The Role of AI in Tech Leadership Ft Rafe Blandford

Rafe welcome to the podcast thanks Rupert very happy to be here thank you for for coming in so this is the second time that we've met up in probably the last couple of weeks and you've been off swanning around in in Iceland that's right it was right I'm at the peak of the Northern Lights so the entire sky lit up in red and green and then sitting in a hot volcanic spring at the time was pretty special tough times yeah but now you're back to the doom and gloom of the UK January weather yeah love it well thank you very much for for joining me today we're gonna get into some interesting topics I think people will get a lot of value out of um but to first of all I introduce you a bit more so you started your career and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this by the way but you started your career um early in like the telco industry um and then you've moved into working in one of the UK's leading agencies Digitast most people have heard of them for the last nearly 12 years working on some really exciting brands to name a couple E E Formula 1 massive Formula 1 fan myself so that's exciting for me um so we're gonna tuck into some of the stuff that you've done um because you've been leading leading teams you're a massive advocate for diversity and inclusion um so I'd like to delve into some of the stuff that you've done there cause I think that's really interesting um but yeah can you give us a bit more of a an intro into who you are your background and and where you started well well like most person people I had a squiggly d career yeah and my kind of background from a tech point of view and product is mobile and that was because I was what would probably now be called an influencer or content creator and back then it was kind of blogging and that was writing about Symbian which was the big mobile phone operating system of the early 2 yep um you know massive market share and it's just you know it's a good example of the way technology can move but it was also before there were really smartphones so I've seen that massive size make shift and that was writing about them and then doing consultancy and product work off the back of that um and then you know Nokia had a few problems and then Microsoft had a few problems so I shifted into what's effectively professional services the agency world but working around tech product innovation and the delivery of products with some of those that you've mentioned but also brands like the National Trust EON Hastings Direct BCCI Cats and dogs and it was a big shift about kind of 12 years ago from one thing but it's interesting it the kind of variety and the versatility in having to be flexible and adaptable hasn't changed a lot of the core skills are there if you go back before that I was um I was a geographer that was the thing I did at university but the reason I mentioned is it because it teaches you systems thinking which I think is a thread throughout my career so that's kind of the central part spine around which the squiggly bits um have happened but you know that you know I I said talked about being an influencer and I sort of say that with a wry smile but it was about you know before it was a big thing smartphones you were writing about what impact they were gonna have much as we're now writing about AI it was going off to phone events it was yeah unboxing phones on YouTube before YouTube was monetized before people were unboxing phones exactly uh and then more recently it's I I stayed in mobile and was a kind of mobile and product strategist yeah um but then that role I think grew out because mobile grew up yeah OK I mean it's hard to think that you know we're talking about 12 and a half years ago with the first iPhone things like that and now the world is completely different everyone has them in the pocket we're well and truly at the top of that particular s curve yeah um but back then you're having to do a lot of advocacy about why it was going to be a big thing and actually thinking about what you had to do to build products and it was still as now those unmet customer needs and making things easier and transformation all the kind of buzzwords but then applying that more broadly um across all elements of a digital kind of end to end and you know I have a particular view on how that should work which I think is some of the topics we're gonna get into today but then it's also understanding how important people are and I think that's where some of the inclusion and diversity came from but everyone talks about it's always about the people but I think and it's an overused word talking about people and culture but it is how you build the best teams and the teams are ultimately what you know deliver outcomes and that's really what you're trying to do and I think sometimes it's too easy to forget that and yeah forget that people are what make it up um because a lot of that is actually longer term investments and often longer term than companies um or projects think because you're talking about multi years a lot of the time and so I've been a big believer always in investing in people and it doesn't come naturally to me cause I'm a bit of an introvert and so I think it's I went through a bit of a almost road to Damascus conversion saying that's the thing that's gonna make it important so when I talk about my work I always go it's important to have high standards and to have values but you've got to have high humanity as well because that's how you get to the best outcomes 100% and it's the thing that sometimes people forget unfortunately as they go down the road you do and I think you get people who are good at one and the other yes and they're really best people um are often have elements of both and yeah whether you call it intelligence and IQ or whether you call it empathy and kind of intelligence there's lots of different ways of talking about it I think people recognize the X factor when they see it but also it's important to build teams that have diversity even within the spectrum I'm talking about there and I think that's something it took me a while to realize and that's sort of hopefully the hallmark of some of my leadership and so talk me through the the transition if you like I don't know if that's the right word for it but from like mobile strategist all the way through to CPTO which is where you have been most recently like how have you managed to come through the gears into what are obviously different roles but there are similarities between what you were doing I'm sure as a mobile strategist to to what you've been doing most recently as a C P t O yeah I think I spoke about it being systems design yeah and actually when it comes down to it designing the systems on what your product works or on what your team work is uh similar but I think it is combining kind of thinking about business the viability of something thinking about customers sort of the desirability and also then the technical side feasibility and I think with mobile strategy it was much more around what what's the business what does the customer want and then I've had to develop the muscle more around technical feasibility and those things are the thing three things that often get talked about by product people so I would describe myself as a product first technology leader because that's the way I've come to and everyone comes to it from different ways you often see um ctpos come either from the technical or the product side I always had a little bit of both because I had a curiosity about technology and I actually think that's one of the common uh threads as well you've always wanted to be pushing the edge you know continuous improvement and that's often driven by a sense of