I spent fifteen years writing strategy decks. Beautiful ones, too. Carefully crafted Keynote presentations with custom typography and elegant charts and perfectly weighted one-line insights on every slide. Decks that took weeks to assemble. Decks that were rehearsed and refined and presented with theatrical precision. Decks that clients nodded along to enthusiastically in the room and then never opened again.
Nobody reads your strategy deck. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean it literally. They don't read it. They nod in the meeting. They say "this is great work." They forward it to someone who wasn't in the room with a note that says "see attached - the strategy for Project X." That person doesn't read it either. They save it to a shared drive where it'll sit untouched until someone deletes the folder three years later during a digital tidy-up. This is the lifecycle of a strategy deck. Birth, presentation, burial.
It took me far too long to understand this. And understanding it changed everything.
The deck industrial complex
Advertising agencies run on decks. Strategy decks, creative decks, media decks, research decks, tissue session decks, status update decks. There's a deck for every occasion and an occasion for every deck. The entire workflow of an agency is structured around the production and presentation of slideshows. We called this "strategy." What it really was, most of the time, was performance.
I say this as someone who was good at it. I could build a narrative across sixty slides that built tension, delivered insight, and landed on a single strategic recommendation that felt inevitable. I could stand in front of a room of marketing directors and make them feel like we had cracked something together. That performance - the shared intellectual journey of a well-delivered strategy presentation - has genuine value. I'm not dismissing it entirely.
But the deck itself? The physical artefact? The sixty slides that took three people two weeks to assemble? That has almost no value after the meeting ends. It's a performance script. Its purpose was to facilitate the live experience of the presentation. Once the performance is over, the script is dead. Nobody goes back to read the screenplay of a play they already watched.
What strategy actually is
The problem with decks isn't just that nobody reads them. It's that they create the illusion of progress without producing anything real. You can spend a month crafting the perfect strategy document and come out of it with nothing but a PDF and a good feeling. The strategy has been articulated but not tested. It has been presented but not proven. It exists as an idea in a file rather than as a thing in the world.
Real strategy isn't a document. It's a series of decisions that manifest in things you can see, touch, and use. The strategy isn't "we should position ourselves as the premium option." The strategy is the pricing page that charges three times the competitor. The strategy is the packaging that feels heavy and expensive. The strategy is the customer service experience that makes you feel important. Those are strategies. The deck that recommended them is just the before photo.
When I started building products, this understanding crystallised. I realised that every product I shipped was a strategy document that people actually used. The London Pub Guide is a strategy document. Its strategy is: curation plus opinion plus clean design creates a better user experience than comprehensive databases. You don't need a deck to communicate that strategy. You need the product. The product IS the strategy, made tangible.
Show, don't present
The most powerful moment in my entire advertising career wasn't a deck presentation. It was when we brought a prototype into a pitch meeting. Instead of showing slides about what we would build, we showed the thing we had already started building. The room changed. The energy shifted. People leaned forward. They asked to touch it. They started suggesting improvements. The conversation moved from "do we like this idea?" to "how do we make this better?" That shift - from evaluation to collaboration - is the difference between presenting a strategy and showing a product.
I think about that moment every time I ship something. Every live URL is a pitch that never ends. It doesn't need a meeting room. It doesn't need me to narrate it. It doesn't need the lights dimmed and the projector warmed up. It just sits there, working, communicating its own strategy through the experience it provides. That's infinitely more powerful than any deck.
Modern Retro is a strategy for how brands could be reimagined through a cultural lens. I could have written a deck about that. "What if we took contemporary brands and visualised them as 1970s retail stores? Here's the strategic rationale, here's the cultural insight, here's why this matters for brand positioning." That deck would have been seventy-five slides and it would have been perfectly fine and nobody would have cared.
Instead, I built it. Eighty-six brands, reimagined as seventies shopfronts, live on the internet, available to browse, share, and purchase as prints. That communicates more strategy in thirty seconds of browsing than any deck could in thirty minutes of presenting. And crucially, people actually engage with it. They share it. They buy from it. They tell other people about it. No strategy deck has ever achieved that.
What advertising taught me anyway
I don't want to pretend that fifteen years of strategy work was wasted. It wasn't. The deck was the wrong medium, but the skills were real. I learned to identify insights - the non-obvious truth about a situation that changes how you see it. I learned to build narratives - to take complex information and structure it into a story that feels inevitable. I learned audience intuition - the ability to instinctively understand who something is for and what they need to feel.
Those skills are embedded in every product I build. When I design the London Pub Guide, I'm doing strategy work. I'm identifying the insight (people want opinion, not information), defining the audience (Londoners who care about quality), and making structural decisions (curate, don't aggregate). The strategy is there. It just lives in the product rather than in a PowerPoint file.
The transition from deck-maker to product-builder has been the most satisfying professional shift of my career. Not because making products is inherently better than making decks - both require creativity, both require strategic thinking, both require taste. But because products survive the meeting. They persist. They work while you sleep. They accumulate value over time rather than depreciating the moment the projector switches off.
The new strategy document
If I were advising a strategy director today - which is essentially me advising my younger self - I would say this: build the thing. Don't write about it. Don't present it. Don't ask for permission to explore it. Build the simplest possible version of what you're recommending and put it in front of people. Let them interact with it. Let them form opinions about the real thing rather than the theoretical thing.
This is now possible in a way it wasn't ten years ago. The tools exist. You don't need to be a developer. You don't need a budget. You need an idea, a clear sense of who it's for, and the willingness to make it real rather than make it into slides. The gap between strategy and execution has collapsed. If your strategy is good, you can prove it. If it's bad, you'll find out faster by building than by presenting.
My portfolio is my strategy deck. Fourteen products, each one an argument made tangible. Each one a strategy that you can visit, use, and evaluate without me in the room to narrate it. That's the best strategy document I've ever produced. And nobody has to pretend to read it.
