Pro tips to boost your creative operations from COEx

The annual creative ops exchange is a forum for creative professionals from companies like Spotify, Apple, Adobe and others to discuss learnings and gain insights on how best to manage the creative process. One of our favorite sessions was a panel of creatives from a range of backgrounds and experiences, hosted by Canto’s Head of Community, Jack Huber.

Creatives often seek the freedom of expression, and trying to add rigor to the creative process can seem stifling. Here are some quick and dirty creative operations pro-tips from the panelists:

1. Get better at planning: Teams within marketing don’t always know or think about what it takes to get things done when they put in a creative request. Map out capacity for up to 90 days of projects, so that no one on your team has to figure out how to navigate the work, and can just focus on doing the actual work. By planning for that kind of visibility into your team’s workload, you can teach the rest of the marketing team to do better and plan further ahead.
2. Allow the business to self-serve: Most people want to be the stewards of their own journey, they don’t want to have to go ask someone to give them what they need. Searching through images and files in cloud storage tools or in emails to find something can be a pain, and having to send an email anytime you need to find something is inefficient. The more you can enable self service across the organization, the more smoothly your organization will flow.
3. Measure creative metrics where possible. Often times, creative teams are working with less resources and expected to do more. The more data you can gather to support and measure your team’s output, the better. Anything from cost per asset to volume of revision requests can be used to advocate for more resources or to gain visibility and demonstrate strategic value to leadership.
4. Gain visibility. Hold regular weekly check ins with specific stakeholders and teams who put in creative requests so you can gain better insight into what’s coming. Share your current workload and SLAs, and change the conversation around workflow. Communicating with stakeholders is key.

Creativity blossoms from having smooth processes in place so the creatives on your team only need to focus on one thing: Being creative. Finding the right balance of checks and balances can be challenging at first, but it’s an iterative process that will continue to grow and change as your organization evolves.

Learn more about the Insights Exchange Network and find events near you.