Cleaning Up Marketing Intake, Approvals, and Project Visibility for a Multi-Brand Team
The Problem
A growing marketing team was managing requests across multiple brands, departments, and stakeholders. Work was coming in through different channels, project details were inconsistent, and the team lacked a clear way to see what was new, what was blocked, what was active, and what was waiting for approval.
Creative approvals were also difficult to track. Requests moved between designers, leadership, and business unit stakeholders, but there was not a simple workflow that made the current approval stage obvious.
The result was a system where work could technically get done, but the process relied too heavily on memory, manual follow-up, and individual team members knowing where everything stood.
The Goal
The goal was to create a cleaner operating system for marketing requests and project work.
The system needed to:
Centralize incoming requests
Separate intake from active project work
Standardize request review and planning
Create clearer creative approval stages
Give stakeholders visibility without overwhelming the team
Support repeatable project setup through templates and blueprints
Reduce confusion around ownership, status, and next steps
What I Did
I reviewed the existing request process, folder structure, workflows, approval steps, and team handoffs. From there, I redesigned the system around a simpler lifecycle:
New request → review → request clarification if needed → ready to plan → convert into a task or project.
I created a clearer structure for how requests should be captured, reviewed, assigned, and moved into active work. I also helped define when something should remain a simple task versus when it should become a full project with multiple workstreams.
For creative work, I designed a more structured approval workflow that separated internal review from stakeholder review. This helped the team see whether a design was in progress, waiting, in peer review, with leadership, with the requestor, approved, or completed.
The System Built
The final system included:
A centralized marketing request intake folder
Clear intake statuses for new, reviewing, needs more information, ready to plan, canceled
A project workflow for active marketing work
A creative workflow with peer review, director review, requestor review, approval, and completion stages
Business unit folder visibility so stakeholders could see relevant work
Blueprint-based project setup for repeatable campaign and event work
Documentation for how requests should be triaged, converted, and managed
Reporting and dashboard concepts to improve visibility into active work and blocked items
The Outcome
The team gained a clearer process for managing marketing requests from intake through completion. Instead of relying on scattered updates and manual follow-up, the system created a single place to understand what was coming in, what needed more information, what was ready to plan, and what was actively being worked on.
The new structure also made it easier to identify blocked work, standardize approvals, and give stakeholders visibility without giving them unnecessary access to internal team management.
Why It Matters
This project was not just a software cleanup. It was an operations cleanup.
The value came from turning a messy request and approval process into a repeatable system that made work easier to manage, easier to report on, and easier for the team to trust.