I spent over fifteen years in advertising agencies. Not the global holding-company kind - the independent, creative, slightly chaotic kind where the work mattered and the people were brilliant and the hours were long and the pitches were relentless. Strategy Director was the title, but the job was really about understanding people and figuring out how to make them care about things.
When I started building my own products, I expected the transition to feel like starting from scratch. New tools, new language, new world. And in some ways it was. But the part that surprised me was how much of what I already knew turned out to be exactly what I needed.
The brief is the product spec
In advertising, everything starts with a brief. A good brief is ruthlessly focused. It articulates a single problem, defines who you are solving it for, and provides just enough context to point the creative team in the right direction without telling them what to make. Writing a good brief is one of the hardest things in advertising. Most people underestimate it.
A product spec is the same thing. What problem are we solving? Who's it for? What's the one thing it absolutely must do well? What are we deliberately not including? When I sat down to define what Curio should be - a tool for surfacing the most-shared links from your network - I wasn't writing a product spec. I was writing a brief. Same discipline, different output.
The strategists I admired most in advertising were the ones who could take a complicated mess of data, insights, and business objectives and distil it into a single, sharp thought. That's exactly what building a product requires. You start with a messy pile of ideas and possibilities and you carve away until you find the thing that matters.
Audience intuition is a superpower
The most transferable skill from advertising to product building isn't creative thinking or storytelling, though those matter. It's audience intuition - the ability to instinctively understand who someone is, what they want, and how they'll react to something.
When I built Little London, a guide to weekend activities for parents in London, I didn't need to do user research. I'm the user. I know what it feels like to open a generic activities website at 8am on a Saturday with my son bouncing off the walls and the listings are either out of date, overly commercial, or obviously written by someone without a kid. That frustration is the entire product insight.
But even for projects where I'm not the direct user, the advertising instinct kicks in. When building a wearable technology news aggregator, I could picture the person who would use it - what they care about, how much time they have, what kind of language resonates with them. That is audience thinking. It's what strategists do every day, and it turns out to be the foundation of good product decisions.
Storytelling is product narrative
In advertising, a campaign isn't just a collection of assets. It is a story. There's a character (the audience), a tension (the problem), and a resolution (the brand). The best campaigns make you feel something. They don't just communicate a message - they create a narrative that people want to be part of.
Products work the same way. Modern Retro isn't just "AI-generated images of brands in a 1970s style." It's a story about nostalgia and imagination - what if your favourite brand existed in a different era? That narrative is what makes people stop scrolling and pay attention. It's what gives the project an identity beyond its function.
Every product I've built has a story. Trove is about the slow accumulation of taste over time. CultureTerminal is about the intersection of creativity and commerce. Even a pub guide tells a story about what makes London special.
The pitch process is shipping
Agency people know what it feels like to work towards an immovable deadline. The pitch is on Tuesday. The client presentation is at 3pm. There's no "we'll push it back a week." You get it done or you don't. This rhythm - intense bursts of work towards a fixed moment where the thing has to exist - is exactly what shipping a product feels like.
I've shipped fourteen products in a matter of months. Not because I'm fast, but because I've spent fifteen years training myself to work under the pressure of deadlines. To make decisions quickly when the clock is running. To know when something is good enough to present, even when it isn't perfect. To resist the temptation to endlessly refine when the moment for action has arrived.
This is the pitch muscle. And it transfers directly to product building.
Why strategists make good product people
There's a narrative in the tech world that product people need to be technical. They need to understand code, or at least understand engineering enough to have credibility with developers. I'm not going to argue against technical knowledge - it helps. But I'll argue that there's another set of skills that matters just as much, if not more.
The ability to understand people deeply. The ability to distil complexity into simplicity. The ability to tell a story that makes someone care. The ability to make decisions under pressure. The ability to know, instinctively, when something is right and when it isn't.
These are advertising skills. Strategy skills. And they're exactly the skills that separate products people use once from products people love.
I'm not suggesting that every strategist should become a product builder. But I'm suggesting that the distance between the two worlds is much shorter than either side thinks. And if you're a strategist with ideas and the itch to make things - the tools to do it exist now. The skills you've been building your entire career aren't just relevant. They're your unfair advantage.
