A podcast for leaders inside professional services: creative agencies, design studios, digital boutiques, consultancies and innovation teams.
Each episode is a one-to-one conversation, 40 to 55 minutes, with someone who has done real work and is willing to talk honestly about it. We don't turn it into a case study or a keynote.
What it feels like to run a team of 10, 20, 100 — and what changes in you when the stakes get bigger.
How you build a team that wants to stay, and what a real growth conversation actually looks like.
What senior people need to develop, and the challenges organisations hit at each stage of scaling.
How the work is changing: what gets automated, what stays human, what people have had to unlearn.
The realities of professional services that rarely get said out loud, and how the best firms are structuring themselves.
The hires that changed everything, the decisions that felt right and weren't, and what you'd tell yourself at the beginning.
We spend our weeks inside professional-services firms — digital agencies, consultancies, IT boutiques. At The Den was born to connect people and promote experience sharing, conversation and genuine curiosity.
The conferences have become performances. The LinkedIn posts are polished sometimes to the point of uselessness. And the honest, useful conversations that help people grow — the ones that happen around the fire, over coffee, in a park — rarely make it anywhere permanent.
We want to share real stories, of real people in the middle of figuring something out, so that together this knowledge contributes to a stronger professional services industry.
Pauline Bertry, co-founder of Polar Bear, the people ops consultancy behind the show. Ex-McKinsey, where she built and led the Design Hubs in Moscow and Budapest, after ten-plus years leading product and design teams.
We're looking for guests. Tell us who you are on the for guests page — we read every application personally.
At The Den — a show by Polar Bear.