envato-labs-ai-057cdad2-52ab-43cd-afb5-d72f7b3445cd_edited.jpg

Scaling Creativity Under Pressure

How a 13-person team delivered for 60+ accounts in a manual-heavy environment

As Head of Creative Services

The Challenge

The Creative Services team at Aarki supported 60+ active accounts with only 13 people.

The workload included producing hundreds of ad creatives monthly across video, banners, displays and playable — all while juggling custom requests, localization needs, and platform-specific specs.

The challenge?

Too many manual steps slowing down workflows.
No central system for tracking requests, performance, or revisions.
Risk of burnout from high-volume production with limited resources.

The Approach

As Head of Creative Services, I led a transformation of how creativity scaled under constraints:

Pod System: Restructured the team into different pods, so each had clear roles and cross-team alignment.
Workflow Design: Introduced repeatable processes (brief intake → production → QA → reporting), reducing ambiguity and wasted cycles.
Data Integration: Launched ContentIQ, a dashboard connecting creative output with campaign performance, enabling faster decision-making.
AI & Automation Pilots: Experimented with GenAI tools and templates to cut down on repetitive design tasks and free up time for strategy.
Onboarding Program: Built a 90-day journey that got new hires ramped up quickly, ensuring consistency across the team.

The Solution

We created a lean but powerful creative engine:

Centralized operations to handle intake, resourcing, and QA.
Production loop designed for speed + craft.
Growth pod insights feeding back into creative concepts.
Innovation pod experiments introducing tools to reduce manual workload.

This system turned what used to be a fragmented, manual-heavy process into a structured, data-backed workflow.

envato-labs-ai-91c6c2dc-68ef-4af3-930a-45cc099e7c71.jpg

The Results

Sustained 60+ campaigns with only 13 creatives — without scaling headcount.
Cut production bottlenecks, reducing time-to-delivery across campaign types.
Increased creative testing capacity, fueling better campaign learnings.
Improved morale & retention by reducing burnout and giving the team tools to work smarter.
Established innovation as a habit, not an afterthought — pilots in GenAI and automation are now part of the team’s DNA.

Why It Matters

This wasn’t just about “getting things done.” It was about proving that with the right structure, workflows, and tools, a small creative team can deliver at enterprise scale.

The takeaway: creativity isn’t just design — it’s systems design.