Part 1 — The problem with being difficult to categorize

For most of my career, the central professional problem has not been a lack of capability. It has been a surplus of capabilities that do not fit neatly into a single box.

I have spent more than fifteen years working across strategy, branding, content, facilitation, creative production, digital marketing, analytics and technology. In one project I might design a content architecture, in another facilitate a workshop, in a third write award-winning copy, direct a film production, build a reporting model or sketch the first architecture of a software product. For a long time, this looked suspiciously like a lack of focus. Employers tend to prefer categories. Strategist. Creative Director. Producer. Product Marketer. Developer. Analyst. The market understands specialists. It is less comfortable with people who move freely between disciplines and seem equally interested in positioning frameworks, Linux servers, typography, Docker containers and the internal logic of Django models. The result is a recurring tension: I am often more useful than my title suggests, but harder to place inside conventional hiring templates. Over time I have come to realize that this is not necessarily a weakness. It may be the defining feature. The same curiosity that led me from copywriting into facilitation, from media planning into analytics, from branding into infrastructure and from editorial thinking into software development is not a series of disconnected detours. It is one continuous attempt to understand how systems work and how they can be made clearer, more coherent and more effective. MikaelOS began as an attempt to make that pattern visible. Not as a portfolio. But as an interface into the way I think and build.

Series

Part 1 — The problem with being difficult to categorize

Building MikaelOS