essential — wireframes alone are not enough to effectively communicate to the product and executive teams. Motion study videos are equally if not more effective as a communications tool, and when we have time and resources available, creating video is preferred. While I speak with our customers to inform the brief, we are innovating in a space that they don’t have a lot of time to think about or plan for. Because of where my company sits in the emerging platform media and entertainment ecosystem we are in a position to lead the market more than responding to asks from our customers. The creative brief and motion studies are the tools that help advance the discussion with stakeholders at the company and to build early consensus without customers and as they are reviewed/approved serve as the basis for initial development of early proof-of-concept or prototype engineering efforts and move out of my hands and into product management. 10. What are important skills or mindsets for a strategist to have? Or what makes you good at your job? The best kind of mindset for a strategist to have is to be inquisitive and playful. Sometimes, people describe that as being clever. A belief that things can be different and a willingness to try — and sometimes fail — is pretty much at the core of what creative strategists, creative people in general, bring to their jobs every day. Even though the pace of our day-to-day work is daunting, great products take time to come into focus and be adopted broadly. This most often happens in very incremental steps over long periods of time. It wasn’t the Apple Newton MessagePad (1993) or the Palm Pilot (1996) or the Microsoft Table PC (2001) that got to scale with consumers, it was the iPad (2010). It took DIRECTV more than 10 years (1994–2005) to get to 15 millions subscribers. The connected TV was just introduced in 2010 and won’t be the dominant form of television until the end of this decade. I’ve been working on developing “interactive TV” products for consumers since 1994 when I created my first interactive television commercial for Levi’s Youthwear and startup children’s programmer daVinci Time and Space on the Time Warner Full Service Network, and I have no intention of stopping any time soon. So, I’d say having a certain type of patience is as important as having an inquisitive and playful mindset in order to be good at your job. That kind of patience comes from working to get the interactive product design process right, over and over again, every day, as we all work to invent the future together.