Gangverk: building the go-to-market

The client became the employer

Gangverk was my vendor at Sotheby’s. They built the auction engine and the catalogue platform under my direction. The auction platform’s code name was Viking. Years later I joined Gangverk. I had directed the firm as a client first, so I knew exactly what I was joining, and they knew exactly what they were getting.

Building the go-to-market

The firm had strong delivery talent. Go-to-market was the gap. I built the model from scratch: what we sold, who we sold it to, and how engagements were packaged. The model centered on a partner ecosystem across content, data, and analytics vendors. The firm packaged that ecosystem as a repeatable accelerator around Twilio Segment, Contentful, Algolia, Vercel, and Databricks, so engagements could start from a proven composition instead of a blank page.

Running the practice

I organized the customer data practice as a center of excellence, an operating model across six domains: strategy and governance, operational management and enablement, engineering and development support, data and warehouse management, integration and activation support, and project and delivery management. The point was consistency: the same governance, instrumentation, and enablement discipline on every engagement.

The commercial record

At Gangverk I carried a revenue number and built the team. No pricing authority, so I won’t call it a P&L, but it’s why I think like an operator, not a consultant. The growth was a build, not a pitch deck: I grew the practice’s client brands from 1 to more than 60 while I held a revenue target and hiring authority, and I was promoted inside the firm, from transformation and martech to head of marketing and product strategy.

The delivery proof

The flagship work was A+E Networks: I directed the complete redesign and replatform of History.com in four months, then the A&E site, and A+E adopted the architecture as its migration standard for its web ecosystem. The full story is in the A+E case study. When your work becomes the client’s operating standard, you were not advising. You were running something.

Consulting work included a Segment-sponsored engagement with TripAdvisor on customer data platform adoption.

The delivery portfolio also included Lindblad Expeditions.