speaker-0: Welcome to the Creative Ops Compass podcast, your navigation system for turning creative chaos into strategic impact. My name is Jesse Krensky. I'm a creative operations consultant and the founder of InFocus Consulting. I help in-house creative teams streamline workflows, improve stakeholder relations, and elevate their role as strategic partners.
speaker-1: We're not widget makers, right? We're not just like cranking out things in a machine. The variable you have is this human. You need to understand the particulars of that human in order for the other pieces to work.
speaker-0: Today I'm talking with Shannon Duncan, Chief of Staff for Marketing at DoorDash. Shannon built DoorDash's creative operations from the ground up. She's navigated hyper growth, taught stakeholders to respect creative capacity, and proven that the best processes are built around people, not the other way around. Shannon and I spoke about why understanding your team matters more than implementing the perfect tool, how to make incremental changes stick when stakeholders resist, and why internal creative studios need to stop being treated as free resources. Shannon, thanks so much for joining me. I met you briefly at a ⁓ Creative Ops conference a couple months ago in LA. You were on a panel there. I loved what you had to say. I loved your perspective on Creative Ops. And I was so eager to have you on as soon as I met you. So I'm so glad to have you here today.
speaker-1: ⁓ Thank you for having me. This is exciting.
speaker-0: So you joined DoorDash in 2021, think, Walk me through what you inherited when you got there. What existed in terms of Creative Ops? What did you have to build from scratch?
speaker-1: Yes. Yeah, well, luckily I walked in knowing what to expect because ⁓ DoorDash just started their internal creative studio late 2020. So I knew that it was on this journey of building itself. So what I walked into was a team that was consisted of ⁓ some existing creatives, just kind of like folks, odds and ends of a full kind of internal creative studio slowly but surely hiring themselves. So I was hired in a year. where we're also hiring other business leads, other operational people just to help build that foundation because you can't really go too far if you're just a team full of creatives and then going, great, now make a studio, right? You have to build the foundation, which I think operations is at the core of. So I walked in with a fairly clean slate with folks who were eager to have me there, which is always comforting. It's, it's, when. when especially creative leaders, when when you have an ops person start and they value operations, they're like, ⁓ my God, you're welcome. Email is always like, ⁓ my God, finally someone has come to like make sense of whatever we're doing.
speaker-0: So that's a double-edged sword though, right? Because you have a clean slate, that's great, but how did you decide where to start? Because you can't do everything at once.
speaker-1: No, you certainly can't. I though I'm definitely a person who wanted to. I wanted to come in and be like, bippity boppity boop, I fixed everything. But the most important thing, and it was very much hammered into me in my onboarding, was just like, absorb what you can. We, you you hear all the adages like, you know, we're building the plane while we're flying it. It's like drinking from the fire hose. Like, insert whichever one may exist. That is what I was given when I started. Because DoorDash is a place that moves quickly and creates quickly, right? So I will use onboarding in air quotes in the sense that I started, had a couple of days of like, hey, here's how you log in. And then you're just jumping in and starting to figure things out. So for me though, where I started was just observing. So I'm the kind of person who's like, I don't care what kind of meeting this is. You're working on some banners. I'm just gonna sit. behind the scenes and shadow every single meeting that's happening with this. I want to understand how you guys are currently creating right now. I am doing one-on-ones with ⁓ everyone and their mom, like just meeting people, asking what it's like working there and just absorbing as much as I can. And then just forcing my way into meetings or spaces or Slack channels just to get details, right? So that was where I first started.
speaker-0: And were you focused mostly on those meetings with the creatives or did you also start trying to make the connections between them and the stakeholders? Because obviously the creative doesn't exist in a vacuum. You're responding to requests and briefs.
speaker-1: Well, originally I was more focused on like, who are the players? Who are the people who are in this studio on this team who I need to understand? So my focus was more so learning the people and how they ticked because then I could better understand how they will eventually work because jumping forward to understanding like, hey, how are you designer interacting with this, you know, marketing manager here? That's no good to me yet if I don't understand like, how this designer ticks, right? So my main focus in having those one-on-one meetings and just observing how people work is to understand them in context.
speaker-0: I'm glad you brought that up because a lot of creative ops leaders tend to lead first with tools, processes, structures, systems. And that's all, it's very important. There's no question about that. But I know that you lean more towards a more people-centric approach, right? What does it actually mean in practice for you? How does that impact how you work and how do you connect the sort of soft skill side of that to the structure that is essential in a creative operation? Yeah.
speaker-1: Well, when I think about where I came from, I started in project management. And ⁓ I also started at either small or independent agencies. So what's good about that is that there are no network-wide systems that you have to work with or ⁓ established processes therein. You really are figuring out how to work best. on the team you're part of because also there was such a variety of clients. So if I was working on Intel or Google or Reebok or whatever we had at the time, I had to shift the way I was working even as a project manager, which kind of then led itself to like creative resourcing a little bit and other processy things. I had to like shift based on the team I was on because the clients were so different. So I was already kind of like the only thing that is constant in that. is that I am dealing with a group of people who work here, right? So the variable that I had to play with was humans. I was lucky to have an experience at places where that was just natural and that was like the variable I had to work with. So when you then jump to something like a DoorDash, ⁓ especially at a time where it's growing and we're trying to establish this studio, like I was kind of like, great, I'm working with a variable that I know, people. And at the end of the day, and I say this to creative leads who are in managerial positions as well, you can want to make like the best work that you want to make. can, you know, if you want to make the best work, you have to think about the people who are making it. We're not widget makers, right? We're not just like cranking out things in a machine. The variable you have is this human. And so therefore you need to understand the particulars of that human in order for the other parts of the pieces to work. So if I have a ton of creatives, who for the life of them will never check email, then why on earth are we sending things in email versus utilizing Slack as the tool that works for us? You know what mean? Or if I'm having people who are of such problems with these Slack channels and how they're managed, why would I use that process in the same way because it's a process established? I need to understand who I'm working with in order to like start to build.
speaker-0: So along those lines, very frequently I've seen when a creative ops leader is building a foundational system from nothing, the technical side, the tools, the process, the systems, that tends to be, I would say, relatively easier part. And the harder part for a lot of these leaders is getting people to change how they work, to buy into these changes and embrace them. What's been your experience with that on the... change management side of creative ops.
