Specifically: teams, brands, and creative organizations, the kind that keep producing great work long after the initial push. I've been doing some version of this for 25 years, and my honest take is that the creative leader's job isn't to be the most talented person in the room. It's to make the room talented.
I started as a designer. Moved into creative direction at agencies where I learned what good looks like under pressure. Google, National Geographic, the Department of Defense: clients that expected a lot and got it. Won some awards. Pitched and won new business. Figured out that I liked building things as much as making things.
Then I left the agency world to join the leadership team building Copper Giants, Liberty Mutual's in-house creative agency. I came in when the department was about eight people. I helped restructure it, grew the team to sixteen, and helped set up the model that let us produce agency-quality work from inside the brand. The outcomes: $3.5M in annual savings, unaided brand awareness that grew from 17% to 30%.
Now I run branding and creative at Toast, a company that went from scrappy startup energy to a $20B+ IPO. The brand had to grow up fast without losing what made it feel like Toast. That's the job I love: keeping the craft honest while the business scales.
I care about the work being genuinely good. Not good-for-a-company-our-size, not good-given-the-timeline. Data sharpens that judgment, it doesn't replace it. And I believe in mentorship over micromanagement, because it's the only thing that actually scales creative quality.
