I define strategy as a process whereby informed ideation can manifest a novel vision for something big. The truth is, beyond use of vague descriptors, I find it difficult to define and articulate “strategy”. In my experience, developing a sound strategy has always been a fluid process. Depending on the business objective being solved for, data-driven insights may be the right starting point. Alternatively, I’ve found creative intuition often serves as the strategic seed that grows a fruitfull tree. Regardless of what’s informing strategy, I believe, the one constant and critical necessity of a reliable strategic plan, is to be well informed. Closing risk of knowledge gaps, ensures you’re never operating blind.

Throughout my career, I’ve encountered innumerable situations where strategy is poorly defined or absent entirely in projects large and small. Whether devised hastily, as a rash solution to surfacing issues, or simply the result of poorly informed planning, a weak strategy can introduce unintended impacts harbouring new issues, greater costs, and even missed opportunity. In the worst-case scenarios, a weak strategy can produce solutions that are dead on arrival.

I cannot understate the importance of strategy when embarking upon any digital venture. When well conceived, a strategy is the foundation to a path for reaching a destination, not the solution itself. By documenting a strategy, we allow for ideas to be scrutinized, which affords impacted stakeholders an opportunity for buy-in, and facilitates a refined vision. The strategy can then be imparted to dependible management, where critical project plans will lay the stone path (brick by brick), to ensure successful outcome.

I’ve worked a great deal in producing strategies over the years....

Years of management experience within various organizations has lead me to adapt my management style to harmonize with the distinct workplace cultures in which I operate. I’ve found this approach to be most effective in collaborating with department heads and other stakeholders in our pursuit of common goals.

As a passionate life-long student of evolving social sciences, I’m an advocate for the value of strong interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. Assuming ownership of mistakes and always passing credit where it is due, I believe a strong manager leads by example and always eats last. Applying the teachings of the Myers Briggs personality assessments, I’m able to deduce the motivations and hesitations of team members. This is broadly helpful in everything from resource assignment on projects, to conflict resolution, and even informs good mentorship practices, by aligning opportunity for skills development with the distinct interests and career ambitions of specific team members.

Although every management role is different, I have identified patterns across production teams which are typically a result of rapidly changing work environments. To maximize output from cross-discipline teams whom often work independently towards shared goals, I begin every management role by conducting discovery sessions with not only team members, but other department heads as well. By uncovering the perceived department strengths, weaknesses and historical performance, this exercise benefits my understanding of the departmental challenges and opportunities. A trajector for achieving sustained, long-term performance improvements can thereby be chartered.

With respect to managing daily operations, I’ve always thought of production teams as an assembly line, where human capital replaces machinery. By establishing a strict adherence to standardized workflow processes and toolsets, production can be streamlined. This enables me to effectively manage teams by reducing operating friction, stress and is pursuant to an inclusive, supportive, workplace environment where a team’s creativity can flourish.

While serving in UX, UI, IxD and Creative Director roles, I’ve witnessed the impact that rapid technological transformation has had on production workflows, toolsets, design systems and more broadly, the creative process. I’ve always sought to proactively embrace industry changes, as a means of staying ahead of the design trend curve.

Recognizing in 2019, the potential for emerging 3D creative technology to disrupt the web, I chose to invest early. Two years of research and development exploration into WebGL2 and Three.js had me surmounting the technological learning curves. Fast forward to today, and most digital agencies still aren’t even aware that such technology exists.

Offering unique product engagement solutions as marketing and sales tactics, I now routinely collaborate with ambitious brands who recognize the commercial value of this creative technology. Having produced numerous award winning web experiences along the way, my focus now is less on accolades. Instead, the analytical Marketing Strategist in me, reveres the growth in conversion rates that result from these creative 3D web experiences, as the pinnacle measurement of success.

Right now, most Marketing, UX, Copywriters and UI Design disciplines are still fumbling their focus on CTA button sizes, colours and positioning to marginally optimize conversion rates by fractions of a percent. Whereas I prefer to take an alternative, creative approach to holistic user engagement, as a means to driving growth in conversion rates. Informative, interactive, animated and captivating, the cinematic 3D web experiences I create, have grown Marketing and Sales conversion rate benchmarks from averaging 3-7% to exceeding 60-82%! Indeed, the results of 3D web experiences are game changing.

As this creative technology becomes common place in eCommerce within just the next 5 years, it’s the early adopters whom are consuming present day market share.

Although product engagement has been traditionally limited to in-person experiences within physical stores, the capabilities of interactive 3D web experiences have now introduced that product engagement to every modern web browser. As a result, the creative experiences surrounding these digital products demonstrations are now more akin to video games or cinematic experiences than traditional websites.

I use this example to emphasive that pushing the bounds of creative capabilities, can no longer be limited to pushing the creative itself. Limiting your field of view to just what can be accomplished in the creative space, without considering technological advancements will never allow creatives to raise the bar on what’s possible. A holistic approach is now required.

My applied technical experience within DevOps spans nearly two decades, and includes custom built full-stack Native and Hybrid solutions. Using Waterfall, Agile and other methodologies, I have personally planned, iteratively designed, built and sold technology for my own benefit, as well as having produced business solutions for countless clients and employers alike. It goes without saying, that through trial and most often error, I’ve learnt a few things along the way.

A transcending theme throughout my Work Experience, is that creative and analytical skills can no longer remain mutually exclusive. Indeed, to deliver novel technology and trend setting customer facing end-products with emense technological dependency, creative and analystical skillsets cannot remain fixed to their respective lanes, they must intertwine.

With respect to technology, even a meticulously curated technical document capturing code base architectures, performance dependencies, and exhaustive functional requirements that trace deliverables from project planning through design, development and testing phases, are more commonly the result of cummulative skills that resembe an art form, than an analytical exercise.

I can attest that committing thousands of hours to producing a single cohesive project plan, encapsulating hundreds of pages of value derived from over a dozen creative and technical disciplines, all to support a single vision and roadmap that culminates to produce a near perfect outcome, is indeed, an art form.

Understanding the technologies available, their strengths, weaknesses and potential for integrated performance is critical to building technology. I’m sure most organizaions would agree that....