speaker-1: Well, kind of going back to the people first essence of that, inside of being a people first ops leader, I am building trust. So I'm getting to know people, understanding how they work. And naturally, many of us creative ops folks end up being mama or papa bears to creatives. We end up being ⁓ the person that they vent to, et cetera. you're naturally building up that like, ⁓ this is someone I can trust to have my interests at heart. because they understand the things that are important to me. So in that regard with creatives, ⁓ I think the important part with change management, and this also applies to like the PMs that I work with and mentor, this applies to the producers and also the business leads I'm partnering with. If I've worked to establish that trust, then when I offer up a change, then it's kind of like, ⁓ well, this is coming from Shannon. someone who understands me, someone who understands the work I'm doing, someone who is like acknowledged and validated the things that are tricky or need to be fixed. So if she's saying that, this could be a good recommendation as far as a process change, let me listen. So that's one part of it. And the second most important part is like, I have never seen it be successful where people are like, hi, we're just gonna dump a huge, massive systems change, but then like figure it out and do it. No, it has to be slow and incremental. like one of the one thing that we live by at DoorDash, I love is one of our values is 1 % better every day, which is in its essence, like we want it's it's about not being perfect. It's like, hey, we don't have to wait to make a change till we know it's 100 % accurate or absolutely work. These small incremental shifts or changes move us in the right direction. Right. So for me, it's like, hey, if I need folks to start using the Slack channel analogy. Start paying attention to Slack channel. Let me change one thing that we do about this. Let's like change it so that we give updates every day on a Monday. Like let's do that every week and see if people start to like pick up on the rhythm. Great. Now let's do the next thing. And it's like a slow incremental change, which is definitely the kind of path we took in developing the studio over a few years where it's like, we were also responding to changes in business. So that was inevitable, but allowing certain processings to change bit by bit. I'm like, oh, this is now how we're running kickoffs. This is now how we're running internal reviews. This is now how we're managing timelines. It's allowing that slow adoption so that people get used to it and then can go on to the next change.
speaker-0: That also can set up another challenge where the people who are outside your team, the stakeholders, for instance, if they're not entirely clear on how to work with you, the process is, if you're iterating, which always is important, absolutely, it can be challenging sometimes for people who are outside the team to understand, what's the process now? And getting them on board with those changes, especially when they're incremental like that, that can be very challenging. How have you dealt with that?
speaker-1: Yeah, well, I think there are two sides of this in that there are changes that, there's a creative process, right, in which, let's say, 40 % of that process is visible to a partner and 60 % is not, right? So when I'm thinking of like incremental small changes on a creative process, I'm thinking about the ones that are more inwards towards the creative studio, right? And that's where I find the ones where sometimes it takes creative a little more to like... make a change where that's where I think those incremental 1 % changes are helpful. Now when you're talking about like bigger changes that affect the entire workflow such that you know folks like a marketing partner might be visible to it, those are definitely more tricky. There are definitely issues in which it's like I would say issues that have come up that I'm sure come up whenever you have big changes have to do with like either control like wait so where am I? Where am I now tapping in? Where am I now providing input? You've changed process A to B, but I need to still make sure this is on brief for our business. So how do I fit into that? To where that is, I mean, the biggest thing in that is collaboration and communication. It is, one, making sure that ⁓ any changes we want to implement to a process, are socializing first with either maybe a test group or a core group ⁓ or leadership or a combination thereof before then. publishing live and talking through live. we have ⁓ here, have like multiple different kinds of all hands, either with our marketing org or with individual audiences or teams, which are like good forums for that. But I found actually workshopping those changes with small test groups is actually been really helpful over time. We've done that before where it's like, hey, we want to do a big tier one priority zero kind of like project differently. we're doing one for winter holiday coming up. Let's actually on this one, treat it a little bit different and let's get alignment for everyone on board like, hey guys, here's our new RACI, here's our new order of operations for presentations, here's how we wanna treat this project, but we're all shaking hands that we are gonna try this out, see how it goes. Because at its core, the DoorDash values we have just don't apply to our creative studio, they apply to the entire organization, right? So our partners understand, if we're like, hey, we're trying to be 1 % better every day. People who work here inherently are buying into those values. So while sometimes it's kind of like, ⁓ it's a little scary, they understand because we've communicated it what we're trying to ladder back to.
speaker-0: I imagine your team has a lot of stakeholders that you have to work with, right? And I love what you said about how you socialize the changes before they're happening, get feedback, but it's gotta be the case where eventually a decision needs to be made about a process change. And inevitably, I'm sure not everybody is gonna love that, right? Especially when curious about with stakeholders who are not on board, how have you navigated that?
speaker-1: This where I think project management as a core function is like a linchpin of successful creative ops. And that when we come into a new process change, they are the people who like, no matter if you're still getting that feedback in ⁓ email versus tagging it on the Figma, they're gonna be the ones who like, as painful as it might be every time, tag it in the Figma guys. Thank you so much for this, put it in there. Thank you so much for this, direct it to the thing we discussed. And they are just... continuously reminding people of the process of the process of the process. And so have we introduced new things where it's like, hey, this isn't sticking? Yep. But then we investigate why isn't it sticking? And maybe it's like, hey, actually we realized we thought of something that was theoretically sound, but then when you put it in practice, it ain't it. It doesn't work. It's, you know, and so that's where we also have to be open to understand like the thing we proposed. actually isn't working. And the perfectionist in me hates that when it happens, but listen, that's on growth. That's on being 1 % better yourself. But that's also an acknowledgement. Like you can enforce something, you can try it out, and hey, everyone can do it, but you can still acknowledge it actually wasn't great and pivot. And I think the biggest thing we do is pivot quickly when it's not working. And we have to. But it's interesting, I'm reflecting, there are so many things if I'm like reflecting on my time here, because now I've been at DoorDash for four and a half years. And if I'm reflecting on like where we are now with like tooling or process or whatnot, I kind of go like, man, there's no way this would have ever existed in 2022. It was just not a world in which it can. Right. So it's like everyone is growing and progressing at the same at the same time. Right. And I think it makes me think of when we one thing we try to do was like very clearly articulate the creative. process down to detail and owners, because we were having a moment with partners where it was like, folks are kind of like, who owns this piece of the puzzle? And it really was for like really big campaigns. And there was a little bit of an ownership pool and like, who's the DRI, the directly responsible individual on certain things? And I remember we kept going through this process of like writing this and then like sharing it with like a smart core team of leadership and couple of stakeholders. but there's still being an issue, still being an issue and still being an issue of some points of it with like top leadership, right? And at one point I was kind of like, hey, actually let's cut it. Let's cut this process stock. Cause one, the creative process doesn't really change that much. Spoiler alert, but with the one I'm speaking about at DoorDash specifically, I was kind of like, I'm actually, let's not touch this anymore. Cause what I'm understanding right now, even though there was a desire ⁓ from the internal kind of studio leadership, like, we need to, we need to publish this process, publish it, publish it. And I'm like, actually, do we? Because all I'm getting is resistance, work keeps going. And right now there's a bigger thing here that needs to be solved that's beyond this document. That's clearly at a leadership level and disagreement about a couple of steps in here that like pushing to publish some detailed doc on process is not the time. There's something else afoot, right? And so it was also being able to acknowledge and to have those moments of, hey, actually. There's a thing I want to implement that now is not the time, so I'm just going to park it, was in that moment the right thing to do? So there's much to be said for something almost like we were diagnosing the wrong thing. You know what mean? We had to actually stop, park that, and let it ride for a minute to understand what the real issue was.
