Evolution Bureau
This case study recounts the development of a quality framework and heuristic evaluation program for Meta’s Infrastructure Org.
Background
I joined an established mid-size advertising agency that was looking to expand their creative output, which had seemingly plateaued. the perceived issue was a hiring one, but I quickly realized the issue was organizational in manner and might be addressed — not by adding more headcount — but being more efficient with the creative team on-hand and adding structure to the creative workflow.
Creative, production, and client services teams worked in silos without enough cross-collaboration, resulting in disjointed campaigns and missed opportunities for synergy.
Challenges
Lack of standardized processes for managing projects and allocating resources, consistently lead to delays, miscommunication, bottlenecks and lower productivity.
Certain team members' skills and potential went untapped, while others were overburdened, due to the absence of clear role definitions and collaborative frameworks, reducing overall team effectiveness.
A lack of structured project management allowed for clients to continuously expand project scope without proper adjustments to timelines or budgets, straining the team.
🎞️
🎞️
📽️
🎞️ 🎞️ 📽️
🎞️
🎞️
📽️
🎞️ 🎞️ 📽️
Solution
To address inefficiencies and scale the team’s output, I templatized the production process and strategically expanded the production department. After identifying that the creative team structure lacked clarity—Creative Directors were operating as ICs without direct reports—I proposed a team reorganization and hiring plan to include dedicated project managers for operational support.
Process:
I secured executive and Creative Director buy-in by presenting a detailed playbook that outlined how these changes would streamline workflows and improve efficiency without increasing creative headcount. From there, I mapped out foundational process documents, drafted a hiring schedule for PMs, and identified communication platform gaps.
Working collaboratively with senior Creative Directors and ICs, I developed and implemented templates, including client cost cards, project briefs, deliverable schedules, and execution guides aligned with industry standards. I also reorganized and archived the team’s shared drive, ensuring resources were accessible and current, with a pipeline for future work. These efforts provided a structured foundation for junior creatives and optimized team-wide operations, increasing output and profitability.
Full Proposal
Convert the building basement into a filming studio developing a full cyclorama to shoot in-house and save on 3rd party vendor costs
Bring in interns to support production gaps
Hire two Project Managers to support work intake through client release
Hire 1 production coordinator to QC production work, prep for broadcast upload, and support in-house shooting
Templatize the production process including, scoping, contract cleanup, budget template, brief and pitch deck templates
Hold post-campaign retrospectives and a weekly shoot-standup sync to serve as pre-production alignment for shooting and post that week
Results
Profit and Efficiency
Project profitability grew from from ~20-30% profit margin on each project to a standard 50% (minimum) profit margin on all projects due to budget standardization and cost-card creation for clients. And scaling to completing 50% of all projects in-house.
Capacity
Arranging folks into sub groups allowed us to specialize creatives and expand the type of work the current creative headcount could execute, expanding output from primarily local digital campaigns to national broadcast, international digital campaigns, small video gaming, national OOH campaigning, and packaging design.
With teams lead by a single creative director per pod and an in-house studio we were able to complete work faster and increased clientele 150%
Production Samples
Stills, game, and OOH examples on full portfolio