3 Ways to organize an in-house creative team.

The purpose of an in-house creative team is to bring the brand to life.

Your point of view and values come to life in every interaction a user has with your product or communication. From organic content on social media to landing pages, emails and even support tickets, everything counts. 

Through strategy, words, design, and media, a creative team works to make each one of these interactions matter.

A creative team needs to be setup to empower professional development

There are many ways to set up an in-house creative team. In my years leading creative at Typeform, we tried three of them.

Continue reading to save time and money avoiding the mistakes we made 🙂

Option 1: The Agency Model

Typeform’s creative team was born to design and produce all of our communications.

We first adopted the most obvious configuration: working as a service team for others. We started operating as a small studio within the company. First come first served.

Typeform 2016: Our creative team operated as an agency. We were grouped by discipline.

The main benefit of a service team collaboration is that all team members are very aligned. They’re all aware of what’s going on within the team. 

BENEFIT 1: Team is aligned, output is consistent.

Because all work together, each project has many eyeballs on it. It’s easy for creatives with more expertise to be involved in most of the projects. Their involvement raises the general bar of the output. 

BENEFIT 2: Senior team members oversee most projects.

Team members working on a campaign.

There’s a downside. 

Collaboration with other teams can go downhill pretty fast. It definitely did for us. Working as a service team for a fast-paced growing company forces you to prioritize. 

The problem with prioritization is that most likely your creative team will not have the full context of each department and initiative, and it will become challenging to decide where to put focus. 

DISADVANTAGE 1: Lack of context to prioritize

This can (and most likely will) generate friction between teams, which will have to compete for resources. Besides the obvious negative implications, the truth is that projects of different nature shouldn't be forced to a sequential prioritization. 

What do you focus on first: designing an onboarding email sequence for your customers, or creating a landing page with Frequently Asked Questions for support? 

The truth is… you need both. 

In our case at Typeform, my team was a small group. We worked in a sequential way: one project after the other, and then another one… 

Working as a service team, especially in a fast-growth company, will soon turn your creative team into a bottleneck. And let me tell you this, no one will enjoy it: neither your stakeholders nor your team members. 

DISADVANTAGE 2: Your team will eventually become a bottleneck

This is exactly what happened after a few months of “proudly delivering shiny, first-in-class creative” ✨ 

Some months down the road, on top of our prioritization challenges, we were slowing down the company. And that didn’t look good.

Even having the same goals, sometimes team leads can seem to pull in different directions.

Option 2: The Distributed Model

You’ve probably heard about Spotify’s famous product team organization, and how they build several self-managed, cross-functional “squads”. 

Our product team gave this a try at Typeform, back in 2017. 

After some time working together, I noticed that some creatives found themselves more comfortable in certain areas. Emulating how the product team was working, we decided to embed each team member in a cross-functional team focused on a different area.

Marketing, Customer Success, and the Creative team joined forces to distribute members in teams around different stages of the customer journey.

2017: A cross-functional team with designers, creators, and support agents working together for the first time

With this new organization, all challenges of being a service team are solved. Prioritization is not a problem, teams are enabled to work in parallel. No bottlenecks and teams are self-managed. 

BENEFIT 1: Different projects can be executed at the same time.

With a distributed team, every stage of the funnel can have a creative working on it, so teams don’t necessarily need to compete for resources. In our case, each individual contributor owned a stage of the customer journey. This organizational style makes creatives feel empowered. 

BENEFIT 2: Creatives feel a sense of ownership that empowers them.

In distributed teams, communication and alignment are essential. In our case, because of a lack of alignment processes, very soon we started to lose consistency.

DISADVANTAGE 1: Lack of consistency in the outcome of the team as a whole.

Because fully distributed teams are most of the time focused on their small part of the cake, without solid communication rituals, each creative begins to work in their own way. It can be noticed only in little details first, but differences will increase over time. 

After a while of working with this setup, different parts of the customer journey started to feel a bit disconnected.

On top of that, the feeling of a team faded. Creative Team members that don’t work much together, can become too focused on their area of expertise. This situation can dissipate the sense of unity, and the brand direction might fade in everyday work.

DISADVANTAGE 2: Lack of one unifying brand vision

Yes, you might be more efficient and work faster, but our brand coherency could potentially suffer.

It’s the same old saying: you need to pick quality or quantity. 

Or maybe you don't?

Option 3: The Hybrid Model

For us at Typeform, the key was balance. It always is. 

We took the best of both models, and we moved into a hybrid system that worked well for years to come. 

2019: Creatives show their progress on weekly bases to stakeholders and C-level management.

Here’s how it works.

A bit distributed

You keep cross-functional teams around the customer journey with embedded designers and writers. These teams are in charge of delivering everyday content. Cross-functional collaboration brings a sense of ownership, focus, and deep subject matter knowledge to creative team members. It also delivers efficiency and reliability to the rest of the organization.

BENEFIT 1: Efficiency, focus, and ownership

A bit of an agency

At the core of the organization, there’s a small group of creatives of diverse skills that operates as a service team. It’s a small creative studio within the company focused on ideating and delivering one-off campaigns and high-impact projects. We used to call it “Creative Core”.

BENEFIT 2: Excellence, expertise, and aditional resources.

This small group of experts applies our creative process to execute complex campaigns and pieces of content. Think seasonal campaigns, new initiatives, or thought-leadership pieces.

The hybrid model of collaboration between creative and other teams at Typeform (2018–2020).

Here’s what I learned: a team can only be set up for success when team members are individually successful.

The key to the hybrid model’s success

The hybrid model worked cause it was built around the idea of individual professional growth for each creative individual. 

With the hybrid collaboration model, the creative team is set up to empower professional development. Our creatives grow and evolve along with the company. 

Juniors are paired with Seniors within Creative Core, enabling them to collaborate closely with more experienced folks. This collaboration between juniors and seniors works both ways and helps junior members level up fast. 

Seniors have the opportunity to apply their top-notch skills to one-off projects with an elevated level of complexity and high impact, while getting support from juniors for the more repetitive and simple but necessary work, avoiding unnecessary grind or burnout.

When juniors gain autonomy, they move to a cross-functional team, where they gain ownership and authority in a controlled environment. This new setup empowers them and continues to support their individual professional growth. 

Once they’re ready to become seniors, they come back to Creative Core again, where they train and inspire new generations.

The hybrid system allows every individual to find their spot within the team.

It took me 3 years to figure this out, but we kept operating with this setup because it just made sense. 

Creatives are happy, stakeholders are happy, and the brand feels coherent.