speaker-0: That can be very hard for a lot of leaders of any kind, but particularly creative ops leaders, I find because often they want to show that they're doing something. They want to prove their work. And that's really remarkable that you had something that leadership was saying, yes, get this out there and you held it back. I think that takes a lot of willpower to be able to say, even if there's value in here, it's not quite ready for prime time. Yeah. And let's hold it back. So not a question there. just think that's remarkable that you had the fortitude to do that. So good on you.
speaker-1: I caveat, I also can do that with the luxury of that time being here for like four years, establishing that trust, building some people. We're going to sit on this. It's fine to sit on it. It's OK. And it's it well, it's also we talk about showing your value. think there's so. It is very hard. And I say this, especially now as someone who's in the chief of staff role or like a good chunk of my job is soft influence. It is very hard.
speaker-0: You built that trust though.
speaker-1: for ops people to show the soft influence value sometimes. And so what we then end up doing is potentially compensating in process or things where it's like, actually the value I'm bringing is all of the in-between that you don't see that is leading to these decisions being made. But I think ⁓ you gotta kind of rely on the sum of all parts in that one. And just like over time, your influence is seen and felt and recognized. because suddenly people, and it goes with project management too in that sense of when things are working well, people sometimes go, well, do we need project management? You're like, it's working well because they exist.
speaker-0: Yes, when it works well, it's invisible. it's not working well, things fall apart. Yeah. Changing the subject a little bit. So DoorDash has gone through massive and very fast growth over the past few years. How have you been working to balance that need for the consistency of systems and processes with the fact that the company keeps changing? I imagine that also means the priorities are changing and the KPIs are changing. Yeah, stability versus the flexibility side. How do you manage that?
speaker-1: Yeah. Well, I think luckily from like an ops perspective, the the changes that are happening in an org don't really affect the foundations that are built, but maybe how we use them. So for DoorDash in my time here, really the thing that's been growing or is most like ⁓ obvious to me from an ops perspective is just the categories we operate in. Like people know DoorDash for restaurants, right? But now it's beyond that. We are in retail. grocery. ⁓ We are now like in like the restaurant reservation business. The types of work that can come into the system is increasing. So how do we adapt to a resource issue? How do we adapt to more like pressure timelines? Because now we do as marketing. Now there's just more work to be done that all can't then just be solved by hiring people because that's not always the way to go, right? So it's then like how do we apply systems of priority and something that's been ⁓ on our mind that we're working through right now is just like, how do we actually kind of create a currency for our studio? Because we've reached the point where now that's something because like internal studios can come up as, hey, that's a free resource. now that we have so many things, we're actually, no, we need to internally figure out how to acknowledge that that's not a free resource. We don't charge ourselves internally, but we have to like put some guardrails up there, right? So in order to protect time. So these are like the things we're exploring now. From an office perspective, AI is also one of them, right?
speaker-0: So along the lines of ⁓ protecting the team, because if you don't work on a chargeback model, then the team can kind of be abused. Well, there's two sides to it. One is that for some stakeholders, if there is not a charge for something, then the value of it seems lower. It's like wine bottles. If a more expensive wine bottle, we believe that it's a better bottle of wine when that's not necessarily the case. One area there that a lot of creative teams have to struggle with is if we don't charge that we look like we're not as valuable. But the other side is that if you don't charge for the work, then there aren't necessarily repercussions for endless rounds of reviews. How have you set up those guardrails so that the team doesn't get abused in that way?
