Director of Creative Operations

You are highly organized and great at coordinating people towards a shared goal. In group exercises, you’re the first to step up and get teams organized. You are obsessive about efficiency, can deal with ambiguity, and have a unique ability to bring strategy to life. You love to help people to do their best work, and can’t stand to see a missed opportunity due to poor communication or subpar process. You have experience managing creative teams and developing processes that improved efficiencies and consistently delivered high-quality outcomes. You approach problems with an entrepreneurial attitude, making sure creative solutions also meet business needs. Ultimately you’re driven by applying innovative solutions to complex organizational problems that allow people to do more, together.

At Underbelly, we’re a multidisciplinary team specializing in user experience, interface design, branding, video, and illustration. We solve complex problems for some of the world’s leading companies, in addition to helping small businesses get new products and brands off the ground. We’re passionate, cooperative, thoughtful, respectful, and always push ourselves and our craft. We care about people and making their lives better through design.

As Director of Creative Operations, you’ll fill in essential gaps where we’re stretched too thin. You’ll lead a team to develop and manage client and internal operations, from high-profile projects to day-to-day tasks that keep Underbelly running.
You’ll also have an opportunity to augment our HR and IT functions (we’re an agile agency, so those department leads are outsourced), helping us maintain a strong company culture and making sure contractors and vendors are fully supported.

With you on board, our CEO can focus 100% on business strategy, growing our service offering, and refining our brand.

You’ll play a key role in implementing operational strategy, managing operating budgets, and ensuring the business continues to perform at its peak. You’ll monitor company metrics, lead the monthly reporting meeting, and work with team leads to develop relevant metrics and communicate progress. The success of this role will be measured by a handful of efficiency and quality related Key Performance Indicators, including Revenue per Full Time Equivalent, and other expense and efficiency metrics. You’ll help ensure we remain profitable as our company grows. You’ll add value to the organization by keeping the team aware of accurate, relevant metrics and by coming up with innovative ways to hit our goals.

You’ll work closely with our design, development, content, and project management teams to improve and develop creative workflows and processes so people can do their best work. The creative process can be difficult to manage—let alone measure—but you’ll bring insights and support to team leads by finding better ways to calculate task time, monitor throughput, manage scope, and deal with unexpected challenges. When necessary, you’ll add support through evaluating and introducing new technology or tools (or, occasionally, by reducing them).

All that said, believe it or not, we like to keep a pretty fun, laid-back atmosphere. We’re looking for someone who is not only great at operations, but a good fit for our close-knit team.