curiosity so in terms of how it happened you know I had to cut my teeth on kind of building products and the first product I built was actually the websites and the apps that ran and what were they all about sites and that was the content um creation yep um the stuff around mobile and then going into uh Digitus it was creating some of those products for some of the big brands you know big mobile apps that were about digital transformation Austin it was about reducing the cost to serve moving people from call centers to mobile apps kind of to be able to self serve and you had to think about you know how are you going to make that work for the business as well as the customer and as that um grew up it's kind of almost a question of scared and I think you know the the difference for a CTO is you are not necessarily running tech or running product you have to own the full outcome chain so you have to think about the strategy and then think about how you're going to build and run the products but also then measure and improve them and it's the last two that often get forgotten about um because that kind of iterative nature and that has been a shift I think in the last decade I mean this is what startups do all the time it is not I'm not saying anything novel yeah yeah or anything new um it is harder I think sometimes in the bigger and more mature established companies and it's now whether you talk about that as business transformation agile transformation it's actually the principles are the same you are trying to or digital transformation you are trying to shift something into the digital domain and mobile I think was really helpful for that because it did put a computer in everybody's pocket and it did make it easy to use and it made people realize that that was something that was gonna fairly fundamentally alter yeah how people go about their lives and it's hard you know if you think back you know 15 years or 20 years you know not everyone had a computer at home the idea that you would just use your banking app all the time that's really quite big shit it's novels right you go to the library wouldn't you exactly and it's the same with access to information whether that's you know social media content whether that's news content and so growing up while creating products in that time and I said it was for companies like um Hastings Direct the National Trust Virgin Atlantic now I was the what would now be called a product manager yep on those but also often doing some of the technical side as well cause I think with mobile apps you had quite small teams creating them and then as that evolved it was like OK how how do we do this at scale and growing up to bigger teams of hundreds of people running across first it was like three or four at the same time and then it was actually a whole portfolio of things and you actually become an integrator of integrators you start being and having to think much more about the system and how you're gonna create the teams rather than individually and it's about pattern recognition you start to see the same patterns um and a lot of it is actually having that gut instinct to make a decision ideally that decision should always be evidence based yep but you do need to have a kind of almost unerring instinct to make that first leap or to make that first decision and set this is how we're going to do it so people often talk about the the what and the how and I think it is what and why are we doing this that's typically the domain of product and then how are we going to do it which is the domain of a technology so build the right thing build it the right way and I started in build the right thing and then moved more into build it the right way as well and that's why I describe myself as kind of product first technology leader but it's been it's when you're in it you don't really realize it's going on and then I look back now and realize I've had four or five different jobs through the years each of which has taken on a new set of skills and as I said earlier through that people and building teams became more important and I think that's the interesting thing about being a C P t O hmm your most important product is actually the operating model and the team that you create that that's then how prioritization happens how teams ship how you get to value how decisions get made because that's the thing that then makes it rectifiable scalable and you get to outcomes and that's a huge like commercial part to that um and the big difference is you can't hide behind the things that often happen in tech you can't say the requirements weren't clear cause ultimately you you were accountable and responsible for those you can't say it's a business problem because you're meant to be solving a business problem depending on what that unmet need is nor can you really say it's ops or the delivery model cause you're responsible for that and so it is um I mean I sometimes describe you have to be a bit of a polymath as me across lots of things but the real secret is of course you're not you actually get the team in place beneath you yep can do that but you need to know enough to be able to guide them and so I think for someone like me coming up through mobile where I'd had to do a bit of everything because it was quite nascent because it was small teams gave me a broad view across all the skill sets that were required and then I've continued to develop that cause I think in my experience the best um not just chief product and chief technology officers but CPTOs in general need to be able to get into the detail when there is something that comes up because you know you're guiding people who are often a little bit earlier in their career and then you're working with people who are clearly a lot smarter than you because they are specialists they are brilliant at what they do but you sometimes have to make them realize the trade off that sit in their particular domain against something else and so you build credibility by being the person who can say yes we can do that but here you need to understand the cost the risk and the path and you need to understand it across all the domains that you operate in and I you know it it I make it sound really grand and complicated it's not it really is about making sure you have a laser view on what outcome you want to get to and what all the trade offs are to get there so it is holding a lot in your brain at the same time but you are absolutely dependent like any good technical thing there's dependencies you're dependent on the people and the team around you and you mentioned earlier that companies miss the the measure part of of what you do in terms of measuring the outcomes it's such a crucial bit like why why on earth would people miss that out like what what are they doing I think it's often down to incentives so yeah sometimes the incentive is we want to get this thing delivered and actually that's not what you want to do you want to have the thing delivered that has an outcome I think also measuring things is harder than people realize it's not just the kind of vanity metrics and you can look at it as you know we've we can look at it from a business point of view there are commercial objectives revenue objectives you need to meet but then there will also be brand objectives which can be harder to measure and then the technical measures you know typically Dora type measurements where you're how fast are you deploying what's the failure rate um but I think getting back to the reason it's difficult is because it requires cross discipline buying and agreement on what that outcome is and what you're going to measure and a lot of time people jump to the thing right at the end the lagging metrics but they often take quite a