speaker-1: Well, it's interesting because we're now the place where like the the handling of that is now being managed by our kind of like new creative ops lead and and business folks, but I'm still advising. I think it's funny to think about it because I would say there's a period of time where go back a couple of years, even if like a currency model ⁓ is necessary now, I can see absolutely not working then because our our focus was we are starting a new studio. We need to show that we're a resource. We need to influence the brand at all possible places and spaces and what we need to do. So we're just gonna hunker down and like, we're gonna do as many projects as humanly possible. But I would say now in the way that we're thinking about it, because there were moments where it was like, we are in that like abuse state, if you will, of well, we don't have money for an agency or we don't have money to do this, so the studio will do it. And you're like, no, that's not what we can do. That's not how it should work. We should be doing it because it's our expertise to do it. so, it's funny, the growth of the business and therefore the need to prioritize is actually a great thing in that it then kind of goes like. Well, now you have to think of us from a what is the expertise that we bring that you need on a campaign thing because now the currency that you have or the amount that you can work with us is now limited because there's so much to do and we all recognize there's a lot of work to do and it needs to be prioritized. So as far as like the thing that I know the team is working on right now in order to protect against that was when we kind of spoke earlier about like how do you process change with this, what was very smart in the sharing of this was like, hey, we're going to introduce this new model where you guys all have like a max capacity per team, right? And a max number of projects you do based on XYZ variables. This kind of like creative currency that they're creating. And it was like, but guess what? This is the first time we're instituting it guys, right? It was a vulnerable moment. It's like, it's the first time we're instituting it. Acknowledge that like we're trying this in Q4 and we're going to try it again in Q1 and we're going to keep iterating it. onward, right? And with that, we might use different forms, right? Or we're going to continue to noodle this based on your feedback, based on what we see going. And this is in general how much allocation you will have, but know that it might tweak because the business keeps tweaking. So we need to respond to it. And I think the critical change management in that is just being very honest and very vocal about, let me warn you now that here are the things that can happen. And also reminding them like, But you know what? This is better than before when we said we just couldn't do your project. You were like, why? And I was like, other things just came up, right? You now have, we are giving you information that's helpful to you so you can plan. Just know is going to have a little kink. So it's a combination of like reminding you what was and how that didn't work and how we came to be in this new world of creating some guardrails and currency, but also being very, very clear, consistently clear that this is a new process. You guys know this. we know this, we are ironing out the kinks, come along with this journey with us. And I see them and I am in some Slack channels where I see the new creative ops team like working through it. And hey, it's a little bumpy and that's fine. But it was an over communication I think was the solve there. And just being very clear that it's a new process and we're trying something. And then I think also we had a population of people who are also kind of fed up with the like, how is work being prioritized here and what are we determining? can go through the studio and can't. And usually those determinations were eventually just based on like, hey, leadership, tell us you want to do it. What are your trade-offs? And even trading off projects was difficult because there wasn't something to work with, right? There was like, we don't know how to trade off because you're just asking us to like connect with another person who may be on a tangential team to see if they can switch projects. So now we're just, giving people, we're giving or trying to create a process for people so that. planning trade-offs prioritization is much more clear to them because before it was a little murky.
speaker-0: I love that. That is very uncommon. Among other things that's great about that is that it also helps break down silos among your stakeholders because they don't necessarily care what other stakeholders' needs are. They just have their thing that's important. if you are facilitating those connections and conversations among your stakeholders, that's fantastic. It's an unusual setup, but I think it's something that more teams should absolutely consider.
speaker-1: We used to back in the day, depending on the audience you're working on and scoping for a quarter, hey, this is your Google Sheet to tell us what you need. Hey, this is your other Google Sheet. I was like, nope, we're gonna have them in one. Because if you're someone who's like me, and if I get a document, I'm clicking through all those tabs. So when you know that I'm saying we can only accept like five of your 15 projects, I want you to click across all these tabs and see that in a quarter we were asked to do 120. which is like impossible for the size team we have. But like people appropriately are focusing on their own lines of business, right? And so in so many ways I can like democratize this information so that everybody is aware of all the things that are happening at once. They are kind of like, ⁓ And granted, did that like light bulb moment happen for a lot of people? Not necessarily. But when it happens for a few, I feel vindicated. I feel seen.
speaker-0: Another thing that's great about that is that it is, addition to helping your stakeholders understand the limits of what your team is able to do and to respect that, you're helping connect dots outside your team, which frankly helps the business more because it helps us break down those silos. But also in order to do that, and this is something that not enough creative ops leaders are adept at or are comfortable with, being willing to step outside of their own sphere of creative. and understanding outside your team what real priorities are, not just what stakeholders say. Because everyone thinks that their thing is number one. In order to actually create and implement prioritization, you as a creative leader need to have a really clear understanding of what actually matters to the business.
speaker-1: 100%. And it's honestly, it was the eye opening thing for me leaving agencies and moving brand side is I was like, ⁓ my God, the client is so much bigger than my brain even imagine. You know, mean, like you're interacting with like, you know, a couple of people and then you go on the brand side, you're like, ⁓ my God, I feel like I want to retroactively apologize to like 15 people I've worked with because I didn't realize how the big machine that is happening behind the interactions that we're having. But the great thing that we do, and I'd encourage anyone if you're not getting this from your brand to go find it, is like, our CMO shares the priorities of the business with the entire marketing team annually. We do, at the beginning of the year, our first marketing all hands of the year, we talk about what are the priorities for each line of business, but also we'll just kind of share like, what is the TLDR? main priorities of the business. And DoorDash does this at an all-hands level as well where they're like, what's important things for us this year? Boom. And there's a lot of important things. But if you ever have that moment where you're kind of like, I am choosing between these following things, I'm like, last time I checked, I'm going back to the biz priorities and this is not one of them. So guys, sorry.
speaker-0: CMOs out there listen to that point because that is not common disseminating that information is so important and Sometimes it's guarded and sometimes just not shared for whatever reason and it is so important ⁓ for people who are doing the actual work to understand Why it matters and what issue we're focusing on Shannon I could talk with you and listen to you talk about the whole this stuff for hours. I've kept you long enough Thank you so much for sharing all this. ⁓ it's to hear
speaker-1: I can, I can yammer about this all day. I love, I love operations. So.
speaker-0: I have 20 more questions that occurred to me as we were talking. So I would love to have you on again. Thanks so much.
speaker-1: Thank you. This was fun. I appreciate it.
speaker-0: Let's recap the key insights from today's conversation. First, people come before process. Shannon's approach starts with building trust. And if you've established that trust, then when you offer up a change, people are more likely to listen. They think, this is coming from someone who understands me. That's why her first priority when she joined DoorDash wasn't implementing tools or documenting workflows. It was getting to know the creatives, the stakeholders, and the leaders. Build trust first. Then you can build systems that people will actually use. Second, small change beats big reveals. Shannon lives by DoorDash's value of being 1 % better every day. That means not waiting until a process is perfect to roll it out. Make one small change, see if it sticks, then build on that. And when something doesn't work, acknowledge it, figure out why it didn't work, and pivot. Building trust with your team and your stakeholders means they'll follow you through those iterations. because they know you're solving real problems, not just imposing systems for the sake of systems. And third, protect your team's capacity. Shannon's team hit a breaking point because they were treated as a free resource. That's the abuse state she talked about, and it undermines everything and everyone. In the creative currency model she talked about, each stakeholder group gets a capacity allocation per quarter. If they want more, they can trade off against their own priorities or negotiate with another team. It might not be easy. but it'll help stakeholders prioritize. Leadership will need to support it, but if you make the case clearly, it's not a hard sell. If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe and leave a comment. Let me know what creative ops challenges you're facing, what topics would help your team work better, and if you work with in-house teams, whether you're an agency partner, a stakeholder, or a freelancer, I'd love to hear your perspective too. Reach out through the contact info in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
speaker-1: We're not widget makers, right? We're not just like cranking out things in a machine. The variable you have is this human. You need to understand the particulars of that human in order for the other pieces to work.
