David Reynolds | Digital Value Creator
The problem isn't building — it's knowing what to build.
Chief Digital Officer. Twenty years building digital products, platforms and commercial propositions in private equity-backed and B2B businesses.
The gap
Most organisations don't have a technology problem. They have a value creation problem.
Technology is an input. Value comes from better commercial decisions, better products, better operating models and better execution. Digital makes those possible. It doesn't replace them.
The conversation around digital and AI is well ahead of the reality. Most of the work is still structural: product, operating model, commercial alignment, execution. That's where outcomes are decided.
Technology is easy to buy. Enterprise value is much harder to create.
My work sits in the gap between the two.
Where this comes from
I've spent twenty years in that gap. The companies and titles changed. The pattern didn't.
Start-up to exit · Totaljobs Group
I joined early and stayed through the whole arc — from around £200k of revenue to more than £20m, and an exit to Axel Springer. I led digital strategy and audience growth across the portfolio, and built the R&D capability that expanded it.
Publisher to data business · RELX / Reed Business Information
Seven years helping turn a traditional publisher into a data and analytics business. I led product and innovation work across a global portfolio: an acquisition that became a new market-data product, automation that saved millions a year, and some of the group's earliest commercial uses of AI and natural-language generation.
Ventures inside an established firm · Grant Thornton
I owned the digital P&L at a professional-services firm and built new products and a corporate-venturing capability from scratch. Some worked. Some didn't. The ones that worked had one thing in common: someone owned the commercial outcome, and the incentives changed around them.
Platform from incubation to launch · Alexander Mann Solutions
Inside a PE-backed global talent business, I took a proprietary platform from idea to launch and into the centre of the company's core proposition. The engineering was never the hard part. The hard part was changing how the business sold, operated and made decisions around it.
Now · OASIS Group
Today I'm Group Chief Digital Officer at OASIS Group, an international information-management business, leading the shift from digital as an internal function to digital as a commercial growth engine.
How I think
Every piece of work starts with the same questions. They sound simple. Most organisations can't answer them.
01What value does this actually create?
02Who owns the commercial outcome?
03If this succeeds, how does enterprise value improve?
04What job is the customer actually hiring this to do — what are the pains and gains, and what do they need to do five minutes before and five minutes after?
05Would we build this if we were paying for it ourselves?
First ninety days in any business: customers, commercial model, operating model, incentives. Technology comes later — it's rarely the constraint. And projects should be killed the same way they're funded: against value, not activity.
Over the years this has hardened into a working method — IDEAS: Ideation, Design, Execution, Acceleration, Scaling — with structured, measured risk decisions at each stage. Nothing revolutionary. It just makes proposition development consistent, teachable and worth investing in.