Why Every Agency Should Build Like a Product Company in 2026

I spent my holiday break building a content management system from scratch. Not for a client—for us.

The tool helps leadership across our portfolio track their content inventory, classify ideas by theme and format, and actually see what's in the pipeline instead of guessing. It's the kind of system I would have either hacked together in spreadsheets or paid a developer $15K+ to build. I did it over a long weekend.

The stack: Claude Code for the backend logic, Lovable for the frontend UI. No dev team. No six-week sprint. Just describing what I needed and iterating until it worked.

Most agencies are still asking "How can AI help our clients?" Meanwhile, I'm building internal infrastructure that makes our operations tighter and gives leadership visibility they didn't have before.

The agencies that start building their own tools—ugly, internal, solve-one-problem tools—are going to operate differently than those waiting for the perfect SaaS to show up.

The Problem: Most agencies treat internal tool development as an afterthought, building ad-hoc solutions when pain points become unbearable.

The Approach: I'm doubling down on development across our agencies. I’m implementing a Product Roadmap framework within our main agency operating company, Marketers in Demand. Just like software companies, we now maintain a prioritized backlog of internal tools (and tickets/feature requests) based on potential impact, not urgency. We dedicate 20% of our development resources (whether internal or AI-assisted) to building these tools systematically.

Our current roadmap includes an automation library to document and standardize our Zapier/Make workflows, improvements to a process library in ClickUp with reusable task templates, and a complete overhaul to our client portal.

The roadmap isn’t too complex to manage. At the moment, we prioritize items across these key stages:

The Outcome: Instead of reactive tool-building, we're proactively solving operational challenges before they become bottlenecks. This systematic approach has already eliminated hours of manual work weekly and improved consistency across our portfolio agencies. This approach also gives visibility across our entire team so they know when a new tool or feature gets rolled out.

There's a hiring trend I'm seeing everywhere: agencies rushing to hire "AI specialists" or "Heads of AI." But this misses the fundamental challenge entirely.

The bottleneck isn't AI knowledge—it's understanding agency operations deeply enough to know where AI should be applied. You need someone who knows the creative briefing process, marketing operations, financial workflows, and project management intimately.

This creates an interesting dynamic: technically-minded agency owners are positioned to win big, while purely creative founders may struggle to bridge this gap. The most successful implementations I've seen come from owners who can directly connect AI capabilities to their existing workflows, not from hiring external AI experts who lack operational context.

It reminds me of that Reddit comment about marketing being "bloated" with people who entered through social media without foundational knowledge. The same risk exists with AI—hiring for the shiny new skill while ignoring the business fundamentals.

I'm curious: what's the first internal tool your agency should build? Not for clients, but for your own operations—finance, project management, reporting, hiring?

If you're thinking about this shift from service business to product-enabled agency, I'd love to hear what operational challenges are eating up your team's time. Reply and let me know what manual process you'd eliminate first if you had the right tool.

Thanks for reading!