speaker-0: Today I'm talking with Shannon Duncan, Chief of Staff for Marketing at DoorDash. Shannon built DoorDash's creative operations from the ground up. She's navigated hyper growth, taught stakeholders to respect creative capacity, and proven that the best processes are built around people, not the other way around. Shannon and I spoke about why understanding your team matters more than implementing the perfect tool, how to make incremental changes stick when stakeholders resist, and why internal creative studios need to stop being treated as free resources. Shannon, thanks so much for joining me. I met you briefly at a ⁓ Creative Ops conference a couple months ago in LA. You were on a panel there. I loved what you had to say. I loved your perspective on Creative Ops. And I was so eager to have you on as soon as I met you. So I'm so glad to have you here today.
speaker-1: ⁓ Thank you for having me. This is exciting.
speaker-0: So you joined DoorDash in 2021, think, Walk me through what you inherited when you got there. What existed in terms of Creative Ops? What did you have to build from scratch?
speaker-1: Yes. Yeah, well, luckily I walked in knowing what to expect because ⁓ DoorDash just started their internal creative studio late 2020. So I knew that it was on this journey of building itself. So what I walked into was a team that was consisted of ⁓ some existing creatives, just kind of like folks, odds and ends of a full kind of internal creative studio slowly but surely hiring themselves. So I was hired in a year. where we're also hiring other business leads, other operational people just to help build that foundation because you can't really go too far if you're just a team full of creatives and then going, great, now make a studio, right? You have to build the foundation, which I think operations is at the core of. So I walked in with a fairly clean slate with folks who were eager to have me there, which is always comforting. It's, it's, when. when especially creative leaders, when when you have an ops person start and they value operations, they're like, ⁓ my God, you're welcome. Email is always like, ⁓ my God, finally someone has come to like make sense of whatever we're doing.
speaker-0: So that's a double-edged sword though, right? Because you have a clean slate, that's great, but how did you decide where to start? Because you can't do everything at once.
speaker-1: No, you certainly can't. I though I'm definitely a person who wanted to. I wanted to come in and be like, bippity boppity boop, I fixed everything. But the most important thing, and it was very much hammered into me in my onboarding, was just like, absorb what you can. We, you you hear all the adages like, you know, we're building the plane while we're flying it. It's like drinking from the fire hose. Like, insert whichever one may exist. That is what I was given when I started. Because DoorDash is a place that moves quickly and creates quickly, right? So I will use onboarding in air quotes in the sense that I started, had a couple of days of like, hey, here's how you log in. And then you're just jumping in and starting to figure things out. So for me though, where I started was just observing. So I'm the kind of person who's like, I don't care what kind of meeting this is. You're working on some banners. I'm just gonna sit. behind the scenes and shadow every single meeting that's happening with this. I want to understand how you guys are currently creating right now. I am doing one-on-ones with ⁓ everyone and their mom, like just meeting people, asking what it's like working there and just absorbing as much as I can. And then just forcing my way into meetings or spaces or Slack channels just to get details, right? So that was where I first started.
speaker-0: And were you focused mostly on those meetings with the creatives or did you also start trying to make the connections between them and the stakeholders? Because obviously the creative doesn't exist in a vacuum. You're responding to requests and briefs.
speaker-1: Well, originally I was more focused on like, who are the players? Who are the people who are in this studio on this team who I need to understand? So my focus was more so learning the people and how they ticked because then I could better understand how they will eventually work because jumping forward to understanding like, hey, how are you designer interacting with this, you know, marketing manager here? That's no good to me yet if I don't understand like, how this designer ticks, right? So my main focus in having those one-on-one meetings and just observing how people work is to understand them in context.
speaker-0: I'm glad you brought that up because a lot of creative ops leaders tend to lead first with tools, processes, structures, systems. And that's all, it's very important. There's no question about that. But I know that you lean more towards a more people-centric approach, right? What does it actually mean in practice for you? How does that impact how you work and how do you connect the sort of soft skill side of that to the structure that is essential in a creative operation? Yeah.
speaker-1: Well, when I think about where I came from, I started in project management. And ⁓ I also started at either small or independent agencies. So what's good about that is that there are no network-wide systems that you have to work with or ⁓ established processes therein. You really are figuring out how to work best. on the team you're part of because also there was such a variety of clients. So if I was working on Intel or Google or Reebok or whatever we had at the time, I had to shift the way I was working even as a project manager, which kind of then led itself to like creative resourcing a little bit and other processy things. I had to like shift based on the team I was on because the clients were so different. So I was already kind of like the only thing that is constant in that. is that I am dealing with a group of people who work here, right? So the variable that I had to play with was humans. I was lucky to have an experience at places where that was just natural and that was like the variable I had to work with. So when you then jump to something like a DoorDash, ⁓ especially at a time where it's growing and we're trying to establish this studio, like I was kind of like, great, I'm working with a variable that I know, people. And at the end of the day, and I say this to creative leads who are in managerial positions as well, you can want to make like the best work that you want to make. can, you know, if you want to make the best work, you have to think about the people who are making it. We're not widget makers, right? We're not just like cranking out things in a machine. The variable you have is this human. And so therefore you need to understand the particulars of that human in order for the other parts of the pieces to work. So if I have a ton of creatives, who for the life of them will never check email, then why on earth are we sending things in email versus utilizing Slack as the tool that works for us? You know what mean? Or if I'm having people who are of such problems with these Slack channels and how they're managed, why would I use that process in the same way because it's a process established? I need to understand who I'm working with in order to like start to build.
speaker-0: So along those lines, very frequently I've seen when a creative ops leader is building a foundational system from nothing, the technical side, the tools, the process, the systems, that tends to be, I would say, relatively easier part. And the harder part for a lot of these leaders is getting people to change how they work, to buy into these changes and embrace them. What's been your experience with that on the... change management side of creative ops.
