United States

Graphic Design

UI/ Visual Design

Branding and Identity Design

Design Operations

Business Development

Project Management

Associate of Arts - AA

Ian Cobb

Founder

Typography

Relationship management

Product strategy

Qualitative research

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Time management

Critical-thinking

Empathy

Team player

Organisation skills

Presentation skills

Customer service

Stakeholder management

Leadership

Project management

Negotiation

Analytical skills

Brand positioning

Brand strategy

Branding

Business intelligence

Content strategy

Data mining

Design systems

Event organisation

Forecasting and reporting

LinkedIn writing

Budget management

Marketing strategy

WordPress

Asana

Canva

ChatGPT

Mailchimp

Adobe Creative Suite

Introduce yourself, define mentoring expectations and goals. Learn and grow together.

General mentorship

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Learn essential burnout prevention techniques and replenish physical and emotional energy.

Managing burnout

Talk to people who have learned to manage their imposter syndrome.

Dealing with imposter syndrome

Understanding factors that lead to a motivated team - recognition, communication and more.

Keeping team members motivated

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to create a positive workplace culture that drives collaboration and productivity?

Fostering a good team culture

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

Strategies for maximizing your design internship or co-op program.

Getting the most out of my internship

Tips for transitioning into a new role or company.

Changing roles

How to successfully prepare and position yourself for a job promotion?

How to get promoted

How to ask for a promotion and negotiate for salary raise?

Negotiating a job offer

How to think about design career paths and what progression looks like for designers?

Design career path

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Practice HR, technical and behavioural interviews with mentors.

Practice mock interviews

Talk to people who've broken into the tech industry and learn their stories.

Breaking into tech

Learn the best ways to answer technical interview questions with frameworks

Acing technical interview questions

How to set up the team for success by defining and measuring team's performance.

Choosing metrics and team goals

Best practices for running productive design critiques.

Running effective design critiques

Manage team expectations and get the most out of your meetings.

Running effective meetings

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

Tips on how to work and collaborate with designers.

Working with designers

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Methods and models of exploring, deciding and delivering design.

Building a design process

Managing being the only designer at your company and working with non-designers.

Being the only designer

Explore different generative and evaluative research techniques. User research synthesis and presentation.

Conducting good user research

Ways and resources to improve your design skills.

Improving design skills

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

Brought in by Director of Brand to function as their Marketing department focused on the execution for a variety of Marketing duties including - 
- Plan, organize & execute photoshoots of product
- Select, edit and color correct product photography for their website and other Marketing collateral
- Production of Marketing materials including business cards, templates, leave behinds, machine branding & UI interfaces.

Brought in by CMO to perform a department-wide discovery including identifying & linking software programs, tech stack integrations, processes, soft skill interviews & best practices to the department. Presented a program roadmap to increase efficiencies by up to 40% to c-suite at the culmination of the project. 

• Over 4 weeks - interviewed stakeholders, c-suite executives, directors, managers & individual contributors to identify opportunities in existing & future processes, production, timelines, schedules, tech stack integrations, subscriptions & tools, processes & operational best practices. 

• Outlined a roadmap with instructions on delivering improvements including a timeline estimate targeted to save the company money on resource burn. 

• Conducted soft skill interviews to identify employee skill sets & contributions & make recommendations around their strengths & where we see opportunity to upskill. Utilizing the existing software stack & employee talent, we provided additional information to further increase efficiencies throughout the department.

Further information is protected under our NDA agreement.

Working with executive level leadership to identify opportunities, design strategy and develop new and engaging programs for the Magnolia Chamber of Commerce. 
Program Management including - 
• Design and implement a scratch PMO structure to better organize, track and optimize events and staff.
• Curate designs for events, social media and email campaigns focused on growing membership by delivering value driven initiatives including stakeholder approvals. 
• Work with executives to interview, dissect and understand business needs in an evolving space.
• Lead, create, test and organize events promoting networking, business development, presentations and more.
• Design, source, coach and host unique scratch events focused on small business growth and development. Sourced venue, managed logistics, costs, coached public speakers, designed engaging presentations and more. In six monthly sessions, we grew from zero to around 30 paid attendees, enlisted sponsors, sourced a larger venue and created self sufficiency within the event.

Brought in as a Marketing Consultant to deploy a new program to all levels of the agency. Tasked to self-train on all existing business processes and workflows and migrate into a new-to-market agency program management tool (COR) the company had planned on integrating as an all-in-one solution to replace their Project Management, Resourcing, Budget Management, Profitability and Time Tracking systems.

• Consuming all of the clients’ processes and workflows and the all-in-one system, creating, scrapping and bridging workflows to be integrated across the agency.

• Milestones included setting deployment schedules, interviewing leads and departments to understand competency levels within the programs, creating level-up training sessions, videos, resources and workflows to deploy the program with a hard launch date in two months (previously established).
 
• Working closely with COR’s COO, Client Success Managers and their Development teams to address and fix issues closest to the dollar, we successfully deployed the program two weeks ahead of schedule to incorporate a soft launch and testing cycle with everyone in the agency. We also integrated a bug tracker and worked with COR, reporting early stage deployment bugs in their software.

