The context
When I joined Mailchimp's Lifecycle Creative team, we were five people responsible for the email communications of a platform serving millions of small businesses. Lifecycle email is deceptively hard: it has to feel personal at massive scale, stay rigorously on-brand across every touchpoint, and prove its value in revenue, not just opens.
The opportunity was bigger than the team. Intuit's Global Business Solutions Group needed lifecycle communications that could acquire, educate, and retain customers across the full journey, from first sign-up through upgrade, engagement, and long-term growth.
My role
I grew with this team from Senior Designer to Associate Design Director in 20 months, eventually directing design staff across the full lifecycle program. But the part of the story I'm proudest of isn't the title. It's the operational foundation.
As we scaled from 5 people to a practice of 33+, someone had to model how a creative team of that size actually works: the workflows, the SOPs, the handoffs between design, copy, production, and our engineering partners. I built and documented those systems as we grew, so that scale added capability instead of chaos.
I also led our team's transition to operating solely in Figma, the only team in the department to do so at the time. Being an early adopter meant absorbing the friction first: rebuilding libraries, retraining muscle memory, and modeling the workflow for teams who followed. It paid off in shared components, faster collaboration, and a design system that could keep pace with our output.
What we shipped
We also launched SMS as a net-new channel, taking it from proposal to production and proving the model with real bookings.
The outcomes
We exceeded our revenue goal by more than $4M, and the SMS launch drove $774K in incremental bookings in its first stretch. The unsubscribe rate is the number I point to most: proof that volume and respect for the inbox can coexist.