The challenge
I owned creative marketing operations for a distributed team of project managers, producers, and coordinators delivering more than 160 projects a year across 8–12 concurrent campaigns. The volume was high and the talent was strong, but the work lived in scattered tools, statuses lived in people's heads, and stakeholders had no reliable way to see where anything stood. Every "quick status check" pulled a manager off real work, and handoffs slowed under the weight of ambiguity.
What I did
I treated the pipeline as a system to be designed, not a backlog to be pushed through. Working hand-in-hand with Marketing Operations, I built the cross-functional framework and led the organizational change to make it real.
- Established a single source of truth. Designed a cross-team operational framework and consolidated the work onto one work-management system so every project had one home, one status, and one owner.
- Led the change management. Aligned my teams behind the move to Asana, then drove adoption across teams and functions, the harder, human half of any tooling change.
- Automated the busywork. Built automations for routine delivery and archiving so the team spent its time on judgment, not administration.
- Made status self-serve. Built agent-powered status and alert dashboards so stakeholders could answer their own questions in real time, without interrupting the people doing the work.
Results
Turnaround dropped by a fifth, delivery and archiving ran themselves, and the "where does this stand?" interruptions that used to tax the team all but disappeared. Just as importantly, the framework held up as volume grew: the system absorbed the pressure instead of the people.