Bringing Order to a High-Volume Creative Team at Traeger
Role: Creative Operations | Company: Traeger Grills | Focus: Workflow design, tool implementation, company-wide training
The Snapshot
A six-person creative team was serving an entire company with no system for managing the demand. I implemented a creative project management tool built for their kind of work and trained the whole organization to use it. The result was faster turnaround times and a 25% increase in team productivity.
The Challenge: Small Team, Big Demand
Traeger's creative team was small but mighty: three graphic designers, a copywriter, a videographer, and a photographer. Together they supported creative requests from across the company, and the company was growing fast.
The talent was there, but the infrastructure wasn't. The team had:
No consistent way to intake briefs, so requests arrived in different formats with varying levels of detail
No structured process for cross-functional creative review, so feedback was hard to manage and easy to lose
No way to manage workload, so it was hard to see who was overloaded or what could realistically get done
When a team is strong but its process is missing, the people end up doing the work of managing the work. Time that should go to creating went to chasing, clarifying, and reprioritizing.
The Approach: The Right Tool, Rolled Out the Right Way
I joined the team to design and implement a better way of working. Rather than adopt a generic solution, I selected and set up a creative project management tool built around the specific needs of this team's work.
The rollout had three parts:
1. A standardized briefing process. Every project now starts the same way, with the information the creative team needs to get going, so fewer requests stall at the starting line.
2. Structured creative reviews. Reviews and approvals live in one place, so cross-functional stakeholders can give feedback in a clear, trackable way.
3. Company-wide adoption. A tool only works if people use it. I personally trained the entire company on how to submit requests and follow their projects, so the new process stuck instead of being an unused new system.
The tool also gave stakeholders real-time visibility into where their requests stood. Fewer "just checking in" messages meant fewer interruptions for the creative team and more trust across departments.
The Results
25% increase in creative team productivity
Faster project turnaround times
Real-time project visibility for requesters across the company
A repeatable, scalable process for briefing, reviewing, and managing workload that the company has used for the past 6 years
Why It Worked
The productivity gains came from removing friction instead of asking a talented team to work harder. Clear briefs meant less back-and-forth. Centralized reviews meant fewer lost comments. Visible workloads meant better prioritization. And because I owned the training as well as the tool selection, the process got adopted across the company.
The Takeaway
Creative teams don't need more hours in the day. They need systems that protect their time and make their work easier to request, review, and deliver. That's what I do at KG Creative Ops.
Is your creative team stretched thin? Let's talk about what a better workflow could look like.
