Building Room to Create

Overview

The creative studio at Sun Life runs at two speeds simultaneously. On any given day, a team of ten designers and writers is managing upwards of a hundred active tasks from business partners across the company — while also concepting and pitching for large, high-profile campaigns that demand focused creative attention. Managing both at once, without one cannibalizing the other, is the fundamental challenge of running this studio.

Campaigns kept running into the same problems: rework from briefs that arrived incomplete, direction that shifted mid-production when stakeholders engaged late, revision loops that multiplied because feedback wasn't consolidated before it reached the team. The work was good. The conditions around it weren't. This project was about changing that — building the infrastructure that lets a talented team focus on making things rather than recovering from avoidable misalignment.

My Role

Process design isn't the focus of my role, but we knew a smoother working process would have a big impact on the team. I mapped out our current process and an ideal state, and ran sessions to refine it with the team.

Challenge

The studio's creative output is only as strong as the conditions it operates in — and the conditions had a few structural problems that kept compounding each other.

The first was how work arrived. Requests came in from business partners throughout the company, often under-specified: missing channel specs, unconfirmed media plans, messaging that hadn't been fully signed off internally. Because there was no formal gate at intake, incomplete information landed directly on designers and writers. They'd absorb it, make assumptions, build — and discover the gap later. The cost showed up as rework, sometimes deep into production.

The second was how large campaigns moved through the studio. On a significant campaign, ten or more stakeholders might have a legitimate voice in the creative — brand teams, business unit leads, media partners, and senior leadership who could shift direction at any stage. Without defined moments for input, feedback arrived whenever it arrived: ad hoc, fragmented, sometimes contradictory. Revision rounds multiplied not because the creative was wrong but because the feedback itself wasn't aligned.

Approach

I started by mapping the problem before designing the solution. A series of working sessions with the creative director and senior designers produced a detailed picture of where campaigns actually broke — at intake, in production, in review. The goal wasn't to document an ideal process. It was to understand the real failure points and build something that addressed them specifically.

The result is a 14-step workflow across five phases, with five hard gates where work cannot proceed without required inputs or sign-off. A few of the decisions that shaped it:

Alongside the process, I drove the team's shift to Figma as the primary working environment for all campaigns. The change wasn't about the software — it was about making work visible and context-rich regardless of how reactive any given day gets. Projects that previously existed across scattered folders, chat threads, and shared drives now have a single source of truth. Key context, briefs, and supporting references sit in the artboard itself, so anyone reviewing work — at any stage — sees the full picture without a separate briefing to catch them up.

The workflow is mapped in full below — five phases, five hard gates, from brief sign-off to files leaving the team.

Outcome

What this process is working toward is simpler than it sounds: a team that spends its energy making things, not recovering from misalignment. More structure isn't the point. The point is the creative headroom that structure creates — the ability to explore properly, to give a lead designer's full attention to a problem, to bring stakeholders work that reflects what the brief actually asked for. That's what this is designed to protect.