An operating system for a shared creative team
- Role
- Designer and builder of the system and its automations
- Scale
- Thousands of tasks, every launch, multiple divisions
The Problem:
A creative team shared by several brands and divisions was taking requests through too many channels and tracking them in disparate places, and nobody outside the team could see what was in progress.
How I think about itA lean team serves a whole company only when the work is visible: to the team, to the requester, and to leadership.
An informal system works until the company outgrows it. When Potter expanded rapidly in the early 2020s, with the fire alarm division taking off and acquisitions arriving, the volume, complexity, and expectations placed on a shared creative team rose at once, and requests coming through email, chat, and conversation were going to start being missed.
- Intake
- Planned
- In Progress
- Needs Revision
- Creative Review
- Department Review
- Ready to Publish
- Complete
I designed and implemented an intake and launch tracking system in Wrike as the single source of truth. Every request enters one way, every launch follows the same tracked steps, and the system now manages thousands of tasks. The hardest part was changing habits: people had convenient ways of reaching us, and the system replaced all of them with one. The trade was worth it, because the system became the only way onto the team’s list, and that clarity protected both the team and the work.
I then connected it to the rest of the company’s tools. Custom automations link Wrike, Smartsheet, Google Workspace, Office 365, and other internal systems through APIs, MCPs, and custom services, with AI as the integration layer.
AI is now part of how the system works. Connected to our project, planning, and file tools, it can find the right request, pull the related work, and move information between systems in a single step, which removes the copying, chasing, and status reporting that used to sit between the team and the creative work.
The Results
- Deadlines prevented from slippingdemand became visible weeks ahead instead of days
- Leadership could see the workwhich made the team’s value measurable and showed requesters where their job sat in the queue
- Thousands of tasks in one systemreplacing email threads and spreadsheets
