Being a Digital Leader - the Good, Bad AND Ugly of Digital Transformation
Join us as we dive deep into the world of digital transformation with real-life stories of breakthroughs and challenges from the front lines. In each episode, we'll sit down with industry experts, AND Digital consultants, and other influential figures in the technology space to hear about their personal experiences of leading digital transformation initiatives.
We'll explore what worked, what didn't, and the lessons learned along the way.
Being a Digital Leader - the Good, Bad AND Ugly of Digital Transformation
From Mountains to Modern Tech: Andy Lole from Travel Chapter
What if navigating the fast-paced world of technology and digital transformation could be as thrilling as a mountain climb? Join us for an engaging conversation with Andy Lole, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Travel Chapter, as he shares the fascinating twists and turns of his career journey.
Andy’s insights offer a roadmap through the complexities of project management and leadership in tech. He underscores the critical need for contingency planning and adaptability. His journey illustrates the art of aligning business visions with investment strategies, ensuring growth is both sustainable and strategically sound.
His leadership philosophies, influenced by experiences in diverse cultures, offer a unique perspective on talent retention and team scaling in the digital age. From the logistical challenges of remote teams to the cultural nuances of global business, Andy’s insights are invaluable for anyone looking to steer their organization through the modern landscape of digital transformation.
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I'm JP. I'm the club executive for Anne's Bristol office. That means that I oversee all of our client engagements in the southwest and the south wales region and also look after our talented people who form up our club. My Anne title is youth football coach, which is pretty self-explanatory as Anne titles go, but it means that I spend my Saturday mornings running around and coaching a lot of nine-year-olds on how to play football.
Speaker 1:Digital transformation is a buzzword we hear often, but for those who haven't experienced it firsthand, the journey can seem daunting and overwhelming. In this podcast, we talk to people who have successfully navigated the complexities of transformation. We'll explore their strategies, the challenges they faced and the emotions they encountered along the way, providing you with valuable insights and inspiration for your own digital journey. Welcome to our podcast being a Digital Leader the good, bad and ugly of digital transformation. On today's podcast, we welcome Andy Lowell, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Travel Chapter. Andy joins us to share his journey in the world of technology, from consulting graduate scheme to founding a startup, to the very role that he finds himself in today. Welcome to the podcast, Andy, and before we jump in, would you like to please introduce yourself and tell us about your role.
Speaker 2:Hi, jp, thanks for having me. So I'm Andy Lowell and run the product, tech and data aspects of Travel Chapter. So Travel Chapter might not be a name many people have heard of, but you've probably heard of some of our brands. We run about 50-odd white labels and primary brands in the holiday rental space across the UK and Ireland. So holidaycottagescouk is our biggest brand, k9 Cottages and many other regional brands as well.
Speaker 1:Good. So you've had quite an interesting career. Not all of it's been in technology. Are you able to give us a quick overview about how you arrived in your chosen profession today and share as much as you feel comfortable with?
Speaker 2:For sure. So by degree I'm an electrical and electronic engineer. All I knew at the end of university was I didn't want to work in a power station. I didn't really like making chips, but I did like problem solving, particularly with technology. So I went into a grad scheme with a company back then was called Sema Group, these days as part of Atos, and ended up doing a lot of technical projects, particularly public sector IT stuff. Four years of that learned a lot, mostly that I wasn't super comfortable doing public sector stuff at the time. It was slow and as a as a taxpayer, it felt pretty wasteful for poor outcomes. So then left technology completely consulting and technology behind me went off around the world for a couple of years doing a lot of climbing, mountaineering, ended up working in Antarctica for a bit, which was pretty special, and then a couple of years of that got that sort of itch out of my system. The mountains are always my sort of happy place, but I had definitely been thinking maybe I could become a mountain guide and pursue that route. Um, a bit of time actually working in the mountains with people I didn't know and, to be blunt, didn't care about so much, felt that it probably wasn't right for me or particularly for them, given they were paying that. That was something I did, and I should keep the mountains for me, not for, not for uh, not try and make a career out of it.
Speaker 2:Came back to the uk, bumped into an old colleague who had a bright idea for a, for a real estate marketplace. This was back in 2006, when the internet was still a bit of a playground. Google maps had just been invented. Right move wasn't using google maps yet, and so one thing led to another and started a real estate marketplace. The following week, um got back into into coding. At that point would definitely not call myself a, a um a proper computer scientist. You know the, the in-depth side of how things work. I get it at a high level, but the what I like doing is just making stuff work and making things that customers want and that I have to do as little as possible to support. So the the quality aspects of it really matter, but I learned that more through laziness than than anything else.
Speaker 2:Scaling up something in real estate was an interesting place to be, but then, by 2008, 2009, we still hadn't found any funding. The global financial crisis hit. There weren't any properties to sell. There were barely any properties to rent and we ended up pivoting to using our map interface as an affiliate to what at the time was called Cottages4U. So a bit of a foretelling of where I'm at these days, which was quite interesting.
