Build systems, fuel scale: Inside Typeform's sustainable creative model

When creative demand spikes but team size stays lean, many marketing and creative leaders face a familiar and pressing dilemma:

How do you scale output quickly without sacrificing quality or burning out your team?

At Typeform, this challenge isn't theoretical—it's happening in real time. With a small but mighty internal team, they’re navigating growing content needs, faster turnaround times, and increasingly complex campaign requirements. But instead of defaulting to rushed production or one-off fixes, they’ve chosen a more intentional path.

We explored that path in Superside's latest guide, Inside Great Creative Partnerships. A true example of building a sustainable creative model and partnership, Typeform's design and paid teams explained how they:

• Prioritize impact over quantity
• Built a system that scales thoughtfully
• Bring in creative partners intentionally
• Stay aligned and curious
• Scale smarter with tools and AI

Their approach offers a blueprint for how modern marketing and brand teams can maintain creative excellence—even under pressure.

A guide by Superside

Inside Great Creative Partnerships

Tap into the minds of 22 top creative and marketing leaders at brands like Wistia, Booking.com and Twilio and see how they ship great work, together.

Get the guideGet the guide

Intentional trade-offs: Impact over quantity

For Dalton Nascimento, Typeform’s Senior Paid Marketing Strategist, high performance doesn’t mean chasing volume for volume’s sake.

We really prioritize what we believe would have an impact instead of just requesting a lot of stuff for the sake of quantity.

Dalton NascimentoSenior Paid Marketing Strategist, Typeform

As someone who requests a large share of video assets, Nascimento knows the demands he places on the creative team are intensive—both in timeline and production lift. That makes prioritization essential.

The tension between wanting to push creative boundaries and the realities of limited time is a familiar one across the industry. 79% of professionals say they want to create bolder work, but are always racing against the clock.

From the creative side, Dimitra Papastathi, Typeform’s Principal Brand Designer, is quick to underline that alignment—not output—is what unlocks scale. “We’re looking a lot into consistency, but not just in terms of repetition. We’re making sure everyone has the same understanding about brief requests and marketing goals,” she explained. That means not just delivering the right file, but working from the same assumptions about campaign strategy and testing plans.

While many teams fall into a transactional rhythm, Typeform’s approach is different. Creative and marketing act as collaborators from the start, not as siloed requesters and executors. And it all starts with a scalable system.

Building a system that scales thoughtfully

To scale sustainably, Typeform invested in building structured processes for creative operations. One of the most impactful? A tiering model that allows the team to categorize projects by complexity and creative involvement—not by scope, but by the level of creative thinking required.

“Some kinds of projects we know don’t need a creative review—they can just have one stakeholder review and go out the door,” says Tess Ramsey, Creative Operations Manager at Typeform. “Others might need full art direction. More complex creative work such as art direction often means we put more eyes on it from a creative or brand perspective.”

Here’s how the tiering system breaks down:

• Tier 1 – Campaigns and more strategic initiatives requiring a concepting or art direction phase. Examples: Brand campaigns, high-impact events.
• Tier 2 – Net new creative that doesn’t require a unique art direction. Examples: Always-on work like new paid ad creatives, emails, landing pages.
• Tier 3 – Simple adjustments to existing creative. Examples: Reformatting, minor text or color changes.

The tier impacts several aspects of creative workflow:

• How early the project must be briefed in.
• The type and depth of information needed in the briefing template.
• The number of review rounds and the level of stakeholder involvement (e.g., executive review, creative lead involvement).
• Resources and level of effort assigned, determined during monthly planning.

This model is paired with a point system—where one point equals one day of work—to guide monthly and weekly planning. With that clarity, the team can better manage capacity and avoid burnout. The tier of a project helps define the process it will go through, while the points framework helps determine the scope and resourcing needed to complete it.

Using a tiering system to define how we handle different kinds of projects has made a huge difference.

Tess RamseyCreative Operations Manager, Typeform

The tiering and point systems also give room for “foundational work,” as Papastathi calls it: Creative-led initiatives that originate inside the design team. “We aim to balance the work that is initiated from a creative perspective versus marketing requests from our collaborators,” she said. “This also helps allow time for our own initiatives.”

When—and why—to bring in creative partners

Scaling through systems is one part of the puzzle. Scaling through strategic partnerships is another. Even with smart systems in place, the team knows when it’s time to bring in outside help. “We’re a very small internal team,” said Ramsey. “We only have two internal designers, one copywriter, and me in operations. So we work with an external agency to up or down our workload.”

Their goal when looking for an agency? Finding a partner that acts as a true extension of their internal team and is open to receiving feedback. For Papastathi, that openness is non-negotiable.

It’s better to have a not-so-good first delivery and a great second one because the agency is receptive to feedback—rather than the other way around.

Dimitra PapastathiPrincipal Brand Designer, Typeform 

Your creative team's creative team

Choose the world's leading AI-powered creative service
and get high-performing ads, videos, experiences and
more at scale, on your schedule and to your standards.

Get startedGet started

Staying aligned, staying curious

While systems and partners help enable scale, the real glue is the collaborative relationship between marketing and creative. Cross-functional alignment is a recurring theme in the way Typeform operates.

Nascimento’s team holds quarterly planning meetings with creatives to review performance and align early on upcoming campaigns. “We discuss all creative requests on a weekly basis and decide what we believe are the most impactful to prioritize,” Nascimento shared.

Ramsey added that creative input isn’t only welcomed—it’s encouraged. “Sometimes marketing teams don’t realize they could submit a more open brief,” she said.

With Nascimento’s team, we’ve been exploring together how open briefs can still spark creativity. Open briefs can sometimes leave space for more creativity than a more closed or prescriptive brief.

Tess RamseyCreative Operations Manager, Typeform

Scaling smarter with tools and AI

Beyond people and processes, Typeform’s team has embraced tools that let them do more without compromising quality.

“We shot a video for TikTok and wanted to use it on other channels in landscape,” Nascimento recalled. “The creative team recommended using an AI tool to reformat it. It worked—and saved us from reshooting the whole thing.”

Papastathi sees AI as an amplifier, not a replacement. “We try to use AI with intention. It’s not about doing things faster just for the sake of it. It should boost our creativity—not dictate it.”

Even as tools evolve, they agree on one thing: Creativity needs space.

We try to optimize everything, but creativity doesn’t come from efficiency. If we just keep running, we’re going to exhaust ourselves. We need to stop a little to be able to run faster later.

Dimitra PapastathiPrincipal Brand Designer, Typeform

Scaling with intention, not just speed

Typeform’s approach to scaling creative work isn’t about doing more for the sake of it—it’s about doing the right things, better. In a landscape where demand is constantly rising and resources rarely scale at the same pace, their strategy offers a practical, human-centered model for creative growth.

By investing in smart systems like tiering and point frameworks, fostering genuine alignment between marketing and creative, and bringing in the right partners at the right time, they’ve created a workflow that’s not just scalable—but sustainable.

With their thoughtful approach to collaboration and scale, the Typeform team could've written Inside Great Creative Partnerships themselves. For more lessons on moving fast while making great work together, be sure to check out the full guide.

A guide by Superside

Inside Great Creative Partnerships

Tap into the minds of 22 top creative and marketing leaders at brands like Wistia, Booking.com and Twilio and see how they ship great work, together.

Get the guideGet the guide