For a stretch of my career I was an Associate Vice President. I directed digital strategy for a public university, ran an eight person team, managed agency relationships, and owned a $4M marketing budget. The work was real. We put the site through a full overhaul, raised conversions 30% with SEO and CRO, and built dashboards that finally connected ad spend to enrollment.
Then I took a job with a smaller title and a narrower scope, and I have not regretted it.
The honest reason is not humility, and it is not burnout. It is a claim about the discipline itself.
Web strategy that never touches implementation drifts
Web strategy is unusual among strategic disciplines because the thing it governs is a working system. A brand strategy can live in a deck. A web strategy has to survive contact with a template, a content model, a permission structure, and a release process. Every good decision is one implementation detail away from being impossible.
The higher you sit, the longer the delay between a decision and the evidence that it was wrong. You approve a roadmap in the spring and learn in the fall that the CMS could not support half of it. By then the plan has been socialized, the budget is committed, and the correction costs more than the original decision.
Sitting closer to the build shortens that loop to days. I find out a template cannot do what I promised while the promise is still cheap to change.
A strategy you cannot test is a forecast. A strategy you can test in a week is a plan.
What distance actually costs
Three things degrade when strategy gets far from implementation.
Estimates lose their anchor. If you have not shipped in a few years, you stop being able to tell the difference between a two week change and a two quarter change. That one skill decides whether a roadmap is a commitment or a wish.
Evidence gets summarized. Reports arrive with the ambiguity already removed by someone else. The most useful findings I have had, like learning that over 90% of our visitors never touch the homepage, came from sitting with raw analytics and heat maps rather than reading a summary of them.
You lose the ability to prototype your own argument. The fastest way to end a long disagreement about a page is to build the page. That is a much weaker move when you have to requisition someone else's sprint to do it.
The part I want to be clear about
This is not an argument against leadership, and I am not describing a retreat from it. I lead roadmaps, I run planning, and I spend a lot of my time on the political work of getting a decentralized organization to agree on one direction. I have no interest in being the person who only writes code.
The argument is narrower. Leading web work well requires staying fluent in the material, the way a good editor still writes and a good architect still draws. Fluency is perishable. You keep it by using it.
The skill I was protecting is the one that lets me tell a stakeholder what something will actually cost, then go verify it myself when the answer matters.
What I would look for now
If you are making a similar decision, the title is the wrong variable. The questions worth asking are whether you will still see the evidence before it has been summarized, whether you can prototype an idea without negotiating for it, and whether the people who build the thing are in the room when it is decided.
A role with a bigger budget and none of those is a role where your judgment gets worse every quarter, and nobody tells you, because from the outside the reports keep looking fine.