The advertising industry has a word for the moment a brand stops growing: stagnation. Strategists spend entire careers helping brands avoid it. We write decks about evolution, repositioning, the courage to leave behind what worked in order to find what works next. We tell clients that relevance requires reinvention. That standing still is the riskiest strategy of all. And then most of us go back to our desks and do the exact same job we did last year.
After fifteen years as a Strategy Director in London agencies, I decided to take my own advice. I walked away from a career that was working, that was comfortable, that I was genuinely good at. Not because it was broken. Because I could feel myself becoming an expert in a version of the industry that was already changing beneath my feet. And the most valuable thing I had learned in a decade and a half of brand strategy was this: the best time to reinvent is before you have to.
The space between careers is not a void. It is not a gap on a CV that needs explaining away. It is where the most interesting professional work of my life has happened.
Why strategy people should build things
Strategists are professional thinkers. We synthesise research, identify tensions, frame opportunities, and hand our thinking to other people to execute. This is the job, and it works. But it also means most strategists never close the loop between insight and product. There is always a handover. Always a brief that translates your thinking into someone else's execution. Always a gap between what you imagined and what gets built.
When I started building products with AI tools (specifically Claude Code), that gap disappeared. The person who identifies the cultural insight is the same person who ships the product. The strategist and the maker became the same role. And the result is something I never experienced in agency life: total creative ownership from concept through to a live URL.
I have now built over twenty products. A cultural relevance scoring engine for brands. A curated Japanese restaurant guide for London. A 70s retail aesthetic generator that turns modern brands into retro storefronts. A taste-mapping platform. A wearable tech news aggregator. None of these came from a client brief. All of them came from the same instinct that drove my strategy work: pattern recognition, cultural observation, an opinion about what is missing and what could exist.
The compound value of pivoting
There is a version of career advice that treats pivots as losses. Every year spent outside your core discipline is a year of seniority you did not accumulate. The LinkedIn algorithm rewards linear progression: Associate to Manager to Director to VP. Clean. Legible. Promotable. But the most interesting people I have worked with in advertising were never the ones with the straightest career lines. They were the ones who had done something else first. Former journalists, academics, musicians, architects. People who brought a different lens to the same problem.
Reinvention compounds. The strategy experience does not disappear when you start building products. It becomes the foundation. I approach product development the way I used to approach brand strategy: start with the audience, find the tension, articulate a point of view, and then execute with taste and precision. The difference is that now the execution is mine, too. Fifteen years of thinking about brands taught me what to build. Learning to code with AI taught me how to build it. The combination is more valuable than either skill alone.
This is the argument for the pivot that rarely gets made. It is not about starting over. It is about stacking capabilities. A strategist who can build is not a junior developer. They are a strategist with a superpower.
The new shape of a career
The traditional career path assumes you pick a lane and stay in it. Advertising, consulting, product management, engineering. Each has its own ladder, its own titles, its own progression logic. But the most exciting opportunities emerging right now sit at the intersections. They need people who understand brand strategy and can build products. People who think about culture and can ship software. People who have taste and can make things.
The job I am looking for probably did not exist five years ago. Head of Product and Culture. Strategy Director with a shipping portfolio. Chief Taste Officer (only half joking). Whatever the title ends up being, the role requires someone who has done both: the thinking and the making. Someone who has spent years inside the machinery of brands, and then walked out and built their own.
I am not waiting for the industry to create this role. I am building the portfolio that proves it should exist. Twenty-four products with live URLs. Each one a demonstration that strategy and execution are not separate disciplines. Each one an argument that the most valuable people in the next era of brands, media, and culture will be the ones who refused to pick a single lane.
Reinvention is not a phase between real careers. It is the career. The ability to learn new tools, enter unfamiliar territory, and produce work that did not exist before you arrived: that is the skill. Everything else is context. And context, as any good strategist will tell you, is something you can always acquire.
