Salary campaign rescopingResetting scope on a multi-market campaign
The brief
1
Business development teams across six APAC countries, under the region head's remit, jointly commissioned a salary and career insights survey and wanted the results turned into three infographics targeting early-, mid-, and late-career audiences with an editable field so local business development teams could swap in the right salary currency before forwarding to prospects.
The production team, based in the US and working from kickoff recordings rather than attending live, approved the brief as scoped and allocated design time for three assets.
The challenge
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At kickoff, I asked for the full survey dataset, initially just to cross-check figures and get context for the copy.
That's when I found the real problem: it wasn't only salary figures that varied by country. Every data point in the survey scored differently market to market, with different implications at each career stage. A single template with a swappable currency field couldn't represent that; the underlying content, not just one number, changed by market.
Design effort had already been scoped and time-boxed against the three-asset brief, without anyone having reviewed the full dataset first.
The approach
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I raised a recommendation to stakeholders and production that this needed to be treated as a multi-market delivery, not a template with regional edits: 18 separate builds across three career stages and six countries, each requiring full design consideration rather than a copy-and-swap adaptation.
To make the scale concrete rather than abstract, I had the designer mock up one country/career-stage combination in full, then map out exactly which elements would need to change for each of the other 17, so that stakeholders could see precisely what "18 builds" meant rather than take my word for it.
Anticipating the client's concern about timeline, I proposed a sequencing fix alongside the scope change: get the client to approve one infographic design first, then use that approved design as the template for quickly producing the remaining 17. I also went back to the production manager directly to secure more design time rather than trying to absorb the 6x scope increase into the original allocation.
One thing surfaced during this process: the design director asked who had originally approved commissioning the survey, since by the following year the organization had stood up a dedicated stats/member intelligence team specifically to vet and manage this kind of work. This survey had been commissioned in 2025, before that governance function existed; this was a gap that this project made visible.
Impact
4
Scope, timeline, and design resourcing were realigned before production progressed, and stakeholders had a clear, concrete view of what the delivery required.
The approved-first-design-as-template sequencing kept the revised scope on schedule despite the 6x increase in asset count, avoiding the late-stage rework and quality compromises that shipping to the original three-asset brief would have caused.