TL;DR
A travel platform had several content and strategy projects on the table, each defended by its owner, and wanted an independent read before committing effort. I audited the site, mapped what each content type was worth, and gave management an evidenced basis to choose. The mapping outlived the audit.
The situation as found
In 2022, Evaneos, a French travel platform, called me in to challenge its marketing teams while it rebuilt the international audience-growth curve it had lost in the Covid years. The stakes were commercial, and the asset I was asked to review was not a clean one.
- The site was a house of cards, stacking generations of code and as many frameworks as it had sections.
- Information technology (IT) teams stretched to keep navigation fluid across the site, so a visitor never saw the seams between technologies.
- Marketing and field teams worked through different interfaces to produce, update, and maintain content.
Management had several projects in front of it, each defended by its proposer, and no grounded map of what any of them was worth. It wanted an evidence-backed read before committing people and budget to any one of them. If you face several plausible paths, each with a champion and no way to compare them, this is the vision to execution problem.
The diagnosis
The question I was handed was narrow: were the projects one owner championed worth the company’s effort. The symptom was that question. The cause ran deeper: no one had ever mapped what the site’s content was worth. The material sat in sections, formats, and themes never compared, so every project was argued by preference, and by the standing of whoever proposed it, not by measured value. Until it was mapped, any verdict would have been an opinion wearing a number.
What was decided, and why
I chose to audit the whole site before recommending anything, then to build the instrument that would make the choice legible: a content-value matrix, grouping the material by section, type, and theme so each format’s performance could sit beside the others and be compared. Around it, I ran structured interviews with the teams who operate the site, asked for the roadmap, and challenged the technical projects whose only purpose was to keep the house of cards standing. This is translator work: turning an executive choice into something a team can act on.
The option I ruled out was the shortcut management was about to take: judging each project by the credibility of its advocate instead of by measured value. That route is fast, and it settles nothing that holds.
What was actually built
Four pieces of work went into the readout:
- A full-site audit, long and complex because of the site’s extent and the volume of material it carried.
- The content-value matrix, grouping the material by section, type, and theme so each content type’s performance became visible side by side.
- Structured interviews with the teams who operated the site, to surface the material and human friction the back-office complexity created.
- Roadmap access and a challenge to the technical projects that existed only to support the house of cards.
I gave management a frank readout: an assessment of the projects on the table, and the reality of what the whole platform cost to run. I built the mapping and the recommendation. The overhauls that followed were the teams’ work, executed under my guidance.
What broke, and what it cost
The boundary came from the company’s own constraints: the site could not be rebuilt from the ground up, so the fix was never a clean slate. The right move was to target the critical sections to modernize or simplify first, accepting incremental change where a rebuild was out of reach. The recommendation carried human weight: I gave the readout with complete frankness while a live personnel decision hung on it. The friction here sat in the platform’s complexity and in the constraint that ruled out starting over, never in a person.
The outcome, with its status
Management commissioned a follow-on engagement to support the optimization of the platform, directly off the readout. That outcome is measured: the company acted on the recommendation. The rest is qualitative, and I will not dress it up. The teams executed deep overhauls and opportunistic fixes, under a pragmatic rule: quick, tangible results without undoing the work toward a simpler, unified platform. Its operation moved toward standardizing the systems behind it. Satisfied, the client brought me back for further strategic decisions, including which country deserved the next wave of effort, grounded in audience-potential and competitive studies. No growth figure exists in what this work left me, so I state none. That advisory and analysis range sits on the about page.
If this is the shape of your problem, let’s talk.