Speaker 2:But on the back of that, came out of a failed startup owing more to Visa and Mastercard than I really wanted to and needed a job in a hurry. Got a job with a company called lateroomscom, which was a bit of a manchester success story at the time. Um learned an awful lot there that they'd they'd made it from we might have made it from sort of zero to one. They'd made it from one to ten and the business was really flying learned an awful lot. Got back into um proper development. That was. That was the. The thing I was doing. Um. One thing led to another and my my then boss was looking for more team leads and encouraged me to apply. Despite me resisting quite hard, it's like he wanted me to do it. So I gave it a go, led our Agile pilot back in 2008, 2009 time and continued through that route and realised that actually what I was most enjoying about this was trying to make teams work, trying to make platforms work, operating those. The platform operations side of things, architecture um what these days is called product management, but back then was technical project management. Um late rooms was acquired by tui.
Speaker 2:More opportunities in in a bigger travel business, moved to germany for a while doing um car rental. Back to the uk because my wife's business was going great guns by that point so I wanted to come and support her for a bit. So joined a company called spareroomcom who were the uk's leading um house sharing platform. Very, very similar model to holiday rental, but for people to live a place to live, not a place to stay. Um massively enjoyed that and and helped take that across to the us. Um next opportunity came along and so moved to denmark for a while working with ebay in the nordics doing the classifieds businesses there. So experienced another culture, another team um a very different organization. That global mindset all around digital business and removing any blockers to succeeding, which led to Brexit, made that a bit of a challenge. So found myself back in the UK again done a bit of cybersecurity work and most recently joined Travel Chapter to help bring together a number of disparate tech platforms and businesses into one uk market leading platform. Now fascinating.
Speaker 1:So you've traveled and been all over the world. Lots of incredible experiences, I guess. Did any of them stand out as a particular what we call sliding doors moment, where you could have seen your career going one way? Um, you know, was it, uh, an event that was out of your control, or perhaps a mentor you spoke to, or anything particular where you were posed with a decision about which way to go? Does anything stand out particular?
Speaker 2:I think a couple of things spring to mind. One was definitely I. I definitely saw myself working in the mountains and realizing that that wasn't the case and actually losing probably the only goal I'd had. Um, coinciding with this, this would have been probably 10 days later, literally being in a pub and bumping into someone I hadn't seen for three, three or four years.
Speaker 2:Um, with a bright idea and thinking, well, that that one's not going to work. So this is not a life and death decision. What have I got to lose by trying and, I think, having that confidence to say it's only money, it's only debt. Yes, it did take quite a long time to pay it off, but debt was cheap back in the noughties, so it was all right. And that mindset, mindset, I think. Then, taking that into a more, maybe a more formal career and being up for listening to if someone I I definitely did not want to become a team lead, I'd I'd just had three years of hard slog. There it was. It was difficult starting to build a team and then letting that team go again. Um, so the thought of team leading, but having someone who could see that maybe I should do it and just pushing and pushing quite hard in the end.
Speaker 2:Um, I'm not sure if grateful is the right word, but I definitely wouldn't be here now if you hadn't pushed me. Thanks, mike good.
Speaker 1:Do you want to ask you a little bit about your mountain guide work? I know this is about digital transformation, but there must be some, some learnings you've taken away from your experience. There was anything from that completely different career path you had or we're working in that you still can find that applies today, maybe helps with decision making, people management, I don't know. But what, um, yeah, what have you? What have you brought from that?
Speaker 2:so I I was lucky enough to work for the british antarctic survey for a while and a lot of what was doing my yes, my skill set that got me the job was being um a good mountaineer and being able to get people around in dangerous situations. But fundamentally that job was about logistics. It was about making sure the scientists who were there with a very short window to get a lot of research done actually looked after themselves, because if you've got 24-hour daylight, people will try and work for all 24 hours of it and they need to. They need encouragement to look after themselves, kind of thing. So it's there's a lot there around the project management aspects of it of okay, what do we do if the weather turns bad? What do we do if the plane can't come back and get us?
Speaker 2:What's our plan b? What's our plan c? Focusing on trying to make plan a work but having other options and being ready to discuss those and particularly discuss them quite quickly when, if you've got the monitoring and the, the governance, should we say right, it feels like the weather's beginning to turn? We should have a chat now about what we do. You know that the parallels there with this spike that we're trying to do around a particular technology or a particular solution isn't working. What's plan b? There are definitely parallels there and I think the positive of digital marketplaces is very rarely a life and death decision. It's just lower stress for sure yeah, that's always good, good.
Speaker 1:Um, the other thing you you spoke about a lot in your intro is well, I think you think you've played down your technical background, which I think is a matter of perspective. From where I'm sitting, you sound very technical to me with your electrical engineering and developer experience. So it's not always the case that people in C-suite positions these days have a comprehensive technical background. So I just wondered, in your experience, like, how, how have you benefited from, from that?
Speaker 2:I, I think, being able to understand the concepts and being able to have a conversation with an engineer about how they're approaching the problem I can't necessarily sit down and pair with them anymore, sadly, but um, the the concepts make sense and being able to talk to an engineer in that way, I think, is useful in that they feel trusted and believed in.
