How We Built a Creative Operating System to Increase Campaign Efficiency by 25% at Yelp

Before we could build a solution, we needed to map the problem. I embarked on a three-phase journey to diagnose, design, and deploy our new operating system.

Phase 1: The Audit (Mapping the Pain Points)

My first 30 days were a listening tour. I conducted stakeholder interviews with leads from every adjacent department—Product, UX, Core Marketing, Sales, and Legal. I didn't ask what they wanted from the creative team; I asked them to walk me through the lifecycle of a recent project, step by step. I built a detailed Process Map for our 10 most common project types, from a simple social media campaign to a complex, integrated product launch.

This audit revealed three critical friction points:

1. The "Throw it Over the Wall" Brief: Creative was being brought in at the end of the process. Briefs were often incomplete, lacking clear strategic goals or user insights, forcing the creative team to guess what success looked like.
2. No Single Source of Truth: Project communications were scattered across email, Slack, and multiple Google Docs. There was no central place to track progress, feedback, or final approvals, leading to confusion and version control nightmares.
3. Lack of Visibility: Leadership had no easy way to see the creative team's current workload or capacity. This made it impossible to strategically resource new projects, leading to constant fire drills and team burnout.

Phase 2: The Architecture (Designing the System)

With a clear diagnosis, I designed a new Creative Operating System built on three pillars. This wasn't just a new workflow; it was a new philosophy of working.

1. The "Strategic Briefing" Document: I worked with Product and UX leads to kill the old creative brief and replace it with a collaborative "Strategic Briefing" process.
   • Old Way: Marketing writes a brief in a vacuum and assigns it to Creative.
   • New Way: Creative is now a required attendee at the project kickoff meeting. We developed a unified Notion-based document that started with the Product's User Story and the UX team's Core Insight. The marketing goals were mapped directly to those user needs. By the time a "creative ask" was formulated, the creative team already understood the strategic and user-centric "why" behind it.
2. The Centralized Project Hub (Asana as the Engine): We moved 100% of our project management into Asana. This became our non-negotiable single source of truth.
   • I designed and deployed a series of templated project plans for our most common workflows. A new "Branded Video Series" request, for example, would automatically generate a 40-step checklist with pre-assigned roles and dependencies, from "Write Script" to "Legal Review" to "Final Assets Delivered."
   • This eliminated ambiguity. Everyone could see the status of a project, who was responsible for the next step, and where any bottlenecks were forming in real-time.
3. The "Resource & Performance" Dashboard: To solve the visibility problem, I developed a strategic dashboard using a combination of Asana's reporting features and Google Data Studio.
   • This dashboard provided a real-time, high-level view of the entire creative department's workload, broken down by project type and individual team member.
   • For the first time, leadership could see our team's capacity at a glance, allowing us to have proactive conversations about resourcing and prioritization. It also tracked key performance metrics, like "Time from Brief to First Draft," which allowed us to identify and optimize inefficiencies in our own process.

This three-part system was the architecture for our new way of working. It was designed to foster proactive collaboration, eliminate ambiguity, and make our performance visible and measurable.

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