I’ve spent close to twenty years moving between newsrooms, health summits, classrooms, and boardrooms. Different worlds, but same problem kept showing up again and again.
Something good gets built everywhere – whether a story inside a newsroom, an educational product, a transformation program, or a new way of doing things. The people who built it can explain exactly what it solves. And then it sits there, forever, waiting for someone to say yes to it, and the yes doesn’t come.
Not because the solution is weak. Because solving a problem and being worth something to the person or organization deciding are two different things, and most teams end up explaining only the first one.
That gap is where I’ve spent my career. Not building the solution. But making its value land with the buyer.
A solution tells you what gets fixed. Value tells you what that’s actually worth to the organization or person who is paying for it – these in terms of time saved, risk removed, outcome generated.
Those aren’t the same sentence, and most messaging never gets past the first one. It explains the fix in detail and leaves the buyer to work out the worth on their own. Most of them don’t. They move on.
I’ve watched this play out the same way more times than I can count. A first draft comes in, and it’s usually built entirely around the solution — every capability, every technical detail, everything the team is proud of solving. It sounds impressive in the room and lands flat everywhere else, because it never answers the question the buyer actually has: WIIFM (what’s in it for me).
What usually fixes it isn’t more polish. It’s translation o these complex solutions to complex problems.
Round after round, the same thing happens: Strip out what the solution does, and replace it with what it’s worth — to this person, in this seat, with this budget and this boss to answer to. The version that finally works is almost always shorter and blunter than the one anyone started with, because it finally puts a value on the table instead of a feature list.
I learned to chase that distinction in a newsroom, where a story survived only if it was worth someone’s time to listen or see, not just because it had to be said. I learned to respect it in healthcare and education sector, where value has to be earned honestly – overstating it costs more than staying quiet. And I’ve learned that in a boardroom, value means something different to everyone at the table. The job is finding the version of it that holds for all of them at once.
None of that is about building the solution. It never was. It’s about standing between something real and the people who need to see its worth clearly enough to act on it.
It matters more now than it used to. With AI, everyone can build a solution faster than ever. Almost nobody can be trusted to state its value honestly. AI can write a polished pitch in seconds; it can’t tell you what something is actually worth to the specific person who is deciding on the other side. That’s still a human read, done slowly, one draft at a time.
The people who can make that translation — who can turn here’s what it does into here’s what it’s worth for you with reason WHY. This isn’t going to matter less as things get more automated. They’re going to matter more because only human can make that judgement and assure the client of its value proposition.
That’s the work I keep choosing, in every room I’ve been to.