I've had jobs where the work was mostly slides. Strategy docs, roadmaps, frameworks. Things that describe what should be built rather than building it. I was good at those jobs. But I noticed something: the distance between the work and the outcome kept growing. You write a strategy, someone else implements it, something else ships. By the time anything reaches a user, your original thinking has been translated two or three times. That distance makes me uncomfortable.
The problem with strategy-only roles
Strategy without implementation is a hypothesis. It might be right. It might be wrong. You usually don't know until someone builds it — and by then, several steps removed, you're not learning from the outcome in the way you would if you were closer. This is how people build long careers in strategy without ever getting a real feedback loop. The outputs are slides. The metric is whether the slides get approved. Whether the thing actually worked is somebody else's problem. I don't want that.
What "close to the build" actually means
It doesn't mean I need to write all the code — though I often do. It means I want to be in contact with the real thing throughout the process. When I run an accelerator program, I also build the tools that run it. When I organize an event, I also build the agenda platform. When I manage a process, I often build the dashboard that tracks it. This keeps me honest. When you're close to the build, you can't hide in abstraction. Either the thing works or it doesn't. Either users come back or they don't.
The feedback loop is everything
The reason I stay close to the build is the feedback loop. Building something — even a small internal tool — and watching someone use it creates a direct signal. You see what works. You see what confuses people. You learn things you could not have learned from a user interview. Strategy gets better when the person doing the strategy has felt what it's like to ship something real and watch it land.
The cost
There's a cost to this. Being close to the build takes time and energy. You can't be in every meeting and also be building. Choices have to be made. I've made peace with this by accepting that I work best at the intersection of strategy and execution. Not purely one or the other. The value I bring is being someone who can think at the system level and also make the system work. That combination is rarer than either skill alone. It's worth protecting.
Why it matters for AI-native work
In a world where AI tools are changing what "building" means, staying close to the build is more accessible than ever. A single person with AI tools and clear judgment can now build things that previously took a team. The remaining gap is judgment — knowing what to build, for whom, and why. That judgment only develops by staying close to the thing being built.