From an embedded team to a formalized 45-person studio.
3+ year build-out of an in-house creative services arm inside an AdTech platform company. The team tripled in headcount across teams in Ljubljana, London, and three U.S. time zones, and gained the scaffolding it needed to plan its work, staff its pipeline, and measure its own performance.
The situation
The in-house creative services arm was a small embedded team inside the company. Sales and Customer Success had ad-hoc access to design talent. There was no formal hiring plan, no well-documented offering catalog, and no way to forecast capacity against demand.
What I built
I started with a departmental structure with named leadership areas. Each senior team member owned one domain: Finance, Processes, Design Excellence, Business Development, Team Building, Studio Metrics, and Pricing. I empowered functional leaders to take control and be accountable for important operational aspects of the studio’s business. This not only ensured that the most experienced person in each area was setting the standard for everyone, it also made for a great career growth tool for those middle managers.
Demand for our services in the States grew rapidly during those years, so I built a U.S.-market hiring pipeline alongside the existing European team, with role archetypes for Designers and Production Managers, and candidate databases tracking each role.
The studio also needed a documented operating cadence. I established weekly management meetings and biweekly all-hands. Monthly performance check-ins covered eight dimensions: revenue, recent projects, employee satisfaction, workload, utilization, speed, special initiatives, and client NPS. We connected our work to the company at large through quarterly OKRs, plus peer and manager surveys to stay on top of people performance management.
As a small but mighty in-house agency working with top tier brands, we were always ambitious to push measurable improvements to the speed, efficiency, and quality of our work.1
The outcome
The team scaled from 15 to 45 over the course of 24 months and didn’t experience any voluntary turnover during my time as its leader. Client NPS, tracked by our post-delivery survey, ran at 96 in the later part of the engagement, up from 90 when I joined. Under my leadership, the studio’s employee NPS also tracked significantly higher than that of the company overall. I led the department to become a formalized revenue-bearing department with its own operating calendar, an offerings catalog across Celtra’s two product surfaces, and a repeatable hiring motion from role archetype through candidate pipeline.
- Brands serviced during my tenure include Nike, Spotify, Adidas, Lululemon, Vimeo, NBCU, Bloomberg, Bustle, GoPro, Mattel, and TripAdvisor. My team interacted directly with stakeholders at those brands.