Building a global design function

Role: Creative Director / Design Operations Lead

  • As POLITICO expanded globally, the design team was supporting an increasingly complex ecosystem of stakeholders across Marketing, Product, Sales, Editorial, Live Events, Human Resources and Executive Leadership. Different teams operated with varying timelines, priorities, and expectations, creating the need for a unified approach to creative operations at scale.

  • Developed and implemented a global creative operating model that standardized intake, prioritization, review cycles, resource planning and project visibility across regions and business functions.

    The framework aligned stakeholders around a shared process while giving designers the structure needed to focus on high-impact creative work. By combining clear governance, transparent workflows and scalable systems, the team was able to support growing demand without sacrificing quality or strategic thinking.

    • Established a unified creative workflow across U.S. and European teams

    • Increased visibility into project prioritization, capacity, and delivery timelines

    • Improved collaboration between design and key business functions

    • Enabled a small global team to support a growing volume of work efficiently

    • Created a scalable foundation for future team growth and cross-functional partnership

    • Global creative operating model

    • Creative intake and prioritization framework

    • Resource planning dashboard

    • Cross-functional workflow ecosystem

    • Team capacity and project visibility system

Design Systems & Scale

Building the infrastructure that enabled creative teams and stakeholders to move faster.

GLOBAL BRAND DECK SYSTEM

〰️

CREATIVE OPS PLATFORM

〰️

LIVE EVENTS TEMPLATE FRAMEWORK

〰️

BRAND GOVERNANCE

〰️

GLOBAL BRAND DECK SYSTEM 〰️ CREATIVE OPS PLATFORM 〰️ LIVE EVENTS TEMPLATE FRAMEWORK 〰️ BRAND GOVERNANCE 〰️

Global Brand Presentation System

Challenge

Multiple POLITICO business lines required independent sales and marketing materials while maintaining a unified brand experience.

Solution

Created a scalable presentation system used across Core, Pro, AIQ, E&E News, and POLITICO Research & Analysis.

Impact

  • Unified brand expression

  • Reduced production time

  • Improved consistency across products

  • Enabled teams to self-serve common presentation needs

Creative OpS Platform

Challenge

Project information lived across Airtable, Asana, intake forms, asset libraries, and stakeholder communications.

Solution

Designed and built a centralized platform (app) that unified project intake, tracking, approvals, resources and asset access into a single experience.

Impact

  • Increased visibility

  • Reduced administrative overhead

  • Improved stakeholder transparency

  • Centralized creative operations

Live Events Design Framework

Challenge

Live and Marketing teams frequently needed event assets, causing repetitive design work and bottlenecks.

Solution

Developed a scalable event marketing framework that combined modular creative systems, standardized workflows, reusable asset libraries, and clear brand guidelines across web, email, social, and event promotion channels. This approach empowered teams to launch campaigns faster while maintaining design quality and brand consistency.

Impact

  • Accelerated campaign launches while reducing design and production timelines

  • Increased stakeholder autonomy through scalable self-service tools

  • Improved brand consistency across all event marketing touchpoints

  • Scaled creative support for a growing global events portfolio, allowing the design team to focus on strategic, high-impact work

*making a better video, we’ve expanded on this

Organizational Impact

These initiatives weren’t simply process improvements. They established the infrastructure that allowed a global design team to scale creative excellence across multiple brands, products, events and business functions.

Next

We Built a Pub