Sara Haragold

Dear Stripe Team,

Problems in a creative studio almost never start where they surface. I’ve spent fifteen years untangling the systems and workflows that produce them, and fixing the cause so the problem stops coming back. That expertise is what I’d bring to Stripe’s Brand Studio.

At HP I was asked to fix the briefing form, because work arrived and then changed shape ten times before anything shipped. An animation would become a stills shoot, a spot would lose the selling point it was built around, and budgets were burned on versions nobody used. The assumption was that requests were not being questioned hard enough before they kicked off. I audited the submissions and found the cause in finance of all places. HP ran on quarterly budgets that expired, so a team that spent three weeks pressure testing an idea could lose the money to actually make it. People were responding correctly to how their budgets were allocated. Nothing could be invoiced until a finished asset existed, so I worked with HP’s billing and legal teams to widen what qualified, and built the staged structure with finance. The mid-flight changes largely stopped, and a campaign made under the new cadence became one of HP’s most engaging in years.

Partner trust was the next thing to fix. They needed to know where their work stood without asking, and to stop seeing easy mistakes in early drafts, which was eroding confidence in everything else. I set up a weekly review, a live status dashboard they could open themselves, and an automated proofing pass that every round went through before anything reached a partner. Satisfaction rose 17%, and the same approach lifted it 21% on the smaller team I ran for Morgan Stanley.

Both fixes started the same way, by finding the source instead of treating the symptom, which comes down to knowing what to ask. News production taught me that a story only lands if you can say why it matters. Advertising narrowed that to why it matters to one specific person. Asking good questions is what got me into rooms I was not on the list for. At Morgan Stanley, HP, and Oliver’s other top accounts, senior executives are kept clear of work in progress, and I was the one their teams let in to work out which projects mattered and which carried the larger vision.

Stripe keeps opening categories that did not exist a year ago, and each one arrives needing to be explained to someone. Some of it will deserve Brand Studio’s time and some will not, and that is knowable long before anyone writes the brief. I’d want to own that upstream work, publish where every project stands so nobody has to ask, and design the systems and tooling underneath both. I’d love to talk about what the first ninety days could look like.