while to become apparent so my advice is always look for the leading indicators when you're measuring things and that can be something like you're starting to see adoption of an app but you're not yet starting to see the revenue off the back of that and that can be applied to the whole thing or to a small feature so you look at something like onboarding are you getting people successfully into the onboarding process if you're not something is probably breaking in acquisition how much you getting people through each stage of onboarding and you can look at that and sometimes it's just as simple as people haven't instrumented it so making sure you've got clear instrumentation in place once you've got all of that making the data understandable and comparable to a broad audience is important so it's really one thing that breaks but I think it's more because a lot of the time um outcomes are mistaken for outputs and I think that's the classic mistake I see most companies uh uh make yup because it's not easier to measure output than it is outcome but it's it's performative if you do that and you say about making the the data easy to understand and I appreciate you're not a data engineer or data analyst but how how do people go out and do that is it by putting into dashboards making it simple to view so it's got nice colours graphs things like that I don't know the simplest version of that is a dashboard yes um but actually and design and making data beautiful is really important because you want people you want the first thing that can be looked at in 30 seconds and you want the thing that can be looked at in half an hour but actually I think far more important is the thing that you're measuring because otherwise people just look at them at like vanity metrics and see that's going up and looking at the trends uh is important um but I think make a lot of the time it's making sure you're actually measuring the right thing not just the load of a page it's are people interacting with that thing on the page are they getting that step along the customer journey are they getting to a micro outcome cause bear in mind every outcome is made up of lots of steps along a a journey and looking at that rather than just looking at is it breaking at the end or is it you know the the metric at the beginning and you know there is a data engineering element to it in that you have to make a data consistent you need to be able to look at it over time mm hmm um quite a lot of time measurement gets broken when there's a new release or something else comes out or a re platform or a rebuild of the product and suddenly you wipe away all your before and after uh comparisons and there's plenty of ways around that with smart uh data engineering um but also making sure your data isn't locked in one measurement Silo especially now there are lots and lots of ways where you can uh use intelligent dashboards or business intelligence tools and you're often combining it from other sources of data into one thing so treating data as a product the thing that's gonna be valuable and recognizing when you're working on a product it's probably got to fit in with the data much more broadly in a company is really important because otherwise you're just creating the same kind of Silo that people rail against whenever you're building something or creating an experience um but I don't think data is often thought about as a product at least not as much as it should be hmm I think it's being thought of more now people realize the value of data on the most part I'd say yes I mean people always talk about uh data being valuable and data isn't valuable on its own no you need to what you do with the data is is valuable and I think that realisation has come um and then combining it with customer data to actually you know and this is where things like automation and personalization start becoming really important topics but the way people behave often tells you more than anything else because what they tell you they do isn't always the same what they actually do shock people lie and you can also use you know it as proxy if they do something they'll probably be out do something else and that's how you get to personalization next best actions and things like that and so data is often just seen as a thing that you measure afterwards but actually you should be using it all the time as a way to iterate on not just what you're doing but on what you present to the to the user and I think you know we are starting to see now a lot more adaptive uh experience design or adaptive UI AI is starting to really bring that in you are not going to be able to do that in an intelligent way if you don't have the kind of real time data so that's the other big trend kind of real time data yeah measurement not just a dashboard or a monthly report you want to be able to look at a snapshot immediately to then be able to make a smart decision about what the next thing to show that person is or to see how real time is and there are plenty of examples of this like the whole advertising industry all of media is built up on making real time decisions that's basically what programmatic does yeah so that's what's interesting being in an agency you often sometimes can take things that are from other areas and apply them um either expertise or apply that knowledge in new ways I think it's an important thing that most business leaders like C Suite CEO for example they want like real time data they want to make decisions in real time rather than the traditional ways of doing things you get your you know your accounts given to you like three months after the fact it's like it's too late like what's the what's the point it can be real time yeah there can be a danger in that because don't jump at yeah at things that happen and there's seasonality and times of day and weather and everything else can a affect this I mean when we're working with on like Formula 1 of course there's an on season and off season but there's also pre during and post weekends and you know fans of Formula 1 behave very differently during those periods and what they want and what their unmet needs are different uh during that period but being able to look at that and go okay that's what we need to do at that time that's really really important but yes particularly around revenue and things like that I think digital transformation has given boards the ability to look at things almost like day to day um and whether that's a big telco they they know how much uh broadband is being sold they know the mobile contracts they know what happens when there's a new phone launch and so they can see and measure that or you know working with Samsung looking real time at kind of what the effect of a launch event is or what the effect of a campaign is becomes crucially important but navigating that I think actually often needs the same instincts that you have in product which is like business impact what's the customer impact what's the desirability and is it then feasible to do something off it cause as I said you know having the data doesn't necessary isn't the end it's what you then choose to do with it that's really important and comes back to what I spoke right at the beginning better decisions and we talked a bit about Formula 1 we've mentioned it a couple of times uh can we talk about that particular piece of work for a for a bit cause I think it's it's really interesting piece of work not only is it Formula 1 most people have heard of Formula 1 but it's the ability to have an impact on on millions of people because it's so many fans in in that area um so tell us a bit more about some of the some of the work you've done and what are the things that you've seen uh throughout your time working with