From Fire Drill to Playbook
From Fire Drill to Playbook
From Fire Drill to Playbook
Role / Title
Director, Brand & Creative
Company
Articulate
Industry
EdTech
Year
2025
Project
Corporate Events Creative Direction & Playbook
Role / Title
Director, Brand & Creative
Company
Articulate
Industry
EdTech
Year
2025
Project
Corporate Events Creative Direction & Playbook
Role / Title
Director, Brand & Creative
Company
Articulate
Industry
EdTech
Year
2025
Project
Corporate Events Creative Direction & Playbook
Nothing about how Articulate ran events was scalable. Every format started over at zero, no matter how many times it had run before.
Articulate is an e-learning software company serving 150 million learners. It's moving through a new chapter all at once, repositioning and rebranding for the AI era, overhauling the product itself, and expanding from a US-based category leader into a global brand reaching audiences it's never spoken to before.
Every event was getting built from scratch, one-off, last-minute, with no shared starting point across formats. That's a production nightmare at any scale, and it was only getting worse as the team's footprint kept expanding into bigger, higher-stakes formats.
01.
Context
The events team's scope had grown well past its original mandate, and the director running it was already stretched thin. What started as internal meetups (our entire org was remote) expanded into large tradeshow activations and Articulate's own "Articuland" series, without the structure to match the growth.
02.
Problem
No single event was the real problem. Every team was solving its own fire drill in isolation and nobody had the mandate to step back far enough to see the forest for the trees. Without a systems approach to that chaos, every event would keep starting from zero, no matter how many had already run before.
03.
How I Moved the Org
I started with discovery instead of production: research spanning design, brand, marketing, events, and operations to understand where every event was actually losing time and consistency. That research helped us build a 100+ page playbook, designed specifically to onboard external execution vendors quickly and give the team work-form templates instead of a blank page every time. The system cut production timelines in half while building brand consistency across formats that had never shared a starting point before.
01.
Context
The events team's scope had grown well past its original mandate, and the director running it was already stretched thin. What started as internal meetups (our entire org was remote) expanded into large tradeshow activations and Articulate's own "Articuland" series, without the structure to match the growth.
02.
Problem
No single event was the real problem. Every team was solving its own fire drill in isolation and nobody had the mandate to step back far enough to see the forest for the trees. Without a systems approach to that chaos, every event would keep starting from zero, no matter how many had already run before.
03.
How I Moved the Org
I started with discovery instead of production: research spanning design, brand, marketing, events, and operations to understand where every event was actually losing time and consistency. That research helped us build a 100+ page playbook, designed specifically to onboard external execution vendors quickly and give the team work-form templates instead of a blank page every time. The system cut production timelines in half while building brand consistency across formats that had never shared a starting point before.
01.
Context
The events team's scope had grown well past its original mandate, and the director running it was already stretched thin. What started as internal meetups (our entire org was remote) expanded into large tradeshow activations and Articulate's own "Articuland" series, without the structure to match the growth.
02.
Problem
No single event was the real problem. Every team was solving its own fire drill in isolation and nobody had the mandate to step back far enough to see the forest for the trees. Without a systems approach to that chaos, every event would keep starting from zero, no matter how many had already run before.
03.
How I Moved the Org
I started with discovery instead of production: research spanning design, brand, marketing, events, and operations to understand where every event was actually losing time and consistency. That research helped us build a 100+ page playbook, designed specifically to onboard external execution vendors quickly and give the team work-form templates instead of a blank page every time. The system cut production timelines in half while building brand consistency across formats that had never shared a starting point before.
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