I have been trying to write the first Field Note for a while. That turned out to be part of the problem. I was trying to write the first one.
It needed to introduce the series. Explain what I believe. Establish where modern commerce is going. Set up everything I might write about later. Basically, I was trying to make the first note carry the weight of all the notes that might come after it.
So I decided to change the question.
I thought if this were Field Note #17, what would I write about this week? That was much easier for me to think about. My mind immediately jumped to what I keep coming back to at work:
The further ahead you are trying to see, the closer you need to stay to the front line.
Building the car of the future
I get the pleasure of spending a lot of my professional time thinking one to three years out.
Where is the puck going in our industry? What will AI make possible? How will commerce and media connect differently? What trends are starting to converge?
That last question is probably my favorite. I have been obsessed throughout my career with finding the places where 1+1 can actually equal 3.
Recently, I was talking with a senior leader about where we are going and what it takes to build the car of the future. My argument was that the people designing that car still need to be deeply connected to the people driving today’s car. You can’t lose sight of the front lines.
I feel this in my bones. I have seen and experienced too many examples where the frustrations, workarounds and the things that simply do not work today become the things that tell us what needs to exist tomorrow.
Necessity drives innovation as they say!
The future is often hiding inside today’s friction
There is a concept from Bain that I have always liked.
Their Founder’s Mentality language describes how companies often begin as insurgents. The glory days of a startup on a rocket ship. Bain describes that stage as being close to customers, obsessed with the front line and always moving quickly. Then those same companies grow. While scale creates enormous advantages, it inevitably also creates complexity and ultimately separation from the front lines.
I am sure there are plenty of people who could better explain Founder’s Mentality but what makes me really fascinated is diving into what signals I am looking for in that connection. Why does it ultimately matter?
The front line is one of the best places to get a read on the challenges of today which lead to the solutions of tomorrow.
When I say front line, I mean wherever strategy encounters reality. Practitioners using the tools. Clients asking the questions. Consumers behaving in unexpected ways. Systems revealing where they break.
There have been countless times in my career where I have had teams spending hours and hours of their time doing the same manual and repeatable tasks. It is one of the strongest signals out there to your product and AI teams on what should be automated.
Seemingly every brand organization in the last year has asked about ways to improve the planning process between brand and retail media. That is a massive signal that our operating models need to change.
How many times have we seen a campaign absolutely crushing it only to have the item run out of stock? It’s absolutely devastating. But it is also a pretty big signal that it is time to better align your demand creation (marketing, media, etc.) with your demand capture (sales, supply chain).
The challenge is that these signals rarely show up with a big blinking sign saying LOOK HERE.
One of my favorite questions to ask teams and clients is: What is one thing keeping you up at night?
I pay close attention to those answers. It is one of my favorite opportunities to gather signals worth exploring.
Necessity creates a pretty good product roadmap
I may not be a Product person in the traditional sense but I do know you can’t design for the future exclusively from the sidelines.
You can strategize and pontificate all day long but eventually somebody has to go use the thing. I think we can all agree that reality has a great ability to expose our assumptions (insert the assume wordplay joke here).
I know I have personally been fooled by a great looking product demo that I later found required six steps before I could actually get any use out of it.
We all hear the stories about the promise of AI and how there are some of the most transformative workflows you have ever seen…until you realize the model doesn’t account for the data or context or anything required to make the best decision possible.
There have been countless times in my career where I have pulled together a recommendation to get incremental investment to take advantage of new consumer trends or innovation in the marketplace. I proudly brought it to my client a dozen different times only to have it revealed that no one at the organization actually owns the budget required to act on it.
The more I see the same problem appearing across clients, teams, platforms and markets, the stronger the signal becomes for where we should build.
How to tune for what actually matters
Being close to the front line does not mean reacting to everything you hear. As a reformed people pleaser, I am here to tell you that it would drive you insane.
Every client request is not the next playbook we need to rally around. Every practitioner frustration does not deserve a product enhancement. You need to be able to look for patterns, not reactions.
If you’re going to take away one thing, it’s this. Get curious and start asking questions:
Why does this keep happening? What changed that made this problem more common? Where else are we seeing it? What needs to be true for the problem to disappear? Where is this taking us?
That last one is where I really like to explore further for those 1+1=3 opportunities.
Build to the future. Learn from the present.
I do not think innovation means asking people what they want and building exactly that.
There is a great line often attributed to Henry Ford: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
I love this because it just shows that people are usually better at describing their problems than designing the solution.
As I relate that back to the part of my job where I get to think one to three years out, I find that the skill required for the job is often synthesis (more to come here in a future Field Note).
The front line gives the raw material but then it’s up to me to investigate. What is the actual problem underneath the request? Is it foundational, contextual or temporary? Once I gather enough information, it’s time to synthesize and move forward.
If the job is to build the car of the future, I would argue it’s important to understand why today’s car keeps getting stranded on the side of the road.
That is why I am starting Field Notes
Once I thought about it this way, I realized it was also the reason I wanted to write this series in the first place.
I don’t want The Modern Commerce Field Guide to become a bunch of predictions about what commerce will look like someday. I will absolutely get those wrong.
My goal is to truly create field notes.
Things I am seeing in the work. Questions that keep getting asked. Signals that seem unrelated until suddenly they do not. And then the attempt to turn those moments into meaning.
Some weeks that will mean talking about commerce. Other weeks may be retail media, AI, creators, marketplaces, clean rooms, leadership or whatever thing is occupying my brain that week.
I want to spend a lot of time in this Field Guide looking toward the future. I just do not want to look so far ahead that I lose sight of where we are currently.
Today’s constraints. Today’s questions. Today’s challenges. The future is often hiding inside all of it. You just have to stay close enough to see it.
Mike, this is a great first Field Note!!! — and selfishly, it's basically a defense of what Sri and I have been doing on the podcast for years without quite articulating it this well.
The out-of-stock example landed hardest for me. I can't count how many times I've sat across from a brand team that just spent real money creating demand, only to watch it evaporate because supply chain and media never talked to each other. Everyone nods when you point it out. Almost nobody has fixed it. That's exactly the kind of "signal hiding in plain sight" you're describing — it's not subtle, it's just organizationally inconvenient to solve, so it gets treated as a one-off instead of the systemic thing it is.
The line that'll stick with me is "you can't design for the future exclusively from the sidelines." That's the whole case for staying close to practitioners instead of just synthesizing from the leadership deck level. It's also why I think the best product and strategy people I've worked with are the ones still doing the unglamorous work of sitting in on client calls and reading support tickets, not just the QBR.
One thing I'd add to the "what keeps you up at night" framework: I've found the *repeated* request is more useful than the *loud* one. Loud requests are often just whoever complained most recently. Repeated ones — the same friction showing up across three different clients who've never spoken to each other — that's the pattern worth building for. Sounds like that's basically what you're getting at with "patterns, not reactions," just wanted to underline it.
Excited to see where this series goes. Subscribed!