Case Study — Process & Operating Model

Ads Manager's First Growth Team Operating Model

Role

Content Design Lead

Skills

Process design · Experimentation strategy · Design/engineering collaboration

Context

Ads Manager had just created its first dedicated Growth team, but there was no established process for prioritizing and executing the large number of experiments the team needed to run.

Approach

I designed a collaboration model defining prioritization, timelines, engineering effort estimates, and design responsibilities. The process grounded experiment selection in customer pain points and created predictable planning between design and engineering.

Key insight

A new growth team's bottleneck usually isn't ideas — it's coordination. Building the operating model first turned a backlog of good ideas into a repeatable execution engine, instead of a team that could only move as fast as its next ad hoc planning conversation.

Key decisions

Defined prioritization criteria grounded in customer pain points rather than internal opinion.
Set shared timelines and engineering effort estimates so design and engineering could plan predictably together.
Clarified design responsibilities across the full experiment pipeline, end to end.

Who I influenced

Design and engineering partners

Established a shared, repeatable rhythm for experiment planning and execution across both functions.

Outcome

The team executed roughly 4x the number of experiments required to meet planning goals.
Leadership attributed substantial advertiser value to the initiative.
The team gained a repeatable experimentation process, not just a one-time result.