The 30-day sprint

How do you deliver 3 multi-partner campaign in less than one month without burning out your team?

Role

company

Creative Operations Lead

year

Starshot

2025

the challenge

A major tech client needed assets for 4 multi-partner end of year close out campaigns. 20+ brand partners, each with their own guidelines and approval processes. Hundreds of assets across web, social, email, and video.

Timeline: thirty days.

This wasn't unusual. In B2B tech, impossible timelines are the baseline. But the traditional approach—throw more people at it, work nights and weekends, hope nothing breaks—wasn't sustainable. Our team was growing fast, and I needed systems that would scale without breaking people.

The Real Problem

This wasn't actually about speed. It was about whether we could build a studio where people did great work without sacrificing their health, their creativity, or their ability to think strategically. Speed was a constraint, yes—but culture was the real challenge.

What We Built

I worked with my team to design a workflow that treated AI as a collaborator, not a replacement. We used it for the grunt work—creating workbacks, prelim copy, generating variations—while keeping humans focused on strategy, storytelling, and creative decision-making.

What Actually Mattered

Yes, we delivered on time. Yes, the client was happy. But here's what I'm actually proud of:

week 1: Strategy & Structure

We started with a 90-minute cross-functional kickoff. Creative leads, strategists, and account leads in the same room (virtually), mapping out brand guidelines, identifying creative territories, and deciding what could be templated versus what needed custom attention. No one touched design software yet.

week 2: Creation & Iteration

AI-powered tools handled schedules, preliminary copy and page layouts. Designers focused on art direction, ensuring brand consistency, and solving the creative problems that actually required human judgment. We built in two formal feedback loops—start and end of the week for all campaigns—so nothing went off track.

week 3 + 4: Refinement & Delivery

Final polish, partner approvals, and file delivery. By building approval checkpoints into the workflow from the start, we avoided the "surprise feedback at the last minute" spiral that kills timelines and morale.

  • The team left at reasonable hours all throughout the month. That shouldn't be remarkable, but in agency work, it is.

  • By setting up good project plans with clear direction, the work was executed flawlessly. They asked better questions. They made better work.

  • This wasn't a one-time heroic effort. We collaborated as a team to finesse our workflow, and it became our standard approach for rapid turnaround projects.

the tension

I'm proud of this work because it solved a real problem and protected my team from burnout. But I also recognize that it optimized for the wrong thing.

We are incredibly good at producing high volumes of content quickly. But B2B tech doesn't need more content. It needs better stories. And no amount of operational excellence changes the fact that most of what we produce doesn’t matter to anyone…really.

The sprint system works. But I want to use these skills for projects where the speed serves a purpose beyond just moving faster.