I spent fifteen years telling other people what to build. As a strategy director in advertising, that was the job. Understand the audience, find the insight, write the brief, present the recommendation. I was good at it. I worked at agencies I respected, with talented people, on brands that mattered. But there was always a gap between what I recommended and what I understood about making it real.
That gap didn't bother me for a long time. It's the nature of the role. Strategists think. Creatives make. Developers build. Everyone stays in their lane. That's how agencies work. That's how most organisations work. And for a while, I believed that was fine. That thinking about things was enough. That the strategy was the hard part, and the execution was just... execution.
I was wrong. Completely, embarrassingly wrong.
The PowerPoint problem
Here's what happens in most agencies. A strategist writes a brief. The brief contains a recommendation. That recommendation is presented on a slide, usually with a nice framework and some research to back it up. The client nods. The creative team interprets the brief. Developers build what the creative team designed. And somewhere between the original insight and the final product, the thing that made the idea special gets lost. Not always. But often.
The strategist doesn't notice, because by then they're on to the next brief. They never had to sit with the consequences of their recommendation. They never had to feel the friction between what sounds good in a presentation and what actually works when someone tries to use it. They never had to make the hundreds of micro-decisions that turn an idea into a thing.
I'm not criticising strategists. I'm one. I'm criticising the system that tells strategists their job ends at the recommendation. Because that system produces strategists who are brilliant at describing problems and terrible at understanding solutions. Who can articulate what a brand should do but have no instinct for what it costs - in time, in complexity, in trade-offs - to actually do it.
What building taught me that strategy never could
When I started building products with Claude Code, with zero coding background, the first thing I learned was that everything is harder than it looks. Not harder in the way I expected - not technically harder, though that too - but harder in the sense that every decision branches into ten more decisions. Should the navigation be fixed or scroll? How does this look on a phone? What happens when someone has slow internet? What about accessibility? What do you do when the thing you designed looks wrong with real content instead of placeholder text?
These aren't strategic questions. They're craft questions. And they're the questions that determine whether a product feels good or feels mediocre. No strategy deck in the world accounts for them, because no strategy deck can. They only emerge when you're actually building.
The second thing I learned was empathy. Real empathy, not the focus-group kind. When you build something and put it on the internet and watch someone use it, you understand your audience in a way that no amount of research can replicate. You see where they hesitate. You see what they ignore. You feel the gap between what you intended and what they experienced. That feeling - the slight embarrassment of realising your clever idea doesn't work the way you imagined - is the most valuable thing a strategist can experience.
The third thing I learned was that speed beats perfection. In agencies, we spend weeks refining presentations. We wordsmith headlines. We debate the order of slides. We treat the strategy document as the product. But when you're building something real, you learn very quickly that a thing that exists beats a thing that is perfect. That getting something live and learning from real usage is worth more than another round of internal review. That shipping is a skill, and most strategists have never practised it.
The empathy gap
I have sat in meetings where strategists recommended a complete digital transformation. Where the slide said "build a seamless omnichannel experience" as if that were a simple ask. Where the timeline said "12 weeks" because it sounded reasonable in a presentation, without any understanding of what 12 weeks of development actually looks like.
I've been that strategist. I've written those slides. And I cringe thinking about it now, because building my own products has shown me how wildly disconnected those recommendations were from reality. Not because the thinking was wrong - often the strategic logic was sound - but because the understanding of what it takes to make something was missing entirely.
When you've spent a weekend trying to get a simple feature to work - something that seemed obvious and easy in your head - you develop a different kind of respect for the people who build things for a living. You stop treating development as a commodity. You stop assuming that your brilliant recommendation is 90% of the work and the building is just the remaining 10%. You realise, viscerally, that the building IS the work, and the strategy is just the starting point.
What I would tell every strategist
Build something. I don't care what. A simple website. A tool that solves a small problem in your life. A side project that scratches an itch. It doesn't need to be big or impressive. It just needs to be real. It needs to have a URL. It needs to be something someone else can actually use.
You don't need to learn to code. I've not learned to code. I use AI tools to bridge that gap, and the results are better than I could have imagined. The point isn't to become a developer. The point is to experience the process. To feel what it's like to go from idea to live product. To make the thousand small decisions that no brief ever accounts for.
When you've done this - even once - you'll be a better strategist. Not because you'll suddenly understand JavaScript or databases. But because you'll understand trade-offs. You'll understand that the elegant solution on your slide might be a nightmare to implement. You'll understand that simplicity isn't the absence of thinking but the result of enormous amounts of it. You'll understand that the gap between recommendation and reality is where all the interesting work happens.
Strategy is valuable. I still believe that deeply. The ability to understand an audience, find an insight, and shape a direction is a genuine skill. But it's an incomplete skill when it exists in isolation. When it never has to prove itself against reality. When it never has to survive contact with an actual user.
The strategists who will thrive in the next decade are the ones who can think AND make. Who can write the brief and then build the first version. Who can move between the abstract and the concrete without losing the thread of either. The ones who stop treating "build" as someone else's verb.
I spent fifteen years advising. Now I spend my days building. And the irony is that building has made me a better strategist than fifteen years of strategy ever did. The best thinking I've ever done has been in service of making something real. Not in service of a slide.
Stop advising. Start making. The strategy will be better for it.
