The Person Who Decides What Counts as Work

I opened Hellon’s hiring page because I was trying to understand whether the company was actually doing well. A company can write almost anything about itself, but hiring is usually a more expensive signal. Hellon had reduced headcount in its original consulting company, while its technology subsidiary had grown quickly, and then it was looking for a Transformation Lead.

At first I assumed the title referred to someone who would transform Hellon.

It does not, at least not directly.

The job is client-facing. The person is expected to understand a client’s business, organisation and decision-making structure, build account plans, develop relationships at several levels, find new opportunities, frame complex projects and meet sales targets. The salary is €5,400 to €6,500 per month, with a monthly bonus based on the revenue the person generates.

That last detail clarified the rest of the description.

A Transformation Lead is partly a salesperson, although calling the role sales would make it sound narrower than it is. A normal salesperson can begin with a product that already exists. Here the product may not exist yet. The client may only have a vague anxiety about AI, customer experience, efficiency, regulation or organisational change. The person has to enter that uncertainty and decide what it could become.

The transformation may begin before the company is transformed. First, uncertainty has to be transformed into a project.

I started looking for the same role elsewhere. The titles kept changing. Frog calls a close version Director of Client Development. Reaktor uses Business Development Lead. Publicis Sapient has Executive Client Partners. Futurice has Business Directors. Devoteam combines CIO Trusted Advisor with Transformation Lead. EY uses Digital and AI Transformation Lead. The vocabulary moves between sales, partnership, strategy, transformation and leadership, but the underlying work is surprisingly stable.

The person finds or inherits an account. They learn who controls the budget, who has influence, who is frustrated, which initiative has executive attention, what has already failed and what the organisation is willing to say publicly. They turn this into an account plan. Then they assemble designers, engineers, strategists, data people or change consultants around a proposed response. They help write the proposal, define the scope, negotiate the price and remain close enough to delivery that the promise does not collapse immediately after the contract is signed.

This is not simply selling work that other people will do. It is deciding what the work is.

That distinction became more interesting the longer I looked at it. At junior levels, a consultancy hires people to answer questions. Someone has already defined the project, agreed on the budget and decided that research, software or service design is required. The junior person enters after the situation has become legible.

At senior levels, the valuable person often arrives earlier. The organisation may not know whether it has a product problem, a technology problem, an operating-model problem or a political problem. It may only know that something is not moving. The consultant has to form an explanation that is specific enough to fund but broad enough to involve the consultancy’s capabilities.

The role therefore sits in an uncomfortable place between diagnosis and demand creation.

A trusted advisor is supposed to tell the client what is true, including when the client does not need a large programme. A commercial lead is rewarded when the client buys more work. Hellon makes that relationship explicit through a revenue-based bonus. Publicis Sapient describes Executive Client Partners who manage portfolios worth tens of millions of dollars. Frog expects its directors to shape demand, create statements of work, price engagements and negotiate them.

The same person who explains that the problem is complex may benefit when the solution becomes larger.

That does not mean the problem is invented. Large organisations genuinely contain problems that cross departmental boundaries. A broken customer journey may involve the interface, employee incentives, data quality, procurement rules, legal constraints and software that was installed fifteen years ago. Fixing only the screen may do almost nothing. A person who can see the whole system and keep several groups moving in the same direction can be extremely useful.

But the problem definition is not commercially neutral.

I have been thinking about this because I keep trying to describe HAAM as work that falls between design, technology and operations. I normally describe that boundary as a problem of responsibility. Important failures are often visible to several teams but owned completely by none of them. A consultancy can enter that gap because it is allowed to assemble a temporary team around the whole situation.

The Transformation Lead is the person who claims the gap before anyone else does.

They notice that a request for a workshop could become a service redesign, that the redesign may require software, that the software will not work without changing an internal process, and that the process change needs executive sponsorship. This could be good systems thinking. It is also account expansion.

I used to imagine that design leadership meant becoming better at design and then guiding other designers. These roles suggest another path. Design becomes less visible as a separate activity and more useful as a way of framing work. The senior person may no longer produce the research, interface or prototype. They use design-like skills to organise ambiguity, understand stakeholders, construct a future state and make the path towards it feel believable.

The output is not necessarily a design. The output may be a funded programme.

This also changes how I think about seniority. We usually describe career progression as an increase in responsibility: larger teams, more difficult projects, more important clients. But there is another shift underneath it. You move from doing work inside a defined project to influencing which projects exist.

The ability to define work becomes more valuable than the ability to execute one narrow part of it.

That may become even more pronounced with AI. Research summaries, market scans, slide decks, prototypes and code can already be produced faster. A small team can create something that previously required a much larger team. Execution is not free, and most AI-generated output still needs judgement, correction and integration, but the relative bottleneck is moving.

I have felt a smaller version of this myself. Before, I was deep in code and limited by my ability to write it. Now AI can help me implement many things quickly, and I am more often limited by my ability to decide what the product should do. The difficult part is no longer always making the feature. It is knowing whether the feature deserves to exist, what problem it changes and what comes after it.

The Transformation Lead faces the organisational version of the same problem. The consultancy may be able to generate ten plausible AI pilots. The client can probably generate another ten internally. The scarce part is deciding which one connects to a real operational problem, which executive will protect it, what data exists, where adoption will fail and whether the organisation can absorb the change.

AI may make this role more important rather than less important.

It may also make the role more dangerous. When proposals and prototypes become cheap, it becomes easier to create the appearance of a project before anyone has understood the problem. A Transformation Lead with good judgement can prevent that. A Transformation Lead measured too aggressively on revenue can accelerate it.

The best person in the role probably has to resist both sides. They cannot become a generic salesperson who attaches AI to every anxiety. They also cannot stay in endless discovery, understanding the organisation perfectly while producing no movement and no revenue. They have to make a bet about what the problem is, persuade several people to share that interpretation and remain responsible when reality disagrees.

This is partly strategy, partly design, partly sales and partly organisational politics. Maybe the strange title exists because none of the ordinary titles can admit how mixed the work has become.

Reaktor is more direct and calls it business development. Publicis Sapient calls it client partnership. Frog calls it client development. Hellon calls it transformation. Each title reveals something about how the company wants the work to feel. Sales sounds transactional. Account management sounds administrative. Consulting sounds detached. Transformation makes the commercial act sound like a shared journey towards a better organisation.

Sometimes it probably is.

I still cannot decide whether the role represents the highest form of design work or the point where design is absorbed into sales. It may be both. The person uses research, framing, facilitation and systems thinking, but the result is judged through pipeline, revenue, account growth and renewals.

Maybe that is not a corruption of the work. Maybe commercial reality was always part of the system and designers were only protected from seeing it directly.

What seems clear is that the person doing the visible work is not always the person creating the most value for the consultancy. The engineer can build the system. The designer can make it understandable. The researcher can reveal what people need. But someone has to make the organisation agree that this is the problem, that now is the time, that this team should solve it and that money should move.

That person decides what counts as work.

I am not sure I like how much power is hidden inside that sentence.

Connected reading

• Now I’m Limited by What I Can Imagine
• The Problems Companies Admit They Have
• The Product Is Becoming an Organization
• The End of the Software Request
• I Want to Work Somewhere the Work Is Already Necessary

AI authorship note

This essay began with Kris Haamer investigating Hellon’s current business health, its open Transformation Lead role and similar positions at frog, Publicis Sapient, Reaktor, Devoteam, EY and Futurice. AI supported the source research, comparison of responsibilities and incentives, drafting, editing and implementation. Kris identified the central Raw Drafts angle: senior consulting roles increasingly create value by deciding which organisational uncertainty becomes a funded project.