Organizing for Growth

In 2015 the Vox Media Revenue Design team responded to 5,108 design requests, a 349% growth from 2014 without scaling headcount. Prompted by this growth, I worked with our partner teams to redefined how we worked together.

Initial Design Goals:

Meet growing workload with current resources
Streamline communication and make it easy for partner teams work together efficiently while reducing redundancy in cross-team projects
Develop internal and external resources that would support continued growth

Challenges:

Simultaneously implementing change across multiple team without disrupting daily workloads
Defining a system that was beneficial for all teams involved, rather than supporting one team at the expense of another

Role: Design Director

Spearheaded initiative, and worked with my counterparts on partner teams to define overall goals and how success would be measured
Determined timelines and maintained open communication as teams worked through the initiative
Led design strategy for templates, style guides, and other reference materials

Team:

2 Designers

Cross-Functional Players:

Account Services and Sales Teams
Ad Operations
Vox Creative

Process:

Led KOC’s with each partner team lead. In each call:
- Outlined challenges with existing process and brainstormed possible solutions
- Defined overall goals and how each team would measure success

*Placement of a mock from my team placed in an RFP Pitch prior to redesign.*

*Placement of a mock from my team placed in an RFP Pitch after templates were created to seamlessly incorporate into the redesigned pitch deck.*

Phase 1: Redesign & Eliminate Design Redundancy

Led the redesign of the Sales Pitch Deck and the guidelines for the integrated mocks
Work with designers to identify and document repeated or reusable pitch deck design requests.
Developed psd templates that would provide a system to reduce design time of a single mock from 2 hours down to as little as 4 minutes.
Compiled and cataloged all completed design requests from the previous 12 months into a library, accessible by the Account Services and Sales team. Standardized file names for quick selection and filtered by client and category.

Phase 2: Internal Education

With the Account Services and Sales team leads, rolled out the new pitch deck and accompanying design process.
Streamline communication and project requests and create consistency with design request language
Arranged design workshops for my team on the new templates and best practices for smart objects, layer comps, and quick exporting techniques in photoshop.

Phase 3: Additional Materials

Update cross-team reference materials; convert 17 reference sheets into 1 master sheet
Led design of internal and client facing style guides

Results:

Scaled the design team's ability to complete a higher volume of requests in less time without adding headcount by using templates for common requests
Streamlined the process for custom mock requests and developed resources such as the mock library to reduce duplicate requests
Devoloped internal and external resources such as psd templates and style guides

⏱ Reduced design time from 3 days to 24 hours

🗂 Mock repository reduced custom mock requests from 15 per campaign to 2-3 per campaign

📑 Converted 17 reference sheets to 1 master sheet