A guide to the ideal creative operations team structure

Factors influencing the creative operations team structure

Finding the right creative operations team structure can be tricky. There’s no set formula, and what works well for one company may not work at all for you.

These are the main factors you should consider as you create or improve your approach to structuring a creative ops team.

Company size and scale

First up, what does your company look like? Do you have 50 employees or 5,000? How many of those employees are creatives?

The larger your company (and your creative teams), the more complex your creative operations will be. That means you’ll need more resources to manage those ops.

Business model

Next up in your effort to streamline creative ops: what does your company do? 

Is your business a creative agency, where creative is all you do? Or is your main business something else — retail, insurance, tech, and so on — where creative teams are building assets to support the business in various ways?

Your business model will impact the structure of your creative teams (and creative operations). If you’re an agency, you’re likely concerned with client management and billable hours, but the internal creative team at a larger business isn’t thinking in those terms.

Industry and market

The industry you’re in and the market you serve both affect creative team structure. Just think about the creative timeline for social media management versus something like textbook publishing.

If you’re building a media-rich college textbook, and you have two or three years to do it, your creative operations team has a ton to manage — but plenty of runway. But social media is measured in weeks, days, and maybe even minutes.

Put simply, the structures put in place for managing creative operations must fit the timescale that the industry demands. The same goes for quality, frequency, and volume.

Project volume and variety

As you consider your company’s size and business model, you’ll also want to weigh the types and number of creative projects your team will complete.

If most of your creative deliverables are similar (social media posts, for example), you’ll likely be able to use repeatable workflows to create these reliably and consistently. But if you’re tasked with a wide range of projects (say, video content, social media management, and print advertisements), you’ll need individual workflows to match.

The way your projects are organized will matter here too. Agencies might structure creative operations by client, with client managers attached to each one. In-house marketing teams might structure operations by discipline, with department heads representing design, photography, copyrighting, and so on.

Budget and resources

Remember that you’re working with finite resources. So consider your budget size and available resources when determining the size, structure, and composition of the team. While you might want or even need a team of 20 experts, company leadership isn’t likely to approve your plan if there’s only room in the budget for eight.

Client and stakeholder needs

Whether you’re working with external clients or internal departments and stakeholders, your creative operations team structure likely needs to flex to accommodate the other party’s needs — not the other way around.

Clients and stakeholders may have specific requirements and expectations that must be met, and these may influence team structure. Teams — and the people who lead them — need to be adaptable to cater to varying client demands and project specifications.

Important roles to include in your creative ops team structure

As we take a look at the common primary roles that make up most teams, keep in mind that all the factors we just covered will affect the shape and makeup of your unique creative ops team.

Not every creative ops team needs to contain every single one of these roles, and some may require additional specializations. But these are the most common and often the most important.

Creative operations manager or director

The person in charge of creative operations as a whole oversees the execution of the entire creative process. This is usually a highly experienced team member with specific creative experience who now manages people and sets a vision for the organization’s creative direction.

In smaller agencies, the founder may retain this role. In larger agencies and in organizations with internal creative ops teams, the role is a senior one usually held by someone with 5+ years of creative experience.

Sometimes the creative director is also the creative operations manager, while in other cases, the roles are separate. When the roles are distinct, the creative operations director likely reports to the creative director. 

Project manager

The project manager’s job is to turn that creative vision and direction into concrete projects and then ensure those projects are completed on time and on budget.

This looks like creating project schedules, managing timelines, setting and monitoring budgets, watching metrics and KPIs, and keeping projects within defined scopes. It also involves easing bottlenecks and helping to solve tactical problems when they pop up.

Project managers in creative ops do most of the same things as project managers elsewhere. The main difference is that creative ops project managers must understand the creative process (not to mention creatives themselves!) and the impact it has on project work. It also helps for the PM to understand the basics of digital asset management.

Content strategist

Anywhere you find creative operations, you’ll also find content — it’s the stuff the creative ops team was set up to create.

But before your specialists can get creating, you need someone to decide what they should create. That’s the content strategist.

Content strategists develop and align content strategies with business goals. They may be responsible for building creative briefs, and they usually assist with quality control, ensuring consistency and quality in your organization’s creative deliverables.

We often think of “content strategist” as a content marketing role, and it is. But in creative ops teams, the content strategist is responsible for a broader set of deliverables, including creative assets not related to content marketing or SEO.

Designers

Designers specialize in the visual elements of creative projects. You may have multiple types of designers on your team, depending on what kinds of assets you’re creating, including:

• Graphic designers who build static graphics for use in digital and print media.
• Motion graphics designers who build motion graphics for use in video content.
• Web designers who create the visual design and layout of websites and landing pages.
• UX/UI designers who build digital interfaces for both aesthetics and functionality.

Copywriters or content specialists

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it can’t replace them all. You still need the words to be clear and compelling.

Copywriters and content specialists are skilled writers who understand specific types of writing ( a blog post or article like this one, social media captions, video scripts, and so on). They can craft messaging that engages audiences and converts readers. 

Production specialists

Production specialists handle the technical aspects of creative projects, especially elements related to video and audio production. It’s their job to output high-quality work that’s ready for audiences to consume. At some agencies, video editors are in their own distinct category, since their workflow is unique to them.

What to remember when setting up creative operations