In-House Design Velocity at Scale

The first weeks weren't about replacing the agency—they were about understanding why it was slow.

I embedded with the agency's workflow: sat in on briefings, reviewed their process, watched where requests died in Slack threads. The bottleneck wasn't the designers—it was the brief-to-approval loop. 3-4 rounds of revisions per asset, no design system, no reusable components, no direct stakeholder access.

I started fixing what I could: built brief templates, set up direct Figma access for stakeholders, started designing assets myself when turnaround time was unacceptable. Week by week, the agency's share of work shrank.

By week 6, I had the data to make the case: every asset I'd handled shipped in 24-72 hours. The agency's equivalent: 2-3 weeks. The handoff was made. Agency retainer cancelled. All design work in-house—just me.

First move after taking over: build a master template system in Figma so I'm never designing from scratch.

Templates built: Landing page component library (hero, features, testimonials, CTAs). Pitch deck master template (one source of truth for sales + investor decks). Email template library (verification, welcome, nurture, event invites). SMM post templates (auto-layout for fast iteration). Ad templates (ABM, performance, events). Brochures and sales collateral.

This cut design time by 60-70% and became the foundation for all the velocity that followed.

Marketing team wanted daily posts. I couldn't manually design 7 posts/week without sacrificing landing page and ad velocity.

Solution: AI + Figma automation workflow. Product/marketing updates fed into GPT-4 → generates post copy → copy pasted into Figma SMM template (auto-layout) → swap image, swap copy, export → automated pipeline delivers to marketing Slack.

Result: Zero SMM posts → 7 posts/week, with near-zero manual design time per post. Consistent brand presence on LinkedIn, scaled without adding headcount.

Agency workflow: brief → 2-week wait → feedback → another week → launch. My workflow: brief → design in Figma using component library (2-4 hours) → async feedback via Figma comments → iterate same day → hand off to dev → live in 48-72 hours.

No handoff docs. No status meetings. Figma inspect link + a message. Dev could see exact specs, assets, and interactions directly.

Result: 2 landing pages/month → 6 landing pages/month. Turnaround: 2-3 weeks → 48-72 hours.

Previous cadence: 2 ads per quarter. By the time the next ad shipped, the first had been running 6-8 weeks with severe creative fatigue.

My workflow: Design 2 ad variations on Monday (different messaging angles, different visuals). Hand off to demand gen on Tuesday. Deploy on LinkedIn + Google on Wednesday. Track CTR/engagement via HubSpot. Kill low-performers Friday. Iterate next week.

Result: Weekly ad refresh cadence = less creative fatigue, more testing, better performance data. The team went from guessing which messaging worked to knowing.

Webinars were being recorded but not edited or distributed post-event. Huge missed opportunity—prospects who didn't attend live never saw the content.

I took over webinar production: edited recordings (cut dead air, add captions, brand intro/outro), created on-demand landing pages, designed follow-up email sequences (Missed the webinar? Watch it here + get slides), tracked engagement via HubSpot.

Result: Webinars became evergreen lead gen assets. Post-event momentum sustained 2-3 weeks instead of dying after the live session.

Mid-funnel drop-offs were known but not analyzed. I ran rapid GTM experiments: tested different UI flows for the enterprise booking funnel, A/B tested CTA copy (Get a Quote vs. See Pricing vs. Request Demo), A/B tested landing page messaging (pain-focused vs. benefit-focused), used Microsoft Clarity heatmaps to identify where users were clicking, scrolling, and rage-clicking.

Found specific drop-off points and handed findings to RevOps + product team for deeper fixes. Experiments validated by RevOps (exact lift metrics confidential).

The direction at Freightify was clear: enterprise SaaS, sell through demos, no self-serve. My PMM head wanted to test a PLG motion but said we couldn't without a dev team. I said give me the weekend.

Using Cursor and Claude, I redirected the Book a Demo CTA to a self-serve signup flow—essentially making an enterprise freight-rate platform look like it had a free tier. Signups started coming in. Nobody expected it.

What we found: a mid-funnel drop nobody had mapped before. People were interested enough to sign up but hit the $10K/year price and left. That data went to the SDR team, who sequenced those contacts and recovered measurable late-funnel pipeline.

Four of us celebrated it like we'd won something. We eventually killed the experiment—the pricing wasn't built for PLG. But the experiment changed how the team thought about the funnel entirely.

This isn't a design deliverable. Nobody briefed me to do it. I just couldn't leave a hypothesis untested.

Designed event booth graphics for physical events — both dark and light versions. Enterprise B2B aesthetics: clean layouts, bold typography, trust signals (logos, testimonials, metrics). Also handled broader print collateral for the sales team.