Strategic Development Manager - mercier

Bilinguallink; Mercier; On-site; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Adobe is seeking an experienced Strategic Development Manager to serve as the creative-production and applied-AI specialist for enterprise customers. You will work with creative directors, design leaders, producers, studio ops teams, marketing, and tech stakeholders to identify high-value opportunities, build prototypes and pilot workflows, and guide customers toward repeatable adoption.

You will bring the judgment of an experienced creative practitioner into the implementation, knowing when to

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading creative production in an enterprise, major agency, studio, or large-scale brand environment.
• A portfolio showing shipped creative work at scale; required for application review.
• Hands-on experience using generative AI, creative automation, or emerging creative tech to solve production problems.
• Ability to build working prototypes and communicate requirements clearly to technical staff.
• Strong facilitation and executive communication skills.
• Ability to work credibly with creative practitioners and enterprise technology stakeholders.
• Sound judgment regarding brand governance, rights, quality, human review, and responsible AI adoption.

Responsibilities

• Lead enterprise creative discovery and identify high-value opportunities based on brand system, production model, and content supply chain.
• Translate briefs into concepts, asset variants, and end-to-end review and localization workflows.
• Define fit for Firefly capabilities and determine when Custom Models or Creative Production are appropriate.
• Develop prototypes and pilot workflows; evaluate output against quality and brand criteria.
• Demonstrate working solutions to creative teams and partner with technical specialists for production-grade integrations.
• Facilitate hands-on workshops and create enablement materials and handoff documentation.
• Drive adoption and measure outcomes like time to asset, variants produced, and workflow adoption.

Skills

Creative leadership

Enterprise experience

Generative AI

Prototype development

Stakeholder communication

Brand governance

Tools

Adobe Firefly

Firefly Custom Models

Workfront

Frame.io

Job description

Creative-production leader. Applied-AI implementer. The person craft trusts to make Firefly work in the real pipeline.

The Opportunity

Enterprise creative organizations are being asked to produce more content across more markets, channels, formats, and audiences while protecting creative quality, brand consistency, and commercial safety. Firefly Custom Models and Firefly Creative Production can help customers move from isolated experimentation to repeatable, governed production workflows.

The Creativity & Productivity (C&P) Customer Strategy & Success group helps customers identify valuable opportunities, implement practical solutions, and build the capability to use AI responsibly at scale. We work with creative, marketing, production, operations, and technology leaders to connect creative intent with measurable business outcomes.

The focus of this role is for an experienced enterprise creative-production leader who can understand how creative work is made, build working Firefly solutions, and guide adoption.

About the Role

As a Strategic Development Manager, you will be the creative-production and applied-AI specialist for enterprise customers. You will work with creative directors, design leaders, producers, studio operations teams, marketing organizations, and technology stakeholders to identify high-value opportunities, build prototypes and pilot workflows, and guide customers toward repeatable adoption.

You will bring the judgment of an experienced creative practitioner into the implementation process. You will know when a use case is strategically valuable, when a Custom Model is appropriate, when Creative Production is the right workflow layer, when human review must remain in the process, and when deeper technical or product involvement is required.

What You Will Do

Lead Creative Discovery and Use-Case Strategy

• Partner with enterprise creative, marketing, production, and operations leaders to understand their brand system, production model, content supply chain, and business priorities.
• Map how briefs become concepts, how master assets become variants, and how work moves through review, approval, localization, asset management, and activation.
• Identify high-value opportunities based on content volume, cycle time, cost, rework, brand consistency, quality, and adoption potential.
• Determine whether a use case is best served by Firefly capabilities, Firefly Custom Models, Firefly Creative Production, Firefly Services, or another Adobe solution.
• Make clear fit and no-fit recommendations. Set expectations about quality standards, human review, brand governance, rights, and the limitations of AI-assisted production.

Implement Firefly Custom Models

• Lead customers through Custom Model readiness, including use-case definition, training-asset selection, visual consistency, captioning, governance, and evaluation.
• Help creative teams determine whether training assets are representative, approved, and appropriate for the intended model and output.
• Train, test, evaluate, and iterate on Custom Models within the agreed customer implementation scope.
• Develop prompting and evaluation practices that help creative teams assess output quality, identify failure modes, and improve results.
• Demonstrate how approved models can support campaign, character, style, illustration, photography, product-background, and other relevant enterprise use cases.
• Document model assumptions, evaluation criteria, review requirements, and recommended operating practices for the customer team.
• Partner with technical specialists when model workflows require APIs, enterprise architecture, security review, data integration, or production engineering.

