One of the biggest blockers to scaling productivity is a set of poor or outdated processes. Such was the case when our client – the world’s largest e-commerce brand and a global technology leader – found it couldn’t keep up with the demand for in-house design services to support its cloud-services platform.

Business was booming: in just a decade, the platform had gained hundreds of thousands of customers across nearly 200 countries. This robust growth, however, presented an overwhelming workload for the small in-house design team that supported this division and the engineers, product managers, executives and other roles that kept it growing. Stretched to capacity, long queues were forming as the team struggled to meet the demands of its growing list of stakeholders, particularly during business spikes. More critically, they had less time to spend on the high-level creative work necessary for ongoing innovation.

In urgent need of a time- and cost-saving solution, the client asked Filter to help them tackle this work –and remedy the underlying issues that caused these challenges in the first place.

Filter assessed the in-house team’s processes, then designed new workflows that resolved inefficiencies across their operations. We also built an outsourced studio of expert visual designers tailored to their unique needs, who began by working closely with the client design team to solidify their visual brand guidelines and refine core design assets. We then helped the client team translate older assets into the new design style, developing new templates that reduced the time and effort of creating on-brand materials.

To improve their team’s ability to scale over time, our process architects implemented new workflows to better facilitate creative oversight and control. With Filter handling day-to-day program management and reporting, and consistently delivering expertly designed assets, AWS’s internal team had greater bandwidth to take on new work more central to their strategic advancement.

Filter’s design studio brought much-needed executional horsepower that reduced the client’s internal workload while maximizing both throughput and quality. More broadly, our operational solutions dramatically improved the efficiency of their design efforts, boosting asset quality while reducing costs and headaches.

As a result, Filter’s work with this client grew to include other stakeholders in multiple departments throughout the company, including the business and marketing team for its cloud-services platform. These new partnerships are helping our client continue to optimize efficiency and keep up with the demands of its ever-growing customer base.