Since starting my career as a junior copywriter at the world’s 8th largest advertising agency, my experiences have grown to include owning my own agency, being Chief Creative Officer and Executive Director at 2 others, moving client-side as Global Creative Director for an iconic CPG brand and, most recently, being an enterprise design team leader managing a UX and design thinking team of 30+ at a Fortune 500 financial services company.
At Key Design Studio (the design thinking-driven internal agency at KeyBank) I led the creative team then talent development for 30+ Product Designers, UX writers and strategists. Here, I learned:
no matter how much you care about the work, if you don’t first care about the team and its larger success, you won’t win
making a difference means knowing the difference between Impact and Activity
the chief skill required to lead a large, distributed, remote team with broad design skillsets is knowing how to help each person achieve their potential
Owning an agency with my name on the door for 5 years taught me:
• how to collect money from strapped clients in the middle of a recession ... and still remain friends
• the one thing more difficult than coming up with a great idea is explaining how you're different
• business boils down to simply helping people—because not everyone needs advertising, but everyone needs help in some way
Working as a senior creative leader in large, complex, corporate organizations taught me:
The closer you are to the actual day-to-day running of the business, the more effective creativity can be—so be a champion for everyone from your clients, your Product Design and digital teams, and your marketing and agency partners.
Writing a thoughtful, informed, and focused creative brief is the single most important contribution a client can make to an agency’s productivity and value.
Agency responses to RFPs are virtually indistinguishable—so find a writer who’s worked as a client and understands the process from their point of view.
Both internal and external agencies are more valued (and clients are more profitable) when creative leaders:
demonstrate impact
clearly articulate the business value of design
compensation is tied to client benchmarks (I created a Value-Based Compensation approach to achieve this).
For both the internal and external agency teams I managed, my goal was to be the client I always wanted to have.
As Global Creative Director at Krispy Kreme, I strived every day to provide an honest, open-minded environment that supported the time, space and talent I know it takes to create—then successfully sell and execute—brand-differentiating, business-building ideas.
Identifying, recruiting, hiring then developing a large, remote team of UX designers and design thinkers—especially those up for the challenge of working in the complex, highly-regulated financial services industry—was a challenge that has proven to be both inspiring and rewarding.
Of the nearly 40-strong team, I hired 26 of them.
Working with the Enterprise Design Officer and our HR Business Partner, I helped devise the Studio staffing model from a linear hierarchy of roles to a talent pool from which resources could be sourced for every engagement.
I re-wrote job descriptions for every role to focus not on experience and qualifications but on expected competencies and activities.
I created a 5-part Talent Management Program based on their ambitions to grow their skills and help them advance at Key. This included coaching, goals definition and monitoring, skills building, and learning opportunities for each designer.
I instituted a Position Plan to accurately demonstrate the need to hire, with explicit role expectations and milestones through the first year that assisted me in candidate conversations and goals alignment.
The Interview Guide for Product Designers I instituted helped to scale the process to include digital product and line of business partners who might never have hired design talent before.
I formalized with design school partners like RISD an interview, feedback, and decisioning process to pipeline design talent to Key, then worked with Studio Operations to ensure a positive onboarding experience.
The work and impact the team accomplished was entirely their’s. The team itself, however, was uniquely mine and one I’m particularly proud of having assembled.
Key Design Studio is the embedded change agency within KeyBank that uses design thinking to re-frame products, problems, and experiences to drive transformational growth across the enterprise.
I've sat on both sides of the RFP process, as a client and agency.
I've written dozens of RFP responses, presentations and proposals, and reviewed many more from advertising, digital and design agencies who were pitching business.
I've both presented as the agency, and been presented to as a client.
I've seen a CMO be offended during a pitch, an agency creds call go south in the first 5 minutes, and was once part of a team of 25 that went into a pitch where the winning agency went in with just 2.
I've learned a lot about what's smart, and what's not.
