Contentsquare: organizing its design studio with monday.com

Contentsquare, a French startup founded in 2012, now has 1,500 employees worldwide. Its mission? To help companies of all sizes and industries create “a more human digital world.” How? With an AI-powered Digital Experience Analytics platform that turns users’ behavioral data into recommendations at every step of their online journey. Contentsquare thus helps companies drive their digital transformation and improve their customers’ experience. To do so, it relies on its in-house international creative studio. And on monday.com! The project management solution that lets it efficiently organize and track creative requests coming from every department, all over the world…

Better project management for a creative studio spread across the globe

Since its founding in 2012, the Contentsquare analytics platform has grown fast and now has 1,500 employees. Among them is a team of twenty-five designers. Brand designers, graphic designers, art directors, strategists, motion designers… All spread across Sydney, Munich, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and New York.

Leading the Design & UX studio are Fanny Pourcenoux, Design Director, and Ornella Kolle, Design Operations Manager.

Ornella is in charge of tracking the team’s projects, assigning tasks to designers, and keeping schedules on track. When she joined Contentsquare in 2021, no project management solution was in use. Requests and project tracking happened over Slack, Trello, email, phone, or even… at the coffee machine!

The Contentsquare brief

An intuitive project management solution to centralize information and trace a project at a glance.

As soon as she joined the company, Ornella Kolle noticed communication problems: many contacts all over the world, many channels in use (Slack, Trello, email, phone…), and no history of exchanges…

She also noticed a problem with how tasks were distributed and prioritized. With each new request sent to the studio, it was hard to know which designer was available. And hard for designers to know which task was most urgent… On top of that, creative briefs were never written the same way and were more or less complete depending on who submitted them… For Ornella Kolle, there was a real need to standardize briefs with the same templates and processes for every requester and every project.

Synolia x monday.com

After extensive benchmarking, Ornella Kolle discovered monday.com. A solution that could handle the challenges of an in-house creative studio. But also an intuitive solution that lets different teams interact on one single platform.

When Contentsquare’s Marketing department decided to onboard its whole team onto monday.com, Ornella jumped at the opportunity and brought the solution to the Design & UX studio as well.

A workspace where everyone can collaborate

Contentsquare’s design operations manager set up a board accessible to all of the company’s stakeholders. A shared space for requests, but also for understanding the Design & UX studio’s methods and guidelines.
To that end, the Documents section centralizes all the studio’s presentation materials, brief templates for designers, request processes, how a project unfolds… This way, all stakeholders are aligned on the same way of collaborating.

Smoother exchanges with automations

Thanks to automations, tasks reach the studio much more smoothly, with clear priority levels and deadlines under control. When a stakeholder submits a new request, the deadline is set automatically based on the request type and its priority level. For example, for a new email template, the deadline is automatically set 3 to 5 days after the request.

Once the task is ready (with the brief attached), it automatically moves to the “Kitchen,” the design operations manager’s management board. Ornella Kolle gets notified and can then assign the task to a designer based on their workload.

Status labels also let stakeholders follow each stage of the task in progress (In Progress, Studio Review, Stakeholder Review, Feedback In…). So they no longer have to worry about where their project stands.

Measuring KPIs

For Ornella Kolle, monday.com’s value also lies in its ability to measure the KPIs that are essential to running and improving the studio’s processes. With monday.com’s features, she can track stakeholder profiles, request types, response time for handling a new request, on-time delivery…

A “turn time” metric also measures the time between a new request landing in the Kitchen and its assignment to a designer. Once the task is assigned, the timer stops automatically. The design operations manager can then measure the average handling time for a new request.

Another metric: in her “Completed” board, Ornella Kolle can see which tasks were delivered on time or late. This lets her regularly reassess how long a task takes.

Try monday.com for free