• Created an interactive 55+ page document of detailed processes including end to end functionality of the program spanning logging into the program, through closing out a client and invoicing. This document was requested and shared with COR’s internal teams as a document to utilize in their training development as well.

• Successfully onboarded and drove with leadership the discovery through the delivery process of new and existing client work. Including identifying client needs, managing scope, budget burn, creative and management hours through multiple gates and campaign deliverables.

• Overall, the agency saved countless employee hours and tens of thousands of dollars with the success of the program launch and process revamp.

Working across C-Suite and Product departments to identify needs, goals, processes, workflows, resources, culture and communications across U.S. and international offices. 

• Overseeing and managing a local and remote team of 15+ including controlling resource and financial burns of Marketing department and contractors. Responsible for six figure yearly budget including weekly and monthly reporting to C-Suite.

• Development and implementation of scratch and active Project Management processes to optimize workflows and deliverables in an ever-evolving environment. 

• Originally brought on to consult on company-wide brand refresh including - logo redesign, print and digital collateral refresh, new website platform build and more. Entered in the middle of the project with no process, no planning or resource management, overspending and delayed by two months. Onboarded in one week and kept projects moving while establishing process and workflows to improve department efficiency. Overall department revamp results included reducing project timeline from kick-off through final deployment by 93% after three months, helping the company save five figures in the first quarter. 

• Controlling contractor and vendor relations including onboarding, budget allocation, hours tracking, deliverables and productivity stand up meetings.

🤘  Helping people & organizations solve problems, find passion & capture greatness!  🤘

Recently ranked as the Top 50 Business Development Consultants on ADPList!

Lifting teams & people by all means necessary including - working with clients’ executive leadership, teams, & individual contributors to identify opportunities & execute organizational & department process improvements, logo & brand stewardship & management, customer journey & advocacy, digital marketing / social media development, project & program management / PMO structuring & tooling, competitive research & benchmarking, SWOT analysis, event management, & related engagements & initiatives. 

• Consulting with clients in building, growing, optimizing & maintaining flow of schedules & pipeline for the production process.

• Consulting on brand management, change management, messaging, timelines, deployment & growth opportunity across platforms.

• Demonstrated proficiencies in collecting research & data, competitor comparisons, analysis & direction in marketplace for the creation of brand voice, strategy, logos, marketing collateral, services, events & more in print & digital spaces.

Charged with sourcing and recruiting viable job candidates for a company receiving three million application submissions each year. Owned entire candidate journeys from passive contact through on-campus interview stages. Worked with Product areas, other recruiters, and hiring managers on data gathering, consultation, and scheduling—primarily to fill Engineering Productivity roles. 

• Pitched, routed, and pipelined candidates based on business needs. Leveraged LinkedIn for networking. Organized 12-15 30-minute calls per week to discuss candidates’ goals and values aligned with Product areas. 

• Built pipeline from zero to 800 candidates within six months. 

• Easily hurdled OKR (objectives & key results) metrics quarter one. Recognized with “Above & Beyond” award for promoting accessibility issues and managing candidate journeys with skill, brand-centricity, and enthusiasm.

Represented the agency brand while shepherding candidates through the interviewing process, portfolio critiques, contract administration, and negotiation of rates and salaries. Proactively managed candidate journeys (800+) from initial contact through offer, hire, and post-hire check-ins.  

• Led improvements to social media presence and worked with executives to mine opportunities for evangelizing candidate/employee experience and agency ethos. Identified and filtered-out negative online reviews resulting from confusion between Creative Circle and a similarly named agency.  

• Worked with executive leadership to identify bottlenecks and improve the candidate journey/experience.

Collaborated with 18 team leads and stakeholders including company owner, management, vendors, creative and production teams, and volunteer groups. Owned and drove end-to-end lifecycles of individual events, including strategic direction and production elements.   

• Researched options for project management system, and selected and implemented Trello; setup teams and trained users. Reverse-engineered development of an interactive product utilized in building lobby.

Working in-house in their Marketing Dept. for 4+ years, a brief intermission (for a few years) and back as a Marketing Consultant. Duties have flexed and shifted, but overall included - 
Driver of numerous concurrent initiatives designed to deliver sweeping improvements to marketing production processes, project management methodology, nationwide promotional campaign management, third party vendor and publication management, and social media and digital marketing presence. Owned yearly production of product catalog including integration of 250+ distinct SKUs spanning 50+ pages.  

• Researched, selected and implemented PMS—for new department-wide project management system that offered far greater timeline and data visibility, delivering 40% improved productivity and efficiency.   

• Collaborated with C-suite executives and stakeholders to strategize, conceptualize and deploy all marketing collateral for nationwide campaigns across print and digital platforms; quarterly in-store promotions for 3,000+ stores (including Big Box retailers Wal-Mart, Big 5 and Dick’s Sporting Goods), website landing pages, micro-sites, rebate programs, email campaigns, product giveaways, and more.   

• Directed social media strategy and audience engagement across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube channels, growing digital audiences 36% (440,000 to 600,000+). Developed daily, original organic posts reaching 1M+ unique profiles.   

• Controlled all photography in lifestyle and product, including creative direction/onsite management of shoots.

Ian Cobb🇺🇸

About Ian Cobb

Expertise

What mentees say