Speaker 2:The flip side of that is, I think most c-suite conversations are actually about trust and understanding the risks involved. So actually being able to to shed some real light on it of the size and complexity of what we're doing and where the risks really are, um, trying to avoid saying words like just um it's, it's never just a small task you know that these, these kind of things and actually trying to be able to represent both sides of the conversation talk to people the commercial folk about why the technical stuff matters, and particularly to talk to the technical folk about why the commercial bit matters and why we might not be calling it a deadline, but if we can do it by this point, it's worth far more to us as a business than doing it two, three, four months later. And I'm actually trying to bring some value and outcome conversations to both sides of the table good.
Speaker 1:You also said in your intro you talked about running a startup in real estate, so that must have taught you a lot. You must have been doing kind of every job that was available to you. Do you have any top lessons from working in a startup that you can apply to, I guess, scale up or where you are kind of enterprise level positions?
Speaker 2:there's a, I think a couple of things. I was the sort of the, the technical guy, the tech, co-founder, um, and whilst we achieved a lot in the time we were doing it as a, as a pair, and then as three, three, four, five of us um, I don't think I might not have got the connections that come with doing an mba, but I don't think I would have learned more about both the business and the operational side of of doing things if I'd done an mba um from a from a pure product perspective, it was was definitely the biggest thing that sticks with me is definitely ship early and ship often get stuff out there. You can spend a lot of time building something, but particularly when you haven't got many customers, the sooner you can validate your idea the better. And this was I definitely hadn't learned the whole get out the room model and go and prototype and test stuff.
Speaker 2:So we were building things and the smallest thing you could build and get it live and I was saying earlier on, you know, if you build it fairly well, you don't have to maintain that. That's just one less thing to have to do later on, because half finishing a bunch of stuff and then nursing all of those, that was a massive time sink and I think that's one of the things that is remains really relevant today of actually be very clear.
Speaker 2:Are you hacking something to learn with the, with the intent that if it works, you're going to rebuild it, or are you doing it right? And if you're doing it right, then get the tests around it and get the quality around it, and get the quality around it and get the documentation around it so that actually, hopefully, you don't have to revisit it too much. Yeah, because product delivery is all about product delivery.
Speaker 1:It's not about product maintenance where's the where's the trade-off, then? Like getting something out early but also making sure that it's of a suitable quality, like how do you, how do you navigate that?
Speaker 2:um, I think that can very much depend on the size and place you're at. What? Where's your business position? How are they positioned? How much does the quality of the experience matter? A lot less early on. If you've got early adop, they'll accept quite a lot of jankiness from you as you start to have a more mature brand, maybe having a portfolio of brands you can experiment with, but knowing how to drive traffic to it. I think it also comes back to that risk point of how much are you betting the farm on this change? If it's something to do with user data or the booking journey, that probably matters quite a lot and people need to trust it. If it's something to do with trying to drive more people into the top of the funnel or the middle of the funnel, you can probably go quite dirty in how you experiment there Good advice?
Speaker 1:And what about the challenges you faced while you were co-founding your real estate startup? What were those and how did you overcome them?
Speaker 2:Funding, funding and funding. Probably we were based up in the northwest of England and I think getting funding outside London is still probably quite hard today. It's definitely easier than it was, but it was nigh on impossible back then. And then, with the economic market changing how it went, we did have the advantage of credit cards with ridiculous credit limits on and interest-free levels were available, but I wouldn't recommend that particular route. But I think I would definitely say in today's market there needs to be a route to profitability. It's not just about build it and try and grab market share. It's definitely there needs to be a route to profitability there.
Speaker 2:So, spending some time thinking what is the plan, what's the vision, how is this going to lead to revenue and therefore, how is an investor actually going to open their wallet and put some money into us? I think that's quite important. Um, I think the other thing as well is, as I was saying earlier on, what's the smallest iteration you can get away with? Um, whether that be sales approach, it's not not just technically, but how quickly can I learn that experimental approach applies just as much around process development or sales development as it does around technical development.
Speaker 2:So just ask lots of questions and try and learn quickly good.
Speaker 1:Are you able to share a little bit about the funding process? Like, um, how would somebody listen to this? Go about, you know, looking for funding? Is it a case of knocking on doors, phoning up vcs? Is it launch events? Is it friends and family like where? How did how did you approach it?
Speaker 2:um, I think it. It's matured a lot since my day, thankfully, but I think in today's market, very much around friends and family bit still matters. Um, there are angel groups, um out there who will always be doing investment events where you can go and pitch um and talk about it. And angel investors are, I think, incredibly important. They are um folk who've prepared to I'd call it spread betting. Basically, they're prepared to risk a few 5, 10, 15k checks on a bunch of small businesses that may or may not work. They will definitely be expecting growth. They'll be expecting return on your money.
Speaker 2:So, I think, be very honest with yourself about is your business. Does it have the growth? Does it have the legs to actually turn into something of that nature? You will find angels who are, who are there for the for the long haul, for sure, but if you're thinking venture capital or private equity kind of model, they will be looking for multiples of return. So, how big? How big is your addressable market? How big can you make your business and you don't have to be up for it? Someone else can come and do that at some point in the future if you've got it that first step. But don't expect people to give you money for free and definitely be aware of what the returns they're looking for are. Because if you've got misaligned outcomes around, you're trying to build something nice and and that will have organic growth and they're looking for something that's going to quadruple every quarter. You know that very quickly you're going to fall out and if they own a chunk of your business, it's very difficult to unpick that good, yeah, I think good.
