Case Study: Agency Transition Triage
How I navigated a high-stakes agency handoff, protected 27 campaigns, and laid the groundwork for long-term partnership.
Background
When enterprise leadership decides to outsource an entire creative operation mid-stream, things get messy fast. When Sam’s Club transitioned its creative execution to an incoming agency, the scope—managing high-volume retail media across massive supplier portfolios—was an enormous lift. The incoming team wasn't yet fully staffed to handle the sheer velocity of incoming briefs, creating a massive department-wide backlog.
The Problem
In an operation spanning dozens of project pods and millions in ad spend, the transition bottleneck threatened to trigger a cascade of missed drop-dead dates. While 14 other PMs managed their own pieces of the puzzle across various pods, my specific pod was responsible for 35+ concurrent D2C campaigns.
The challenge wasn't just clearing the queue—it was executing emergency triage within my pod, protecting enterprise suppliers from disruption, and stabilizing workflows without letting panic or finger-pointing derail our new agency relationships.
Enterprise Scale
$55M Portfolio Spend
High-Value Triage
27 At-Risk Campaigns Mitigated
Relationship Payoff
Trusted Partner (The Agency Hired Me Next!)
The Strategy: Collaborative Triage over Blame
Rather than treating the agency like the enemy, I stepped in to architect a collaborative protocol:
The Backlog Audit: Immediately isolated 27 high-risk campaigns in my pod's pipeline facing missed go-live dates.
Value-Based Prioritization: Partnered with the account team to evaluate queues by live dates and financial impact—protecting high-spend initiatives for business continuity.
Scope Discipline: Held the line on scope by pushing back on non-essential late-stage revisions to protect core delivery windows.
The "Invisible Shield" Loop: Shielded external suppliers from internal friction via proactive weekly status updates and graceful milestone resets.
Building a Bridge: Worked directly with agency counterparts as partners in the cleanup, aligning on priorities while their team ramped up hiring.
Before: Backlog, Choked Queue, Delayed Milestones.
After: Prioritized Audit, Clear SLAs, Graceful Milestones.
The Outcome
By establishing transparent priorities, we stabilized the pipeline without compromising relationships:
Zero Supplier Disruption: Brand partners were completely shielded through proactive expectation management.
Systematic Recovery: Once agency staffing scaled, structured triage allowed us to burn down the backlog and return to a humming workflow.
Long-Term Trust: Approaching a systemic crisis with partnership earned deep respect from leadership on both sides—directly leading to the agency bringing me onboard later in my career.
The Takeaway: In operations, a crisis isn't solved by pointing fingers or working panicked overtime. It’s solved by getting brutally honest about priorities, protecting your team from whiplash, and using relational trust to fix the machine while it’s running.
