Rebuilding a Design Function During Enterprise Transformation
I rebuilt Marigold’s marketing design operating model, production methodology, design system, and creative-decision framework, turning a fragmented internal group into a more structured function with substantially faster request-to-delivery cycles.
Marigold
Design Director, Brand
2024–2025
Creative Leadership
Team & Function Building
Creative Direction
Creative Operations
Design Systems
Challenge
The design team lacked unified intake, pipeline visibility, resourcing and capacity planning, shared templates, a working design system, and consistent modern production practices.
Work entered through fragmented channels with little visibility into pipeline, forecasting, resources, or capacity. Designers lacked shared infrastructure and foundational production practices, including consistent auto-layout use, while creative leadership was largely absent. The immediate problem was not simply visual consistency; the function itself needed structure.
Approach
Align the team around a dependable production methodology, implement organization-wide systems, educate designers, and improve creative operations while maintaining output.
As Design Director, Brand, I stepped into the leadership gap to restructure intake and the operating model, establish visibility and priorities, rebuild the design system, educate the team on production methodology and modern Figma practices, direct approvals and output, and introduce brand metaphors that gave abstract campaign work a clearer conceptual foundation.
Outcomes
Average request turnaround fell from more than two weeks to approximately three days after intake, prioritization, production methods, and reusable systems were rebuilt.
During the same tenure, the wider Marketing organization reported rapid messaging, rebrand, and website timelines plus improvements in funnel conversion, pipeline, organic traffic, and LLM visibility. Those are shared departmental and period outcomes and should not be presented as design-only causation.
This case demonstrates that creative quality and creative operations are the same system viewed from different ends. Clear intake, shared methods, stronger tools, and a useful conceptual framework made the department both faster and more deliberate.
Unified intake and production workflow, making pipeline, priority, resourcing, and capacity more visible.
Rebuilt shared templates and design-system foundations.
Educated the team on auto-layout and repeatable production practices.
Introduced a clearer creative framework for campaign design rather than relying on arbitrary visual production.
Reduced estimated average request turnaround from more than two weeks to roughly three days.
Miles Courtney
Work
Information