Designing the Operating System Behind a Multi-Brand Creative Organization

Connecting business demand, creative capacity, and portfolio decisions across RVO Health.

Challenge: Marketing and Creative Studio demand came from teams throughout the organization, but inconsistent intake and limited capacity visibility made it difficult to evaluate new requests against work already underway.

My role: I designed and improved the systems used to capture requests, forecast workload, coordinate delivery, and give leaders a clearer view of portfolio tradeoffs.

Outcome: A more consistent operating environment helped reduce stakeholder back-and-forth, surface capacity constraints earlier, and support better decisions about what to prioritize, delay, reduce, reassign, or pause.

By the Numbers

  • 50-person multidisciplinary creative organization

  • Eight cross-functional teams supported

  • Approximately 30–60 active stakeholders

  • Typically 10–30 concurrent initiatives

  • More than 50 major initiatives annually

The Operating Challenge

RVO Health supported a portfolio of consumer health brands that included Healthline, Healthgrades, Medical News Today, Optum Now, and Psych Central.

Marketing and Creative Studio requests came from a substantial portion of the company. Teams needed support across campaigns, editorial programs, lifecycle marketing, paid media, websites, product experiences, and brand initiatives.

Those requests did not always arrive through the same process or with the same level of clarity. Creative disciplines also had different skills, workloads, and availability.

The organization needed a shared way to answer several fundamental questions:

  • What work was entering the system?

  • Was there sufficient capacity to support it?

  • Which creative skills were required?

  • What would need to move if a new priority was accepted?

  • Which tradeoffs required leadership involvement?

The need extended beyond task tracking. The organization needed a stronger connection between business demand, creative capacity, and portfolio decisions.

My Role

I worked across business stakeholders, marketing teams, Creative Studio leaders, and individual contributors.

My responsibilities included:

  • Improving intake and workflow structures

  • Coordinating cross-functional planning

  • Supporting portfolio prioritization

  • Building workload and capacity visibility

  • Tracking delivery risks and dependencies

  • Developing recurring operational reporting

  • Supporting Asana adoption across requesting teams

  • Helping leaders evaluate tradeoffs when demand exceeded capacity

My focus was creating the information and operating rhythms required to make those decisions more effectively.

What I Changed

Standardized intake and workflow expectations

I helped replace ad hoc request practices with structured Asana workflows, intake frameworks, service-level expectations, and clearer ownership.

Asana became the primary request and work-management environment for essentially every team using Marketing or Creative Studio support, reaching a significant portion of the organization because teams requesting marketing or creative work were expected to coordinate through the platform.

The improved intake structure helped strengthen request quality and reduce stakeholder back-and-forth by approximately 30%.

Built capacity and workload visibility

I developed capacity-planning and workload-forecasting models that connected incoming demand with:

  • Available creative capacity

  • Discipline-specific skills

  • Existing assignments

  • Upcoming initiatives

  • Timing and delivery constraints

This made it easier to see when the studio could absorb new work and when accepting it would require another portfolio decision.

Created operational reporting for leaders

I built recurring reports and Looker Studio dashboards covering areas such as:

  • Workload distribution

  • Utilization

  • Intake trends

  • Delivery timelines

  • Upcoming demand

  • Capacity across creative disciplines

The reporting’s strongest value was making capacity pressure visible and giving Creative Studio leaders evidence for priority conversations with senior leadership.

How the System Changed Decisions

When demand exceeded available capacity, leaders could evaluate the full portfolio instead of treating each request independently.

Depending on the situation, that meant:

  • Delaying an initiative

  • Reducing its scope

  • Reassigning work based on available skills

  • Pausing lower-priority work

  • Redirecting a designer toward an urgent business need

  • Declining to commit until capacity became available

The conversation shifted from “Can the Creative Studio do this?” to “What should the studio prioritize, and what will need to change to make that possible?”

The system also helped the team match projects with the designers best equipped to support them. When one contributor was at capacity, leaders could evaluate whether the work should be reassigned, delayed, simplified, or prioritized above something already in progress.

The Result

The operating model helped RVO Health:

  • Create a shared environment for marketing and creative requests

  • Improve request clarity and delivery predictability

  • Identify workload and capacity conflicts earlier

  • Allocate work more deliberately across creative disciplines

  • Reduce dependence on fragmented project information

  • Give leaders a stronger basis for prioritization decisions

  • Standardize execution across brands and teams

  • Make the consequences of accepting new work more visible

The most important result was a more durable connection between business demand and the capacity required to deliver high-quality work.