them uh Formula 1 are an amazing organisation and you know it was a real privilege to be able to rebuild their products and what that was was the website the mobile app in their core products um started working with them after the acquisition by Liberty Media which was a change from the Bernie Ecklestone era so Formula 1 fans will understand what that meant and digital had not been a priority um but suddenly it was like we need to concentrate on this we need some support and so that was a case of um in a relatively short period of time creating the foundations for what they have today in their their digital products we working very closely with the team at Formula 1 um it's often the case that the best teams I think are um hybrid um mixed but what it really was it came down to quite something quite simple it was how do we get fans closer to the action because at most 100,000 couple of hundred thousand people can go to any race weekend and they're all around the world there are hundreds of millions of Formula 1 fans and the digital audiences you know grown immeasurably Formula One's own numbers show that increasing from 50 to 300 million that's in the public domain and the digital products were an incredibly important part of that but really it was going okay what do the fans want and they wanted access to more content they wanted access to kind of sports data what I mean by that is the timing information the telematics information where they were on the circuit there's some really interesting behaviour around second and third screening with Formula 1 fans cause they're often using digital products while watching yeah either live at the race or so they can see the timings or follow a specific driver and then there's the drivers and the teams and yeah they are actually quite specific behaviours despite what a lot of people think they're not connected to Formula 1 directly as an organisation but of course people have favourite um teams and drivers and so it was thinking about how do you make that simple enough to understand and it got more and more complicated because there was also the Netflix drive to survive a new generation of fans coming in and you know to begin with it was a very quite an old audience and how do you appeal and you were not gonna increase the audience by uh sticking with just what the core fans were back in I guess it was sort of 2015 or so um and then it was you know think about well once you've done that how do you keep iterating and you know Formula 1 has some incredibly smart products and technology people but they were partnering with an agency because they wanted to be able to move quickly they wanted to be able to get some of the the skills and the perspective um from elsewhere um but you know there are so many fun things within that there's some amazing technology having to scale up at race weekends um using the cloud yep to kind of scale the particularly things like the live timing data um but also think about how can you make the content publishing as fast as possible and there's under Formula 1 there's a composable architecture that uh at the time was quite a big leap to take now it's like standard practice no one would bat an eyelid at it um but also thinking about how you would have the difference between what was on the web what was on the app the different experiences I spoke earlier about kind of what you showed before the race during the race and after the race of course during the race you really wanted to bring to prominence the fact there was a race going on um and so having kind of a race tracker that showed that in real time with the data being streamed was really important but also thinking about the different tiers of the product you know for more casual fans and for the more dedicated fans and the die hard hard fans it was really quite a complicated thing uh to think through but it needed to be simplified down in order to make it something that was deliverable and then since then there's been a lot of the things I was talking about earlier you know born out of the experience of building those products nice and you talked a bit about some of the technology and like it being groundbreaking at the time now pretty standard practice like as a technology leader how do you decipher things that are effectively gonna be fads like we talk about bubble of AI whether it's a bubble or not who knows I think it's here to stay from my opinion but um how do you go through and work out when things are perhaps in a bit of a hype bubble uh as opposed to being genuinely useful in what we're doing in our everyday lives and and work I mean it's a great question and I think emerging technology and actually technology choices really should follow the same framework but it's just about how you make that decision what kind of thing you are making that decision against and when I say that is you need to look at things like speed and quality and customer experience and unit economics and decision when you're making a choice about your technology whether that's the architecture or the strategy itself I think with emerging technology and AI I don't really think it's in that category anymore it's emerged elements of it are but you can you know it's the s curves you know we've had mobile we had social the metaverse is an interesting one cause I think that's a thing that probably didn't deliver on the hype that was around and AI I think is both gonna be smaller and bigger I mean it's a classic thing people always overestimate the short term impact and underestimate the long term impact but uh I think it's it actually goes back to you need to look at don't use technology for technology's sake what problem are you trying to solve and that can come back to a customer problem or it can come back to a business problem for something like uh Formula 1 a headless composable architecture made sense because there were always going to be multiple channels in which that content needed to get out into the world and the content needed to be published as fast as possible so decoupling you know having the multi tier architecture was an no brainer and uh the the risky thing there was choosing the one that was going to be right in terms of the supplier and vendor uh and Formula 1 are publicly on the record is using uh contentful so it's okay yep mention that there's a whole bunch of other technology choices uh there but they were all based around the what's often those decisions have to have a kind of a decade long kind of timeline because that's most tech architectures do need to think in at least 10 year cycles um because of the investment involved and platforms are very different to campaigns uh in that respect but then when you apply that to kind of emerging technology it's I think having a culture of experimentation yeah is important uh for things that are on the edge and then the hard thing is when you move it from what's effectively a lab or experimentation into kind of mainstream and it's also important that culture of experimentation should run through everything so yes it's most often talked about with innovation and emerging technology but having a culture of experimentation is at the heart of how you deliver product well and you know startups talk about fail fast it's all actually the same thing yes validate something as quickly and as early as possible um and it's what you know product people will talk about is continuous discovery there are different words for it but all of it comes down to the same thing is try and validate as early as possible whether it's going to have value and I think the bit that people sometimes get caught on is what is value and sometimes with emerging tech there's actually value in just experimenting to find out whether it's