Creative operations built from nothing
I built operations for the creative team from the ground up, and scaled it to support event, video, web, and digital production for nearly a dozen campaigns a year.
- Scope
- Nearly a dozen campaigns and events a year, 120+ projects
- Team
- Grew from 1 to 8
- Stakeholders
- 6 internal teams
- Output
- +25% year one, +40% by year four
Context
Marketing was growing faster than any process behind it. Requests arrived in whatever form the requester chose, whoever asked most recently set the priorities, and nobody could say what the team had capacity for. I was the first operations hire and there was nothing to inherit.
What I built
I designed the first intake process, with a brief template that required scope, audience, channel, and date before anyone could schedule the work. That moved most of the negotiation to the front.
I built the prioritization and capacity model on top of it: a visible queue, a capacity view, and a standing planning session where we made tradeoffs openly instead of the team absorbing them.
I ran project plans and work-back schedules for nearly a dozen campaigns and events a year, tracking milestones, dependencies, and risks, and escalating early, not at the deadline. I managed a half dozen agency and freelance partners.
As volume rose I hired, trained, and mentored the team, growing operations from one person to eight, and wrote the documentation that let each new person work independently within weeks.
Result
- Output rose 25 percent in the first year and 40 percent by year four, on 120+ projects annually.
- The operations team scaled from one to eight without a matching rise in escalations.
- Intake, briefs, planning, and documentation worked as a system rather than as personal habits, and outlasted the tools and the reorganizations.