Diana Ismail

I came up through engineering, not a creative programme. That mattered. It meant that when I eventually moved into agency work — running programmes worth millions, managing teams across time zones, delivering experiences that live in the real world — I never lost the habit of reading the actual spec. Not a summary of the spec. The spec.

That’s the thing people usually miss. They see a project director and assume I’m there to manage the calendar and mediate the meetings. What they don’t expect is that I can sit down with their engineers and talk architecture, then walk into the brand review and explain what the build actually requires — in language that makes both rooms trust the same plan. I’ve led a $15M HoloLens mixed-reality build for P&G’s Tokyo Olympics pavilion. I’ve delivered a 40-screen Times Square campaign in the time most teams spend in kickoff. The range isn’t incidental. It’s what makes the whole system hold.

The path that got me here was not the obvious one. I served as an Army Master Sergeant. I competed in Strongman. I ran a gym, worked the door, co-founded a youth nonprofit. I’ve been in rooms where the energy could turn, and rooms where the stakes were genuinely high, and I’ve learned to tell the difference between a problem that needs to be managed and a problem that needs to be solved. That range of experience is not decoration on the résumé — it’s why I can read a room before I read the brief. It’s why I do my best work alongside people who don’t think the way I do — engineers, creatives, strategists, people from corners of the world I’ve never been to. Different vantage points find things one perspective misses.

What I’m interested in now is the frontier edge of this work — agentic AI, interactive retail, experiences that respond to the people inside them. The technology is moving fast. I like fast. Fast, messy, and satisfying is exactly the kind of project I want to be on.