Speaker 1:Good advice on being really clear about the vision and the plan for for where you see the business going. I happened to read a couple of days ago that if you invested ten thousand pounds or maybe it's dollars in the tesla ipo, uh, today you'd be worth a million pounds. So, uh, that's uh, you know betting on a betting on a deal thing, but you know betting on a bet on a thing, but obviously you know hindsight is great in these situations. Yeah, good, ok, so this podcast is all about the good, bad and the ugly of digital transformation. Could you share a key moment of success in leading a transformation, a time when you had to re-engineer or rethink something and an occasion when you had to completely abandon an idea?
Speaker 2:it's a key moment of success. I think we are, um, we're in a pretty good place with with travel chapter at the moment and seeing actually the the momentum of the business swing behind, actually doubling down on bringing all of our tech stacks together into one place and actually seeing that be something that comes from the chief exec all the way down through the business, getting that buy-in, that this isn't just a technical product problem, this is the problem for the business. The example I've tried to use to explain that internally, which I think really landed, was that think of it as a squaring or cubing problem. The more systems you have if you've only got one system and you want to make a change to it one times one is one.
Speaker 2:If you've got two systems and you need to make the same change to both of them two times two is four.
Speaker 2:You know it's it's not quite that straightforward, but making making three reservation systems continue to work across 50 odd brands, that's that's a big, a big amount of change.
Speaker 2:So if we can cut it down to one system, yes, we've still got to make those 50 brands work, but there are ways that you can share complexity around that and I think having that land as something that the non-technical c-suite people are talking about and championing that in the business, that that changed the momentum, I think, for for us, which is great, and getting that, getting that buy-in yes, we still need to deliver, for sure, but actually when you start seeing some of the pieces fit into place and it becomes the thing I've said of look, it will be easier to change this when it's just one thing and actually we get use cases of that, and then we get the monitoring and the alerting around it and the system starts telling us it's got a problem and then you get the automated test suite filling in the gaps so that even the build process it's telling you, um, it's working or it's not working, you know, and that could just calling back to that laziness piece yeah don't.
Speaker 2:Don't do all the work yourself. Get the system to tell you yeah that's.
Speaker 1:That's gone well for us, I think and then, of course, I guess, once you have all your your data in one place, the insights you'll be able to drive across. That will be a lot more straightforward and a lot more useful as well than you know exactly that.
Speaker 2:You know, it's one set of data and if we need to optimize it, if we're missing a bit, we fill in one gap rather than filling in three, etc.
Speaker 1:And I think that that starts to become simpler good, and good to hear that you've got that exact buy-in from your team, so congrats. The second one was a. Could you share a time when you had to re-engineer or rethink something? Maybe? You've maybe been challenged and you've even re-changed your own idea.
Speaker 2:So, yes, less so in today's world where you can build cloud-native applications, but it definitely used to be the case where, particularly where infrastructure was expensive, you would build for a certain scale and maybe not explicitly but implicitly accept you were going to have to re-engineer to get beyond that scale. And back in the day that almost certainly meant a caching layer of some sort and then caching on top of caching, etc. So that point when you think, right, actually this isn't sustainable and we have to rebuild. Quite often, search engines, in particular, digital marketplaces, search is almost always one of the key things. And making that scale and looking at things like pre-calculation, um, so that, for as an example with with the holiday cottages brand, we have 16 000 properties that are available from one night to 28 nights across many different locations of the uk.
Speaker 2:If there is technology out there, what that would allow us to do that in real time, but it's far, far cheaper to pre-calculate that. But actually re-engineering that every couple of years as the company has has scaled has been something that the team have worked really hard on and we're at the latest iteration of that of how do we take that up to the next level and actually try and make the pricing even more dynamic so that we can be offering our guests the best possible pricing in real time. But what does real time actually mean? There is real time to the millisecond, or more likely as real time to to a sort of 10 minute period or something like that. Um, I think many, many examples of of having to do something of that nature with a digital marketplace, with just having more traffic, more users, more searches, more stock, more volume.
Speaker 2:It's almost always a scaling problem and it's usually a good problem to have, but often doesn't feel like it at the time.
Speaker 1:No, I wonder where we were without cloud computing. Feels like only yesterday we were having to go to the data center for uh dr testing. Okay, and finally, on transformation, can you share an occasion where you had to completely abandon an idea, if you have one?
Speaker 2:yeah. So probably one of the biggest lessons I ever learned was back in the first big travel platform I worked on and we had built our own stack and that had gone very well. But we were then acquired by a large multinational who were much more used to the idea of buy over build, used to the idea of buy over build, and we're very keen that we we embraced a bunch of sort of market leading, uh, commercial off-the-shelf packages and stitch those together because it fitted the wider architecture model. And there are pros and cons to that, for sure, but one of the reasons we'd, with hindsight, one of the reasons we've been successful, is we hadn't taken that approach. We'd made a search engine and a market that worked for the product we were selling and we put a good 18 months into that, that attempted re-platforming, before we actually had to draw a line and say no, that we our.