Design and Implement Firefly Creative Production Workflows

• Translate creative production requirements into repeatable workflow designs with defined inputs, transformations, creative controls, approvals, outputs, and system handoffs.
• Configure and demonstrate no-code or low-code workflows for activities such as asset variation, resizing, cropping, background replacement, compositing, adaptation, and localization.
• Build customer-facing prototypes and pilot implementations using real or representative customer assets.
• Evaluate workflow output with creative teams and iterate against agreed quality, brand, and production criteria.
• Demonstrate working solutions directly to creative directors, designers, producers, and production teams rather than relying only on presentation material.
• Partner with Customer Forward Deployed Engineering, Technical Consulting, and customer technology teams to move validated workflows into production-grade integrations.

Drive Adoption and Value Realization

• Facilitate hands‑on workshops with designers, producers, editors, marketers, and creative operations teams.
• Train customer teams to use, evaluate, govern, and extend implemented workflows.
• Create enablement materials, operating guidelines, prompt practices, evaluation rubrics, and handoff documentation.
• Help customers define responsibilities for creators, reviewers, approvers, publishers, and workflow owners.
• Establish a practical adoption plan that moves beyond a demonstration and into repeatable use by the target creative organization.
• Track outcomes such as time from brief to approved asset, number of variants produced, cost per asset or campaign, reduction in rework or reshoots, time required for localization, percentage of output accepted as on‑brand, active users, and workflow adoption.

Scale What Works

• Convert successful customer patterns into reusable workflow templates, demonstrations, playbooks, evaluation methods, and implementation guidance.
• Share customer insights and product gaps with Product Management, Engineering, Enablement, Customer Success Managers, and other Adobe partners.
• Contribute to the operating model and intellectual property of the newly formed Customer Success and Strategy group.
• Stay current on Firefly capabilities, creative technology, production practices, and responsible AI considerations.

What You Will Bring

The primary profile is an experienced creative-production leader who has absorbed AI and technology. We are looking for someone who has led creative work in an enterprise, major agency, studio, or large‑scale brand environment and can now apply that experience to customer‑facing implementation.

Required Qualifications

• Significant experience leading creative production in an enterprise, major agency, studio, or large‑scale brand environment.
• Experience in a role such as Creative Director, Design Director, Executive Creative Director, Art Director, Creative Producer, Studio Lead, Head of Content Operations, Post‑Production Lead, or equivalent.
• Demonstrated understanding of enterprise creative workflows from brief to final asset, including production, adaptation, localization, review, approval, asset management, and distribution.
• A portfolio showing creative work that shipped at scale. Examples may include campaigns, brand systems, photography, motion, video, 3D, editorial, or content operations. A portfolio is required for application review.
• Hands‑on experience using generative AI, creative automation, or emerging creative technology to solve real production problems.
• Ability to build working prototypes, configure practical workflows, evaluate creative output, and communicate requirements clearly to technical specialists.
• Strong facilitation, storytelling, written communication, and executive communication skills.
• Ability to work credibly with creative practitioners and enterprise technology stakeholders.
• Sound judgment regarding brand governance, rights, quality, human review, and responsible AI adoption.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Adobe Firefly, Firefly Custom Models, Firefly Creative Production, Firefly Services, GenStudio, Workfront, AEM Assets, Frame.io, or Creative Cloud.
• Experience with APIs, JSON, workflow logic, automation platforms, or no‑code and low‑code tools.
• Experience with creative technology, design systems, content supply chain transformation, enterprise consulting, or change management.
• Familiarity with tools and production environments such as Figma, Cinema 4D, Nuke, Omniverse, Runway, ComfyUI, or comparable platforms.
• Experience developing creative operations playbooks, enablement programs, or customer centers of excellence.

What Success Looks Like

• Creative leaders trust you because you understand the craft, the production process, and the operational reality of enterprise work.
• You build solutions that customers can use and evaluate, not just strategy presentations.
• You make sound fit and no‑fit decisions and know when to involve technical, product, legal, or security partners.
• You translate creative intent into implementable workflow requirements and clear evaluation criteria.
• Customers move from pilot activity to repeatable adoption with documented ownership and operating practices.
• You demonstrate measurable improvements in production speed, cost, scale, quality, localization, or brand consistency.
• You leave customers with practical capability, documentation, and reusable patterns that continue to create value after the engagement.

Appendix

What We Are Not Looking For

This is a specialist profile. The following backgrounds alone are not sufficient:

• Creative practitioners who are unable or unwilling to work hands‑on with technology. You do not need to be a software engineer, but you must be able to assemble a working workflow, use AI tools to prototype, and communicate technical requirements.
• Management consultants, project managers, or product managers who do not build and evaluate working solutions with customers.
• General AI enthusiasts without substantial enterprise creative‑production experience or a portfolio of shipped work.