Exploring Collaborative Podcast Creation: Practices, Challenges, and Future Technology Roles in Creative Workflows

Creative workflows increasingly rely on technological support, yet less is known about how creators navigate the complex collaborative ecosystems and what roles technology might play in supporting these ecosystems. We investigate podcast production as a case to understand collaborative creative practices and identify opportunities for future technology design. Through diary study and interviews with 14 podcast creators, we examine how teams navigate complex stakeholder ecosystems involving distributed teams, episodic guests, multi-tiered audiences, and networks. Our findings reveal three underlying tensions that lead to frictions in current collaborative creation practices: fragmentation vs. coherence in creative coordination, structure vs. spontaneity in live production, and intimacy vs. scale in listener engagement. We outline design opportunities for technology roles to address these tensions: a Story Architect synthesizing fragmented inputs while preserving accessibility, a Live Collaborator providing real-time support during work, and a Feedback Proxy simulating audience feedback at scale. This work contributes a rich empirical foundation for designing technology that reduces social coordination burden while preserving authentic creative relationships in collaborative creation.