Speaker 2:Our secret source was the fact that we had built it ourselves and could optimize it ourselves and went back to okay, what's the to that point a moment ago, what's the latest version and what's the latest iteration of that going to be? And with hindsight, we definitely lost a load of market share in the process because we'd been 18 months trying to make a new platform instead of trying to make new features and new functionality and new stuff for users. So it was, um, an expensive lesson for all of us to learn, um, and definitely something that's formed my thinking ever since around build is. Build is not always the answer, but for the, for the stuff that differentiates us and holds us um, gives us the opportunity to get ahead in our marketplace, it's usually the answer good, thank you.
Speaker 1:so you talked a bit about the travel chapter and you've got multiple reservation systems, brands, so it sounds like you're already in a digital transformation journey. Could you just share a little bit about what is the program that's happening there? Is it a program? And what is it that excites you about the, the challenges that you're you're facing, or or the, the road ahead?
Speaker 2:so it's it. I don't think we are framing it as a program in the traditional sense, but it's definitely a huge program of work. There is a, there is a number of work streams. It's not just about the technical platform. Actually our colleagues who are using those tools. A big part of introducing a new system is making sure they know where they're moving, from where they're moving to why they're moving, how do we help them use it. So it's not just about build it and forget about it. There's there is a load of work there to bring our colleagues with us.
Speaker 2:The reason we're doing it is because we've we've been very lucky as a business.
Speaker 2:We've grown quite dramatically through organic growth, but also through m&a work and making sure that actually m&a will stay a part of our future, and we have a plan around how we will integrate those platforms that we acquire and those businesses that we acquire.
Speaker 2:Now that's that that's always been part of the vision, but we've been running so fast to achieve it that it's actually been quite useful to say look, how do we want to plan for this and what? What are the outcomes we want once we've got to one platform and I think that, um, what are the outcomes. We're looking for that whole start with the end in mind thing. It's useful to just check back to that If we're not sure what option to take, like I was talking about earlier on with. We have plan A, but we should be aware that there might be a need for a plan B or a plan C. Are we still going towards plan A? Have we got any more information that thinks we should adjust on that and getting as little big picture decision making at the team level as possible so that they are making all of their time and efforts focused on decisions that help them day to day rather than decisions that help the bigger picture.
Speaker 1:But arguably we probably have got clear before the team even set off so, yeah, it seems to be more of a kind of common approach to transformation. That isn't, you know, it's not a one and done. It's kind of you're always evolving, there's always a new challenge ahead and, like you say, you're, you've acquired more brands and perhaps you may acquire more in the future and it's, you know, being able to adjust to the, the challenges ahead and whatever, whatever the world or life may throw throw at you, and making sure you stay, stay relevant and stay adopted into the environment absolutely in the even in my time with travel chapter, we've launched into a new market.
Speaker 2:Um, we're considering a new territory, I should say, and we're considering what are the other opportunities around the markets we're already in. You know, the one thing, the one thing that's going to be an absolute constant of a private equity-backed business is that we need to be bigger and we need to understand where the opportunities to find that growth come from organic, m&a, new markets, new territories, etc. And if you design your platform to be completely optimized for any one of those but but inflexible to work with others, that's going to lead to re-engineering at some point okay, so a lot going on.
Speaker 1:What is your approach and you can take these individually, if you want what's your approach to setting yourself and your teams up for success?
Speaker 2:um. Set myself up for success is almost certainly around making sure the team can succeed. My job is twofold it's to represent the vision of the leadership team within the product function and it's to represent the challenges that the product function is having within the exec team. So any organisation I've ever worked for has always been ambitious and has been trying to do as many things as possible. And it's getting that balance right between not doing too many things badly but also being as ambitious as possible. So we are trying to do as many things as possible but to the right quality standard. So again, what's what's the experiment? What can we do cheaply in parallel with other things? But at the same time, what's the stuff that really matters? And, generally speaking, if you're looking at a transformation program, probably trying to make sure that your capacity for that is not distracted on other stuff is pretty critical.
Speaker 2:So, from my perspective, is just making sure that I'm as upfront as possible with my peers in the leadership team on what we can achieve, um, and that we're having a a well-thought-through conversation about changing priorities. Um, we should always be reviewing them. I don't I don't disagree with that, it's not. It's not about we will only work on this thing. But the flip side of that is it starts to get really expensive if we're asking teams to pivot on a weekly or even more frequent basis. So actually, if the team's vision and mission can be clear for a month or a quarter at a time, that gives me quite a lot of freedom to be trying to line things up ahead of that and make sure my peers are aware of what's going on and my team know what is coming their way and that I can try and remove blockers for them.
Speaker 1:Thanks, andy. I meant to pick up on what you said earlier a bit more about your title. So it's interesting to see you're the chief of technology and of product. So I was just curious to know a bit more about how that role came about and you know why. Why is there? You know, sometimes we see two people in those roles as opposed to one. So was that a conscious decision on yourself or travel chapters for taking that position on?
Speaker 2:um, I think within travel chapter, the product um led approach is definitely quite new. So we we have a hybrid blend where we have product managers within the commercial teams and we have product owners and delivery and and technical leadership within my department per se. But actually trying to build those cross-functional teams, my experience in in other organizations of having a chief technology officer and a chief product officer um, to your point earlier on it's quite. It's not uncommon to have a less technical c-suite and I've definitely seen situations where a CEO or a CFO is almost trying to referee a discussion between a CPO and a CTO. There's huge value to that but if the audience that's part of it can't or sometimes won't engage with that, I think there's real challenges to it.
