I've spent fifteen years making decks. Beautiful, considered, sometimes genuinely brilliant decks. Hundreds of slides across dozens of brands, each one a carefully constructed argument for why a company should do something differently. Strategy frameworks. Audience insights. Cultural tensions. Competitive landscapes. The whole performance - the room, the projector, the moment where you land the killer slide and the client leans forward in their chair. I was good at it. I'm still good at it. But something started eating at me around year twelve, and by year fifteen it had become impossible to ignore.
None of it shipped.
Not one deck I ever wrote went out into the world as a finished product. Not one framework I developed was something a real person could use. Every single thing I made was an instruction for someone else to go and make the actual thing. I was the person who told other people what to build. And for a long time, that felt important. Strategic. Senior, even. But at some point - and I can't pinpoint exactly when - it started to feel like an excuse.
The uncomfortable gap
The thing about being a strategist in advertising. You develop an incredibly refined sense of what is good. You spend your career studying what works, why it works, what the audience wants, where culture is heading. You become an expert in taste, in judgement, in knowing. But you never have to prove that your taste actually holds up when it meets reality. You never have to ship something and find out whether real people agree with your assessment. The deck is the end of your involvement. Someone else takes it from there.
And that gap - between knowing and proving - gets wider every year you don't close it. At twenty-five, it's fine to be the person with the ideas. At thirty, you're expected to be strategic and advisory. By thirty-five, you've built an entire identity around being the person who thinks rather than the person who makes. And by the time you realise you might want to prove you can actually do the thing you've spent your career recommending, the gap feels enormous. Too big, maybe. Definitely intimidating.
I know because I felt it. That creeping awareness that I was all recommendations and no receipts. That I could stand in front of any room and explain what great looked like, but I had never actually made anything great myself. I had opinions about design but had never designed anything. I had opinions about user experience but had never built a product. I had opinions about content strategy but had never published anything beyond a LinkedIn post that took me three weeks to write.
The moment it broke
There was a meeting. There's always a meeting. I was presenting a strategy for a brand - a good strategy, genuinely - about how they needed to be more culturally connected, more real-time, more plugged into what their audience actually cared about. And someone on the client side, not unkindly, asked: "Have you done this yourself? Do you have something we can look at where you've applied this thinking?"
No. I didn't. I had fifteen years of telling other people to do exactly this, and zero examples of doing it myself. The question wasn't hostile. It was reasonable. And it completely wrecked me. Not because it was unfair, but because it was perfectly fair. I was selling something I had never personally tested. I was a restaurant critic who had never cooked.
That night - and I remember this clearly because it was about 10pm, son asleep, house quiet - I sat at my kitchen table and thought about what I would actually build if I had to prove my own thinking. Not what I would recommend. Not what I would deck. What I would actually make, put my name on, and release into the world where real people could judge it.
Modern Retro started that week. Not as a strategy. Not as a deck. As a thing. A real thing. AI-generated images of modern brands reimagined as 1970s retail stores. It was specific, it was visual, it was culturally interesting, and - critically - it could exist without needing anyone's permission or budget. I could make it and ship it and find out whether my instinct about what people would find interesting was actually right.
What building teaches you that strategy can't
The first thing you learn when you start building is that strategy decks leave out approximately ninety percent of the decisions that matter. A deck might say "clean, minimal design with strong typography." When you're actually building, you discover that sentence contains about four hundred decisions: which typeface, what weight, what size on mobile versus desktop, how much whitespace, what colour for body text versus headings, what happens when the title is longer than two lines, what the loading state looks like, what the error state looks like. The deck glosses over all of this. The build can't.
The second thing you learn is that your taste gets tested immediately and relentlessly. In a strategy role, taste is theoretical. You point at things and say "that's good" or "that isn't good enough." When you're building, taste becomes practical. You have to make the thing that is good. You have to stand behind every pixel, every word, every interaction. And sometimes - often, actually - you discover that your taste is less refined than you thought it was. That knowing what's good and making what's good are different skills. That the gap between the two is where the real learning happens.
CultureTerminal taught me this more than anything. I knew exactly what a culture aggregator should feel like - I had been describing it in decks for years. Clean. Fast. Curated. Opinionated. But building one forced me to make a thousand decisions that no deck had ever prepared me for. How many items on the homepage? How do you balance recency with quality? What counts as "culture" - is it just art and music, or does tech count, does food count, does sport count? These aren't strategic questions. They're product questions. And they only get answered by building.
Proof as identity
I need to be honest about something. The reason I started building wasn't purely intellectual. It wasn't just "I want to test my strategic thinking in the real world." It was more desperate than that. More personal. I needed proof that I wasn't just talk. After fifteen years of advising, recommending, and presenting, I needed something I could point to and say: "I didn't just describe what good looks like. I made something good."
That need - for proof, for evidence, for receipts - isn't something I'm entirely comfortable admitting. It suggests insecurity, which strategists aren't supposed to have. We're supposed to be the confident ones, the ones with the answers. But confidence built entirely on opinions is fragile. It needs constant reinforcement from the room - the nodding heads, the "great thinking," the approving clients. Take away the room and what are you left with? Opinions. Just opinions.
Building gave me something the room never could: proof that exists independent of anyone's approval. Modern Retro is there. CultureTerminal is there. Fourteen products, live on the internet, built by someone who six months ago had never written a line of code. That isn't an opinion. That isn't a recommendation. That's a thing that exists in the world. And no matter what anyone thinks of the strategy behind it, the thing itself is real.
The view from the other side
Here's what I didn't expect. Building didn't make me a worse strategist. It made me a dramatically better one. Because now, when I recommend something, I know what it actually takes to execute. I know that "just add a personalised feed" is six weeks of work. I know that "clean design" requires obsessive attention to spacing and typography and colour theory. I know that "launch and iterate" means months of late nights fixing things you didn't anticipate.
That knowledge - the knowledge that only comes from doing - changes how you think about strategy entirely. You stop recommending things that sound good in a deck but are impossible to build. You start thinking about execution as part of the strategy, not as someone else's problem. You develop empathy for the people who have to turn your beautiful slides into a working product. And you start to understand that the best strategy is the one that gets built well, not the one that gets presented well.
So this is my case for strategists building things. Not because strategy doesn't matter - it matters enormously. But because strategy that has never been tested against reality is theory, not practice. And theory is comfortable, safe, and ultimately hollow. Building is uncomfortable, risky, and the only way to find out whether your ideas actually work.
Fifteen years of decks taught me how to think. Twelve months of building taught me that thinking isn't enough. Decks don't ship. Products do. And the gap between the two is where everything interesting happens.
