People, including myself, have asked why I am back working for myself and why as a Fractional Digital Analytics Leader, why not a new client side role or starting my own agency or basically anything else. Simple answer is I picked out the best bits of different options, put it all together and this fractional approach is my way to describe it.
When working as a consultant, I enjoyed solving problems, the variety of companies & people that I worked with and their variety of problems. And I definitely enjoyed being the expert in the room. Even running my own business, deciding how I wanted to work and what to focus on, that was good. Evolving to put work in the context of Digital Analytics maturity and how success needs businesses to change the way they think, I became happier with this.
Not being able to follow through on my work or recommendations, that was frustrating. The admin side of running a business, never fun.
I tried client side and got to go deep on some projects, especially the migration from Google Analytics to Amplitude across 50+ countries in only four months (which is crazy) and subsequent expansion across Decathlon. But there was a different set of frustrations, work moved slower and there were so many more meetings, plus somehow I was no longer the expert, just because I was in-house.
Pre Decathlon, I thought it was a seniority level thing and I had tried for Head of Data roles. But they were wanting people with a data science or data engineering background, I don’t tick those boxes. I am a business person who works with data, I don’t care about data products but about business solutions.
So I need a way to be something in between. I do want to work inside an organisation so that I am embedded over a long time and can make change happen but, at the same time, to still be the outside expert that leadership actually listens to. While I am the Digital Analytics expert, my focus needs to be at the strategic level e.g. identifying where a business is, where it needs to get to, and working with the internal teams to make that happen.
My description of myself as a Fractional Digital Analytics Leader is my attempt at finding that sweetspot. Balancing the best (to me) of agency and client side, being the expert and being there long enough for change to happen. I aim to explain this in more detail in the coming weeks but please reach out if it is already sounding like something you need in your organisation.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn on 12th May 2026. View the original post and discussion here.