Creative Operations System

Context

There was no old system—I want to be clear about that, because "I replaced a broken process" is a different story than what actually happened. When I started, creative requests came in however they came in: someone would say "Hey Jacob, I need this" in a hallway, or send an email with varying levels of detail, or catch me after a meeting. My tracking system was a physical notepad, which worked fine until the day I left it at home and couldn't remember what I'd committed to.

The interesting thing is that this wasn't a problem unique to me or to creative work. When I surveyed other department leaders about how they tracked their own work, almost everyone was using physical notebooks. My entire online information sphere was buzzing about digital note-taking systems—Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, all the rest—and yet nobody internally had actually cracked the transition from paper to something digital and functional. People had tried, but nothing stuck.

Approach

I modeled the system after Tiago Forte's "Building a Second Brain" framework, which gave me a structure for how to organize information rather than just store it. That framework informed the original Notion database I built, and the database structure then informed the design of the creative request form—the two evolved together rather than one being an afterthought of the other.

The request form itself captures three things that turned out to matter more than anything else: who's requesting the work, their intended timeline and first draft date, and—this was the key one—who the final approver is. The approver field seems simple, but it solved a problem that had plagued projects for as long as I'd been there. Before the form, work would get done, someone would review it, and then someone else higher up would see it and want changes nobody had anticipated, because they hadn't been looped in from the start. By requiring the approver upfront, the form ensures the right people have visibility into what's being produced and who has final say before any design work begins.

Getting buy-in was surprisingly easy, precisely because everyone recognized the paper notebook problem in their own work. I wasn't asking people to adopt a system they didn't think they needed—I was offering a solution to something they'd all quietly been struggling with. The whole thing is built in Notion, which keeps it lightweight enough that people actually use it rather than routing around it.

What It Tracks

The system captures everything around task completion—who requested what, when, current status, who's working on it, when it was delivered. What it intentionally doesn't track is campaign results, because that's a separate system managed by a dedicated data team. I made that boundary early and I think it was the right call; trying to make one system do both would have made it too complex to maintain and too slow to be useful for day-to-day project management.

We're processing roughly 100 requests per month now, and that number trends up over time as the team and the company grow. Adoption isn't perfect—I still get email requests and in-person asks that I then try to log manually—but the system catches more than it misses, and the requests that do come through the form arrive with enough context that we can start work without a round of clarifying questions.