What this is
The people and structure behind a commercial digital operation. How the team is shaped, what belongs inside, who should own what, and how the specialists and the board manage to understand each other.
What usually brings people here
A digital team that has grown by hiring whoever was available. An agency relationship nobody is happy with and nobody will end. Or a board that keeps asking the same question because the answer has never been framed in terms it can act on.
Insource or agency
Almost never a cost question, although that is how it gets argued. If a capability compounds with knowledge of your specific business, or customers experience it, or you need to change it weekly, it belongs inside. If it is specialist, cyclical, or benefits from seeing many companies rather than one, it belongs outside. The failure version is owning neither, where an agency sets direction and the internal team coordinates it.
What I do
I work out which capabilities are how you compete and which are services you buy. I design the team around that, hire the specialists and the leaders who run them, and make sure there is a career path, because specialists leave when there is nowhere to go. The cost nobody budgets is management attention, and six specialists without a leader who understands their work produce a group of individuals rather than a team.
Translation
One of the things I do most. I can sit with a developer or a data scientist, understand the trade offs they are weighing, then turn those same trade offs into a business case leadership can act on. That fluency is usually the difference between an initiative that gets funded and one that stays stuck in translation.
On hiring your first commercial digital leader
The common mistake is hiring for the channel rather than the judgement. Deep expertise in one channel is the easiest thing to buy in this market and rarely what the role needs in year one. Design the role around a bad week, not a good one.