Work that worked

I’ve always believed that creative work doesn’t fail because of bad ideas. It fails when communication breaks down.

You can have the best team in the world, but if everyone’s working from a different version of the truth, it’s over before it begins.

At 90 Seconds, I watched that play out in real time. Projects were scattered across chats, drives, emails and links. Feedback lived everywhere and nowhere. By the time something was approved, no one remembered who had said what, or why. Collaboration had become coordination, and coordination had become chaos.

I didn’t start designing right away. I started by listening. Producers working across time zones, creators waiting on uploads, clients typing comments into old threads. Everyone was working hard, but the tools were working against them. That realisation shaped everything that followed.

I wanted to build something that didn’t ask people to change how they worked, just made it easier to do what they were already trying to do. The answer became obvious only after removing everything that didn’t help. 

One upload. One thread. One approval.

Nothing fancy, nothing clever. Just a single place where creative work could breathe again.

The real challenge wasn’t the timeline. It was everything that came before us.

Years of uploads lived across frameworks that no longer spoke to each other. Old databases, file structures and permissions… All stitched together from past versions of the platform.

We couldn’t start fresh, but we also couldn’t keep building on top of a house that was already leaning.

So the work became a balancing act: design something new without breaking what thousands of users still relied on. Every decision had to bridge two worlds: the past we had inherited and the system we were trying to create.

I spent as much time working with engineers and data teams as I did designing, making sure nothing was lost in translation.

Real-time co-editing and fancy dashboards could wait. The real success would be if someone uploaded a file and didn’t even notice how much had changed underneath.

The quiet after the noise

When Content Manager launched, something changed. Teams stopped asking which version was final. Feedback felt less like a mess of opinions and more like a conversation. Within weeks, approval cycles were down by a third, but that wasn’t what I remember most. What I remember is the calm. The noise was gone.

It’s strange. You can’t really design calm directly. You can only make space for it to exist. That’s what this project taught me. When you give people a shared place to think and act together, the work starts to take care of itself.