Writing
How to build an in-house video team from scratch
I have had the most success building in-house video teams by starting with repeatable production systems first (and a producer, or someone, to build and run those), rather than buying gear or hiring crews and agencies. You can add specialists, self-serve tooling, and a triage process as volume grows. This sets you up for long-term success.
Should you build in-house at all?
In-house starts to make sense when three things are true: you're producing video consistently (not one campaign a year), you need faster turnaround than an agency can give, and you're spending more on outsourcing than an internal function would cost. If you only need occasional hero films, keep using an agency. In-house wins on volume, speed, and institutional knowledge — the team learns your brand, your people, and your stories in a way no external crew can.
Does the same model work for every company?
No — and this is where a lot of generic advice falls down. The principles hold, but what you actually build depends on what the business needs video for.
Some companies, particularly SaaS businesses, are best served by a leaner team focused on how video supports the marketing funnel or the product. Elsewhere the goal is education, brand and awareness, and the creative team has more control and ownership and steers the work itself. Those are different teams — different hires, different budgets, different definitions of good.
I've worked at both ends of that. At Monocle, and making 25-minute shows for Notts TV, the job was to make great stories. At Google that instinct met a scale challenge: we needed to reach as many developers as possible, so we blended repeatable formats we could produce reliably with a smaller number of high-end productions — including the documentary work that won Webbys. That combination gave us the best of both, but we had the budget, the team, and several years to build it. The same model dropped into a SaaS business wouldn't work the same way, because there the video has to answer to marketing or product objectives first.
So before you hire anyone, get honest about the company's objectives and what video is actually for. Everything downstream — the hire, the kit, the tiers — follows from that. It's also what lets you inspire the creative team, because they do their best work when they understand why the straightforward projects matter as much as the fun ones.
Who is the first hire?
One versatile producer who can be on tools (shooting and editing) and can take a business goal and return a finished video — someone comfortable owning a project end to end, not a specialist camera operator or a motion designer. Your first hire's real job is to build the system: the intake process, the templates, the relationships that surface stories. Buy simple kit based on your needs and deliver different video formats. From here they'll learn your most common requests and format types, and will be able to build agency or freelancer relationships to help them scale or bring in specialist skills (such as animation) when needed.
How do you keep it from becoming a ticketing system?
Triage, from day one. Without a system, a video team drowns in "can you just quickly…" requests and never does the work only video can do. You can sort incoming work into tiers and set expectations for each up front. Ideally you want a video team to spend more time on the most impactful work, rather than lower-value ad hoc requests that don't move the needle either creatively or for the business.
Protect the makers — the system exists to help absorb noise before it reaches the people doing the work. This is the hardest part of running an in-house team.
How do you scale without gatekeeping?
Remove the bottleneck instead of guarding it. Give internal teams self-serve templates, playbooks, and toolkits so they can make on-brand content independently — and free the video team for the work that genuinely needs them. Democratise, don't gatekeep. The goal isn't to be the only people allowed to make video; it's to raise everyone's floor so your specialists can push the ceiling. You can do this while still protecting quality and the brand, and can introduce third-party tools (for example Riverside FM, Canva, Google Vids) to help.
Where does AI fit?
AI and automation raise the floor — they handle the mundane, repeatable parts of the process faster and cheaper. But you shouldn't stop there, at simply cutting cost. Reinvest the time you save into craft: more ambitious stories, formats, and technique. For me the question on a creative workflow isn't just "what can AI do?" but "which parts genuinely need a human, and which bits can be handed over?" Answer that honestly and you get a team that ships more and makes better work.
The TL;DR
Start with a system and a great producer. Sort work into tiers so you're not a ticket queue. Hand the simple stuff to self-serve tooling, AI, repeatable formats and workflows. Spend the time you win back on stories worth telling — because testimonials have their place, but human stories are what people actually connect with.
Written by Ben Jay, who is building Trustpilot's global video function from scratch. He was previously at Google, where he grew from shooting producer to leading the video department — ultimately managing 26 producers across the US and Europe — and where his campaigns won two Webby Awards. Full bio → · Get in touch →