Role
Design Operations Manager
COMPANY
Team
Focus
At a glance
The problem. Creative was always late, and that meant the revenue channels depending on it missed their launches. What I built. One front door for every request, resourcing based on skill and effort, and shared workspaces so everyone could see what the studio was working on.
The situation
The creative studio fed more than eight-plus revenue channels (e-commerce, retail, email, paid, organic social, affiliates, events, B2B) across four time zones. The team was good. The problem was that the work kept landing late. Requests arrived through every door at once: a Slack message here, an email there, someone catching a designer in the hallway, half a brief, a “quick favor.” The team rarely had what it needed to start, so work went through round after round of revisions. And since no one outside the studio could see the queue, the channel teams had no idea where anything stood until a launch slipped. But lateness was only the surface of it. When creative is late, the channels waiting on it can't run their campaigns. Launches miss their windows. Revenue targets built around those assets started slipping out of reach. That was the part leadership actually felt.
What I did
There were three problems tangled together here, so I separated them.
01
One front door for requests
I set up a single structured intake. Every request now comes in the same way and captures the details, the mandatories, the deadlines (both the due date and the launch date), and director sign-off before any work starts. No more starting from half a brief. I also gave the channel teams clear guidance on what a good request looks like, so accountability runs both ways: send a complete ask, get a committed delivery date back.
02
Resourcing by skill and effort
Once briefs were coming in clean, I could group the team by skill and project and assign each request based on urgency and effort, instead of handing it to whoever happened to be free. The studio finally had a real basis for saying what could ship, and when.
03
Workspaces that made the work visible
I built shared workspaces with a few views: a high-level one, a per-project one, and one for ad-hoc requests. Now the workload, the timing, and anything out of scope were visible to the studio and the channel teams alike. People mostly stopped asking where their work stood, because they could just look.
How it actually rolled out
Designing the system was only part of it. Getting people to actually use it took just as much work.