Speaker 2:So I think there can be value in having one person accountable for both, that doesn't mean that that person is actually doing both of those roles. I don't think there is a this. There's huge positive differences in the mindset between a great product manager and a great technical architect, for example, but equally, I've seen some incredible product managers come from a from a quality background and an automation background as well, of actually trying to think through what are all of the, the weird edge cases and nuances that I want to try and catch, and when you then add a bit of commercial exposure to that, you can find very interesting product mindset in there, just as much as you can from a ux background or from a technical background hopefully that brings us kind of nicely on to and.
Speaker 1:Obviously we have a similar way of thinking around the product management and technology being very close together. So, as we're a partner of travel chapters and you've been there pretty much since the beginning of the relationship between and and travel chapter, are you able to say what first drew you to and or drew travel chapter to and, and what you know what was appealing and what was it you were looking to get out of the partnership that you, that you have with us?
Speaker 2:so I think the the first introduction to and actually came through our board and our um. I think our chairman was involved in a business that had already had great success working with and and although we're working with you guys down in the southwest my background up in up in manchester I knew quite quite a few people who had worked for AND and had super positive stories about the projects and the engagements they've been on, and these were people I knew and rated, so hearing AND talked about. We were considering what we want to do around finding a partner to scale up. As we talked about, we've got a lot of interesting projects on our hands at the moment and actually getting that transformation work moving and accelerated was not something we could do alone. I think the size of the permanent team that we went into this program with is definitely not big enough, but I don't think it needs to be the size that we're currently at working with yourselves.
Speaker 2:So that ability to to burst up and and scale up but also then start to taper off again, I think is interesting. And I think the other piece that was really important for us is, as there's a lot, what we've talked about the, the, that product mindset and trying to operate in a product-aligned way. I know that it's something that and also pride themselves on. So, having people who've experienced that before, so that when we ask a team to do something, it's not all about, trust me, the book's right, we can. Let us talk through some examples of where we've done it elsewhere and what we've seen elsewhere and what might work and what, what will work and what probably won't work with this, this culture and this team. Now there's um adding an external team, particularly um the, adding as much capacity into a team as we have done culturally, can be pretty challenging. Um explaining to the team that the in-house team to start with of why we even need to do this and making sure that this, this, is seen as a sign of success, that we need to do even more right now, and not a sign of failure that you've done it wrong. Someone else is coming to do it.
Speaker 2:That's not what it's about. It's about empowering everyone, doing more, getting getting to those outcomes quicker, and I think that mindset is um. It is one of the reasons why there are. You can take a body shop approach or you can take a partnership approach, and I've taken that partnership approach and I've taken that partnership approach with a couple of times not had experience with them before, but that it it is. I've definitely learned from from this one of um, where it's right to try and shoot straight for the end state and where it's right to be consciously taking steps along the journey towards, as an example of, do you take a team who are working in a more waterfall way and jump straight to Kanban or do you go through scrum on the way so that you pick up some of that? And I think that's been, that's been great to see and and we continue to to push on with the program good.
Speaker 1:So, taking sort of a, rather than the big bang, the incremental improvements, power of you know, one percent gains to get you to you, well, towards the the end state, if there is.
Speaker 2:If there is an end state, yeah, and I think that that's it isn't it when we part of the reason I tend not to frame things as programs per se is um, it feels like it's a project, and project has a start and finish, and this definitely doesn't have. What we're doing today has a finish, for sure, but there will be something else beyond it, and what we're trying to build is something that enables us to make quick choices and pivot to grab those opportunities, but it's almost certainly going to involve more development and engineering of some sort so your, your teams are spread out over, predominantly so, biddeford and Norwich, but obviously, and providing people from the greater Bristol area, how, how do you find?
Speaker 1:and and how do you find even those teams from, you know, norwich and Biddeford? How, how is the integration working? How are you able to to overcome any challenges in that space, to kind of get everybody behind the journey you're on?
Speaker 2:so more than 50% of our permanent team now are actually home-based, so we have people from Cornwall to Scotland. There's pros and cons to that means we've got some great talent within the team, but it also makes it very difficult to bring people together. And I think one of the real benefits we've found from working with Anne, with your Bristol base, is that, although geographically it's not halfway between Norwich and Biddeford, in travel time it probably is. So Biddeford in North Devon is a fantastic place to be, but it can actually be quite difficult to get to. Uh. There isn't public transport all the way to the door. Uh, our team in Norwich were working uh more orally in Norfolk and we moved them in into a new Norwich office um just over a year ago now and and have built that up uh in a great way. But again, we are we're we're a b corp now and we take that very seriously. So try and use public transport where we possibly can. We don't like to fly between offices etc. So, um, having even just the the space of having some smart people who we can come and work alongside, and it's not a case of um don't know Bristol, where do we even start? We're talking to people who understand the local space can act as hosts to us, literally and metaphorically. But then having a having access to the hand offices and being able to work in a collaborative way in a space that is set up for the kind of collaboration, and being able to work in a collaborative way in a space that is set up for the kind of collaboration we're trying to achieve, and you guys are helping build that culture, it's been great. You know that's.
