How Window Nation’s creative department leverages Wrike’s AI features

Preparing for successful scaling

Window Nation has had quite an evolution, from just 20 licensed users a few years ago to now over 100, and from a creative director running its Wrike operation to a two-person dedicated Wrike project management team keeping the Wrike use on track.

When we first checked in with Window Nation in 2024, Creative Director De Lisa Patterson had chosen Wrike for her team. She used it to turn a previously ad hoc piecemeal system into a single Wrike hub. Fast forward several years, and Zita Cajthaml, Project Manager at Window Nation, is now in charge of the company’s Wrike instance, and has recently brought on a project coordinator to help with the expanding operation. 

Zita’s role as dedicated Wrike champion at Window Nation has grown alongside the company’s scaling Wrike usage. Whereas previously, Zita was the only person who could really help teams build workflows in Wrike, she now has much-needed help. Zita explained, “A lot of people want a lot of things to be built in Wrike.” 

When Zita landed at Window Nation, Wrike was working, but there was room for improvement to ensure the platform was functional beyond De Lisa’s team. Zita immediately took the opportunity to make small improvements to Wrike to solidify its foundation at the company. 

Zita started by tackling the project requests, which included a range of questions too broad for individual requests. “There were too many questions during the process of the project request that we had to answer,” she said. “So I expanded on all the tasks listed in those blueprints and made it so that every time somebody filled out the form and picked that project, it would pull in that specific blueprint.” This resulted in a quick win that made users’ lives easier. 

Zita also rebuilt the creative workspace in Wrike, adding better dashboards and custom fields. “If any of the VPs of marketing wanted to check in and see how many creative projects came into the system this month, how many of those were rushed, and how often we finished on time, all of those little things were built into the custom fields,” Zita explained. This served as another visible win at Window Nation, bringing more attention to how helpful Wrike could be.

As word spread about increased and improved Wrike use, Zita began to build spaces for other teams in the marketing department, including the digital, traditional media, and analytics teams. “Because everybody saw how functional we were getting in Wrike, they wanted to know what they could add and track,” she recounted. And now, she’s expanding outside the marketing department, embarking on new spaces for the Sales team so their members don’t have to use Excel sheets when they need a central place to quickly visualize information.

Accounting for bandwidth to improve efficiency — and bringing in AI agents to help

Window Nation’s creative team faced a common issue: how to quickly assign work based on capacity. “For general projects, we just want to look at the bandwidth calendar,” said Zita, “So I audited all the work we do, every single task, and built ‘effort’ into all of those tasks and project blueprints.” That effort speaks directly to the team bandwidth calendar, populating it with each person’s capacity for a given day. 

“Since effort is buffered into all tasks, assigning it to a designer or copywriter raises their bandwidth for the day,” Zita explained. “If a designer is at 8 hours, we know we can't assign anything else to them.” 

Zita then created a Wrike AI agent to automatically unassign a designer or copywriter from a task when it gets canceled. “If the project gets canceled, it moves to a canceled folder, but it still speaks to the bandwidth calendar, showing those people as fully booked for the day,” she said. This way, capacity reflects the person’s assignments accurately — without Zita having to manually unassign the person herself. 

This represents a core shift in how Window Nation operates: governance earns autonomy. Because the AI agent operates securely within Wrike's established rules and permissions, Zita can confidently delegate routine tasks to AI while keeping her team in total control of every outcome.

In a busy week, Zita reported that the time savings might be as much as two hours, simply from not having to manage admin tasks that really add up. And some weeks, that’s a game changer: “On the busiest weeks, when we have so many projects coming in and going out, if two hours get substituted, I can actually have lunch!” 

That weekly time savings also aligns with a larger enterprise trend: Wrike AI is designed to remove heavy cognitive load, helping users save up to 11 hours per week across Wrike agents and Copilot features, essentially enabling teams to deliver over six days of output in a standard five-day work week.

Window Nation team members are also using AI in Wrike for other use cases. De Lisa uses the Wrike Copilot summary so she can get a quick overview of the different teams’ workloads, progress, and potential bottlenecks. Likewise, the VP of marketing likes to look at this dashboard and the AI comments summaries to determine whether he needs to put more attention toward particular projects. 

Meanwhile, Zita always puts the AI summary in her teams’ dashboards so everyone can quickly get a handle on how team projects are moving forward. 

Creating an repeatable master marketing playbook in Wrike

In early 2026, Zita led the development and execution of Window Nation’s first standardized, cross-functional market launch framework, built around the company’s entry into Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The results were overwhelmingly positive, even earning the company a finalist spot in the Shorty Awards. 

Prior to instituting this new framework, market launches at Window Nation were unstructured and inconsistently executed across teams. But after weeks of research with the relevant teams, Zita used Wrike to build a centralized launch playbook that brought together creative, digital, traditional media, and marketing leadership into a single, coordinated workflow across a three-phased campaign. 

“I leveraged Wrike Blueprints to duplicate the launch framework across all five markets, ensuring each followed the same standardized process while maintaining individual timelines and ownership,” said Zita. Introducing Wrike Blueprints eliminated the need to rebuild project structures from scratch and gave every cross-functional team member, including graphic designers, copywriters, the creative manager, creative director, and digital leads, a consistent, clear view of their role at every phase.

Here’s a glimpse at what the Wrike-supported launches achieved: 

• Pre-launch engagement: The campaign successfully drove over 40,000 visitors to the website in the six-week window preceding the official opening.
• Exceeding lead targets: During its initial month, the Detroit market surpassed its lead generation objective by 286%, outperforming comparable launches by 245%. Simultaneously, Grand Rapids reached 163% of its target.
• Advertising efficiency: Paid social campaigns achieved click-through rates significantly higher than standard averages, while maintaining a cost per lead that fell notably below established industry benchmarks.

The Detroit and Grand Rapids launch became one of Window Nation's most successful market entries to date and now serves as the company's standard playbook for opening new locations.

Engaging a culture shift to ensure success

Zita admits she had to become the Wrike enforcer for a time in order to build the Wrike habit for teams that had only been using it inconsistently. She likened this culture shift to building the Wrike muscle on her teams. “It’s really about constantly reinforcing that this is where the discussion belongs, and showing them that someone is going to be responsive in it,” she explained. 

When she received an email or a Teams chat about a project, she’d redirect until that habit became more ingrained, “I would re-navigate those people and say, ‘Hey guys, let’s have this conversation in Wrike instead.” 

Zita’s effort has certainly paid off as it resulted in a complete culture shift at Window Nation. Wrike has become their trusted work delivery platform: an intentional environment where context, control, and collaboration meet.