I’ve spent a lot of my life in ad agencies, on film sets and inside companies, trying to figure out how to tell a story that people will care about. They’re very different places to work. But somewhere along the way, the same question always comes up: what are we solving for?

It’s easy to get excited about an idea and start making things. I love that part. But it helps to stop for a minute and ask what we’re actually trying to do. Who’s going to see this? Why should anyone care? Sometimes figuring that out is the hardest part of the whole job.

For me, that usually means getting to the truth of something. What makes this company who it is? What’s useful about this product? What’s someone able to do because of it?

You can spend a lot of time trying to make a company sound like something it isn’t. It’s much more interesting to find out what it really is. And the truth’s the easiest thing to remember.

That’s what I’ve always loved about sitting down with a customer. You don’t really know where the conversation’s going to go. You ask what they’re trying to accomplish, whether the product’s helping and what could be better. Then you listen.

There’s usually something in there that’s far more interesting than anything you could’ve scripted. And someone watching it might think, hang on, we’ve got that same problem. Maybe we could do that too.

A film set taught me a lot about how to make room for that kind of discovery. You show up with a script, a vision and a deadline. You might only know a handful of people. Everyone around you knows something about their craft that you don’t, and you hope they’ll share it.

So the tone you set matters. Keep it open, keep it respectful, have some fun. Someone might come over with an idea for a shot or a lens or a different way to play a scene. That’s one of the great joys of directing. You get to see what happens when all those people bring something to it.

I’ve taken that with me into every team I’ve led. People need to understand where we’re going, but they also need to know what we’re trying to get done today.

And if you’re asking them to try things, you have to be there when something goes wrong. You can’t invite people to take a chance and then leave them on their own when it doesn’t work. That’s part of the job too.

Now there’s this whole new world opening up with AI, and I’m spending a lot of time exploring it. There are things I can make today that I couldn’t have made a couple of years ago. That’s pretty extraordinary.

I keep thinking about what it could mean for a team, for an idea that used to be too difficult to try, or a story we couldn’t quite find a way to tell. There’s so much to figure out, and that’s a big part of what makes it exciting.

I’ve been through a lot of changes in this business. The part I still love is making something with people who care about it, then seeing what happens when it reaches an audience. Did it move them? Did it help them see something they hadn’t seen before? After all the work that goes into it, they’re the ones who get to decide.