What Running an Agency Taught Me About Director-Level Clarity

The best thing I ever did for my director-level work was stop being a director.

Not permanently. But long enough to run the agency side of my life properly. Two days a week on RUONALIM, billing clients, shipping work, sending invoices. Three days embedded in product orgs. That gap, the switching, is where most of my growth in the last 18 months came from.

Here is the hook most in-house leaders miss: when you bill by the day, you do not coordinate. You decide.

The fractional market is shouting a message in-house leaders keep ignoring.

Between 2022 and 2024, the number of fractional leaders roughly doubled, from around 60,000 to 120,000 professionals. Job postings mentioning 'fractional' grew 400% in the same window. Gartner's baseline projection has 30% of midsize enterprises running at least one fractional exec on retainer by 2027.

That is not a trend. That is a correction.

Companies are paying a premium for high-trust decision making, by the day. They are willingly paying more per hour for people who will walk in, cut the fluff, unblock a workstream, and walk out. Meanwhile, in-house directors are drowning in rituals that produce no decisions.

The fractional market is repricing clarity. That should worry every full-time director who runs a calendar built around ceremonies.

What agency work forces you to do differently.

When a client is paying you for a Tuesday, you cannot spend that Tuesday 'aligning.' You have a brief, a budget, and a meeting at the end of the week. You cut the list of ten concerns down to two, you show up with a point of view, and you leave with a decision.

I stopped running six stakeholders through six versions of the same slide. I started asking one question: who owns this call, and what do they need from me to make it today? Most of the time the answer was small. A visual. A recommendation. A number. Not a workshop.

That discipline migrated back into my in-house work. At Kraken, on the consumer app, I stopped writing Figma comments that asked engineers what they thought. I wrote comments that stated what I wanted and what I would change if constraints forced us to compromise. Response times dropped. Loops shortened. The work moved.

The three things agency work actually teaches you.

One. Scope is a leadership act. In-house you inherit scope. In an agency you define it, sign it, and defend it. That rewires how you think about trade-offs. Every good director should be writing statements of work for their own projects even if nobody asks. Here is what I am doing, here is what I am not, here is why, here is when I will know.

Two. The client is paying for your recommendation, not your process. Clients do not care about your double diamond. They care about whether the button should go top-right or bottom-centre, and which one will convert. If you cannot answer that in plain words, you are charging for theatre. Same goes internally. Most VPs are paying you to say 'I would do X, here is why' and they are getting 'here are five options, let's discuss.'

Three. You only get paid when you ship. Agency P&L punishes procrastination in a way an in-house salary never does. That economic pressure teaches you to compress the decision cycle in a way no internal OKR ever will. When you carry that back inside, you become the person who closes decisions instead of the person who hosts them.

What this means for the next director role you hire into.

If you are interviewing for senior design roles in 2026, the bar has shifted. Hiring managers are not looking for a calendar operator. They are looking for a decision closer who ships under pressure. The fractional market proved that skill has a price, and now the in-house market is catching up.

Three practical things I would do if you are coming from in-house only.

Take one paid project outside your day job. Not a side hustle for the portfolio. A real client with real money and a real deadline. You will find out in a week what your decision-making actually looks like when there is no safety net.

Rewrite your job description for yourself. Not the one HR posted. The one that answers, what decisions am I paid to close this quarter? If you cannot list five, you are being paid to facilitate, not lead.

Audit your calendar for ceremony-to-decision ratio. Mine was 70/30 at Kraken. On agency days it was 20/80. Pick a week and try to move the number. That alone will make you sharper than any leadership podcast.

The quiet shift.

Directors who treat in-house the way an agency owner treats a retainer will make more money, get promoted faster, and get headhunted sooner. The ones who stay inside the ceremony machine will keep getting restructured out.

The agency did not make me a better designer. It made me a less tolerant one. Less tolerant of low-signal meetings, vague briefs, and unsigned decisions.

That is what clarity looks like at director level. It does not look polished. It looks final.