going to be relevant or not and frankly a failed experiment or it's not gonna be work is just as valuable as something that works really well sometimes it's actually about I want to position my brand as being on the leading edge of technology and most of the metaverse uh activations I was involved in actually had that there was a realization there wasn't going to be a commercial outcome but the biggest decisions and the biggest investments still need to come back to is there gonna be a real benefit for the customer that is gonna drive a business outcome mm hmm um or is it gonna drive kind of customer loyalty or something like that and as I said there's lots of ways of measuring value but I mean most of the time it does come back down to the bottom line yep I I think it's important sometimes to have innovation for the sake of art and for the sake of learning because otherwise organizations become very stagnant and become a bit backward looking and there is actually an expectation for a lot of people to be on the edge and Formula One's a great example because people expect it to be innovative and forward looking because that is part of the brand and I think that's the um that sometimes when I was talking about the trade off between technology product and then kind of creative and campaign all of those things come together which is why it can be a very hard job cause when you're talking to stakeholders there's a degree of pragmatism but there's also a degree of OK that decision has to be grounded in some rational thoughts yeah ideally some evidence based data and so when I when you ask me a question about you know how do you decide what to back it is so dependent on the circumstances but if someone can't articulate to you why in two minutes they've made a decision that's probably the sign it hasn't been thought about carefully and you talked about the meta metaverse I'm gonna put you on the spot do you think it's dead I think the metaverse has just changed into uh other things and so I think metaverse got conflated with gaming and gaming is absolutely massive culturally you only need to look at Roblox I think VR that also got rolled into that hasn't been as big as maybe uh everyone thought it would be um but I would say if I was you you put me on the spot I think we are still going to see another paradigm shift in computing and I do think things around smart glasses and things like that are really interesting but I don't think it's going to be as a rapid as the adoption hmm um I'll say mobile was it's taking a while but if you look at AI first devices they are probably gonna be wearables and some kind of glasses some kind of overlay of combining the physical and digital world will come together but I think that's very different from some of the original metaverse vision which was kind of this idea of virtual worlds hmm I think it will be much more around kind of the XR rather than the VR the real world mixing with the virtual world because yeah I think most people actually whilst there's a big following still for people who who like the virtual world most people don't want to go to a virtual world as well as living in the real world it's not mainstream in the way that kind of people using mobile apps are and don't get me wrong there's lots of there's lots of money there's you know of meta have sold tens of millions of the Oculus devices yep and are still pushing on it but has it created the return that was expected no but yep uh I I tend to be a bit of an optimist about technology and as I said I think looking at the the next cycle I think AI first devices are going to bring in some of those elements of the metaverse and combining the physical and digital world you know just being able to look at things and query the world around you have things overlaid I mean maybe I say that because I wear glasses yeah so it's easy um but get away with it I I also don't think we are at the peak with just the slab of glass that's in everyone's pockets yeah there's there's more still to come a lot more multimodal devices we're bringing out there's not Johnny Ivy's looking at creating this thing in your pocket the top pocket or pin that goes on you for recording everything you say again I'm not sure how I feel about it yet because there's always a I don't want everything recorded but there's always a societal acceptance factor on yeah all of these things uh but I think the most surprising thing would be if the world doesn't change yeah that is the least likely scenario and we're probably overdue something because you know mobile does you know date back a decade mm hmm and yes the iPhone and the Android devices have got more and more sophisticated but they are starting to control more and more things around them um and whether that's things like the smart home whether that's smart offices smart roads there's a lot more I think still to come there and it's interesting I personally feel that one of the things about AI is it is going to increase the tendency for software to eat the world because it makes it easier for you to create software for quite niche use cases and you talk about not wanting to have things recorded all all the time I think the idea of always on it will just be another bit of acceptance in the same way that people would have probably been aghast about the thought of a telephone being with people all the time and people being contactable all the time um but there are you know societal shift like that are really difficult as technologists to kind of read and that's one of my jobs has been to look at what's coming and I said people underestimate it in the long term overestimated in the short term so I don't think this will be immediate but the AI is disruptive because it is changing the velocity of which it's possible to deliver things and change and you know you could get into a whole conversation yeah AI and stuff like that which probably not the purpose of this but thinking about that you know if you if you round back 15 years and ask people to predict what the smartphone would do in a kind of 5 10 year period we are at that point where we are going to have the same with AI first devices but I think the difference is it will happen in a couple of years not over a decade yeah good and I think that should these things should happen so slowly in in the sense of uh we've all saw how AI has failed in in organizations whereby people have been told you need to implement AI and people just implement it and it comes back to that they're not doing it for the user looking at the human need rather than the technology you're absolutely right and the biggest thing you learn about digital transformation and product is that organizations are slow they are like oil tankers and there's a nurse often for very good reason and I think that also comes back to things like inclusion and belonging not everybody wants to adopt those things there are still uh portions of the population who don't use banking apps which will probably horrify everyone listening to this podcast but you know it's at about 90 95% so you know you have to be careful that people don't become unbanked it's going to be the same with AI not everyone adopts it and people who use chat GPT and yes it's had the fastest ramp up to 800 million users pretty much ever and that's what worries me is not that um technology will become bad it's just actually approaching the point where it's happening faster than humans ability to adapt and be yeah flexible solve it because actually most people now perfectly comfortable using a smartphone but it is going to be it's going to be disruptive or it already is disruptive I mean you just need to look at the data I was preparing for this podcast and I'll be honest rather than listen