Context
McKinsey Digital Labs pairs strategy work with hands-on build. I led engagements across the Americas for clients in banking, telecommunications, retail, eCommerce, and insurance, all of them working through some version of the same digital transformation. Client identities are confidential. The work pattern is not.
The problem
The classic transformation failure is the handoff. A strategy gets approved and the capability never materialises. Clients did not need another deck. They needed martech stacks running inside their own teams, with the economics to justify the spend.
What I did
Deployed and configured adtech and martech stacks inside client organisations across Google Marketing Platform, Meta, Adobe Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot, Segment, and Sprinklr, then trained the teams who would run them.
Adapted the same playbook to each industry: payments and lending in banking, subscriber growth in telco, merchandising and lifecycle CRM in retail and eCommerce, and quote-to-policy journeys in insurance.
Built transaction cost models, ROI frameworks, and investment business cases so programmes were funded on numbers rather than enthusiasm.
Produced 40+ transformation roadmaps for C-suite and product teams, each one sequenced for the organisation that had to execute it rather than an idealised version of it.
Led engagements end to end as the bridge between partner-level strategy and the client teams doing the work.
The outcome
The engagements that worked shared one trait: the capability was built inside the client's team, not around it. That conviction, that transformation is a handoff problem, is the foundation of how I run every engagement today.
Need the same thing done? Here is how a MarTech implementation engagement works.