My CV says Strategy Director. It lists agencies -- Monks, Poke, Dare, AnalogFolk -- and clients and campaigns and the kind of bullet points that recruiters scan for three seconds before moving on. What it doesn't list, because there's no standard way to list it, are the skills that actually matter. The ones that made me good at strategy and now make me good at building products. The invisible skills.

These are the things I use every single day when I'm building something, and none of them appear on any job specification I've ever seen. They don't have certifications. They can't be measured in a test. You can't learn them from a course. They accumulate silently over years of doing the work, and when you finally need them, they feel less like skills and more like instincts.

Audience instinct

The first invisible skill is knowing who something is for. Not in the abstract, market-segmentation sense. In the gut-level, immediate sense. Looking at a product idea and knowing -- before any research, before any data -- whether the audience exists, whether they care, and what they'll feel when they encounter it.

This is different from empathy, which everyone claims to have. This is pattern-matched intuition built from years of sitting in focus groups, reading research decks, studying consumer behaviour, and watching campaigns either connect or miss. It's the voice in your head that says "This is for a thirty-something parent in a city who has ten minutes of free time and wants something that feels curated, not random." That voice doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from fifteen years of listening to people talk about what they want and noticing what they actually do.

When I built Little London -- a weekend activity guide for parents -- I didn't do audience research. I didn't need to. I am the audience. And more than that, I've spent a career understanding audiences like me. The product was shaped by instinct that took fifteen years to develop. That instinct is invisible. It doesn't go on the CV. But it's the reason the product feels right.

Nobody lists "knows who this is for before anyone asks" on their CV. But it's the single most valuable skill in product building. Get this wrong and nothing else matters. Get it right and everything else becomes easier.

Brief-writing

Here is a skill that sounds mundane and is actually extraordinary: the ability to articulate what you want clearly enough that someone (or something) can build it. In advertising, this is brief-writing. In product building with AI, this is prompting. They are the same skill.

A good brief does four things. It defines the problem. It identifies the audience. It establishes the tone. And it sets constraints that are tight enough to be useful but loose enough to allow creative solutions. I wrote briefs for fifteen years. Hundreds of them. For campaigns, for pitches, for internal projects, for creative teams who needed a clear starting point.

Now I write prompts. And I'm good at it -- not because I studied prompt engineering, but because I spent a career learning how to tell other people exactly what I wanted in a way that produced the right output. The strategist who can write a clear brief can write a clear prompt. The strategist who can't will struggle with AI just like they struggled with creative teams. The skill transfers perfectly.

Taste

Taste is the most controversial invisible skill because people either think it's innate (it isn't) or subjective (it partly is, but less than you'd think). Taste, in the way I mean it, is the ability to look at something and know whether it's good. Not whether you personally like it. Whether it's good.

🧭
How taste shows up in products: It's the typography choice. The spacing. The colour palette. The decision to leave something out. The feeling that every element belongs. Taste is why Modern Retro feels like a gallery and not a gallery template. It's invisible until it's absent.

This skill developed over years of exposure. Print magazines in my teens -- The Face, i-D, Dazed. Design blogs in my twenties. Brand work across dozens of categories in my thirties. Every reference point accumulates. Every bad design you notice sharpens your sense of what good design looks like. Every great campaign you study adds to your internal library of what excellence feels like. By the time you've done this for fifteen years, you don't think about whether a font pairing works. You feel it. And that feeling, that accumulated aesthetic judgment, is the reason a non-coder can build products that look and feel considered.

Reading a room

This one sounds like a soft skill for meetings, but it's actually about understanding context. In advertising, reading a room means walking into a client presentation and knowing within thirty seconds what the energy is, what the concerns are, what needs to be said and what needs to be left unsaid. It's situational awareness at speed.

In product building, reading a room translates to reading a market. Understanding the context that a product exists in. Knowing that a culture aggregator needs to feel authoritative but not academic. Knowing that a pub guide needs to feel opinionated but not exclusionary. Knowing that a taste-scoring tool needs to feel playful but not frivolous. These are contextual judgments. They require understanding not just the audience but the environment in which the audience will encounter your thing. That's reading a room. And it's invisible.

Pattern recognition

The last invisible skill is the one that ties all the others together. Pattern recognition is the ability to see that a problem in one domain has already been solved in another. It's the moment when you realise that Spotify Wrapped works because of the same psychological principle that makes end-of-year lists compelling. It's noticing that the reason people love Letterboxd isn't the reviews -- it's the curation and self-expression. It's connecting a trend in Japanese design philosophy to a product decision about whitespace.

Strategy directors are professional pattern recognisers. That's literally the job. Sit across categories, study culture, watch behaviour, and find the patterns that nobody else is seeing. This skill doesn't retire when you leave the agency. It intensifies. Because now instead of applying patterns to briefs, you're applying them to products. And the output is tangible.

The invisible skills don't appear on any job spec. They can't be tested or certified. But they're the reason a fifteen-year strategist can build products that feel considered, targeted, and aesthetically right -- without ever having written code before.

Making the invisible visible

The frustration with invisible skills is that they're, well, invisible. You can't point to a line on your CV that says "audience instinct: expert level." You can't show a certificate in taste. The only way to make these skills visible is to make things that demonstrate them. Products that clearly know who they're for. Designs that clearly have aesthetic judgment behind them. Experiences that clearly understand their context.

That's why I build. Not just to have a portfolio, but to make the invisible skills visible. Every product I ship is a demonstration of audience instinct, brief-writing, taste, contextual awareness, and pattern recognition -- all working together, all accumulated over fifteen years, all completely absent from my CV.

The skills that matter most are the ones you can't list. You can only show.