The Showcase: Making Work Visible

As the teams I led at the National Football League grew, it became harder to make the full scope of our work visible across the organization. Product design, marketing, brand, UX research, and editorial teams were delivering great stuff, but the surface area was so large that even people inside the department rarely had visibility into everything being created.

For years, I solved for this with executive roadshows in Los Angeles, New York, and New Jersey. The presentations helped, but when the meeting ended, no one ever looked at the deck again.

In 2018, I replaced the presentations with a hardcover book called the Digital Media Design Annual. The book featured standout work from across the organization, including shipped products, campaigns, exploratory concepts, and internal experiments. It also dedicated pages to the people and personality of the teams themselves. The work spoke for itself, but I wanted the organization to see the people and culture behind it too.

The reaction was immediate. League executives called to say they were impressed by the breadth of work and had new ideas about how we could collaborate. Team members kept copies on desks and bookshelves for years. I still occasionally spot them in the background on Zoom calls.

In 2021, after COVID had sent everyone home to work from kitchen tables and spare bedrooms, the first edition of the RVO Health Creative Showcase was published. It was the first truly shared experience the organization had in more than a year. Flipping through the pages reconnected people to the broader organization and to each other.

What started as a way to raise the visibility of my teams became one of the most effective tools I found for recognizing contributors, strengthening culture, and expanding the influence of creative organizations inside large companies.