Gesa Credit Union | 2020 to 2025
Building an in-house creative operating system
A regulated financial institution's in-house creative team had outgrown the way its work got done. We built the operating system it now runs on.
- Role
- AVP, Brand Experience
- Team
- Built highly collaborative team through reorganization.
- Environment
- Regulated financial institution, $6.25B in assets
Problem
When I arrived, the in-house marketing team faced four operational gaps.
- Asset access. Files lived on individual machines and were hard for others to reach.
- Quality control. Consistency was hard to hold across a distributed team.
- Intake. Demand was high, and requests were handled as one-offs.
- Vendor direction. Outside partners worked without consistent design direction.
System
Instead of buying an off-the-shelf platform, the team built a system tailored to how it worked.
- Moved production from Adobe to Figma for design and asset export.
- Made Figma the project-management layer, with boards for projects, campaigns, card designs, annual reports, and brand guidelines.
- Used FigJam as the bridge between project managers and creative, and for standups and structured ideation.
- Defined roles and responsibilities, trained the team, and onboarded new hires directly into the system.
- Commissioned and approved a design system from an external UX firm, then made it the standard for the team and its vendors.
Result
- The team moved from individual contributors to a collaborative team.
- One-off requests gave way to a shared, structured workflow.
- The team absorbed growing volume without bottlenecks.
- Creative turnaround dropped by an estimated 35%.
- Project managers worked inside the same platform as creative.
Durability
After I left, the system kept running and is still being refined. The team, Figma as its production and project-management tool, the collaborative culture, and the brand and website all continued.
That is the point of the work. A system that depends on the person who built it isn't finished.
Next case study
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Let's talk.
If this looks like the problem your team is facing, let's talk about the system behind it.