Blog

Not because they’re lazy. Not for a lack of ambition. I've got five reasons. 1. They have no memory. Agencies treat every requirement as novel because it’s novel to them . Because they are structurally incapable of learning. No institutional learning = No compounding advantage. Each project is a pilot episode of amnesia. They’ll tell you your business is unique . What they mean is: we didn’t retain anything from the last six clients who looked exactly like you. 2. No methods.

Strategy is how organisations talk about change. Behaviour is how change actually happens. Most AI conversations begin with grand ambition. Transformation. Reinvention. But don't we need to start with observed behaviour? Of how people are already using these tools. Every day. Unsupervised. Without ‘permission’. In ways they wont readily admit to. Until recently, that data was mostly anecdotal. Then ChatGPT released its version of Unwrapped . Like Spotify (but more like Black

When we started First Three Things three years ago, we made a bet. That the next disruption in digital will come from being small, senior, and AI-native  by default. At the time, that sounded wishful. Contrarian. Now it just sounds obvious. We’re seeing three signals clearly. First:  output is decoupling from people. Work that once needed large teams is now being delivered by a handful of experienced operators. Often unreasonably efficiently . Second:  clients care less about

A selection of excerpts from my daily journalling. I hope you find value. Day 284 of Becoming a Better Leader Woke at 4:58am. Not by choice. Couldn’t sleep. Too many ideas. No caffeine until I’ve read two pages of Marcus Aurelius and reorganised the Trello board for my thought-leadership pipeline. Planked. Discipline is everything. People think running a business is about design. Or code. Or even clients. They're wrong. It’s about being the calm in the centre of the chaos you

Software vendors rightly worry about post-launch adoption. Because if the client isn’t using every bell and whistle, someone’s going to ask: Why are we paying for this? Low adoption is a CX issue. It's a churn risk. It's an upsell blocker. Let’s put aside the usual suspects: training, enablement, or change management - all of which are too vague to blame - and I'd argue, almost always wrong. If CMS users aren’t embracing the full feature set three to six months after go-live,

I should probably admit it: I’m an Optimizely addict. I’ve been using since 2007. My role has always been about customer care - trying to...

Agencies bang on about ROI like they invented it. But let’s be clear: it’s not your  return they care about. It’s theirs. Your budget...

You tried to make it work. Really, you did. You set up a Notion board called “Web Application Necessary Knowledge” and promised yourself...

Sometimes, supporting a platform is harder than building one. Not just harder, Kafkaesque. And most often, thankless...

Most e-commerce sites already use some form of recommendations—it’s not groundbreaking anymore. But not all recommendation systems are...

Optimizely has launched a dedicated, stand-alone Personalization product, enabling businesses to tailor content dynamically for different...

The architecture of a modern consulting business is ‘composable’. Certainly, we think of ourselves as a composable consulting business...

Opticon Stockholm has finished and my journey back to Yorkshire from #Onederland (via Oslo) has given me space to reflect. Here are the...

Optimizely products have evolved. Their new generation of products changes the game.

At a glance…  Intuitive, easy to use site search makes all the difference for customers.   Easy to find means more likely to buy. That’s...

In our recent Masterclass with Optimizely (September 2024) we described how to migrate smart from Sitecore to Optimizely. Here in this...

Sitting on an aging Sitecore platform and seriously tempted by Optimizely? You should be. Remember . . . The website is not your CMS....

Big Tech knows AI radically transforms productivity. With huge roadmaps of work, AI propels them faster than ever. It's noteworthy that...

A value proposition tells the world why you exist. But they ain't easy to write. Here's a framework I use to help me. Think of your value...

If you’re responsible for your company website, there will be times you’ll question whether the software you’re using is right for you....

When we started early in 2023 we didn’t have any clients. To be honest, we didn't really have a business plan. Hope was our strategy....

The bigger the digital agency, the more expensive they are to work with. Makes sense, right? They’ve got hundreds, maybe thousands of...

I always thought to be a good Account Manager meant being a good listener. I still think that’s true, but I’ve come to realise being a...

Self-publishing predictions for the future based on little more than gut feel is the very definition of hubris, if not a personality...