The Setup

Let’s play a quick game of word association. When I say "Product Team," you probably think of words like: sprints, data-driven, agile, iteration, velocity. When I say "Creative Team," you probably think of: vision, brainstorm, inspiration, magic, and... chaos.

This, right here, is the central conflict in almost every modern creative workplace. Product and engineering teams run on a fast-paced, highly structured, iterative drumbeat. Creative teams, meanwhile, are often seen as a mysterious "black box"—a place where great ideas go in, time passes, and polished assets (hopefully) come out. This fundamental mismatch in process and pacing leads to friction, frustration, and a massive loss of potential.

As a leader who has spent my career as the bridge between these two worlds—running creative ops at Yelp while partnering with UX and product squads—I’ve learned that this conflict is entirely optional.

The solution is not to force creatives to become robotic engineers. It's to adapt the brilliant, battle-tested principles of agile and product management into a new framework: Agile Creativity.

When you run your creative team like a product squad, you don't kill the magic; you just build a better, faster delivery system for it. You stop being a reactive service department and you become a proactive, iterative, and indispensable part of the growth engine. Here’s the playbook.

The Problem: Why the Traditional Agency Model is Failing Inside Tech

The "old world" creative model is a waterfall. A stakeholder throws a brief over the wall, the creative team goes into their cave for three weeks, and they emerge with a "Big Bang" reveal, hoping they nailed it. This process is slow, arrogant, and fundamentally incompatible with how modern tech companies work.

Product teams work in two-week sprints. They deploy code multiple times a day. They live and die by user feedback. They cannot and will not wait three weeks for a "big reveal," only to find the creative is completely misaligned with the user data they just collected.

To be a successful partner, creative must learn to speak the same language and operate at the same tempo.

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1. Trade Your Project List for a "Creative Backlog"

The Agile Creativity Playbook: 4 Steps to Systematize Your Spark

This framework steals the best ideas from product management (Agile, Scrum) and repurposes them for the creative process.

Product teams don’t have a random list of "stuff to do." They have a prioritized backlog. Your creative team should be no different.

  • The How-To: Stop accepting requests via Slack and email immediately. All requests must go through your "Single Front Door" (your Strategic Brief, as I've covered in another post). These briefs don't go onto a creative's calendar; they go into a single "Backlog" column in your project hub (Asana, Trello, Notion).
  • Why It Works: This is a crucial psychological shift. A "backlog" is a list of potential work. An "active project" is a commitment. This gives the Creative Lead the power to review, prioritize, and resource projects strategically, rather than just reacting to the nearest fire.

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2. Run Creative "Sprints," Not Endless Projects

The biggest drain on a creative team is the "never-ending project" that just drags on for months. Product teams solved this with sprints—short, fixed blocks of time (usually one or two weeks) dedicated to a specific, shippable outcome.

  • The How-To: Structure your team's work in two-week creative sprints.
    1. Sprint Planning: On Monday morning, the Creative Lead meets with key stakeholders (like a Product Manager) to review the top-priority items in the backlog. Together, they agree on what can realistically be accomplished in the next two weeks. This becomes the "Sprint Commitment."
    2. The Sprint: For the next two weeks, the team's only focus is on that committed work. New, "urgent" requests that come in don't interrupt the sprint; they go straight into the backlog to be prioritized for the next sprint.
    3. Sprint Review: At the end of the sprint, the team presents their "shippable" work (the first draft of the ad campaign, the new landing page design) to the stakeholders.
  • Why It Works: This creates a predictable rhythm. It protects your team from constant, disruptive context-switching. It forces stakeholders to be more thoughtful and to plan ahead. And it creates a powerful, recurring sense of accomplishment for the team as they "ship" work every two weeks.

3. Implement Daily "Stand-Ups" and a Culture of Transparency

One of the biggest fears stakeholders have about creative teams is a lack of visibility. They give a brief, and then... silence. Agile teams solve this with a daily "stand-up."

  • The How-To: You don't need a physical meeting. The best stand-ups are asynchronous. Create a dedicated Slack channel (#creative-standup). Every morning, each member of the creative team answers three simple questions:
    1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
    2. What is my main focus today?
    3. Are there any blockers preventing me from moving forward?
  • Why It Works: This 5-minute ritual provides 100% daily visibility to the entire team and all stakeholders. It's not for micromanaging. It's a powerful tool for self-accountability and, most importantly, for identifying and solving "blockers" in real-time. If a designer is stuck because they're waiting on copy, the whole team sees it, and the problem can be solved in minutes, not days.

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4. Run "Creative Retrospectives" to Learn and Iterate

Product teams are relentless about improvement. After every sprint, they hold a "retrospective" to analyze what went well, what went wrong, and what they can do better next time. Creative teams should do the same.

  • The How-To: After a major project ships, schedule a 45-minute "Creative Retrospective." This is a blameless post-mortem. Using a digital whiteboard tool like Miro, the team collectively answers three questions:
    1. What Worked? (What parts of our process felt smooth and efficient?)
    2. What Was Clunky? (Where did we get stuck? Where was there friction?)
    3. What Will We Try Next Time? (What is one concrete process improvement we can experiment with in our next sprint?)
  • Why It Works: This creates a culture of continuous improvement. It proves that you are a team that learns and evolves. It turns every project—even the ones that were a struggle—into a valuable data point. This is the single most powerful ritual for transforming a good creative team into a great one.
"When you run your creative team like a product squad, you don't kill the magic; you just build a better, faster delivery system for it."

The Result:

Design

A Team that is Both Creative AND Credible

When you start running your creative team like a product squad, you don't lose your creative edge. You gain a powerful new one: Credibility.

You are no longer the "department of magic and feelings." You are a predictable, transparent, and high-performing strategic partner. Your stakeholders stop seeing you as a mysterious black box and start seeing you as a reliable engine for growth.

  • Your team's morale improves because they are protected from chaos and empowered to do their best work.
  • The quality of your work improves because you are constantly learning and iterating on your process.
  • Your influence in the organization grows because you can now speak the language of your product and engineering counterparts and demonstrate your value in terms they understand and respect.

Adopting an agile creativity framework is the most effective way to bridge the cultural divide between the creative and technical worlds. It's how you build a team that doesn't just produce beautiful, inspiring work, but does so with the rigor, speed, and strategic alignment that modern businesses demand.

For a real-world example of these principles in action, read my case study on

'Building the Creative Operating System at Yelp.'

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