Speaker 2:I don't think remote working will ever disappear now off the back of COVID. If we've learned anything from COVID is that it is a thing that can work. The flip side of that is the intentional get-togethers are incredibly important, um, whether they be social or team team building or team delivery and product building. Um, so I I don't want to underestimate the value of having a partner who can help facilitate that kind of stuff. And and also um the the culture we have, where we do have two offices who are geographically pretty far apart in england, um, bringing those teams together continues to be part of the, the opportunity. Transformation isn't just about the tech, it's about the people in the operating model as well. Um. So modeling what can work, modeling what maybe not modeling, but demonstrating what doesn't work and helping encourage uh teams who are not necessarily I would, I don't think us and them is fair, but but it's. It is fair to say that there are subtly but importantly, different cultures between people working so far apart. So how do we bring them together?
Speaker 1:Good, yeah, and yeah, we're very much advocates of the face-to-face time being absolutely critical as you know because we come down to Biddeford fairly regularly or try to. Also. I know you had everybody from your team into bristol, like the entire team, recently. Um, it was an annual annual meeting for the digital department. How did how did that go like getting everyone together?
Speaker 2:I heard I heard lots of good things, because I know some of our my own colleagues were able to attend as well so we we hadn't actually done an in-person product engineering team event since 2022, which many perfectly good reasons for that but it felt quite important by the time.
Speaker 2:We're working with AND we are now 120 people across the department and actually bringing those people together to hear why we're doing stuff, what are we doing, giving them the chance to socialize together um, we, we didn't actively try and mix up the teams. We we hoped that, um, that people would choose to do so, and I'm very, very pleased to say that they did. We had a social event the night before. We went bowling and indoor curling, which is a a new thing for me um, and it absolutely the, the, the, the social group started as the ones who knew each other, but very quickly, people actually were of of their own free will, going talking to the people that they work with, and that was that's probably one of the best things I've seen since I've been here of actually those as folk who are who've never met each other before.
Speaker 2:We're actually seeking them out and obviously in a in a product world, people are generally more introverted, so seeing people putting themselves out of their comfort zone, it was a, I'd say it was actually a pretty proud moment for us as a, as a team, I think, quite a big step in the right direction of making one department rather than a number of offices and some remote people.
Speaker 1:Good, good to hear. So I was going to ask you about emerging technologies. Of course, we have to talk about AI, because we're in that age, but are there any advancements in AI that's going to help with improving customer experience, that's going to help to shape the future of Travel Chapter? You did mention dynamic pricing, so I'm sure that's something you're looking at. Is that an avenue you're going down, or is there other things you might be able to share about emerging tech at Travel Chapter?
Speaker 2:We're looking at it in a number of ways. I heard a brilliant thing recently that framed ways of using AI as a clerk, colleague or coach Clerk being getting to do the work transcribing meetings, capturing the actions at least getting the first draft of the actions that kind of thing of actually trying to do some of the stuff that maybe we don't always do as rigorous as we could do. Colleague, the what, what does that mean? So someone you can actually delegate stuff to, be it translations or content improvement, or actually taking a complex data set of free text and trying to turn that into structured data that that's easier to filter on, the kind of stuff that historically might have been quite manual and might never have happened because we didn't have enough people to do it.
Speaker 2:And then the coach side of things. We've got some great examples that we've recently implemented a new CRM tool for our customer service team and there is a lot of AI available there in terms of some of that Clark piece around summing up the calls and getting the call wrap up sooner, but also on the coaching side, of being able to make recommendations based on the context of the call and make recommendations of what direction to steer the call in or what properties might be relevant, or whether escalation or support is needed and this, this kind of stuff, and I think we pride ourselves on having high quality properties in in the right places and having the service to go with it. And I think you could definitely look at ai as being a cost-saving measure.
Speaker 2:But I think where we're seeing the opportunity here is extra tooling and extra support for an already strong team, and it's the it's not cost saving, it's efficiency and it's making sure that the service improvements come with that and I think, taking that mindset of giving the right tools to the right people whether that be co-pilot or these sort of things in in office, or in github for that matter, yeah, what more can we unlock from the, from the people we've already got?
Speaker 1:yeah and yeah, every day more and more coming out. So I think, yeah, I think next month we've got Apple Intelligence will be for Mac users and newest iPhones, and a lot of that stuff is just going to be embedded in our day-to-day. So that's good. Do you actually look to build anything yourselves, or is that something that might form part of your work, or does it tend to be like you're using some tools like you said, your CRM and you're taking the benefits of what's coming with it?
Speaker 2:I think there's two or three ways of looking at that. One, the likes of Apple AI, creates a new governance problem. If you've got bring-your-own-device policies and Apple AI Apple Intelligence, I should say is now able to look at all of your data. Do you want that to happen? My view on that would definitely be how do we enable people to take advantage of it rather than saying you can't use it? But that doesn't mean it's simple. There's work to be done there. So there is definitely work to be done around policy and governance. I think there is definitely work to be done around policy and governance.
