Presenter leading an internal review of a new creative process at Glantz, pointing to slides on a screen while team members listen around a conference table.

Built systems that outlasted seven years of growth, turnover, and market shifts

Role: Studio Operations

Scope: Founder transition, operational standardization, data-backed planning, sustained retention

Transformed founder-dependent delivery into sustainable studio operations. Teams made decisions, caught quality issues, and planned capacity without waiting for direction.

Impact at a Glance

  • 90% team retention within 2 years

    Career development frameworks and capability building sustained a 15-person studio through significant growth

  • 80% reduction in client revisions

    A 400-item quality standard gave teams consistent criteria to apply without waiting for oversight

  • 125+ annual clients

    Capacity planning and work routing sustained high-volume delivery without operational breakdown

  • Ricardo Lisboa - Creative Director, Glantz

    “She taught me to slow down and narrow in. To be more selective with my decisions rather than burning through every possible option.

    The processes she built for Glantz are still very much active, helping us honor and respect that flow.”

  • Keith Glantz - CCO & Founder, Glantz

    “Hired into possibly the hardest role at my organization. She didn't just maintain the quality we had; she genuinely elevated it. She fostered an incredibly positive and productive environment, consistently helping her direct reports grow their skills and take on new challenges.”

  • Woman with short brown hair and green shirt.

    Lisa Henthorn - Corporate Communications and Marketing Executive, Client

    “She expertly manages competing stakeholder opinions and encourages teams to step outside comfort zones.

    Though you may initially retain Jen for a short-term project, you'll quickly discover she's a long-term play."

  • Anne Weber - Account & Operations Leader, Glantz

    “She pushed the creative to be smarter and sharper. She pushed the culture to be more collaborative and more fun.

    We hired her to run the studio and then promoted her to the Leadership Team."

  • Brooklyn Guan - Web Developer, Glantz

    "She brought more structure to all aspects of work, and also a lot of fun to the office.

    She never runs out of creative ideas and passion for improving things."

The Problem

Glantz was winning larger, more complex projects, but had no systems to prevent bottlenecks, manage client expectations, or ensure consistent quality at scale.

None of it could be mandated. The systems had to earn adoption on their own.

What was breaking

  • No visibility into team capacity or utilization

  • Quality inconsistency across 125+ annual clients

  • Client revisions consuming 30%+ of project time

  • Reactive resourcing causing team burnout

  • Designers hitting skill ceilings with no clear path forward

  • Studio services falling behind what clients actually needed

Whiteboard covered with grouped sticky notes from a team retrospective, organized under headings such as ‘What We Did Well,’ ‘What We Could Have Done Better,’ and ‘How We Can Improve.’
Wall display of creative exploration work including printed design concepts, illustrations, brand visuals, handwritten notes, and sketches grouped around a theme labeled ‘Path/World of Glantz.’

The Decision That Mattered

How do you scale a studio without losing what made the work good?

What I Built

Work Routing and Studio Assignment

The mechanism:

  • Built intake model separating strategic from executional work, ensuring requests were scoped before resourcing began

  • Assigned work against three criteria reviewed every Friday: skill match for quality-critical deliverables, growth opportunity for designers ready to stretch, and new exposure for cross-pollination across client types

  • Padded timelines for growth assignments with senior support provided, either through direct CD oversight or paired senior designer, to build skill without sacrificing delivery

  • Surfaced overlapping team efforts through intake review, reducing duplicated work across the portfolio

Why it mattered:

  • Work went to the right person for the right reason

  • Expertise was protected where quality was non-negotiable

  • Growth was built into the week's resourcing plan, not left to chance

Adoption proof:

The routing system changed how work was staffed and why. Assignments were intentional, not just whoever was available. Partners engaged earlier and trusted the framing process before submitting, which meant the studio influenced direction at every level, including up.

