Digital SHIFT is the independent digital practice of Marc Thornton, a Digital, Product & Technology Director with 15+ years' experience building products, businesses and multidisciplinary teams.
I'm currently taking on a small number of focused UK and European projects alongside my search for the right long-term leadership opportunity.
What I can help with
Untangle a website, product, workflow or technical problem that is costing you time or opportunities.
Turn an unclear requirement into a practical plan, then bring together the right people and tools to deliver it.
Review what is working, identify the real bottlenecks and prioritise changes around customer value and commercial results.
Identify useful ways to introduce AI, automation and knowledge systems without creating another expensive technology project.
Provide senior product, digital or technology direction when you need experience now but don't need another permanent executive.
How it works
I spent more than a decade building and running Digital SHIFT and the SKYLAB software and venture business, working across commercial strategy, product, technology, design and growth.
Today I keep things deliberately lean.
You work directly with me. For specialist implementation, I can bring in trusted expertise where appropriate rather than maintaining a large permanent agency overhead.
That makes Digital SHIFT particularly suited to short, clearly defined projects where an experienced pair of hands can make a meaningful difference quickly.
Case studies
Seventeen detailed examples spanning product pivots, digital platforms, venture building, applied AI, Unreal Engine R&D and long-term client partnerships.
09Blue Pelican needed more than a new recruitment website. It needed a digital platform that could support candidates, consultants, marketing campaigns and search visibility without leaving the business dependent on a collection of disconnected tools.
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01Before ClickASnap existed, the product was a video platform with the economics of streaming working against it. We helped test the idea with a real prototype, used actual behaviour and costs to challenge the original model, then helped redirect the working technology and community into a photography product with a more viable cost base.
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08Digital SHIFT led the digital delivery for Clipper Tea as part of a wider £1m national campaign, translating the campaign’s creative platform into digital work and coordinating the specialist delivery needed around it.
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04Custom Marine initially appeared to need an app. Discovery showed that the real problem was larger: orders, scheduling, fabrication, treatment, QA, sign-off and client communication all needed to connect. The result was a shared operational platform built around the way the business actually worked.
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13Genarrator was an educational interactive-storytelling platform developed and managed with Bournemouth University. It went on to host more than 2,000 narratives, support creative teaching and learning, and contribute to published research.
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06LifeOS is an ongoing founder-led R&D project exploring a practical question: can email, documents, messages, tasks and personal knowledge be connected by AI without giving up source evidence or letting automation silently rewrite important records?
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16As a voluntary Marketing Director and board member of The Arts Poole CIC, Marc worked with the council, funding bodies, artists and the public to help turn cultural ambitions into events, collaborations and installations that could actually be delivered.
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07Voxel Plugin already had technical value and a community. The challenge was turning that into a product people could understand, price and buy. Marc partnered with the developer on the commercialisation of the first paid release while the developer retained ownership of the underlying technology.
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02SKYLAB was created by Digital SHIFT founder Marc Thornton to pursue work that sat beyond the conventional agency model: bespoke software, new products, venture partnerships and investment-ready ideas. It grew into a profitable business and, for part of its life, a 13-room Centre for Innovation designed to put founders, specialists and clients in the same environment.
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03Digital SHIFT was built by combining the talent, clients and resources of three agencies, then acquiring a fourth. The objective was not simply to become bigger. It was to create a strong permanent core that could expand with trusted specialists when a project needed deeper or broader expertise.
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05Hollabox arrived with an idea and a set of Photoshop concepts for a location-based discovery app. We helped turn that early vision into user journeys, a product roadmap and a working first version, while strengthening the material the founders needed to explain the opportunity to investors.
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10AURA is an early-alpha AI assistant integrated into Unreal Engine. Marc has contributed to product evaluation and refinement, focusing on whether context-aware assistance can reduce repetitive technical work without getting in the way of real development workflows.
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11Fate of the Few is an independently developed Unreal Engine project that has provided six years of hands-on product R&D across AI behaviour, procedural tools and tightly connected gameplay systems. Marc leads the product direction while working with specialist developers where deeper implementation expertise is required.
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12AMS explored how a soundtrack could respond continuously to gameplay without sounding like a playlist of tracks being switched on and off. Marc co-designed the musical architecture, compositions and interaction rules while Unreal developer Jorge from Coqui Games built the Blueprint implementation.
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14Procedural tools can remove a surprising amount of repetitive setup from early world-building. Marc has developed and explored reusable Unreal Engine systems for generating and varying landscapes, cities and playable environments so that ideas can be tested before large amounts of manual production are committed.
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15MESH Interactive grew from a recurring Unreal Engine problem: excellent systems can work individually and still become difficult when somebody tries to combine them into one multiplayer game. Marc Thornton and networking specialist Raed Abbas turned that experience into a reusable framework concept, studio identity and commercial offer, then tested it against real client requirements.
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17Character Interaction was a tightly coupled single-player Unreal Engine system being converted for multiplayer use. Marc’s contribution was not to claim the deepest networking expertise, but to make the distributed technical work more reliable through source control, structured diagnosis, research, testing and careful coordination with specialists.
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If you have a digital, product or technology problem that needs experienced attention, send me a short description of what is happening.
For my professional background, CV and leadership experience:
marc-thornton.com
