Stepping away from a highly technical role in a large corporation pulled me out of the comfort of clean abstractions and into the messy reality of how industries actually work. Beneath the surface, every industry is a web of interconnected value chains, each shaped by geography and culture. What works in Jakarta doesn’t necessarily resonate in New York. What succeeds in New York might feel irrelevant in Tokyo.
When you’re equipped with technical expertise, you understand how things work. That depth creates a bias toward selling the how of the building. Consultancies or agencies that trade on execution. But what kind of service you can offer, and how it’s perceived, depends on where you operate in the chain. The same skill can be indispensable in one context and invisible in another.
Then there’s positioning. Selling IT infrastructure puts you in front of a CIO, fighting for the IT budget. Selling marketing technology means courting a CMO and competing for the marketing spend. Each seat at the table comes with a different logic of value, a different vocabulary of trust.
Expertise turns into value only when it finds its rightful place in the chain when it connects to the right node, the right problem, at the right level of the system. Understanding that is the real work.