Case Study: Transforming Marketing Asset Delivery for a Fast-Growing iGaming Operator

Rapid growth is exciting until the operating model behind it starts to break. For one international iGaming operator, expansion into new and emerging markets created a sharp increase in demand for localised marketing assets, campaign support, and cross-functional coordination. What had once been manageable became a growing operational bottleneck that threatened speed, quality, and confidence across the wider marketing function.

The business had already invested in people. Headcount had grown across departments, and marketing operations had been reorganised into a 30-person team focused on delivering the assets needed by acquisition, retention, CRM, and other internal stakeholders. But despite that investment, the team was still only partially meeting the needs of more than 40 stakeholders, and the strain was becoming increasingly visible.

Background

The operator’s growth had been driven largely by smaller markets, and the next phase of expansion depended on entering additional markets with increasingly localised marketing activity. That placed heavy pressure on the marketing operations team, which sat at the centre of campaign delivery and asset production. Every launch, promotion, and market-specific activation depended on the team’s ability to intake requests, coordinate delivery, and keep work moving smoothly from brief to final output.

The challenge was not a lack of commitment or effort. The team was working hard, but the underlying system had become too fragmented to support the pace and complexity of the business. More demand was entering the function, but the workflows, tools, and communication structures had not evolved in step.

The Problem

At the front end of the process, requests for marketing assets were arriving through five or six different channels. Some methods were awkward for stakeholders to use, and once submitted, requests entered a maze of manual workflows that varied by team and request type. Even simple work could become administratively heavy, while more complex projects required coordinators to navigate multiple projects, handoffs, and approvals.

That fragmentation had several consequences. Old requests were frequently copied and reused, even when only part of the original scope was still relevant. This resulted in unnecessary work being commissioned and assets being created that were never used. Manual handling also increased the risk of errors, which then triggered rework, clarification loops, and delays that frustrated both requesters and delivery teams.

The internal operating structure added further complexity. Each of the four specialist teams within marketing operations needed separate work orders in individual JIRA projects, while a fifth project was used by the coordinators to manage more complex initiatives. This made end-to-end visibility almost impossible. Stakeholders could not easily see where their work was, what stage it had reached, or what was causing delays.

The Impact

The human impact was immediate. The four coordinators were overwhelmed, and the team lead was at clear risk of burnout. Creative and technical production teams were carrying substantial backlogs, which reduced their ability to absorb urgent work or respond quickly to external events. Pressure levels were rising precisely when the business needed greater agility.

The stakeholder experience was also deteriorating. Because progress was difficult to track, the only practical way to get updates was to interrupt coordinators or team leads directly. That led to growing frustration on both sides. In some cases, communication became so disruptive that team leads instructed stakeholders not to contact them or their teams directly and to route all queries through the coordinators instead. The result was a poor perception of the marketing operations function and a widening divide between delivery teams and the stakeholders they were there to support.

From a business perspective, the model was not scalable. Historical resource constraints had been relieved by adding headcount, but senior management no longer saw that as a viable long-term answer because of cost concerns and office space limitations. The organisation needed a better system, not simply more people working inside a broken one.

The Goals

The improvement brief was clear and commercially relevant. The business needed one simple request system, one unified workflow, lower levels of rework and wasted output, and far better visibility for stakeholders. The aim was not just process tidiness. It was to create an operating model that could support growth with more predictability, less friction, and stronger confidence from the wider organisation.

These goals mattered because marketing operations were a leverage function. When it worked well, campaigns could move faster, stakeholders could plan with confidence, and production teams could focus on high-value execution rather than administrative firefighting. Improving this function had the potential to lift performance across multiple parts of the business at once.

The Approach

The first step was to understand the reality of the current state in detail. Existing request methods and workflows were thoroughly documented, producing a workflow diagram that stretched across three pages and included numerous steps identified only by individual names. That exercise made the degree of complexity visible and created a shared understanding of why the system felt so difficult to navigate.