to the past 20 episodes I stuck them into a notebook LM and asked it to summarize what were the kind of topics what were the kind of conversations that happened that took me 15 minutes versus having to listen to 10 hours of audio that kind of behavior is gonna become more and more apparent and it will become something that just happens with an assistant in your ear or overlaid in the real world and so let's say I'm a techno utopian so I actually look forward to that but you look excited I do worry about the I do worry about the effects on you know designing for everyone on inclusion and all those kind of things um it's drifted slightly off your question no that's good though and and coming back to like the human side of thing you talked about inclusion designing for inclusion as I mentioned you've been an advocate for diversity inclusion and building teams um I don't want to say it's a tick box exercise for for certainly not for most companies but some companies it probably is a tick box exercise I think that's fair to say um and it's not as easy as just going well yeah I mean most people want to have a diverse and inclusive workforce I think that's probably a fair statement to say but it's not as easy to do it as to say it it's one of those things easier said than done so how do you go about intentionally building out a diverse workforce and team without ultimately making sacrifices so that you are excluding people to be purposefully inclusive does that make sense it does make sense and the work for that never stops yeah uh it has to be a deliberate and conscious decision and you have to advocate for it and you have to be the change that you want to see in the world and I've had colleagues who kind of opened my eyes and made me realize that and I am kind of a walking example of privilege in that sense you know white male southeast of the UK went to university etcetera and I think until you realize that other people have very different experiences you don't really realize the power of having those perspectives inside a team but for me it's actually driven by fundamentally try and make the world a fairer place and you can do that by the actions and the decisions you make now of course there are things you can do as a leader and there are things no well accepted best practice like you know blind CVS and trying to remove bias from the recruitment process but I think it's that's not really enough you actually have to make a deliberate effort to go I'm gonna make things different I'm gonna try and build a more diverse team'cause there is no question in my mind more diverse teams create better experiences and better products because they're more representative of the people that are going to be using them and they also bring new ideas and fresh thinking and I think you also create teams that are happier and more inclusive and a lot of those are really difficult to measure and you do probably have to push against them because sometimes the easy thing is just go we'll keep on doing what we did before so I'm talking very much about people and teams there but there is a another side of it you know sometimes it gets talked about as being you know tech for good but again it just comes back to it's about real outcomes and you sort of said it and yes it's absolutely sometimes a check box exercise and it's quite distressing to see that happen although equally you can use that to uh inject or achieve the outcomes that you're actually trying to get to mm hmm uh and more recently with accessibility the kind of things like the EEA and government regulation have actually put it up the agenda because there's like big fines it's basically the equivalent of GDR particularly last summer when the kind of EEA came into force but it's also that's actually a good thing to do because if you design for everyone you make it better for everyone I think too often accessibility is seen as you know it's for the you know 1/3 of people that have a disability no if you make a product better you make it better for everyone um because generally those things are around you know latency and performance around comprehension understandability you know the poor principles that all the accessibility will also talk about but it's also about reducing customer harm removing dark patterns removing frustration and I will say it's absolutely possible to you know build products in an evil way yeah get people hooked and addicted and you have to make some you know that's the trade offs I was talking about earlier you do have to think about those quite carefully but then it is also things like sustainability or reduce bias in decision making and like the first of those is much more around infrastructure from a technology point of view you know what is your underlying cloud infrastructure what's your page weight you know and there can be a trade off about how many videos you put in and things like that uh AI is gonna be really important there because what model you choose will dictate how much computers use and what the energy is underneath that but even that is a complicated topic because with renewable energy and even the new tech around kind of mini nuclear reactors like is that gonna be such a big deal um but I also think it's then around kind of transparency and user controls and this is something we're seeing coming a lot more you know privacy by design is something that's really important to give control back to users yep and again with AI sort of being transparent about what's AI what's human the handovers between that um and all those topics I've just talked about are things that you can do whether that's accessibility sustainability privacy and it is sort of driven by at the moment I would say mostly by regulation and compliance but I think there will be an advantage to those that actually go for good for the trade off because I think people are becoming more and more aware of those and so in the role of CTO you are trying to make those ethics actionable by putting in place guardrails by putting in review processes by having the North Star audibility audibility I should say yep and that becomes I think vitally important but my experience is you only get that if you have the diverse inclusive teams in place because you will find that humans are quite different yeah and some people care deeply and passionately about these there are people I've worked with um who are brilliant at understanding and articulating the benefits of accessibility uh and you know with Formula 1 we've actually made that one of the most accessible uh websites and one of the most high performing it does really well in the uh in the Google scoring around that and that's because accessibility was baked in from the very beginning and it was designed for very deliberately a very conscious decision and I don't think that would have happened if we hadn't had the right people uh in the team and so for me it comes full circle back to as a technology leader you have a fundamental responsibility and like technology has problems with diversity there is the mix between uh men and women um things like the gender pay gap or ways of measuring that that you have to look at but then it was also about social mobility it's about neurodiversity all those elements and often crossing over um as well all of those elements are really important to think about and I don't think it happens unless you lead by example as a leader and that is in your hiring decisions in the way you treat people in the way you advocate for people and you know culture gets talked about all the time but it becomes really evident if you have it and you can see it in the teams and you can see it in the products if you know what to look for and that's why I'm actually very passionate