Bringing Structure to Creativity: Joanna Coleman on Operational Excellence in Marketing

Joanna Coleman is a Marketing Operations Project Manager, formerly with UnitedHealthcare, where she led marketing operations and project workflows across a high-volume marketing communications team. With nearly a decade of experience in marketing operations, she’s helped shape the processes that bring structure to creative environments – balancing compliance, timelines, and team dynamics in one of the most regulated industries out there. In this ML Stories interview, Joanna shares what actually makes operations work and how the human side of the process often matters most.

What’s one operational approach you’ve changed recently?

We really focused on collaboration within the team, and as part of that we brought our marketing project managers into projects and campaigns from the very beginning; we found that made a huge difference. PMs aren’t seen as part of the creative force, so they are often brought into the project further down the line. But having them at the table for project kick-off meetings meant they asked different questions, understood the goals from the start, and helped make sure the right people were included early on. That helped reduce redundancies and brought cohesion to the team and to the projects. PMs might not set the strategy, but they often see everything else that’s happening and can connect the dots in a way others can’t.

What challenges do marketing teams regularly face?

Reporting. Everyone wants numbers, but they don’t always know what they want to report on. Teams often learn they weren’t collecting the data needed when leadership has a new request. At that point, collecting retroactive data is a guess, at best. Even once we know what to track, putting that structure in place can be harder than expected. Operations teams need to understand the why behind the request in order to implement the changes needed to support the request and drive accountability for data accuracy. 

If you could go back to 2020, what would you do differently in how you built or ran marketing operations?

I joined UHC in 2020 to define and document processes for a team with a new project management system that wasn’t fully integrated. Everyone was working in their own way, and we couldn’t even track one project against another. By standardizing processes, continuous training, and lots of tweaking based on feedback, we changed the team mindset that the tool could help them – not slow them down. Ideally, you’d start by understanding how the team works and then build the tool around that. We did it a bit backwards, and it was a long process. But we eventually brought consistency to how we worked, which drove efficiencies, and ultimately, we were able to reduce our task touchpoints by about 30 percent.

How are you thinking about integrating AI into marketing operations?

I’m very interested in how AI is going to fit into the marketing workflow. Automation within project management systems for sure, and for repetitive tasks. I personally get a little stuck when it comes to AI-generated images or content, and I’m hesitant about that. But operationally, using AI to analyze data and find trends is really powerful. It can help us understand the data better and faster. That’s where I see the opportunity—to free us up to do more creative and strategic work.

What’s something your team is doing operationally that’s improving outcomes or speed?

As a high-volume team, everything felt urgent all the time. But we built standard turnaround times for each portion of our process, and that helped us go from being totally reactionary to due date driven. It gave the team time to plan and prioritize their own work. It empowered them to ask more detailed questions about projects and educate clients on our process, so they understood we needed to get a project done and done right. That structure helped us to better understand requests, get ahead of the work, even with things that were out of our control, and gave the team space to breathe.