speaker-1: Well, kind of going back to the people first essence of that, inside of being a people first ops leader, I am building trust. So I'm getting to know people, understanding how they work. And naturally, many of us creative ops folks end up being mama or papa bears to creatives. We end up being ⁓ the person that they vent to, et cetera. you're naturally building up that like, ⁓ this is someone I can trust to have my interests at heart. because they understand the things that are important to me. So in that regard with creatives, ⁓ I think the important part with change management, and this also applies to like the PMs that I work with and mentor, this applies to the producers and also the business leads I'm partnering with. If I've worked to establish that trust, then when I offer up a change, then it's kind of like, ⁓ well, this is coming from Shannon. someone who understands me, someone who understands the work I'm doing, someone who is like acknowledged and validated the things that are tricky or need to be fixed. So if she's saying that, this could be a good recommendation as far as a process change, let me listen. So that's one part of it. And the second most important part is like, I have never seen it be successful where people are like, hi, we're just gonna dump a huge, massive systems change, but then like figure it out and do it. No, it has to be slow and incremental. like one of the one thing that we live by at DoorDash, I love is one of our values is 1 % better every day, which is in its essence, like we want it's it's about not being perfect. It's like, hey, we don't have to wait to make a change till we know it's 100 % accurate or absolutely work. These small incremental shifts or changes move us in the right direction. Right. So for me, it's like, hey, if I need folks to start using the Slack channel analogy. Start paying attention to Slack channel. Let me change one thing that we do about this. Let's like change it so that we give updates every day on a Monday. Like let's do that every week and see if people start to like pick up on the rhythm. Great. Now let's do the next thing. And it's like a slow incremental change, which is definitely the kind of path we took in developing the studio over a few years where it's like, we were also responding to changes in business. So that was inevitable, but allowing certain processings to change bit by bit. I'm like, oh, this is now how we're running kickoffs. This is now how we're running internal reviews. This is now how we're managing timelines. It's allowing that slow adoption so that people get used to it and then can go on to the next change.
speaker-0: That also can set up another challenge where the people who are outside your team, the stakeholders, for instance, if they're not entirely clear on how to work with you, the process is, if you're iterating, which always is important, absolutely, it can be challenging sometimes for people who are outside the team to understand, what's the process now? And getting them on board with those changes, especially when they're incremental like that, that can be very challenging. How have you dealt with that?
speaker-1: Yeah, well, I think there are two sides of this in that there are changes that, there's a creative process, right, in which, let's say, 40 % of that process is visible to a partner and 60 % is not, right? So when I'm thinking of like incremental small changes on a creative process, I'm thinking about the ones that are more inwards towards the creative studio, right? And that's where I find the ones where sometimes it takes creative a little more to like... make a change where that's where I think those incremental 1 % changes are helpful. Now when you're talking about like bigger changes that affect the entire workflow such that you know folks like a marketing partner might be visible to it, those are definitely more tricky. There are definitely issues in which it's like I would say issues that have come up that I'm sure come up whenever you have big changes have to do with like either control like wait so where am I? Where am I now tapping in? Where am I now providing input? You've changed process A to B, but I need to still make sure this is on brief for our business. So how do I fit into that? To where that is, I mean, the biggest thing in that is collaboration and communication. It is, one, making sure that ⁓ any changes we want to implement to a process, are socializing first with either maybe a test group or a core group ⁓ or leadership or a combination thereof before then. publishing live and talking through live. we have ⁓ here, have like multiple different kinds of all hands, either with our marketing org or with individual audiences or teams, which are like good forums for that. But I found actually workshopping those changes with small test groups is actually been really helpful over time. We've done that before where it's like, hey, we want to do a big tier one priority zero kind of like project differently. we're doing one for winter holiday coming up. Let's actually on this one, treat it a little bit different and let's get alignment for everyone on board like, hey guys, here's our new RACI, here's our new order of operations for presentations, here's how we wanna treat this project, but we're all shaking hands that we are gonna try this out, see how it goes. Because at its core, the DoorDash values we have just don't apply to our creative studio, they apply to the entire organization, right? So our partners understand, if we're like, hey, we're trying to be 1 % better every day. People who work here inherently are buying into those values. So while sometimes it's kind of like, ⁓ it's a little scary, they understand because we've communicated it what we're trying to ladder back to.
speaker-0: I imagine your team has a lot of stakeholders that you have to work with, right? And I love what you said about how you socialize the changes before they're happening, get feedback, but it's gotta be the case where eventually a decision needs to be made about a process change. And inevitably, I'm sure not everybody is gonna love that, right? Especially when curious about with stakeholders who are not on board, how have you navigated that?
speaker-1: This where I think project management as a core function is like a linchpin of successful creative ops. And that when we come into a new process change, they are the people who like, no matter if you're still getting that feedback in ⁓ email versus tagging it on the Figma, they're gonna be the ones who like, as painful as it might be every time, tag it in the Figma guys. Thank you so much for this, put it in there. Thank you so much for this, direct it to the thing we discussed. And they are just... continuously reminding people of the process of the process of the process. And so have we introduced new things where it's like, hey, this isn't sticking? Yep. But then we investigate why isn't it sticking? And maybe it's like, hey, actually we realized we thought of something that was theoretically sound, but then when you put it in practice, it ain't it. It doesn't work. It's, you know, and so that's where we also have to be open to understand like the thing we proposed. actually isn't working. And the perfectionist in me hates that when it happens, but listen, that's on growth. That's on being 1 % better yourself. But that's also an acknowledgement. Like you can enforce something, you can try it out, and hey, everyone can do it, but you can still acknowledge it actually wasn't great and pivot. And I think the biggest thing we do is pivot quickly when it's not working. And we have to. But it's interesting, I'm reflecting, there are so many things if I'm like reflecting on my time here, because now I've been at DoorDash for four and a half years. And if I'm reflecting on like where we are now with like tooling or process or whatnot, I kind of go like, man, there's no way this would have ever existed in 2022. It was just not a world in which it can. Right. So it's like everyone is growing and progressing at the same at the same time. Right. And I think it makes me think of when we one thing we try to do was like very clearly articulate the creative. process down to detail and owners, because we were having a moment with partners where it was like, folks are kind of like, who owns this piece of the puzzle? And it really was for like really big campaigns. And there was a little bit of an ownership pool and like, who's the DRI, the directly responsible individual on certain things? And I remember we kept going through this process of like writing this and then like sharing it with like a smart core team of leadership and couple of stakeholders. but there's still being an issue, still being an issue and still being an issue of some points of it with like top leadership, right? And at one point I was kind of like, hey, actually let's cut it. Let's cut this process stock. Cause one, the creative process doesn't really change that much. Spoiler alert, but with the one I'm speaking about at DoorDash specifically, I was kind of like, I'm actually, let's not touch this anymore. Cause what I'm understanding right now, even though there was a desire ⁓ from the internal kind of studio leadership, like, we need to, we need to publish this process, publish it, publish it. And I'm like, actually, do we? Because all I'm getting is resistance, work keeps going. And right now there's a bigger thing here that needs to be solved that's beyond this document. That's clearly at a leadership level and disagreement about a couple of steps in here that like pushing to publish some detailed doc on process is not the time. There's something else afoot, right? And so it was also being able to acknowledge and to have those moments of, hey, actually. There's a thing I want to implement that now is not the time, so I'm just going to park it, was in that moment the right thing to do? So there's much to be said for something almost like we were diagnosing the wrong thing. You know what mean? We had to actually stop, park that, and let it ride for a minute to understand what the real issue was.