about it and it's very easy for that to become just a checkbox or a thing that you do for performance reasons um I would say the companies I admire most are the ones that just do it because it's the right thing to do and then don't do a press release about it yeah don't shout about it and you will you will see they get clusters of talent and that has always you know been the driver for me um can you make it a bit fairer yeah because actually it's good business have you ever seen it go wrong um I think like everything it can go wrong because you don't get the decision right and you are limited by your own framing and experience and I've been fortunate to be taught by um my colleagues now I was part of the uh business resource group Viva Women um and it was made me realize that don't talk about it do it yeah and I think there's often a lot of talk about it and a lot and not enough of doing it and you cannot substitute for real experience and I I guess the the the best example of this is you can build a product but if you don't include the people that you're building it for you will not get it right yeah and that can be in things like health it can be in charities make sure you are engaging with and whether that's you know it can be like user research but ideally you know the best products are actually you bring the users into the building process into discovery and the best intentions of people who don't have that lived experience and whether that's a health condition they suffer from or you know they don't own a cat or a dog yep and I try to understand what that means and so I think you have to be really careful to intent and good intentions is not the same as good outcomes and so yes I've seen it go wrong plenty of times and it's not it's very often not deliberate um humans are messy yeah and it's really hard to get it right so that self awareness to always be looking at it and always be an active listener on those things and your team will often know and so listening to sometimes the smaller voice is it's a really important part of being a leader and the role of leaders in technology it's it's changed as we've we've gone through time and it's continues to change it makes our job as recruiters for my business very difficult but that's alright that's why we still exist because if it wasn't difficult we wouldn't be needed so I'm happy with that but even like seeing job titles change if CPO wasn't a thing maybe like six six seven years ago I didn't really see that many people in that role I'm sure there were people who were doing that role product you know 10 years ago product management wasn't such a thing UX design wasn't such a thing 15 years ago but people were doing it just not called that so where's the role of technology leadership going and what what's changing I mean I think the role titles always lag behind what's happening yup um probably by no five years or so I think the biggest things I mean so maybe just talk about CPTOs just for a moment cause I think it's illustrative of what's happening previously it was about being a tech leader or a product leader but to get to what I think is the right thing outcomes you had to own them together and you could do that by having a team of people but the role of CTO came about really because it was like the gold standard for getting uh to those things and it sort of removes some of the risk of messy people interacting with each other I think it's actually quite hard to do really well of course I'm going to say that yes as one of them um but I think it does require a certain mindset and the reason I talk about mindset is cause I think that's the thing that shifting in tech leaders they were seen very much as kind of delivery work horses but actually as tech has become more and more broad and more and more embedded actually you have to become almost a controller of an operator of social technical systems and it comes back to what I was talking about with people earlier um and so it's not just being responsible for owning the technology you have to be responsible for owning the outcomes and what that technology causes both the good and the bad harm that we were talking about earlier and you have to be able to navigate that in a way that I think is probably much more people centric than the early CTOs and I think AI is actually accelerating that shift because it's actually removing execution and building as the big bottleneck that is not gonna happen overnight and for all the CEOs listening I I'm not one of those people who believes all the jobs are gonna disappear I actually think it's gonna result in more work in technology um because as I said earlier it will mean that it makes more realistic to build software for quite small use cases but what it does mean is that you are going to be able to kind of test and prototype things way more easily than you used to so it's gonna become even more important to get those requirements right to get that validation of early discovery because the risk equation is gonna get bigger and bigger and so technology leaders are going to have to become much more fluent in handling risk in handling legal and compliance and it's not necessarily doing it themselves but it's how do you integrate it in and just as product bought in kinda customer centrism or UX and everything all things you could talk about I mean if we've been having this conversation five years ago would have been talking about kinda design thinking product thinking user centric design that that debate is over like that's already happening yeah but what you're going to have to equip yourself with next just as you know maybe 10 years ago it was data it's going to be how can you make those decisions about trade offs on automation on uh AI and what are the kind of new skill profiles that are gonna be needed for that what are gonna be the new governance and so I think there'll be a greater emphasis on things like platform strategy measurement and experimentation security and resilience a little bit of organization design in a way that is broader than we have it uh right now and we'll touch on more parts of the organization um so I mean you could summarize that you're the tech leaders of tomorrow need to become multipliers creating better teams making better decisions and building better systems not the kind of heroic we will deliver this when we say we will uh and so it is more hybrid leadership I think is the way I'll describe it so you will own both the strategy and the excellence of uh delivery and that's that's a big ask and I'm I I think there's still a lot of questions about what that looks like and you know how that will happen um and for me things like AI are just bringing that decision in in faster because good example is what does a team shape look like in five years time or even next year frankly and it used to be pyramidal now it's actually what is some of that pyramid made up of AI agents or yeah things like that I actually my view on AI is actually there's two things you have to worry about one of which is the kind of automation and removing humans as much as possible because it makes things infinitely scalable and repeatable processes and businesses that can be built like that you will get a unicorn built with one or two people but that isn't gonna replace everything no it's much more the Centaur effect which is half AI half human um and that's what the jagged frontier of AI is which is the redesign of workflow processes and those will look different but what's so exciting about that is it's a bit like the way mobile opened up all kinds of new use cases and new possibilities exactly the same thing is gonna happen with AI but to be prepared for that I think and of course I'm a little biased in saying this