How to Scale Creative Operations Without Chaos
It’s Monday morning, and Slack is already lighting up: five so-called urgent requests, three strong opinions, and a foggy “brief” (if you can even call it that). This is the daily dance of Creative Ops, the backbone of your creative marketing production. It’s about turning strategy into creative assets, guiding what gets made, when, and by whom, so the team can actually get things out the door without losing their minds. Today, Creative Ops matters more because of the increasing volume of in-house creative production. With AI, in-house marketing teams can do more, better and faster.
Prioritize work that serves the KPI
No brief, no build. That’s the rule. Successful brands know that every creative request needs to tie back to a real brand message and in turn an organizational KPI. Picture this: someone asks for a shiny new social post, but there’s no real strategy behind it. Instead of jumping in, we pause and ask if it helps our current mission, for example, increasing lead generation for X program this quarter. When something new pops up, we ask: what key brand message does this ask support? If the answer is not clear, it’s not a priority.Top tip! If a request can’t name the key brand message it supports, it’s not a priority.
Prioritize Minimum Viable Creative
When everything is a "priority," nothing is. Minimum Viable Creative is about prioritizing the simplest, most impactful creative that directly serves your current key performance indicators via your overall marketing strategy.
In other words, let the strategy guide what gets shipped first. If your top goal is to drive sales through paid social, a template approach helps you move quickly through frequent refreshes. If you're building brand awareness, you might focus on your next brand campaign. Prioritize what serves the most pressing goal so your team isn’t overwhelmed and disoriented.
This way, you can also communicate to stakeholders why certain requests are prioritized and others are held back. It’s not about doing everything at once, but it’s about doing the right thing first.
Make brand guidelines your operating system
Simply put, you cannot grow your brand without usable brand guidelines. You'll need key messages, clear rules for logos, type, colours, images, and a few real-life do’s and don’ts. Guesswork is the enemy of brand consistency and operational efficiency, so make sure your creative team has the rulebook they need.
If you need a hand, in tandem with an art director, I can pull together brand guidelines your team will actually enjoy using.
Don't set up Creative Ops before you have usable guidelines. It’s cart-before-horse. Get the rules clear, then build the machine.Want a fast brand guideline audit? →Book a 15-min consult
Appoint a Strategy Guardian
This gets us to my favourite point. Creatives shouldn’t be briefed by every stakeholder. Work should be routed through a single owner, such as a brand/marketing manager or creative director, who has a comprehensive understanding of capacity, brand strategy, and organizational goals. Crucially, they’ve done real creative production, so they know the demands of invididual roles, and can therefore guide the creative team. This person prioritizes the queue, consolidates feedback, and makes final decisions with the brand goals in mind.
When selecting this strategy guardian, consider their ability to communicate effectively across departments, their familiarity with brand objectives, and their decision-making capabilities. Empower them with clear responsibilities and ensure they have access to relevant performance data.
Need an interim Strategy Guardian to stabilize the queue? → Start here
Resourcing can make or break your ops
If you’re just kicking off your creative marketing ops or your in-house team is swamped, freelancers are your go-to. For production ebbs and flows, having a bench of freelancers is a must for any well-run in-house studio.
By 2027, about 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be freelance anyway, so you’ll have plenty of talent at your fingertips as this global trend becomes the norm.
You can run a freelance-led model with a single highly specialized creative consultant. That’s someone like me who has deep knowledge of creative operations, and can therefore translate your brand guidelines and source the right creatives for your budget and project needs. That way, you get a consistent output, without juggling a dozen different specialists yourself.
Need a flexible production plan that matches your priorities? → Let’s talk resourcing
Let data inform your decisions
Give the creative team regular visibility into performance: what’s winning, what’s fading, and which message actually resonates, and then decide strategically, not reactively. Set up a weekly 20-minute meeting with the creative team, listing top winners, assets fatiguing, and adjustments you’ll make using your performance data. Double down on what works, but don't let a single creative's performance make radical changes to your overall creative strategy.
Tools that keep production sane (and accountable)
Disclosure: This section may include affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you sign up.Thankfully, there are a growing number of tools that make creative project management super easy for the entire team. These tools utilize automation, which means more time for strategic decision-making and less of that tedious admin we'd all rather live without.Pick one system where briefs, tasks, feedback, and approvals live. You’ll ship faster because nobody is hunting assets across DMs and email.monday.com
You’ve probably come across this one. What’s great about monday.com is that intake, briefs, and approvals all sit in one place. Build intake with WorkForms, route requests with automations, and track outcomes on dashboards so stakeholders see project status at a glance. There is even a ready-made Project Requests and Approvals template, so everything is ready to run your creative ops from request to delivery.GanttPro
TeamGantt is another winner, especially for smaller businesses. GanttPro is generally best for small to mid-size teams, freelancers, agencies, and non-technical project managers who want Gantt-based planning without enterprise-level pricing or complexity. Its pricing typically sits below tools like Microsoft Project and Smartsheet, while offering more structured timeline control than lighter tools like Asana or Trello, making it a good value for teams that rely heavily on scheduling, dependencies, and visual planning rather than deep automation or developer workflows.SmartSuite
If you are managing multiple teams, a flexible tool like SmartSuite might be what you need. Here, briefs, SOPs, and asset tracking all live in one system. Relational views keep work consistent across brands and channels.
Key takeaways
Prioritize clear, strategy-aligned requests (not nice-to-have's).
Prioritize Minimum Viable Creative.
Make brand guidelines usable and train the team on them.
Appoint a strategy guardian to stop design-by-committee.
Use performance metrics to guide your next move.
Run one shared PM tool for comms, briefs, and approvals.
Need help setting up your creative ops?
I run 1-hour creative ops workshops for teams looking to build or scale their marketing creative operations.
Email me for a 15-min consult.
About
Thoughtful Creative Habits
In a field where anyone can call themselves a specialist, choose a marketing consultant who has been responsible for delivering on KPIs in complex in-house roles and has big-brand experience.I am Piret Saar. My 15-year track record includes launching an innovative brand strategy for Toronto Film School and piloting transformative content for Visit Estonia. I am ex-Vice Media and ex-Publicis with well-rounded experience in brand and content strategy, as well as production.Having worked across 3 continents, I connect with diverse audiences and nurture emerging talent. As an independent consultant, I aim to be a disruptive force offering a high-value alternative to big agencies.
customized projects
Brand & Content
Focus areas for content:
Video production · Copywriting · Editorial content · Art direction · Editing and proofreading AI-produced content · Content Strategy alignment with brand goalsFocus areas for brand:
Brand strategy from concept to execution · Campaign design, launch and management
Project Leadership
Project management · Talent sourcing · Creative workflow development
what to expect
RESULTS
Brand positioning that is easy to say and sell.
Lightweight ops so creative ships on time.
Branded assets that convert and set you apart.
A calm, senior partner who gets it done.
How I work:
I start with a quick audit, then a 2- to 3-week sprint focused on your biggest wins: clearer messaging, and creative that converts. We keep meetings light, ship weekly, and document decisions so your team can run with it.
Free resources for your team
Explore short how-to videos on building an internal marketing team and aligning brand strategy with your organization’s goals. Learn about creative team managment, and how to connect your value proposition and key messages to KPIs for measurable outcomes.Ready for hands-on support?
See my services and book a free 15-minute chat.