speaker-0: That can be very hard for a lot of leaders of any kind, but particularly creative ops leaders, I find because often they want to show that they're doing something. They want to prove their work. And that's really remarkable that you had something that leadership was saying, yes, get this out there and you held it back. I think that takes a lot of willpower to be able to say, even if there's value in here, it's not quite ready for prime time. Yeah. And let's hold it back. So not a question there. just think that's remarkable that you had the fortitude to do that. So good on you.
speaker-1: I caveat, I also can do that with the luxury of that time being here for like four years, establishing that trust, building some people. We're going to sit on this. It's fine to sit on it. It's OK. And it's it well, it's also we talk about showing your value. think there's so. It is very hard. And I say this, especially now as someone who's in the chief of staff role or like a good chunk of my job is soft influence. It is very hard.
speaker-0: You built that trust though.
speaker-1: for ops people to show the soft influence value sometimes. And so what we then end up doing is potentially compensating in process or things where it's like, actually the value I'm bringing is all of the in-between that you don't see that is leading to these decisions being made. But I think ⁓ you gotta kind of rely on the sum of all parts in that one. And just like over time, your influence is seen and felt and recognized. because suddenly people, and it goes with project management too in that sense of when things are working well, people sometimes go, well, do we need project management? You're like, it's working well because they exist.
speaker-0: Yes, when it works well, it's invisible. it's not working well, things fall apart. Yeah. Changing the subject a little bit. So DoorDash has gone through massive and very fast growth over the past few years. How have you been working to balance that need for the consistency of systems and processes with the fact that the company keeps changing? I imagine that also means the priorities are changing and the KPIs are changing. Yeah, stability versus the flexibility side. How do you manage that?
speaker-1: Yeah. Well, I think luckily from like an ops perspective, the the changes that are happening in an org don't really affect the foundations that are built, but maybe how we use them. So for DoorDash in my time here, really the thing that's been growing or is most like ⁓ obvious to me from an ops perspective is just the categories we operate in. Like people know DoorDash for restaurants, right? But now it's beyond that. We are in retail. grocery. ⁓ We are now like in like the restaurant reservation business. The types of work that can come into the system is increasing. So how do we adapt to a resource issue? How do we adapt to more like pressure timelines? Because now we do as marketing. Now there's just more work to be done that all can't then just be solved by hiring people because that's not always the way to go, right? So it's then like how do we apply systems of priority and something that's been ⁓ on our mind that we're working through right now is just like, how do we actually kind of create a currency for our studio? Because we've reached the point where now that's something because like internal studios can come up as, hey, that's a free resource. now that we have so many things, we're actually, no, we need to internally figure out how to acknowledge that that's not a free resource. We don't charge ourselves internally, but we have to like put some guardrails up there, right? So in order to protect time. So these are like the things we're exploring now. From an office perspective, AI is also one of them, right?
speaker-0: So along the lines of ⁓ protecting the team, because if you don't work on a chargeback model, then the team can kind of be abused. Well, there's two sides to it. One is that for some stakeholders, if there is not a charge for something, then the value of it seems lower. It's like wine bottles. If a more expensive wine bottle, we believe that it's a better bottle of wine when that's not necessarily the case. One area there that a lot of creative teams have to struggle with is if we don't charge that we look like we're not as valuable. But the other side is that if you don't charge for the work, then there aren't necessarily repercussions for endless rounds of reviews. How have you set up those guardrails so that the team doesn't get abused in that way?
speaker-1: Well, it's interesting because we're now the place where like the the handling of that is now being managed by our kind of like new creative ops lead and and business folks, but I'm still advising. I think it's funny to think about it because I would say there's a period of time where go back a couple of years, even if like a currency model ⁓ is necessary now, I can see absolutely not working then because our our focus was we are starting a new studio. We need to show that we're a resource. We need to influence the brand at all possible places and spaces and what we need to do. So we're just gonna hunker down and like, we're gonna do as many projects as humanly possible. But I would say now in the way that we're thinking about it, because there were moments where it was like, we are in that like abuse state, if you will, of well, we don't have money for an agency or we don't have money to do this, so the studio will do it. And you're like, no, that's not what we can do. That's not how it should work. We should be doing it because it's our expertise to do it. so, it's funny, the growth of the business and therefore the need to prioritize is actually a great thing in that it then kind of goes like. Well, now you have to think of us from a what is the expertise that we bring that you need on a campaign thing because now the currency that you have or the amount that you can work with us is now limited because there's so much to do and we all recognize there's a lot of work to do and it needs to be prioritized. So as far as like the thing that I know the team is working on right now in order to protect against that was when we kind of spoke earlier about like how do you process change with this, what was very smart in the sharing of this was like, hey, we're going to introduce this new model where you guys all have like a max capacity per team, right? And a max number of projects you do based on XYZ variables. This kind of like creative currency that they're creating. And it was like, but guess what? This is the first time we're instituting it guys, right? It was a vulnerable moment. It's like, it's the first time we're instituting it. Acknowledge that like we're trying this in Q4 and we're going to try it again in Q1 and we're going to keep iterating it. onward, right? And with that, we might use different forms, right? Or we're going to continue to noodle this based on your feedback, based on what we see going. And this is in general how much allocation you will have, but know that it might tweak because the business keeps tweaking. So we need to respond to it. And I think the critical change management in that is just being very honest and very vocal about, let me warn you now that here are the things that can happen. And also reminding them like, But you know what? This is better than before when we said we just couldn't do your project. You were like, why? And I was like, other things just came up, right? You now have, we are giving you information that's helpful to you so you can plan. Just know is going to have a little kink. So it's a combination of like reminding you what was and how that didn't work and how we came to be in this new world of creating some guardrails and currency, but also being very, very clear, consistently clear that this is a new process. You guys know this. we know this, we are ironing out the kinks, come along with this journey with us. And I see them and I am in some Slack channels where I see the new creative ops team like working through it. And hey, it's a little bumpy and that's fine. But it was an over communication I think was the solve there. And just being very clear that it's a new process and we're trying something. And then I think also we had a population of people who are also kind of fed up with the like, how is work being prioritized here and what are we determining? can go through the studio and can't. And usually those determinations were eventually just based on like, hey, leadership, tell us you want to do it. What are your trade-offs? And even trading off projects was difficult because there wasn't something to work with, right? There was like, we don't know how to trade off because you're just asking us to like connect with another person who may be on a tangential team to see if they can switch projects. So now we're just, giving people, we're giving or trying to create a process for people so that. planning trade-offs prioritization is much more clear to them because before it was a little murky.
