Frameworks and observations for Directors of Ecommerce navigating performance, attribution, and the politics of marketing budgets. Published when we have something worth saying.
Strategy. Management. Execution. You can't do all three well. Here's which one to drop first, and how to give yourself permission.
You were hired to set strategy. You spend most of your week managing agencies, freelancers, and an in-house team that's two seats short of where it should be. By Thursday you're back in the platforms doing the work yourself because the agency missed something you flagged on Monday. Then someone asks for a board deck for Tuesday. The job description said Director. The actual job is strategist plus operator plus vendor manager plus internal politician. None of it scales.
Read the piece→A vocabulary for the conversation you keep losing in finance reviews.
Your CFO isn't the enemy. They're operating on a 90-day cash horizon and you're showing them numbers that won't be true until the LTV plays out twelve months from now. The vocabulary is broken. Here's how to fix it without spending six months teaching the finance team what MER means.
For the newly hired Director of Ecommerce. What to ignore, what to audit, what to defend.
You took the job because the opportunity looked huge. Three weeks in, you've inherited an attribution system you don't trust, two agencies the previous director loved and one you can't tell what they do, and a board meeting in six weeks. What to do, what to delay, what to defend. The 30-day playbook we'd run.
Transition windows, knowledge transfer, the three things to lock down before notice.
Most agency transitions break the channel. Not because the new agency isn't good, but because the old one had context the new one doesn't. Three things to lock down before you give notice. None of them are in the contract, and all of them are the reason the next quarter goes sideways if you skip them.
Why incrementality matters more, how to measure it, how to talk about it without losing the room.
Your CAC dashboard is a lagging, inflated, last-click average. The number you should be managing to is the marginal cost of the next customer, and almost no team measures it. Here's why, what to measure instead, and how to introduce the concept to a board that's been trained to think in last-click ROAS.
Channel saturation, attribution debt, brand-vs-acquisition tension. The patterns we see across our portfolio.
Every premium brand we see at $40M to $60M GMV hits the same set of bottlenecks in roughly the same order. The channel mix that got you here stops working. The attribution becomes harder to trust. The board starts asking why growth has slowed. The patterns are predictable. The fix isn't, because it depends on which bottleneck hits first.
Translating channel-level chaos into a narrative the board can actually act on.
Quarterly board prep eats a week of your time. The deck gets edited by your CMO until it tells a story you don't fully believe. You leave the meeting with action items based on a number you know is partially wrong. A different way to structure the marketing section of the deck, written by someone who has sat in your chair.
New pieces, occasional frameworks, and the patterns we're seeing across the accounts we run. No tactics-of-the-week. No re-packaged Twitter threads.
We don't sell, share, or rent the list. Ever.
We'll show you what we see on your account in real time, walk through what is actually limiting growth, and you decide whether to keep talking.
Introduce yourself→