I could tell I’d lost the room. Which was impressive, given I wasn’t even in it.
It took me a while to figure out what I’d got wrong. When I did, it changed how I work.
First monthly meeting with the new system I’d built for this agency. I was on screen. They were all in the room together. I started talking through the data and I could feel it; I was definitely losing them. Nobody had prepared, nobody had questions. I might as well have been conducting the meeting in another language.
And I couldn’t even fully see how badly it was going. Just a wall of faces on a laptop screen, probably glancing at each other when they thought I wasn’t looking.
Here’s what I’d got wrong.
They had heads of department - brilliant creatives, long-tenured, knew the client work inside out. I’d built them dashboards. Reports. Weekly data they could use to run their teams.
But I’d assumed “head of department” meant “comfortable reading data.” - it didn’t. These were people who’d earned their titles by being exceptional at the craft.
I’d built a system for the team I wished they were or maybe the team I would have hired, not the team they actually were.
And that never works.
You can’t force people into boxes they don’t fit in. You can’t make a brilliant creative suddenly love spreadsheets. You can’t turn someone who earned their role through craft into a data analyst by handing them a dashboard.
What you can do is work out who you’ve actually got. What they’re good at. What they naturally do. And then build around that.
That mistake changed how I work. Now the first thing I do with any agency isn’t build the system. It’s figure out how the team already operates - and what they’ll actually use. Maybe it’s not even how they operate, it’s fundamentally who they are. The system comes after that, not before.
What’s something you built for your team that they just ignored?