Overview
Corus Entertainment needed a unified workflow system to support its national creative operations—spanning sales teams, creative services, brand groups, and production teams across multiple markets. Existing processes varied widely across regions, creating inefficiencies, visibility gaps, and inconsistent delivery standards. I led the end-to-end production and product development of a custom software platform designed to streamline intake, accelerate production cycles, and align cross-country teams around a single, integrated tool built for the realities of creative operations at scale.
Challenge
National broadcasters operate with complex internal ecosystems: multiple markets, distinct sales territories, localized client lists, and highly variable creative workflows. Corus required a platform capable of supporting these variations while still enforcing consistency, quality control, and traceability across the entire production lifecycle.
Key challenges included:
- Deep workflow fragmentation across teams and markets
- Multiple user types with unique access levels, permissions, and responsibilities
- Market-specific data structures, client lists, and deliverable expectations
- A need for flexible project states and approval routing across departments
- High-volume creative output requiring transparent tracking, reporting, and integration with operational tools
- Limited existing requirements—meaning the product vision, user experience, and system logic would need to be defined from scratch
- A large, distributed team requiring careful change management, onboarding, and adoption support
This was not simply a tool build; it was a national-level digital transformation building a custome enterprise platform at scale to streamline, optimize, and grow the Creative Services business.
My Role
- Product & Production Lead guiding the full development lifecycle from discovery through deployment
- Requirements Architect establishing the system logic, user roles, permissioning, project states, and deliverable workflows
- Conducted extensive stakeholder research with sales, creative, brand, IT, and management teams to capture needs and reconcile conflicting workflows
- Designed the core user experience, including intake flows, project dashboards, deliverable tracking, and routing logic
- Defined market-specific data structures, including:
- unique client lists
- regional configurations
- role-based access
- custom reporting fields
- Developed a complete archive and retrieval system to support long-term visibility and asset governance
- Led the creation of a custom reporting framework capable of generating production metrics, performance insights, and business intelligence
- Designed functionality for automated invoice generation tied to production activity and project states
- Directed the software development team, prioritizing features, managing sprints, validating builds, and aligning technical delivery with user needs
- Oversaw change management strategy, including:
- early-adopter/test pilot groups
- training for project champions
- cross-market training sessions
- rollout sequencing
- ongoing user support structures
- Built all training materials, including quick-start guides, video walkthroughs, onboarding content, and a scalable train-the-trainer model
- Coordinated with internal IT for hosting, security, deployment, and long-term platform governance
This was a rare opportunity to steward a large-scale custom product from ideation to implementation and long-term adoption.
Outcome
The resulting enterprise workflow system, guided by my creative operations leadership, centralized creative production processes across markets and improved team efficiency and alignment. It improved production visibility, standardized deliverable tracking, centralized client and market data, and created a reliable structure for approvals, reporting, and collaboration across regions. With high adoption across hundreds of users in over fifteen markets, the platform became an essential tool for securing the creative deliverables associated with over several million of dollars in annual sales revenue.
