Every job description I read asks for the same things. Strategic thinking. Stakeholder management. Data-driven decision making. Cross-functional collaboration. These are the table stakes of professional life, the phrases that populate every CV in every industry. And they tell you almost nothing about whether someone is actually good at their job. The qualities that make someone genuinely worth hiring rarely appear in a job specification, because the hiring system was never designed to measure them.
After fifteen years in advertising and a period spent building 24+ products with AI, I've developed a clear view of what actually matters. Here are the skills that don't fit on a CV.
Taste
My most valuable professional skill is taste. Not "strategic thinking" or "brand guardianship" or any of the other phrases I could list under my LinkedIn skills section. Taste. The ability to look at something and know whether it's right. To feel, almost physically, when a design is off by ten percent. To understand why one colour palette feels premium and another feels cheap, why one product name sticks and another slides off your brain, why one piece of content gets shared and another gets scrolled past.
Taste is the compound interest of a life spent paying attention. It's the residue of every magazine you've read, every restaurant you've tried, every interface you've used, every brand you've admired or dismissed. It doesn't come from a course or a certification. There is no LinkedIn endorsement for it. And yet it's the thing that separates work that resonates from work that merely exists. Every product I build, every recommendation engine I design, every editorial decision I make is filtered through this skill first. It's the operating system underneath everything else.
Cultural fluency
There's a specific type of professional who can walk into a room and immediately connect a brand's challenge to something happening in culture. Not in a shallow, trend-report way. In a way that draws lines between a restaurant opening in East London and a shift in how Gen Z thinks about luxury. Between a viral TikTok format and an emerging consumer behaviour that hasn't hit the research decks yet. Between a colour palette trending in Japanese graphic design and an opportunity for a sportswear brand's next campaign.
This is cultural fluency, and it's almost impossible to interview for. You can't put "I read everything, I notice everything, I connect everything" on a CV without sounding unhinged. But this is the skill that makes strategy feel alive rather than procedural. It's the reason I built CultureTerminal and The Relevance Index. The pattern-matching engine in my brain has been running for decades. I just finally gave it a URL.
Speed and obsessive iteration
I built Oishii London in an evening. Not because I'm reckless, but because speed is a skill. The ability to go from idea to live product in hours rather than quarters is, I believe, one of the most undervalued capabilities in modern business. Most organisations are drowning in planning cycles, approval chains, and strategy documents about strategies. Meanwhile, the most interesting work is being done by people who ship first and optimise later.
This isn't about being careless. It's about having the conviction to put something into the world before it's perfect, then iterating obsessively based on what you learn. I've shipped 24+ products this way. Some of them are thriving. Some of them taught me something and were put aside. All of them exist because I believe that a live URL beats a pitch deck every single time. The bias toward action, the compulsion to make rather than plan, the willingness to let the work speak for itself: these are the qualities I'd hire for. And I've never seen them on a job specification.
The gap in hiring
Here is the problem with how companies hire. The process is optimised for measurability, not for the qualities that actually drive exceptional work. You can measure years of experience. You can verify certifications. You can assess someone's ability to answer competency-based questions in a structured interview. What you cannot easily measure is whether someone has the taste to know what good looks like, the cultural fluency to spot what's next, or the speed to build something before the competition has finished their first meeting about it.
The result is a system that selects for people who are good at performing competence rather than people who are genuinely, unusually good at their craft. The best strategists I've worked with were not the ones with the most impressive CV. They were the ones who could walk into a room, look at a brief, and instantly see the angle that everyone else had missed. That skill comes from obsession, from taste, from living inside culture rather than observing it from a distance.
What I'd hire for
If I were writing a job description for the kind of person I think organisations actually need, it would look nothing like the ones I see posted every day. It would say: show me what you've built. Show me what you're obsessed with. Send me five links that you think are interesting and tell me why. Tell me what's overrated and what's underrated in our industry right now. Ship me something in a week and let's talk about the decisions you made.
These are the signals that actually predict whether someone will do exceptional work. Not their ability to describe a time they demonstrated leadership in a challenging situation. Not the number of years they've spent in a particular vertical. The signals are taste, speed, obsession, cultural fluency, and the willingness to put work into the world rather than talk about the work they might do someday.
I've spent fifteen years in advertising building the instincts, and the last year building the products that prove those instincts work. The CV tells you where I've been. The portfolio tells you what I can do. But the skills that actually make me worth hiring, the taste, the speed, the cultural obsession, the relentless shipping: those don't fit in either place. They belong here.
