Agency Operations · Process Design · Team Management

Agency Ops · Process Design

17D
North

Building the delivery engine for a brand strategy and digital marketing agency, introducing Agile ceremonies, tooling infrastructure, and cross-functional discipline across concurrent client engagements.

Role: Product Operations Manager
Duration: Jun 2019 to Jun 2020
Company type: Brand Strategy & Digital Agency
Scope: Agency-wide delivery operations

+25%

Improvement in team productivity through efficient sprint execution across multiple concurrent client initiatives

Delivery performance

-30%

Reduction in manual tracking time after implementing Jira and Trello for product tracking and reporting

Tooling & process efficiency

+20%

Increase in client satisfaction by aligning business requirements with development goals across engagements

Client outcomes

The problem they were living with

17D North is a brand strategy and digital marketing agency working with 150+ clients across naming, identity design, digital campaigns, and web. The creative output was strong. The delivery infrastructure to support it wasn't.

As the agency grew its client roster and took on more concurrent engagements, the gap between creative quality and operational consistency became a problem. Projects were slipping. Teams were working without visibility. Clients were getting inconsistent experiences.

My role as Product Operations Manager was to build the systems, ceremonies, and tooling that would let the agency scale its work without scaling its chaos.

✕No centralised project tracking, status lived in email threads and verbal updates
✕No Agile ceremonies, sprint planning, standups, and retros were ad hoc or absent
✕Concurrent client work had no visibility layer, blockers were discovered late
✕Manual tracking and reporting consumed significant team time each week
✕Client requirements weren't being translated into structured delivery goals
✕No retrospective process, problems recurred because root causes weren't captured
✕Senior stakeholders lacked a consistent view of delivery health across engagements

The vision: one platform, every stakeholder

Give a creative team the infrastructure to do their best work consistently, with less friction, more visibility, and fewer surprises. Minimum viable structure: the lightest framework that solved the real problems, adapted continuously based on what the team actually needed.

Agile ceremonies

Sprint planning, standups, reviews, retros adopted as a full cadence

Jira & Trello rollout

Every active engagement on a board with owners and status

Stakeholder reporting

Weekly delivery health snapshots replacing ad hoc chasing

Brief intake

Client briefs translated into structured delivery milestones

Backlog grooming

Priority and capacity risk surfaced across 10-20 engagements

Retrospectives

Root causes captured, problems stopped recurring

Triage cadence

Weekly triage separated from planning to cut cognitive load

Sprint reviews

Clear record of what shipped, visible to leadership and clients

How I worked

Diagnose

Spent the first weeks mapping workflows, identifying where time was lost and where handoffs broke down before touching tools or ceremonies.

Sequence

Started with the highest-pain points. Project tracking and standups came first because they delivered immediate visible value. Retros came once trust in the cadence was established.

Adopt

Used early adopters as change agents. Identified team members frustrated by existing chaos, onboarded them first, and let peer influence drive broader adoption.

Iterate

Measured sprint velocity, ticket throughput, and blocker resolution time. Every retro included a check on the ceremonies themselves, were they useful, too long, missing something.

What we shipped, and what it changed

Productivity

Lifted team productivity 25% through efficient sprint execution across multiple concurrent client initiatives.

Delivery

Tooling

Cut manual tracking time 30% after implementing Jira and Trello for project tracking and reporting.

Process efficiency

Client satisfaction

Increased client satisfaction 20% by aligning business requirements with development goals across engagements.

Outcomes

Visibility

Senior stakeholders gained a real-time view of delivery health across all concurrent engagements, replacing ad hoc status chasing with structured weekly reporting.

Reporting

Blocker resolution

Daily standups reduced blocker discovery time from days to hours. Problems surfaced within the sprint, not after a client deadline had slipped.

Operations

Team culture

A team that had been operating reactively developed a proactive delivery culture, catching problems before they became client-visible and continuously improving their own process.

Leadership

Where I'd take it next

17D North was the role where I learned that product operations is fundamentally a leadership discipline, not a tooling or process discipline. The tools are easy. Getting people to change how they work is the hard part.

Process change is a people problem first

No tool or framework succeeds by mandate. The unlock is always understanding what each person finds frustrating about the current state, and showing them how the change makes their specific situation better.

Visibility is a product feature

The weekly stakeholder report felt like overhead until it started replacing 10 ad hoc status conversations. Making the right information visible at the right cadence is itself a product decision, with users, format, and value proposition.

Structure enables creativity

The creative team's resistance to Agile ceremonies dissolved once they realised that structured planning gave them protected time to actually create, rather than reacting to ad hoc requests and rediscovering scope mid-deliverable.

Adapt frameworks, don't transplant them

Standard Agile is built for engineering. A brand agency has different rhythms. Shorter standups, flexible sprint scope, and explicit client review windows kept the discipline of Agile without the rigidity that would have rejected it.

Want to talk product?

Open to PM roles, advisory work, and AI-driven collaborations.

Get in touch See all work

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