Capacity Planning and Utilization Tracking

The mechanism:

  • Tracked weekly utilization across the 15-person team

  • Billable hours by project and non-billable time across internal systems and business development

  • Weekly operations review reported utilization and demand trends to studio leadership

Why it mattered:

  • Eliminated reactive resourcing

  • Leadership could see bottlenecks forming before they caused delays or burnout

  • Branding and concepting work was chronically under-budgeted because PMs could not see the non-linear time those phases actually require

  • Capacity planning gave that invisible work a number

Adoption proof:

Studio sustained operations through market shifts, adjusting capacity to demand without over or under-hiring. Timesheet accuracy improved significantly, reducing billing discrepancies across 125+ annual clients

Capacity dashboard with utilization heatmap, project budget status, and hiring triggers indicating sustained overcapacity and a resulting Junior Designer opening.

Quality Standards and Review Systems

The mechanism:

The checklist came from watching what broke in crits and client reviews. Rounds of feedback, design-to-dev inconsistencies, and scope creep from under-budgeted concepting cycles. It codified what experience already knew.

  • Built 400-item quality checklist across milestones

  • Accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA)

  • Browser and device compatibility

  • Content structure and hierarchy

  • Design system consistency

  • SEO and performance standards

Why it mattered:

  • Designers and developers caught issues before client review

  • Reduced late-stage rework and emergency fixes

Adoption proof:

80% reduction in client revisions. Checklist still in use, now maintained by team.

Accessibility launch checklist at 82 percent complete, showing most structure, interaction, language, and motion compliance items marked done, with multilingual language attributes still pending.

The systems created capacity. Developing people is what made them last.

UX Practice and Capability Building

The mechanism:

  • Web designers were skilled but not working at the level they were capable of

  • Introduced research, prototyping, and IA before visual design

  • Migrated to Figma with shared component libraries

  • Strategically hired senior UX talent to fill capability gaps

  • Established career paths for UX specialization

  • Introduced cross-discipline crit format where designers presented decisions first, then each person named one thing working and one thing not, nothing repeated, developers and PMs included

Why it mattered:

  • Studio expanded from visual-first web design to full-service UX

  • The gap was visible in how designers talked about their work: solutions before problems, layouts before flows

  • Teams could solve harder problems and command higher project value

  • The crit format changed how the team gave and received feedback across disciplines

  • Issues surfaced earlier and with more specificity because everyone in the room had a voice and a structure for using it

Adoption proof:

Designers who previously jumped to layouts led discovery and prototyping. By the time feedback reached me in the crit rotation, the room had flagged most issues already. One UX designer progressed to a new role: Creative Director leading Content Design.

Visual comparison of studio shift from visual-first web design to research-driven, full-service UX with shared systems, prototyping, and defined UX career paths.

Career Development and Retention

The mechanism:

  • Defined career progression criteria from IC to leadership

  • Skill development plans tied to project assignments

  • Quarterly growth conversations separate from performance reviews

  • Skills framework built using AI-assisted mapping across design, engineering, and project management

  • Built role-specific onboarding documents with a peer-contributed "what I wish I knew" section, making the why behind how people work visible from day one

  • Sourced multiple hires directly from AIGA Chicago and SheSays community networks

Why it mattered:

  • Team members saw a path forward

  • Studio could promote from within instead of always hiring externally

Adoption proof:

90% retention within two years. Team capability compounded rather than reset with turnover. Designers referred peers, stayed through market downturns, and grew into leadership. Retention was the outcome. Culture was the mechanism.

Glantz studio competency framework showing six skills across four levels, with a sample focus skills assessment card rating a senior designer on stakeholder management, systems thinking, and team leadership.

What Changed

  • Decision velocity increased: teams evaluated scope and estimated timelines without a leadership bottleneck

  • Studio expanded its service offer: UX strategy, IA, and research-informed design became core capabilities, not gaps

  • Quality became predictable: consistent work regardless of which team members were assigned

  • Hiring became strategic: resourcing decisions based on capacity data, not panic

  • Team capability compounded: 90% retention meant institutional knowledge grew instead of resetting

What Scaled Forward

  • Quality checklist: Maintained by team with quarterly updates

  • UX practice: component libraries, Figma standards, and career paths for UX specialization carried forward independently by the team

  • Capacity and routing models: adopted by leadership for hiring decisions and incoming work prioritization

  • Career frameworks: team leads operated independently making it part of review process

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