Building a creative operating system for a fast-growing brand

Role: Creative Operations / Project Management
Focus: Creative workflow, team operations, project management

The Challenge

Wip was a fast-growing brand in an exciting new category, generating significant momentum immediately after launch. That momentum also created a growing volume of creative requests.

The creative team was managing those requests without a centralized system for prioritization, communication, or visibility. As demand increased, the existing workflow put unsustainable pressure on the creative team.

What I did

I built a project management playbook that gave the team a shared system for managing creative demand from request through delivery.

The immediate goal was to organize projects. But over the long term it was to create an operating model that could scale creative output without requiring the team to scale at the same rate.

The playbook established a clearer structure for how creative needs were communicated, prioritized, assigned, and tracked, while giving leadership greater visibility into the team's workload and progress.

Impact

The new system helped Wip scale its creative operation without increasing the number of designers on the team.

It also gave the founder greater visibility into what the creative team was working on, reducing the need for day-to-day oversight and allowing them to stay focused on growth.

The result: Wip surpassed 2.5 million units sold in its first year.

The takeaway

The infrastructure that allowed the creative team to support a rapidly scaling business also protected the team to help prevent them from burning out.