Six Things IBC 2026 Was Really About, and None of Them Were on the Stands

I had 63 meetings across IBC and the Devoncroft summit this year, most of them with CEOs and founders. I expected the usual mix of product news and market chatter. What came back, conversation after conversation, had very little to do with what was on the stands.

The same six themes kept surfacing. On its own, each one is a hiring problem. Together they point to something bigger, which I will come to at the end.

Scoping Is Where Deals Are Being Lost

Not in the pitch, and not on price. Several conversations came back to the stretch between a deal being agreed and it being delivered, and to what it costs when that gap is handled badly.

The capability that closes it sits between engineering and commercial. It needs someone who can sit with a customer, understand what they are really trying to achieve, and turn that into something the delivery team can build and the business can stand behind. Very few people genuinely have both halves, and the ones who do are rarely looking.

The Most Valuable Profile Is Often the Hardest to Approach

Vendors increasingly want people who have lived on the customer side. They want someone who can shape the narrative, the deployment journey and what customer success actually looks like in practice, because they have been on the receiving end of all three.

The catch is that those people usually work for the vendor's own customers. That makes it a question of which relationships you are willing to spend, not a sourcing exercise.

The move itself is well trodden. The transition from customer to vendor has traditionally been much smoother than the other way round. It is still not easy to find the right fit, but that credibility can only help.

Sales Structures Are Getting Flatter and More Senior at the Same Time

Middle management layers are coming out, and the focus is on fewer, stronger commercial people who can own enterprise relationships end to end.

On paper it looks like a simplification. In practice it is a different cost base and a much narrower pool than the org charts it replaces. The people who can carry a major account from first conversation to renewal, without a layer of management around them, are in short supply, and every company making this change is looking for the same ones.

Marketing Is Back on the Agenda

I had more conversations about messaging, brand and go-to-market this year than in previous years. They came from companies whose strategy has moved and whose market-facing story has not caught up.

That gap is easy to miss from the inside. The leadership team knows where the business is heading. The website, the sales deck and the stand are often still describing where it has been.

Automation Is Removing Roles in the Middle and Raising the Value at the Top

Where technical work is built once and shared across many sites, the operator role goes and the value of the few people designing the system rises sharply.

This is not a smaller version of the current team. It is a different headcount shape, with fewer people at the centre who matter far more. Hiring for it means looking for people who design systems rather than people who run them, and they are rarely the same people.

Almost Everyone Is Working to an Ownership Clock

A process, an investor timeline, a decision not yet made. Very few of the businesses I met were without one. It changes the urgency of every senior hire, and it changes who the right person is.

I wrote about this in more depth in The Hidden Variable in Media Tech Hiring: Who Actually Owns the Business.

The Common Thread

Strategies have moved faster than the organisations underneath them.

Each of these six themes is a version of the same gap. Companies have decided where they are going: new delivery models, flatter commercial teams, automated operations, a sharper story, an exit. The people and structures that have to carry them there have not caught up yet.

That is where most of the hiring risk sits right now. It is also where the right appointment makes the biggest difference.

Which of these is most live for you? I will go deeper on a few of them over the coming weeks.