Fifteen Years of Preparation That Didn't Look Like Preparation

When I was 21 I wanted to build a website.

I had no idea what it would be. No idea how. This was the early days of the web: before the tools, before the tutorials, before you could describe what you wanted to an AI and watch it appear. Just the sense that there was something here, something possible, and I wanted to be part of it.

I didn't build the website. But I didn't stop wanting to build something.

Falling into contracting

My dad worked for himself. That was the model I grew up with. The idea that you could make something your own, be your own person, answer to yourself. I thought I'd climb the corporate ladder: enthusiasm, willingness to learn, make whatever I touched a success. That was the plan.

The ladder never quite delivered. Partly the corporate machinery, the politics, the feeling of always being on the outside looking in. Contracting seemed like the better fit: more autonomy, different environments, keep moving. So I fell into it. Fifteen years of it. Retail, enterprise, large organisations, complex programmes.

At first I didn't understand the game. It took time to find the rhythm. But somewhere along the way I started recognising patterns.

Recognising the patterns

Patterns in the work. In the organisations. In what worked and what didn't and why. The BAs, the SAs, the product owners: I watched how they thought, what they built, where the gaps were. I picked up the technical thread too: databases that took a while to click, VBA, Java, a web portal for an early job. Always the technical and the operational side by side, one informing the other.

And always, underneath it, the same hope: maybe I can build something for myself. But what?

The question sat unanswered for years. Not because I stopped asking it, but because the answer wasn't ready yet. The skills were still accumulating. The patterns were still forming. The problem I was going to solve was still being lived, slowly, across every contract and every client and every Monday morning trying to stay two steps ahead.

The gap I couldn't close

The gap I couldn't close was marketing. The non-technical side: how you find people, how you tell a story, how you make something someone else wants to use. I knew the technical. I understood the operational. But the bit that connects a product to a person, that was the missing piece.

Ka-do is where I've had to close it. Not by studying it, but by doing it. The writing, the LinkedIn presence I swore I'd avoid, the SEO posts, the founder story told honestly rather than polished. All of it uncomfortable. All of it necessary.

What it was preparing me for

I didn't know I was preparing. That's the honest version.

The website at 21. The database that finally clicked. The fifteen years of patterns. The skills picked up sideways, across roles I took because they were available and kept because they were interesting. None of it felt like preparation at the time. It felt like a career that hadn't quite found its shape.

Ka-do is the shape. Why fifteen years of contracting made me the right person to build it is the subject of The Product Was Me.

Not the exit from contracting. Not the second act after a first one that didn't work. The thing that all of it (the technical, the operational, the pattern recognition, even the gaps) was quietly pointing toward.

I just didn't know what to call it yet. I've written the fuller, harder version of not knowing what I wanted for a lot of that time in I Didn't Know What I Wanted. For Decades.

Steve Drew is the founder of ka-do, built for doing, not organising.