Twenty-five years of digital transformation, distilled into lessons worth stealing.

I started in digital in 1998, when "ecommerce strategy" was mostly an argument that the internet was not a fad. I joined a global entertainment brand's U.S. operation as one of its first American hires, and I've been building digital businesses ever since — through fashion, specialty retail, and consumer goods, and most recently leading content and personalization product for a portfolio of global consumer brands, for brands selling across EMEA and North America.

The through-line of my career is translation: between executives and engineers, between global strategy and local markets, between what a platform can do and what a customer actually needs. The result I'm proudest of is the hardest to count: the teams that kept doing the work well after I left the room.

Technology is rarely the hard part of transformation. The hard part is getting smart people to change how they work — and stay changed.

Through Corvid Group, I advise organizations on digital transformation, product strategy, and personalization — and I write these field notes to pass the lessons along. Corvids — crows and ravens — are the great problem-solvers of the bird world: they watch, they remember, they use tools, and they learn from each other. It's not a bad model for an operator.