What Exactly Does a Podcast Producer Do?

Author: Mallory Carra

When it comes to podcasts, the hosts and guests may be the most well-known, but the podcast producers are the ones behind the scenes, making things happen. Producing job listings are always floating around on LinkedIn and podcast job sites, so you might be wondering what a podcast producer does exactly.

I teach audio journalism to college students and when they ask about the role, I often tell them a producer does whatever needs to be done. That’s just the simple version of the job description, though. It’s important to note every production will define the role in different ways and many productions actually have several different levels of producers. However, within the podcasting industry, there are many usual duties at each of those levels.

Here’s what you can expect as typical duties at the following producer levels.

Associate Producer

Associate Producers, or APs, are often the lowest producer rank, but still incredibly crucial to productions. Typical duties for APs include: coordinating and booking guests, drafting questions for interviews, doing background research, coordinating and scheduling tracking/recording sessions, writing show copy and promos, audio editing episodes together and/or performing quality control on edits.

Producer

This title is often a catch-all because a lot of podcasts will have one sole producer. So in that case, the podcast producer really does whatever needs to be done – from booking guests and running tracking sessions to editing episodes and managing deliverables. 

However, when a podcast has more than one producer on board, the producer is mostly responsible for running tracking sessions, working with hosts, reviewing and editing scripts, and executing the daily deliverables for the podcast. Sometimes, their job also involves audio editing.

Senior Producer, Supervising Producer or Executive Producer

The higher you go up the producer chain, the less a producer works with the day-to-day of production and the more they oversee the entire process – and the jobs themselves go by many different names. Some shows or companies call this job the senior producer, but others may call it a supervising producer (because it is a supervisory role with direct reports, often other producers) or the executive producer.

No matter what you call it, this major role views the whole process from the top while supervising other producers and APs. It also deals with high-level parts of the podcast production, such as budgets, hiring, partnerships, optimization, marketing, promotion and working with the company or podcast’s leadership on the creative direction of the show.

These are the main 3 levels and types of producers you’ll encounter in podcasting, but by all means not the only ones. Here are a few other producer roles you might see in a production:

• Coordinating producer: A producer who coordinates calendars and schedules, along with deliverables for productions.

• Creative producer: A producer who works with the development and/or pitching of new shows and concepts. May also specialize in the creative side of production, including overseeing the writing and editing of podcast scripts.

• Managing producer: A producer who primarily works in the operations part of podcast production, managing budgets, logistics, external contractors or freelancers, and administrative paperwork. 

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Mallory Carra a veteran journalist, podcast producer and adjunct professor with 20 years of journalism and new media experience. She teaches digital, audio and TV journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and has worked on several podcasts, including Sarah Turney’s Voices for Justice, The Why Files, and USC’s Electric Futures. Previously, Mallory was a podcast writer and story editor at Spotify’s Parcast Studios for over 5 years. She also contributes articles to NBCU Academy’s Equity Lab and co-leads the Asian American Journalists Association’s Voices fellowship, a multimedia journalism training program for college and graduate students. You can find her on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and her website, mallorycarra.com.