Every shift runs at two speeds

My first job was watching an industry break. I was at Insomnia Publications as publishing went digital, in the corner where the problem was hardest: graphic novels, where the files were heavy, the colour mattered and the contracts were written for a world of paper. The industry was running at two different speeds. One thing was accelerating while another stood still, and the early digital efforts were doing damage to the traditional world without yet having any independent success of their own. That's the phase everyone forgets afterwards, the long stretch where the new thing is strong enough to wound and too weak to replace.

The details told you everything. Authors held the digital rights to books whose print rights they'd signed away years earlier, because nobody drafting those contracts had imagined the question existing. We had to understand print technology, digital print technology, compression, watermarking, rights, and the inbound interest from TV and film, all at once. Not because we were ambitious, but because at two speeds there is no single place to stand.

The sharpest lesson came from the bookshops. The Borders experience, the cafe, the lounging, the browsing, the communal Saturday afternoon, was a real product. It did not digitise. It could not digitise. But it was load-bearing: it was a large part of what made people buy books. When the shift came, everyone ported the catalogue and nobody ported the afternoon, and then the industry acted surprised that something was missing.

So the lesson I still use every week is that at a time of change you have to understand more, not less. You need a deeper and truer understanding of what made people buy in the first place, because some of it carries over and some of it does not, and telling those two apart is the entire game.

I've since worked the same front edge three more times: retail going bricks-and-clicks, property going proptech, and now software going AI-native. The speeds change and the shape does not. Something accelerates, something stands still, and the failures come from porting the catalogue while ignoring the afternoon. So before any roadmap, name which part of what you sell is the catalogue and which part is the afternoon. Most teams can only name the first.