How a Messaging Expert Taught Me to Describe 6 Years of Technology Strategy in 5 Words
The lessons that turned technical documents into a vision investors repeated back to me.
A CTO’s real job is translation.
I spent years translating the business model into our technology approach. That skill helped scale the UK’s fastest-growing company, create an advantage the competition still can’t replicate, and expand into 10 markets. But as we grew, I had to translate the other way: turning our technology innovation into a direction the whole business could follow.
It took me six years to learn how.
My CEO asked me for a platform vision. I gave him team topologies, architectures, and technical documents; what he wanted was a direction. So he sent me to Jeffrey, a friend of his and a messaging expert who presents using obscure science-fiction references. As our leadership team worked through his process, I realised how much I had to learn.
Together, we built a vision I’m proud of, one that changed how investors see us.
Here are the five things I took from it, and I’ll use them again and again.
1. Know what a vision actually is
Jeffrey was clear from the start: before building our vision, we had to define what a vision is.
His test sorts them out. A daydream is something you’ve no credible shot at delivering: inspiring yet useless. A plan is already on next quarter’s roadmap: useful yet unexciting. A vision sits between the two: you haven’t built it yet, but you’ve as credible a shot as anyone, and a better one than most.
A real vision is also directional, and five years is about the right horizon. Ours, “the general intelligence for travel,” set the direction word by word: general, because it works across the whole business; intelligence, because it runs on AI through one platform; travel, because that’s the domain we own.
Define it well, and you’ve got something people want to hear more about.
2. Reveal your vision in layers
A vision is a three-layer artefact.
The name: the one-line aspiration.
Pillars, or “key messages” in Jeffrey’s terms: three to five claims, in parallel, that add up to the vision.
Proof points: milestones under each pillar that mark when it becomes true.
Ours had three pillars: intelligence for our customers, our suppliers and partners, and loveholidays. They add the next layer of detail beneath the name.
To be pillars, they have to pass two tests.
Aggregation: if every pillar comes true, does the vision? If not, they sit side by side instead of holding it up.
Aspiration: a pillar shouldn’t be true today, or you’re describing the present, not the future.
Proof points come from marketing, where they show, right now, why you’re different. In a vision, they do the opposite job: they describe how you’ll know when you’ve arrived.
Done well, the name, pillars, and proof points reveal the vision in steps, each drawing the reader further in.
3. Agree on the vision, one gate at a time
Getting to a vision means breaking the difficult question about the future into smaller steps you can settle in turn and not back out of.
Jeffrey’s seven gates, lightly compressed:
We need one.
What a vision is, and what it’s for.
What this vision specifically must accomplish.
The substance: the positioning, independent of words.
The language.
Where it fits with our other frameworks.
How to keep it alive.
The hardest stretch sits between gates 4 and 5, where we went back and forth as the language changed how we understood the concepts. Gate 7, keeping it alive, runs it close, but that’s a post of its own.
Three things kept us on track:
Name the phase you’re in: “We’re not choosing options any more; we’re optimising the ones we have.”
Accept that there will be imperfections.
Use a concrete example when something feels fuzzy.
When you agree on the substance before the language, the whole process becomes much easier.
4. Find the name through different lenses
Like in software, naming is one of the hardest and most important problems in messaging.
It is what people remember, so be prepared for this stage to take a while. You already know where we landed; getting there took longer than it should have. We came at it from three angles to see what worked:
Generic descriptor: “the world’s smartest travel AI.” Too safe and forgettable.
Bold conceptual claim: “The artificial general intelligence for travel.” Exciting, a real conversation-starter, but the AGI claim strains credibility.
Brand plus descriptor: “Apex: the world’s smartest travel AI.” Adds shorthand, at the cost of a comms layer to support it.
We liked our CDO’s bold claim, “the artificial general intelligence for travel,” but it was a step too far. Dropping “artificial” gave it a different dimension: “the general intelligence for travel”; it clicked.
The right name rarely comes first; you find it by looking from every angle.
5. Communicate it through AIDA
Once you know the vision, have structured it, and agreed it, you still have to land it.
Jeffrey used AIDA as the persuasive spine of the deck. Ours looked like this:
Attention: open provocatively. Ours challenged our own advantage: “When is the best technology no longer enough?” “Right now!”
Interest: explain your reasoning and the challenge. Travel, technology, and AI together equal something entirely new.
Desire: finally reveal the vision and walk through the pillars and proof points. We emphasised each with aspirational examples.
Action: finish with next steps. Ours functioned as a reminder of what travel intelligence could mean for customers, partners, and us, and my excitement about it coming to life.
He had advice on the deck and how to land it, too. Optimise for minutes, not slides: pause when you land an argument, and add a slide to slow things down. And add a punchy line for every important moment (“activity isn’t achievement”; “what got us here won’t get us there”).
However sound the thinking, a narrative your audience can’t follow won’t land.
The thinking was only the start
We already knew what we were doing before we met Jeffrey. We had the plan; what we lacked was the language to describe it.
I learned from Jeffrey that communicating a vision is intentionally lossy.
Fitting a complex strategy into a name, three pillars, and a few proof points means cutting the clever detail you’re proud of. But the reward is clarity: the means to explain your thinking layer by layer, in a way your audience can follow, in language they understand.
Jeffrey gave us the structure we were missing: a way to compress a clever strategy into a sharper, more compelling vision. The vision reached investors recently. When they fed back on the business, they used our words. They described the platform as a “moat” and “the general intelligence for travel” as what would sustain it.
I had spent years translating the business into technology so we could innovate at scale. Now I could translate those innovations back into the business.
The job was always translation. I’d only been doing half of it.