When people in the development sector hear that I spent years running a market research company in Cambodia, delivering projects for clients like Facebook, Honda, and Coca-Cola before joining FAO, they tend to pause. The assumption is that commercial research and UN statistics are fundamentally different worlds. They are, in some ways. But the overlap is larger than most people realise, and the skills I brought across have been more useful than any technical qualification on my CV.
I ran Spear Insights (previously MSD), a market research firm competing with and working alongside the big international agencies in Southeast Asia. We developed and managed Cambodia's first retail audit — a significant achievement for the local industry and something I'm still proud of. The work was demanding in a very specific way: clients paid serious money and expected results delivered on time, on spec, with clear recommendations they could act on by Monday morning. There was no tolerance for vague findings or beautifully formatted reports that didn't answer the business question. That commercial discipline — the relentless focus on "so what?" — is something I carry into every project now. When I'm producing agricultural statistics for the Cambodian government, I'm still asking the same question: will anyone actually use this to make a decision?
Project management at scale transferred directly. Running a national agricultural survey across 25 provinces with hundreds of enumerators isn't conceptually different from coordinating a multi-market retail audit with field teams across the region. The logistics are different, the budgets are different, the stakeholders are different. But the core challenge is identical: how do you maintain data quality when collection is happening simultaneously in places you can't physically be? The answer, in both sectors, comes down to systems, training, and relentless quality checks.
Stakeholder management was another transferable skill I didn't fully appreciate until I needed it. Presenting findings to a room of government ministers requires the same instincts as presenting to a brand director who doesn't want to hear that their campaign underperformed. You learn to lead with what matters to your audience, to be honest without being alienating, and to translate statistical nuance into language that sticks.
What I think the development sector can learn from the private sector is urgency around usefulness. Too much development data gets collected because a log frame requires it, not because anyone has a clear plan for how it will inform a decision. And what the private sector could learn from development is patience with complexity. Not everything worth measuring yields a clean quarterly metric. Sometimes the most important data stories take years to emerge. My career has been richer for having sat on both sides of that tension.