I’ve just started working with a pre-product travel startup that have a great – and, as far as I’m aware, original – idea. My brief is to help to define the broad proposition, and how that should show up in everything from the flow through the UI to the monetisation model. It’s nice to be flexing my techie and UX muscles after a few years of absence.

Cedric Chin, in his excellent Commoncog, has often written about “career moats” being formed through the acquisition of “rare and valuable skills”. I’ve always had the sense that my tech knowledge and my brand knowledge are rare and valuable individually, and much rarer and more valuable in combination. But I’ve not found many opportunities to flex them both in the same place before. I hope that this can be the start of something.

I met up with the always excellent Nick Geoghegan, who’s returned to the UK after nearly a decade in LA working for eatbigfish. He’s looking for his next opportunities, so hit him up if you’re in need of some brainpower.

My spirits portfolio project is continuing apace. The thing that’s been exciting and liberating about it is considering the portfolio as a whole. So there’s the opportunity to try to stitch together a coherent narrative about how the business as a whole will grow, and then to figure out how exactly each brand in the portfolio can contribute. It feels like the way portfolio strategies should always be approached, except that it’s often not possible because of the number and siloed nature of the people involved.

I kicked off the life sciences project in earnest this week, too. Stakeholder interviews first, then a workshop in a couple of weeks. I can already see that it’s going to be a challenging project, for a host of reasons: it’s a new industry for me, the technology is difficult to understand fully, and the organisation is large, with lots of layers of specialism and lots of potential communication paths to navigate.