My senior year of high school, I took a class called Living On Your Own.

Everyone took Living On Your Own. It was an easy A, the teacher was super nice and we got to cook “California Medley Soup” (1 brick Velveeta, one can cream of mushroom soup, one bag mixed frozen vegetables). We also went on field trips to neighborhood laundromats and apartments.

[Also, the class was an odd-but-memorable introduction to the consumer advocacy work of Ralph Nader. ]

During the “Desserts” portion of the semester, my work group was tasked with making banana bread. The teacher handed us a recipe and told us we had the rest of class to gather the ingredients, mix them up and bake it in our oven.

One gal gathered the dry ingredients (sugar, flour, etc.). I grabbed the wet (butter, eggs, milk) when we realized We … had no bananas.

“How are we going to make banana bread without bananas?” I asked.

“There,” a kid in my group said, pointing to a team across the room tasked with assembling fruit salad. “They have bananas.”

The boy boldly stepped into their kitchen and politely asked if we could borrow three bananas for our recipe. Lucky for us, one of the girls in the fruit salad group said, “Bananas are the absolute worst. Here,” and handed them over.

By the time the oven was preheated, we had our batter setting in a pan coated with Pam nonstick spray.

“This doesn’t look right,” one of my baking partners said.

“Why is it chunky?” another asked.

A half an hour later, we took the bread out of the oven, let it cool for a couple of minutes and then turned the pan over to extract the concoction.

We cut a slice and discovered the middle contained gooey bits of banana that should have been well-blended into the batter prior to baking.

After receiving our grade of a C, we learned that ripe bananas are are critical to making banana bread because they mash up easily into the rest of the ingredients. They also make the bread extra sweet, which is why most recipes don’t require a lot of extra sugar.

Aside from my now-lifelong aversion to banana bread, I hadn’t thought of this memory for a long time, that is, until recently when I thought of a long-ago content-heavy project that completely fell apart.

What happened? My project lead at the time asked for content after he’d already had our designer create the materials, including a landing page that was intended to increase subscriptions.

Like underripe bananas, this content conundrum had me scrambling to fill in the gaps based on wireframes and design blocks ill-suited for the strategy at hand. I was cutting up bananas I knew wouldn’t bake into a perfectly sweet loaf of bread.

Your content should come first in most cases, because it can improve both the quality and efficiency of the designer’S or developer’s work.

Don’t rush through your content creation

The vendor I was working with was on a very tight timeline, so when they realized the content wasn’t right, it pushed their project back several weeks. My best advice is to give your writer plenty of lead time between project kickoff and the deadline.

Collaborate

The absolute best content is a result of many minds working together. Put a writer next to a designer and just see what happens: pure, delicious magic.

Plan - especially if you’re the project lead

Our Living On Your Own teacher should have noticed we didn’t have any bananas to make our bread. As a leader of the class, she missed a key component that determined the success (or in this case failure) of the project at hand. Be sure your teams have what they need before they get started. Resources and timelines are awesome!

Ask for help

This is my absolute favorite advice in the whole universe and one that many people ignore. Seriously, ask for help. It’s not a sign of weakness; in fact, it’s a sign that you are open to receiving assistance when you know it will improve a project’s plan, process and outcome.