A series of small-group discussions then took place with stakeholders to capture their needs, frustrations, and concerns. This was an important turning point, because it showed that stakeholders were not resistant to process discipline; they wanted improvement just as much as the operations team did. Once that stakeholder picture had been built, it was shared with the marketing operations team, which surfaced a second layer of issues around internal concerns, ways of working, and strained relationships.

The diagnosis made two things clear. First, the process had to be redesigned for simplicity and automation. Second, a purely technical fix would not be enough on its own. Some relationships needed to be rebuilt, and the team needed support to develop a more flexible mindset around how work could be delivered.

The Solution

The redesigned model was built around three principles: keep it simple, automate wherever possible, and use technology that people already knew. To enable a single workflow, the organisation first needed a single way to create requests. After testing different options and balancing usability, cost, and training effort, Atlassian’s JIRA Service Desk was selected as the request entry point.

That decision was strategically strong for two reasons. First, Service Desk was already in use in the organisation for IT issue logging, so most stakeholders were already familiar with the interface. Second, it could be configured to present different options depending on request type while still feeding requests directly into JIRA, creating the foundation for a more controlled and automated workflow.

To make adoption easier, a new JIRA master project was created to support the new process and its automations. Specialist team tickets could now be generated with a button click, and sub-tasks were automatically linked back to the master ticket. This replaced multiple disconnected handoffs with a more coherent system that made work easier to create, easier to manage, and easier to track.

The operating change was not implemented in isolation. The full solution was reviewed with senior members of the marketing operations team, then presented to the wider team and to stakeholders for feedback before being finalised. Senior team members also received off-site training in agile methodologies, not to impose a full agile transformation, but to introduce more adaptive thinking around prioritisation, collaboration, and delivery.

At the same time, specialist team leaders were encouraged to hold one-to-one conversations with key stakeholders. These meetings were intentionally informal and focused on discussing current work, team activity, and recent projects. Their value was less about status reporting and more about rebuilding trust, increasing mutual understanding, and breaking down the “them and us” mentality that had emerged.

The Results

The new process required only a short adjustment period after launch, and stakeholders quickly warmed to the change. The Service Desk request tool made it easier to submit the right request in the first place, which reduced unnecessary work and helped eliminate asset creation for items that were not actually needed. A single master JIRA project also gave stakeholders one place to check progress and provide feedback, removing much of the uncertainty that had previously driven interruptions.

The operational gains were substantial. Automation reduced manual work for the coordinators by 75 to 90 percent, freeing them to focus on higher-value activities such as prioritisation and clarifying request detail rather than simply acting as update channels. The simplified workflow also meant people understood the process more clearly, and interruptions for status checks dropped to almost zero.

There was still a high volume of work to deliver, but the environment became more manageable and less stressful. The direct contact between specialist teams and stakeholders, while initially resisted by some, soon proved valuable because it reduced misunderstanding and helped lower rework. With better systems and stronger relationships in place, the function became more scalable, more resilient, and better equipped to support continued business growth without relying on repeated hiring as the primary solution.

Conclusion: Scaling is More Than Just Numbers

Growth demands more than headcount: it requires operating model reinvention. This case exposes a classic scaling trap: layering people onto outdated processes until complexity overwhelms capacity. The real unlock? We redesigned from the core, streamlining intake, automating workflows, embedding transparency, and realigning stakeholder dynamics.

For iGaming and fintech leaders, this is strategic leverage. A refined operating model doesn’t just cut friction; it safeguards high-performance teams from burnout, elevates stakeholder trust to strategic partnership levels, and builds resilience for unrelenting expansion. We delivered efficiency and a cultural shift, transforming marketing operations from cost centre to growth multiplier: proving fractional COO intervention can rewire your operations for outsized returns.

For more information or to discuss how we can help your business email:

andrew@thefractionalcoo.biz