation and submission of Advisory Artifacts. If you’re the team’s manager, let the team know that Advisory Artifacts are a normal and expected part of how the team’s work gets done. The simplest way to do this is to integrate Advisory Artifacts into the team’s expectation-setting and performance review processes.
- As part of your onboarding process, show new team members how to find, use, create, and submit Advisory Artifacts. New team members need to know where to find prior artifacts, especially for the projects and teams they will advise going forward. They also need to learn how to use artifact templates and become comfortable with submitting their own artifacts.
- Create an internal feedback mechanism to encourage team members to learn from one another, start a cycle of continuous improvement, and ensure that artifacts serve their intended purpose before they are submitted. Peer reviews — where team members are partnered to review each other’s artifacts — are a simple way to get started.
- Periodically review the team’s artifacts for actionable trends. As the team produces more artifacts for various projects, you’ll find recurring themes in the recommendations; these trends can help you identify, define, and proactively socialize the principles and values your team holds dear.
For example, a review of this quarter’s artifacts may show that the team has to repeatedly recommend against dark patterns in your website’s user interfaces. Address this trend by writing a principled recommendation explaining why the company should avoid such deceptive practices. Your team members can link to this write-up when they encounter another dark pattern in a future project, thus saving them time. You can also take it one step further by proactively recommending to Product leadership that they officially disallow the use of dark patterns.
Recap
You and your team will reap multiple benefits by consistently creating Advisory Artifacts. You enrich the team’s knowledge base, demonstrate your value and contributions to projects, and protect yourself (and your team) when your recommendations are not followed.
Adopt team-level practices to maximize the value you get from these Advisory Artifacts. You’ll protect against the loss of institutional knowledge, continuously improve the consistency and quality of the team’s work, enable knowledge transfer to new team members, and proactively get ahead of undesirable trends.
While creating advisory artifacts requires some extra work, the benefits—for the individual and the team as a whole—far outweigh the effort required.
Author’s Note: Thank you to BC and LM for their feedback, which helped make this post more useful. This post was originally published elsewhere. Find more content relevant to Policy Teams.
Footnotes
[1] The term Knowledge-Based Organization refers to “an organization that depends on the capability of employees to produce, acquire and apply knowledge to create products or services.” Classic examples include teams that work in software development, mergers and acquisitions, law firms, and most types of professional service firms.
