How did I get here?

Since I have worked in strategy, there has always been an air of mystery about the career paths of agency roles like “planning” or “innovation”. And it makes sense! There is no one defined way of becoming a strategist. And understanding how other people got where they are can give you a sense of reassurance that you’re not the only one figuring it out as you go along.

Over the years I have been on podcasts with folks like Breda Doherty and Adam Pierno who expertly dissect folks’ unique backgrounds and points of view. And, like other strategists who reach a certain maturity in our industry, I’ve answered dozens of emails and given handfuls of talks about “How I Got Here”. But, in an effort to make this information more easily accessible, I wanted to share here in my blog too. And not because I think my background is special! But because I think it isn’t. At all.

Let’s start at what I consider the beginning of my adult life: design school. While at MassArt, I interned at a record label doing design work mostly for New England area bands. I had done some posters and album cover art for State Radio and Guster. And it was really cool!… but I was a thoroughly mediocre designer. I wasn't a great designer. I was never going to become Sagmeister. Music was just a thing that I was personally passionate about and wanted to be adjacent to. 

My dream job was never “strategy”. In fact, I thought the coolest job in the world would be being a radio announcer. When I mentioned this to a friend, she introduced me to someone she knew at a local rock station called WBCN. They hired me (on the spot!) to do street team work and brand promotions. I wasn’t a radio announcer, but occasionally I did get to collaborate with on-air talent or do call-in’s for the station. It was there that I got my first exposure to marketing. The art and design program at my school had elements of communications, but more from a visual perspective. And I loved how creative and fun and people-oriented it was getting to go out into the field.

After I graduated college, I was promoted to a promotions assistant. This meant a little less time spent at bars and shows and instead helping coordinate events for the station. It was a really cool job! And I always joke that I probably would have done it forever. But after only six months, in the throes of a major economic recession, the station decided to flip formats. I was heartbroken, but I needed to keep making money. So I took the skills I learned there into the agency world.

I didn't know what strategy was until I was at an agency in Boston called Arnold. I was a designer on the brand promotions team which was perfect because it was not entirely dissimilar from what I was doing at the radio station. One day I was sitting in on a creative review and I chimed in with something like, “well, you know, you could just post that event on Facebook, right?”. My Creative Director turned her chair to me and said, “tell me more about what’s going on with Facebook”. Back then it was still new! This conversation led to further discussions and, eventually, questions about why I was on the design track and not doing strategy. But like I said, I didn’t know strategy was a thing! I was excited (and shocked!) to discover that my interest in the internet, and my interest in how people use the internet, could be a job. It really took having that advocate internally to point me in a different (better) direction.

My first strategy-specific job was doing digital strategy at a small agency. It was always obvious to me that social media was just an online channel for human connection. It was a new way for people to find community, but with its own unique behaviors. The culture of the internet really fed my curiosity about people in a macro way and the folks around me took notice. Moving over into being a strategist at my next job, without the qualifier of digital or social in my title, was seamless because I didn’t have to change the way I thought about people and their needs. But it became more of an operational challenge for me to get folks to see the relevance of my background, utilize my skills in different areas, and maybe take a risk to put me on a brand-level project like positioning (instead of defining how the brand should behave on social).

Over time, I settled in to life as a strategist and made some amazing strides working with LeBron James and his team, Sunglass Hut, and Keds. And I was having a blast! But I started to feel a bit like an outsider. While I now know that there is no one path into strategy, it seemed to me then like most folks around me had gone to business school. Or portfolio school. Or did planner bootcamp. I didn’t do any of those things because, again, I did not know they existed! It was my first brush with Imposter Syndrome. But what I have come to believe, and what I have seen validated by the folks I look up to most, is that if you have a natural inclination towards curiosity, if you’re a confident and creative communicator, and you want to know more about people from all walks of life: you’re already primed to be a strategist. That is the foundation of our work. From there you can learn the rest! It’s not brain surgery. Besides, no single program can prepare you for all aspects of our job anyway. With the right leadership, you can learn how to write a brief or some specific methods for doing research. But you can’t teach a desire to understand humans, or the micro and macro problems that make up our world.

Part of the challenge with strategy is that it is not well known enough as a career option. There is usually only one planner for every 10 or so “creatives”. And it doesn't sound like the most interesting career. When you say “strategy”, it doesn't seem fun or creative at all. But it is! You're helping brands get perspective on where they're at, where they want to go, and how to best navigate the in-between. I think that is what I love most about strategy: figuring out where there are opportunities to do something in a different way.

I’m happy my path to strategy was a winding one. In many ways, linear career paths are a recipe for disaster! It is not sustainable for the current pace of change in our world to have a narrow set of professional experiences. And I know this is cliché, but I really think it’s important to find a job that allows you to do some of what makes you happy. For a while for me that was working in music. But going down rabbit holes and learning about people or things I never knew existed always made me happy, too. And that’s what happened to help me grow in to strategy. And now I see all of the ways that my former, seemingly irrelevant professional experiences helped me come full circle: I started out at a record label, went into radio, and 10 years later I was being hired to do strategy work for Beats By Dre, Deckstar, and The Viper Room. And it’s not because I had an MBA (I don’t), or went to planner bootcamp (they don’t even know what that is). It’s because I was able to say, “I know how your business operates”. Everyone’s strategy path is unique and you never know how the experiences of your past could become some of your most valuable professional assets.