practice systems thinking and a framework approach to problem solving. Strategy is mainly about simplifying the chaotic and the complex into a simple diagram or a statement that everyone on your team can understand and get behind. Some people are naturally better at that kind of thinking and others are better at creative thinking. I find it’s very rare to find people who are super creative and analytical at the same time. Those people are very unique. In my experience, business school is only a requirement if you want to get a really big corporate job. Having an MBA at a Fortune 500 company might be environmental requirement, but I don’t think it’s necessary for the creative world. I learned a lot by looking at the decks of strategists whom I respected and saw how they told the “business stories.” As I mentioned before, that type of storytelling is not something you would perfect in school. 5. What types of products have you done the strategy for that were the most exciting or fun to work on? What I’m working on right now is probably the most engaging for me. But again, that’s because I’m the product owner who has a lot at stake. I think you have to have a different level of commitment not just when your name is on the line, but also all your finances and everything else. Perhaps that risk factor is what makes it very engaging. In the agency world, you often do the strategy and sometimes you see through design, and in rare cases, you see it all the way through the build, but almost never do you then interact with the clients day-to-day to see how it really affects their businesses. With working in client services, sometimes you get feedback after delivery and you do postmortems. But it’s after your work has been delivered to your clients and the project is over. When the strategy is out of your hands, then it really becomes their baby. And the outcomes depend on what they do with it and how they market the product. And by that point, it’s really hard to isolate what worked or did not work. Was it the strategy or the design or the technology or the marketing? If the strategist is not involved throughout the process, she can’t really be held accountable. For me, that’s a bad thing because being able to be involved in the final outcomes is what motivates me. So, right now I am building a product that we just put out on the market and I could immediately see how people reacted and how they use it. We spent nine months making assumptions and building a product based on our best thinking, and then, in a matter of days, we finally get some real feedback from real users. That is very satisfying, even if the feedback is not always positive. And believe