I think having more product thinking and having more people who think about product which is people and business outcomes as well as the elegance of the technology to do it is going to be really important I think you say product can be at the forefront of all of this in my opinion I'm equally biased haha if not a little more so um but I genuinely think it's an opportunity for for people in the product world to to get more involved with the understanding of the technology and how it all works to to really facilitate yes I and I think that's it's almost having orchestration skills hmm and I think you have to be really careful for product people not to gatekeep product yup everyone is able to contribute uh to product and actually is go back to it's a mindset about being you know opening up your mind to a slightly wider set of things and you know the best product people I've worked with are skilled across multiple areas but they're deep experts in one area but what they have in common is the ability to bring teams together to act as the glue and it's often quite invisible work and it can be quite thankless and working with stakeholders who don't get it is can be very tiring hmm um but when you get it right it results in kind of the best feeling because not not only are you creating you know and there is there's something nice about creating something getting it out in the world you can also see the impact it has on the team around you on people and then the then the people that you're building for and you know yes it has a has a value and a business outcome that's revenue or financial as well um and so what drives that is as I said the orchestration of the future yep you talked there about working with stakeholders that don't get it I think that most people if they've been in the tech world product world in any way shape or form over the last six months that probably have worked with the stakeholder that doesn't get it um how do you how do you have the mindset to to try and convince the stakeholder without uh basically going in with both feet first to to show them um is it just by looking at the metrics and showing them the deliverables of things that are happening or and what if you don't have those metrics in place how can you convince a stakeholder that this is the right path to take I think every stakeholder is different and so you need to uh without being too brutal about it play the person that's in front of you um I think it's easier to talk about the things that are done badly whereas gonna tech can be this black box to a lot of stakeholders so don't explain the technology explain how it's gonna make their life easier explain what outcome it's going to get to and yes that is all the outcomes I'm talking about but it's also how is this going to make your life better or how is this going to be effective for the teams that you're talking to and so if you're talking to a finance stakeholder that will often be driven by things like operational cost savings and the impact it can have on revenue if you're talking to a marketing team it's you'll be able to run these campaigns more effectively or you'll be freed up to not do some of the kind of standard work of you know campaigns and automation becomes really important there then when you're talking to uh CEOs I do think you tend to have to take a longer term vision and talk about it in terms of nor star you then need to be prepared to explain the technology in an accessible uh way so that people don't feel like they're being railroaded into a decision um but often it's about empathy and communication and putting yourself in that person's shoes and going like no generally no one wants to stop decisions from happening they want to make the right decision um but they want to feel like they are a participant in that process and I think that's why product people are often very good at managing stakeholders yeah cause they have to do it both downwards and sideways and upwards and it can feel pretty thankless almost like a circle isn't it it it it is um and so when you when you get to that point it is often understanding the person and understanding what their incentives and motivations are um and also accepting that sometimes you won't manage it um because you can also be wrong yep um and I think it's really important to have a strong strong opinion weakly held um and being open to whatever you're hearing cause most of the time those stakeholders are experts in their own area and really understand I the business or the finance or the legal really deeply and I think if you approach it with a view to let's make this decision together and sometimes that does mean you have to trade off what you want or you have to be a big pragmatic about things um but also if you're doing product properly or stakeholder management properly that it's very rare to come across a decision that's gonna lock you in for 10 years yeah um in fact if you're doing that you probably need to be thinking about how you're approaching uh things a little a little better um'cause actually most stakeholders are looking no more than a quarter or two quarters ahead yep um and actually the hardest thing is persuading them to make longer term investments and that's definitely been been my experience um that's why actually getting to the CEO is often the important thing yep because they're the ones that often have the vision for the company or where they want to go and it doesn't it's not necessarily CEO it's the person who is ultimately making decisions on a different horizon um and thinking about that when you're managing stakeholders is part of the empathy understanding what horizon their decisions are what's driving their decisions but also be bold don't be afraid to go I think it will have this impact cause what people are often looking for is to be as certain as possible and this is the uh this is the thing with product roadmaps it is not promising a delivery date it's promising that you will move towards a certain outcome and that's often the thing that will persuade people mm hmm you know don't promise absolute exact things promise that you are trying to move things and it is about you know being able to deliver on change yeah and that that's the main thing right is being able to as you say deliver on something that's an outcome try and people talk about moving moving the needle right yes changing that needle and that requires ambition and that requires you know innovation because the world is not standing still and so it's very easy to become stuck in frameworks or to become stuck in this is the right decision actually take it back to what are you trying to achieve and who are you trying to achieve it for and you know communication keeping things simple is so important in that uh stakeholder management cause most people take decisions in the first 90 seconds of you speaking to them yeah you've not got long um in terms of final question from me looking back uh throughout your career and if you were talking to someone who's perhaps coming up in the world of product or technology like what's the one bit of advice that you might give them so that they can get to where they want to over the course of the next three to five years uh it's so easy to just go experiment with the latest tools and technology uh but for me from a personal point of view it's I would say remember to be generous to people around you be kind because that compounds in a way that nothing else does I love that very simple but very effective Rafe it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you again so thank you so much for giving up your time uh some really interesting nuggets of wisdom shared so I'm really looking forward to getting this one out there great thanks very much