When I was promoted to Production Manager at Codeless, the role didn’t yet exist in any formal structure. The company had more than 30 active clients and 45 team members, but no clear ownership over how content moved from brief to delivery. Work got done, but inconsistently. I’d seen where the gaps were from two prior roles and had specific ideas about how to fix them.
Proactively shaping my role
The Content Production Specialist role was my idea. While working as Operations Strategist, I’d been documenting SOPs and mapping workflows, and the same bottlenecks kept appearing. Everyone could see them. No one owned fixing them.
I drafted a role proposal: the responsibilities, the workflows it would own, and the kind of person who’d succeed in it. Leadership approved it. What I hadn’t anticipated was being asked to lead a newly formed team. That unexpected promotion became the starting point for everything that followed.
Leading through change
Within months of stepping into the role, things got complicated. My direct manager resigned unexpectedly, which caused uncertainty across the team. On top of that, budget constraints required repositioning team members and eventually reducing headcount significantly. I was making hard personnel decisions before I’d fully found my footing as a manager.
My response was to stabilize through structure. I introduced centralized team pages in ClickUp, personal OKR dashboards, and new systems for feedback and performance reviews. I increased cross-functional visibility by inviting people from other departments into our meetings, so the team wasn’t operating in isolation. I built in space for team connection at the end of each session.
Team satisfaction rebounded to 95% within three months. The team stayed focused and productive through the uncertainty, and the systems we put in place became a reference point for other teams at the company. The goal throughout was the same one I had when I proposed the role: make the right behavior the easy behavior.
Scaling the production workflow
As client volume grew, the original systems couldn’t keep pace. There were frequent delays, communication gaps, and unclear ownership at every handoff.
I optimized our ClickUp-based production system that covered the full workflow from topic approval to delivery: role-specific responsibilities, automated assignment logic based on writer experience and availability, and a structured communication layer that kept clients informed about where their content was at any given time.
Turnaround time dropped by 35%. Writers had clearer expectations and editors had fewer bottlenecks. For the first time, delivery was predictable.
Rebuilding the automation layer
When my manager left, I also inherited responsibility for the company’s automation workflows. These had been managed by a VA who reported only to her, operated in complete isolation, and had no documentation behind any of it.
The setup wasn’t working. Requests were missed, communication was minimal, and the automations themselves were fragile. After a performance improvement plan produced no change, I made the decision to offboard her.
With no one else trained on the systems, I stepped in directly. I taught myself Zapier, reverse-engineered every existing workflow, and simplified the entire automation layer from scratch. Then I documented all of it so onboarding a replacement would be repeatable the next time.
The results were measurable: automation errors dropped by 90%, time to generate content cards fell by 25%, and Zapier dependency dropped by 50%. The function went from a fragile, undocumented dependency to a role anyone could pick up and run.
Proposing the merger
For months I’d been watching the production and delivery teams operate in parallel, duplicating effort and creating avoidable delays. The fix was clear: merge the two teams into a single function with client-specific ownership. But I wasn’t in a position to push that decision yet.
I had a new manager, and she’d been told I had conflicts with the other team. Trust had to be built before anything structural could change. So I focused on delivering consistent results, documenting where the redundancies were costing time, and making the case through data rather than argument.
Four months later, she approved the proposal. That merger became the foundation of the Head of Production role, which I moved into next.
Looking back
Operations isn’t the systems in isolation. It’s the systems alongside the people who use them and the conditions those people are working in. I learned that more clearly in this role than in any other.
The work I’m most proud of from this period is harder to quantify than the metrics. The team kept moving when things were hard. The documentation I built outlasted my time in the role. That’s usually the sign you built something real.
Alex Gita 