Sean McInerney

Where It Started

I registered lakehouse.net while I was still at the University of Georgia, studying English Literature and spending most of my time building websites instead of writing papers. It was the late nineties, and the web felt like it belonged to whoever showed up with ideas and the willingness to figure things out. I had both.

Lakehouse was never a grand business plan. It was a domain name, a side project, a place to experiment. I built sites for local businesses, tinkered with interactive experiences that probably should not have worked, and started learning the thing that would define the next twenty-five years of my career: the intersection of technology and human experience. Not just making things work, but making them work well for the person on the other side of the screen.

Then the dot-com boom hit, and suddenly everyone was racing to figure out the internet. I jumped in headfirst. Startups launching every week, brands scrambling to get online, a whole generation of builders learning by doing. Most of us had no playbook. We were making it up as we went, and that turned out to be the best education I could have asked for.

Lakehouse stayed with me through all of it -- sometimes active, sometimes dormant, always mine. A place to return to when I needed to think clearly about what this work should actually look like.

Building the Career

Studio720

In 2001, I co-founded Studio720, a digital studio that rode the post-crash wave of companies who actually needed the internet to work, not just look impressive. We spent seven years building interactive experiences and learning the hard way that great work requires more than great ideas -- it requires understanding the business problem well enough to know which ideas matter.

SapientNitro

At Sapient, the methodology was experience-led transformation. Every engagement started with the end user and worked backward to the technology. I led mobile and omnichannel strategies for The Coca-Cola Company, Target, NASCAR, Ralph Lauren, and Verizon Fios -- managing a $10-20 million book of business and earning the Distinguished Technologist Award for delivery excellence.

The biggest lesson was that digital experiences do not exist in isolation. A mobile app is part of a store visit is part of a customer relationship. The companies that understood this were the ones winning.

Huge

Huge was where scale met craft. As Group Vice President of Technology and Global Head of Retail Technology, I oversaw 76 professionals across six global offices, delivering roughly $36 million in yearly project revenue. I grew the Atlanta office to 140 staff and $28 million in annual revenue as Technology Discipline Lead.

The client roster was extraordinary: PGA of America, AMC Theatres, Lowe's, Capital One, Lexus and Toyota, Under Armour, UPS, and McDonald's. We launched a retail and e-commerce industry practice, opened a functioning café as a retail innovation lab, and achieved over 90 percent on-time, on-budget delivery accuracy using Lean-Agile methodologies.

Huge taught me that great digital work is not about clever ideas in isolation. It is about understanding the full picture -- the user, the business, the technology -- and finding the solution that serves all three. In 2018, I was invited to serve as a jury judge at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Avanade

Avanade, the joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, gave me the enterprise lens at its largest scale. As Executive and North American CX Practice Lead, I drove the development, product, and go-to-market strategy for the Customer Experience Practice across five regions, managing an $88 million P&L.

I directed a merger of the Southeast and Southwest regions that grew headcount and revenue from $14 million to $32 million. I pioneered the Specialist Team Office, improving pipeline win rates by 30 percent and reducing business development costs by 20 percent. The team was named Microsoft CX Partner of the Year in 2023 and received the Sitecore Excellence in Business Award the same year.

The biggest lesson from Avanade was bridging the gap between business stakeholders who think in outcomes and engineering teams who think in systems. That translation work -- making the technical accessible without dumbing it down -- became one of my strongest skills.

Capgemini and Merkle

At Capgemini, I led the North American Digital Customer Experience practice for Mobile, Front End, and Adobe-platform solutions, defining experience-led transformation strategies anchored in Adobe's ecosystem for enterprise clients across retail, financial services, and consumer industries.

At Merkle, part of dentsu, I lead enterprise technology and digital transformation strategy for the firm's largest client engagements, partnering directly with CIOs, CTOs, and business leadership. The work spans AI and machine learning strategy, governance frameworks, enterprise architecture advisory, and CX transformation roadmaps across retail, financial services, healthcare, and consumer goods.

The best digital work happens when strategy, design, and technology are in the same conversation from day one.

Why Lakehouse

After twenty-five years inside agencies that ranged from scrappy startups to global consultancies, I keep running into the same friction. Talented people buried under layers of process. Senior leaders who sell the work and vanish after kickoff. Teams staffed to fill utilization targets rather than to match the problem. The overhead is real, and clients feel it.

Lakehouse Digital is the realization of something I have been thinking about since I registered that domain in college. Smaller teams of senior practitioners who stay engaged throughout. No layers between the people doing the work and the people who hired them. Right-sized engagements where every person on the team is there because the project needs them, not because a bench needs filling.

The name was always waiting. A lakehouse is a place where you do your best thinking. It is relaxed and unpretentious, but serious about the things that matter. That is the energy we bring to client work. We are digital natives who have been doing this for a long time, and we like what we do.

How We Work

We assemble the right team for every engagement. Rather than maintaining a fixed roster, we draw from a network of senior specialists -- practitioners who have built careers in their disciplines and bring real depth to every project.

This is a deliberate choice. It means every person on a Lakehouse team is there because their specific expertise matches the work at hand. No juniors learning on your project. No overhead from departments that have nothing to do with your engagement. Just experienced professionals working together on the problem you actually need solved.

Our capacity scales with the work. A focused strategy engagement might be two or three people over a few weeks. A full digital experience build brings in a larger cross-functional team. Either way, the senior attention stays consistent from start to finish.

We cover the ground that matters for modern digital work: