Seasonal Creative Operations Manager position at Columbia Sportswear Company responsible for translating marketing strategies into creative deliverables, managing project workflows across multiple creative teams, building and maintaining workback schedules, and ensuring seamless collaboration between internal design, agencies, photo studio, and eCommerce teams. The role requires 8+ years of experience in creative operations or program management and involves overseeing scope, timelines, accountability, and continuous process improvement.
About the Position
The Marketing Operations Team believes that creativity thrives when structure supports it—not stifles it. Our mission is to empower our creative teams to do their best work by removing operational roadblocks, streamlining processes, and ensuring every project is delivered with excellence. We value clarity, collaboration, and craftsmanship, and we know that the right operational leadership can turn ambitious ideas into impactful realities.
As our Seasonal Creative Operations Manager, you'll be the strategic backbone of our creative department—connecting people, processes, and priorities across multiple workstreams. You'll turn big picture marketing strategies into actionable, achievable plans—managing scope, deliverables, and timelines with precision. Your leadership will ensure that our designers, writers, and production teams can focus on what they do best: creating exceptional work that moves our Brand and our Business forward.
This position is designated as a hybrid role based out of our headquarters near Portland, Oregon. The current expectation is for employees to work onsite four days per week, subject to change based on business needs.
How You'll Make a Difference
•Translate Strategy into Execution: Oversee the conversion of marketing strategies and initiatives into creative deliverables, ensuring alignment with channel-specific and regional requirements.
•Define and Align: Partner with creative leadership to establish project scope, deliverables, team assignments, and success metrics for campaigns and brand initiatives.
•Synergize Creative Workstreams: Streamline workflows and foster collaboration between Agencies, Internal Design, Photo Studio, and eComm Creative to ensure seamless, integrated output.
•Optimize Creative Operations: Manage seasonal project intake and prioritization to maximize efficiency without compromising creative quality, leveraging systems to support and enhance processes.
•Own the Workback: Build and maintain detailed workback schedules that map every milestone deliverable from kickoff to delivery, ensuring alignment and visibility across marketing, creative, and production teams.
•Drive Accountability: Track progress against timelines, proactively identifying risks and implementing solutions to keep projects on track—holding teams accountable to dependencies, decisions, and deadlines.
•Facilitate Communication: Ensure stakeholders are informed, aligned, and empowered to make timely decisions through clear, consistent communication.
•Continuously Improve: Lead post-project retrospectives to capture learnings, refine workflows, and elevate operational excellence across the creative organization.
What You Bring
•8+ years in creative operations, program management, or production management, ideally with agency experience and a proven ability to navigate complex, fast-paced environments.
•Skilled at guiding multi-stakeholder projects from concept to consumer.
•Deep and proven expertise in building and managing complex workback schedules for omnichannel and regional nuanced campaigns.
•Mastery of project management platforms such as AirTable, with a talent for turning complexity into clarity.
•Able to translate creative vision into actionable plans, keeping diverse teams aligned and accountable.
•Anticipates challenges before they arise and implements solutions that keep projects moving forward.
•Passionate about supporting creative talent and enabling them to deliver their best work.
•Experienced in driving change management and evolved Ways of Working to improve transparency, efficiency, and collaboration.
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