Leadership
Client
Bally's Interactive
Timeframe
3 years
Year
2023-2026
The situation
In-house creative teams live under permanent delivery pressure. Exploration is the first thing sacrificed, and with it goes the team's future: new skills, new workflows, and the next generation of leads. When I took over the team, my thesis was that R&D and people development are the same investment. You cannot build new capability without growing the people who will own it.
What I built
Discovery Days. I designed a formal R&D programme, not just protected time. Written guidelines set the structure: a 40/50/10 split across research, practical development, and documented findings presented back in team retros. Two tracks kept it balanced, freestyle exploration and project-related research, and a brand-connection rule meant even abstract experiments used brand colour and visual language, keeping exploration commercially anchored. Every project was documented on a standard card with objectives, notes, links and a rendered preview, so learning accumulated instead of evaporating.
The rule that made it work: exploration had to connect to production, not float free of it. Experiments that proved themselves became standard workflows. The model was later scaled across the entire Marketing department, launched by the VP of Marketing as dedicated AI R&D time for every team, with me named as one of the department's AI accelerators, the go-to advisers for teams starting out. Within months, teams across the department had used that time to build working tools, from AI-assisted campaign creative and generation pipelines to self-updating delivery dashboards and research agents.
A lead-explores, team-executes operating model. For peak delivery periods, I designed a model where a senior designer explores and locks the creative route first, and the team executes against it in parallel. At its hardest test, it delivered 15 videos in 3 days with measurably less stress on the team, and was validated in retrospective as the new standard process.
Direction first, then the specialist to own it. In early 2025 I set the team's UX research objective: partner with CX to map the user journey through paid acquisition, identify pain points, and produce tested creative against them. Then I developed one of my designers into that space, defining a UX and interactive motion specialist track with SMART objectives and measurable KPIs. Within a year, the specialism was formally recognised with a new title. I set the direction before the discipline existed on the team, then grew someone into it.
Forming leaders, not just skills
I mentored a senior designer from strong individual contributor into owning creative direction, then deliberately coached him out of being the team's single point of failure, moving him from fixing others' problems to running his own workshops teaching procedural 3D workflow.
Where performance fell short, I acted with structure rather than drift: direct day-to-day coaching first, then a formal development plan with the people lead when coaching alone was not enough.
Where the career ladder had no next step, I built one: designing alternative progression titles for a designer blocked from promotion by banding, so real scope growth was still recognised.
I delegated commercially significant work as a development tool, handing a direct report ownership of the proposal to bring an externally supplied interactive product in-house, a project carrying a six-figure external cost.
The result
A repeatable R&D structure that turned experiments into production systems, several of which have now been live for over 6 months
The Discovery Days model adopted beyond the team, scaled department-wide as dedicated AI R&D time, with department teams shipping working tools built inside it
One designer formally recognised as a UX and interactive motion specialist, another operating as a creative lead and mentor in his own right
The team's work recognised with a company-wide innovation award in 2026, in the Builders and Innovators category
Public recognition from senior leadership, with the Head of Video describing me as "an incredible leader and innovator" and the VP of Marketing highlighting "the impact you're having not just in your team but across the whole department"
Why this case matters
Most leadership case studies show outputs. This one shows a system that produces outputs: protected exploration, a model for converting it into production, and a deliberate practice of turning designers into specialists and specialists into leaders. Teams built this way keep improving after any single project ends, and they do not collapse when the lead is out of the room. That is the actual job.
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