speaker-0: I love that. That is very uncommon. Among other things that's great about that is that it also helps break down silos among your stakeholders because they don't necessarily care what other stakeholders' needs are. They just have their thing that's important. if you are facilitating those connections and conversations among your stakeholders, that's fantastic. It's an unusual setup, but I think it's something that more teams should absolutely consider.
speaker-1: We used to back in the day, depending on the audience you're working on and scoping for a quarter, hey, this is your Google Sheet to tell us what you need. Hey, this is your other Google Sheet. I was like, nope, we're gonna have them in one. Because if you're someone who's like me, and if I get a document, I'm clicking through all those tabs. So when you know that I'm saying we can only accept like five of your 15 projects, I want you to click across all these tabs and see that in a quarter we were asked to do 120. which is like impossible for the size team we have. But like people appropriately are focusing on their own lines of business, right? And so in so many ways I can like democratize this information so that everybody is aware of all the things that are happening at once. They are kind of like, ⁓ And granted, did that like light bulb moment happen for a lot of people? Not necessarily. But when it happens for a few, I feel vindicated. I feel seen.
speaker-0: Another thing that's great about that is that it is, addition to helping your stakeholders understand the limits of what your team is able to do and to respect that, you're helping connect dots outside your team, which frankly helps the business more because it helps us break down those silos. But also in order to do that, and this is something that not enough creative ops leaders are adept at or are comfortable with, being willing to step outside of their own sphere of creative. and understanding outside your team what real priorities are, not just what stakeholders say. Because everyone thinks that their thing is number one. In order to actually create and implement prioritization, you as a creative leader need to have a really clear understanding of what actually matters to the business.
speaker-1: 100%. And it's honestly, it was the eye opening thing for me leaving agencies and moving brand side is I was like, ⁓ my God, the client is so much bigger than my brain even imagine. You know, mean, like you're interacting with like, you know, a couple of people and then you go on the brand side, you're like, ⁓ my God, I feel like I want to retroactively apologize to like 15 people I've worked with because I didn't realize how the big machine that is happening behind the interactions that we're having. But the great thing that we do, and I'd encourage anyone if you're not getting this from your brand to go find it, is like, our CMO shares the priorities of the business with the entire marketing team annually. We do, at the beginning of the year, our first marketing all hands of the year, we talk about what are the priorities for each line of business, but also we'll just kind of share like, what is the TLDR? main priorities of the business. And DoorDash does this at an all-hands level as well where they're like, what's important things for us this year? Boom. And there's a lot of important things. But if you ever have that moment where you're kind of like, I am choosing between these following things, I'm like, last time I checked, I'm going back to the biz priorities and this is not one of them. So guys, sorry.
speaker-0: CMOs out there listen to that point because that is not common disseminating that information is so important and Sometimes it's guarded and sometimes just not shared for whatever reason and it is so important ⁓ for people who are doing the actual work to understand Why it matters and what issue we're focusing on Shannon I could talk with you and listen to you talk about the whole this stuff for hours. I've kept you long enough Thank you so much for sharing all this. ⁓ it's to hear
speaker-1: I can, I can yammer about this all day. I love, I love operations. So.
speaker-0: I have 20 more questions that occurred to me as we were talking. So I would love to have you on again. Thanks so much.
speaker-1: Thank you. This was fun. I appreciate it.
speaker-0: Let's recap the key insights from today's conversation. First, people come before process. Shannon's approach starts with building trust. And if you've established that trust, then when you offer up a change, people are more likely to listen. They think, this is coming from someone who understands me. That's why her first priority when she joined DoorDash wasn't implementing tools or documenting workflows. It was getting to know the creatives, the stakeholders, and the leaders. Build trust first. Then you can build systems that people will actually use. Second, small change beats big reveals. Shannon lives by DoorDash's value of being 1 % better every day. That means not waiting until a process is perfect to roll it out. Make one small change, see if it sticks, then build on that. And when something doesn't work, acknowledge it, figure out why it didn't work, and pivot. Building trust with your team and your stakeholders means they'll follow you through those iterations. because they know you're solving real problems, not just imposing systems for the sake of systems. And third, protect your team's capacity. Shannon's team hit a breaking point because they were treated as a free resource. That's the abuse state she talked about, and it undermines everything and everyone. In the creative currency model she talked about, each stakeholder group gets a capacity allocation per quarter. If they want more, they can trade off against their own priorities or negotiate with another team. It might not be easy. but it'll help stakeholders prioritize. Leadership will need to support it, but if you make the case clearly, it's not a hard sell. If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe and leave a comment. Let me know what creative ops challenges you're facing, what topics would help your team work better, and if you work with in-house teams, whether you're an agency partner, a stakeholder, or a freelancer, I'd love to hear your perspective too. Reach out through the contact info in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
