Context
I started at the company as a graphic designer, and fairly quickly executives began referencing me as the creative director in partner-facing emails—which was initially more about looking professional to external partners than it was about a formal role change. But titles have a way of becoming real, and as the volume of creative work scaled rapidly with new partner launches, I went from doing all the work myself to needing to figure out how to build a team that could handle it.
My first hire was a standard graphic designer, because what I needed most was simply another set of hands. The work was coming in faster than one person could produce it, and the immediate problem was throughput, not specialization. That changed over time as the types of work diversified and I could see where dedicated expertise would make a real difference.
Team Structure
The team today is seven people including me: four graphic designers who work as generalists across the range of what we produce, one video production specialist, and one print and fulfillment specialist who handles direct mail, postage, and inventory management. The generalist model for the design team was deliberate—I need people who can move between partner brands, between print and digital, between marketing collateral and platform assets, because the work demands that flexibility. The specialists exist where the skill gap is genuinely deep enough that a generalist can't cover it well.
How We Work
Reviews are primarily asynchronous through Ziflow, which was built by the same team that created Adobe's Workfront Proof (formerly ProofHQ) but costs significantly less. It tracks who's viewed a proof, what feedback they've left, where comments are anchored on the design, and the overall review status so I can see at a glance whether something is waiting on a stakeholder or ready to move forward without chasing people down for updates.
Beyond the async reviews, we hold a weekly informal design critique with the design team where team members show work in progress, bounce ideas off each other, and gut-check brand consistency. That last part matters more than it might sound—when multiple designers are working on materials for the same partner, or across partners that share visual DNA, those critiques are what keep everything feeling cohesive rather than like it was produced by different teams.
My management approach is to give people a lot of context and background on why they're making what they're making—who the partner is, what their business model looks like, what the stakeholder cares about. I trust my team, and they regularly produce work that's better than what I would have done myself, which is exactly the point. I actively try to hire designers who are better than me at the things I'm asking them to do, because a team that can only execute to the level of their manager has a very low ceiling.
The Proof Point
The clearest example of why the team exists—and why it's structured the way it is—was a week where we had five separate partner pitches. Five distinct brands, five pitch decks, each with relevant collateral examples featuring realistic content in polished mockups. One per day, divide and conquer. Every designer took ownership of a specific asset, and by the end of the week we'd delivered five complete pitch packages that would have been flatly impossible for one person to produce at that quality in that timeframe. That week made the case for the team better than anything I could have written in a planning document.
Outcome
The team now handles the full range of creative output—direct mail, email, web, video, brand collateral, partner pitch materials—with me providing direction and context rather than execution. I've shifted from doing the work to enabling the work, which is the only way a creative function scales with a growing company.