Borja Delgado

Strategic Consultant. Digital. Brand. Product.

Where I come from.

That means working in the beautiful tension between a founder’s big ambition and their company’s messy reality. I use that energy to translate strategy into real digital products and services, bring together the people who need to carry the work, and stay close enough to make sure the vision doesn’t get lost on its way off the whiteboard.

I do this work with medium and large companies, and with startups that already have traction. These people and organizations are often standing at a threshold: They can sense a transformation but can’t yet say what it is. Or, they have a direction, but don’t know how to move on it yet.

I bring clarity, structure, and the kind of thinking that only comes from having built things. Not just planned them. That gap — between knowing and doing — is exactly where I work.

I grew up in a Madrid neighbourhood where you learned fast that nobody was coming to help you. That instinct — figure it out, make it work, keep moving — turned out to be the best professional training I ever got.

I entered this field the only way I could: self-taught, making things with whatever I had. Books I bought myself, projects nobody asked for, teams I talked my way into. It worked. By my late twenties I was running digital departments in advertising agencies, learning what it really means to make strategy legible to the people who have to execute it.

Then came Domestika. At the time, it was a forum of 700 people. I helped shape the vision and lead the redesign that turned it into a community of 70,000. That was the first time I saw what happens when purpose and product really line up. It doesn’t happen often. But when it does, you feel it in your bones.

From there I co-founded Hanzo with two friends on a simple bet: that quality, commitment, and genuinely caring about the work was enough of a strategy. Fifteen years later, that bet had taken us from a scrappy Madrid startup to an internationally recognised studio. We had Vogue, BBVA, Meliá, Cartier, Bulgari, and Lego as clients. Projects spanning over 84 countries.

We didn’t plan any of this. We just refused to do bad work.

Then I walked away.

My mother was ill. My father had died when I was two. Hanzo had me travelling every week and working every hour until one day, I realised I’d totally lost the thread of why any of it mattered in the first place. So I moved to the Pyrenees. And stopped. No plan, just mountains.

What followed was deliberate in a different way.

I went back to advising startups, invested in a few, and then co-founded Dersu with my brother and a close friend. A mountain startup named after a Kurosawa character, a wilderness guide who could read terrain better than anyone alive. We closed it last year. Not every project lands.

But I came out of it knowing exactly what I want. And why.

This is what’s next. Focused consultancy work, on my terms, with teams and projects I truly believe in. Everything I know, pointed in one direction.

You can’t control the mountain.

Most companies lie to themselves. Not deliberately, but consistently. What they say they are and what they actually do are often two different things. I’ve seen that gap destroy good projects more times than I can count. Fix it first, or don’t bother with the rest.

Here’s another failure I’ve lived through: companies define strategy at a high level, spend real money on it, and then lose it completely on the way to delivery. The detail disappears, the intent gets diluted, and nobody remembers why the original decision was ever made. Part of my work is staying close enough to stop that from happening. Most people don’t. That’s where things fall apart.

And then there’s the planning trap — the belief that a three-year roadmap can hold its shape in an uncertain world. It can’t. Strategy gives you a direction, but you always have to be ready to move with whatever’s real.

I learned a lot of this — unexpectedly — from the mountains. There’s a planning method developed to predict avalanche risk. I’ve used an adapted version in corporate strategy for years. The logic: know your terrain, read the signals, and stay oriented when things shift. That turns out to be exactly how good strategy works.

Three things make a project work: a clear and shared sense of purpose, people who are honest with each other, and resources aligned to the actual goal. When those three are in place, remarkable things happen. When they’re not, no amount of methodology saves you. I’ve seen both. The difference is unmistakable.

The detail disappears, the intent gets diluted, and nobody remembers why the original decision was ever made.

When to call me.

What I do.

Your move.

If any of this sounds like where you are right now, let’s talk. I work with companies that know something has to change but haven’t yet found the right person to help them move.