When I was brought in, eBay Enterprise had already decided to shut the affiliate advertising and creative production department down. Most of the staff had been let go, the unit wasn't profitable, and the output across 30+ mid-market and enterprise clients had drifted into inconsistency. Leadership asked me a single question: can we save this? I said yes we can.

That became the assignment — not to optimize a working operation, but to rebuild one from the ground up while the business was still deciding whether it was worth keeping.

The first move was diagnostic. I spent time inside the problem rather than above it, looking at the actual work, the actual breakdowns, and the actual people still standing. Most of what had been framed as a creative problem was really a systems problem: ad-hoc workflows, drifting quality standards, and reactive instead of structural QA. Craft wasn't the issue — clarity was.

I rebuilt the operation around three decisions. First, a single creative standard that held across every brand we touched, so the output stopped looking like thirty different shops. Second, workflows engineered to get the team to the 80% answer fast rather than the 100% answer never — essential in a production environment that ran on tight turnarounds. And third, I brought in an offshore design team out of Costa Rica that I'd worked with before and trusted. That team grew past 20 people. They weren't a vendor — they were the creative engine.

I led creative direction for display, web, and interactive advertising across the full client portfolio, while managing and mentoring the distributed design team day to day. Within a relatively short window, the unit wasn't just surviving — it was a high-performing, profitable operation shipping work at a standard the company hadn't seen from it before.

What I took from it: most creative messes aren't craft problems, they're conviction problems first and clarity problems second. If nobody believes the thing can be saved, no system will save it. Someone has to say yes we can and then actually build the thing that proves it.