[Hiring] Creative Operations Manager @Lumen

Role Description

Leads the systems, governance, planning, and insights that enable the creative organization to operate effectively at scale. Owns intake, prioritization, capacity and resource planning, workflow governance, reporting, process design, and operational health. Partners with creative leadership to align resources with business priorities, improve how work moves through the organization, and build scalable practices that increase speed, visibility, accountability, and creative impact. Transforms reactive request management into a transparent, strategic, and scalable operating model.

Main Responsibilities

• Own enterprise creative intake and set briefing, categorization, prioritization, and readiness standards so requests arrive with sufficient context, scope, and strategic clarity.
• Define pathways for planned, reactive, executive, innovation, and special-initiative work; assess readiness, close information gaps, and improve submission quality before scoping or assignment.
• Maintain visibility into capacity, workload, utilization, project mix, skill demand, and constraints across internal teams and external partners; forecast needs using pipeline, priorities, seasonality, campaign calendars, and enterprise initiatives.
• Identify staffing gaps, bottlenecks, and over-allocation risks before delivery is affected, informing staffing, contractor, agency, and headcount decisions.
• Evaluate demand with creative leadership based on strategic value, effort, priorities, and capacity, while providing portfolio visibility across current and upcoming work.
• Facilitate tradeoffs across campaigns, executive and reactive requests, brand initiatives, and capability-building work; guide decisions to start, pause, accelerate, outsource, or decline work and align resources to highest-impact priorities.
• Own the operating model from intake and scoping through assignment, production, review, approval, delivery, and measurement; define stages, roles, decision rights, handoffs, review cycles, escalation paths, and governance standards.
• Drive consistent use of work-management tools, intake systems, dashboards, and processes while clarifying requirements and reducing friction across creative teams, stakeholders, agencies, PMO, and partner functions.
• Build dashboards and reporting on demand, project mix, throughput, cycle time, workload, utilization, velocity, and bottlenecks, giving leaders clear visibility into capacity, operating health, and tradeoffs.
• Track trends and define KPIs linking operations to creative effectiveness and business impact, using insights to guide staffing, partner strategy, prioritization, process improvement, speed, quality, clarity, and scale.
• Design, document, and improve workflows, SOPs, governance, briefs, review practices, and operating cadences; remove redundant work, unclear ownership, unnecessary approvals, and process gaps.
• Lead improvements that increase velocity, reduce rework, and strengthen stakeholder experience; communicate changes, drive adoption, and establish scalable practices for planned and reactive work.
• Configure tools to support the operating model and provide team and leadership visibility; identify opportunities for automation, templates, improved reporting, and workflow simplification.
• Partner with technology and operations teams to improve adoption, data quality, and system effectiveness, and set standards for tracking work, resources, timelines, and project metadata.
• Advise creative leadership on structure, resource planning, workload forecasts, agency and contractor strategy, future operating models, business cases, staffing recommendations, and capability planning.
• Identify recurring demand patterns requiring new roles, process or scope changes, or alternative partner models, and clarify how organizational design choices affect capacity, velocity, quality, and business impact.

Qualifications

• 7 years in creative or marketing operations, PMO, resource management, agency operations, or related operational leadership.
• Experience building and scaling processes in creative, marketing, brand, or content organizations.
• Strong knowledge of creative workflows, intake, resource and portfolio planning, and delivery governance.
• Experience with dashboards, KPIs, reporting, capacity models, and workflow or collaboration tools.
• Strong analytical, systems-thinking, problem-solving, communication, and facilitation skills.
• Ability to influence cross-functional teams and operate in ambiguous, fast-changing environments with competing priorities.
• Experience advising senior leaders on prioritization, resourcing, and operating-model decisions.

Compensation

This information reflects the anticipated base salary range for this position based on current national data. Minimums and maximums may vary based on location. Individual pay is based on skills, experience and other relevant factors.

• $105,786 - $141,047 in these states: AL, AR, AZ, FL, GA, IA, ID, IN, KS, KY, LA, ME, MO, MS, MT, ND, NE, NM, OH, OK, PA, SC, SD, TN, UT, VT, WI, WV, WY
• $111,074 - $148,099 in these states: CO, HI, MI, MN, NC, NH, NV, OR, RI
• $116,364 - $155,152 in these states: AK, CA, CT, DC, DE, IL, MA, MD, NJ, NY, TX, VA, WA

Benefits

Lumen offers a comprehensive package featuring a broad range of Health, Life, Voluntary Lifestyle benefits and other perks that enhance your physical, mental, emotional and financial wellbeing.