Speaker 2:I think there is also we. We pride ourselves as being a great travel partner for our, for our owners and for our guests, um I. That, I think, means we don't see ourselves as necessarily building um ai stuff from scratch, but we'll definitely be leveraging tooling, and I think it plays back to what I was saying earlier on of what should we own? Where should we differentiate? The pricing side of things, as you say. I think there's a real opportunity there around modeling that and making sure that we're getting the right outcomes for our owners, but also the right pricing, and the right experience for our owners, but also the right pricing and the right um the right experience for our guests absolutely, and I think there's a lot we can do to make our data better.
Speaker 2:So things like um analyzing the, the information that's been put in and making sure we're pulling out the right sentiment things and I think to start with, that's almost certainly third-party tooling. But over over time, when we know whether it really makes a difference for us, or probably where it makes a difference for us, there's a huge opportunity.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'd like to ask you a few questions about talent and retention. I know we spoke a bit about your teams coming together and the benefits you felt there, but you said in your intro you've worked in various countries, so you've got experience of different cultures, workplace behaviors. Curious about those experiences that you've had working in in those different cultures and has that influenced your approach to business or team dynamics at all?
Speaker 2:and you know working with different groups yeah, definitely, I think, being british, we can quite often be.
Speaker 2:We can almost hide behind the English language of not necessarily saying what we mean and what we think, and working in other countries where people are working, english is still the working language, but actually they're using it as the words are defined rather than with sarcasm or other sentiment. It's been fascinating seeing that and the time I spent in Denmark I think I learned the most in terms of Dane's default position is trust, and trust is lost rather than earned and equally, people have no qualms. It's a very egalitarian culture. People have no qualms. It's a very egalitarian culture and people have no qualms in saying what they're thinking, even to pretty senior people within the organisation. And I think that transparency and that candour has definitely helped me to start thinking. Let me say exactly what I mean and try and be as respectful but direct as possible, because actually by getting to the point, hopefully, where things aren't lost in in the nuance of it being a very interesting topic interesting in that case probably meaning boring, yeah yeah, so it's in and we have, we have colleagues in the.
Speaker 1:This is probably the closest I can relate and, yes, certainly the direct approach is. I like it. It's humbling, it's different, and you sometimes think, yeah, they do just cut straight to the point. Why don't we do more of that? It'd be a lot easier sometimes. We can all learn from each other and, in your experience with scaling teams, what strategies have you found most effective in bringing teams together and improving their performance? Is it the social stuff or are there other parts to it?
Speaker 2:I think there's getting the outcomes really clear so that actually the team know what they're doing, so that when you ask them to scale, they know what they're trying to hit. I think is important. I'm sure it's a bit of a cliche, but the roles and responsibilities really matter and it's really easy to say that, but it's actually quite difficult to do of keeping that up to date and making sure that people do know exactly what's being asked of them, and that's definitely something that I'm always challenging myself on. Is this clear and is this right?
Speaker 2:I think it's incredibly important to be able to grow talent, but it's actually quite difficult to grow talent without an incredibly strong base in the first place.
Speaker 2:So quite often scaling in my view, quite often scaling means starting with the, with the senior developers, with the more experienced people, and trying to get a high functioning team of that nature that you can then maybe consider splitting in two and adding in some people earlier in their career, or apprentices and people right at the start of their career.
Speaker 2:But without the vision and the principles and the practices defined right, everybody's trying to make decisions for themselves and then it can be really really quick to see teams diverging and how they're trying to operate and I think, whilst it's very important that teams should operate in the best way for them, it's still important that they're operating within the same boundaries and that the boundaries are clear so that actually we we are removing as much of the what are we even doing kind of questions and focusing on the how do we do them kind of questions, so that actually, when you have got new people, and particularly if those new people are remote, that it's clear for them what we're asking them to work on and what we're asking them to develop personally, not just from a, from a product side okay, you've got, um, you've got a great team already around you.
Speaker 1:Uh, in biddeford and norwich I've met a lot of the people who work for travel chapter. That's really really great talented bunch. What's do you have any thoughts or tips on? You know, how are you, how are you looking to attract more top talent and and also how you, how do you hope to retain them?
Speaker 2:um, very good question. I think the, the retention side of things is is challenging, particularly given we are now in a, in a world where anyone can work pretty much for anyone anywhere in the world. So the, the value of what we do, needs to be clear, and I think in today's world, with the cost of living crisis still being a thing for the foreseeable future, not every organisation can afford to pay the rates that the largest platforms, the largest global platforms or the financial financial businesses in london can afford. So what's the value offering what? What do we offer in return for what we're asking of people? I think it's incredibly important, so the that that employer value proposition is probably the buzzword for it. That matters, but I think what also matters is being really clear about what it is you're doing and how you're contributing.
Speaker 2:Um, we're finding more and more people are not purely financially motivated, but actually things like the purpose and the mission of the business matters. I wouldn't say that's that's everyone by um by a long way, but there are definitely people out there, and so if we can be clear what our purpose is and what we're trying to achieve, and people can make a their own values-based decision about that, um, that that's, I think, something that we've seen real success with. We we continue to have interesting roles for people to do and find interesting applicants who want to to talk to us about it, which is just pretty reassuring, and we we are definitely not market leading in terms of the compensation we can offer for that. So it's yeah, the it's got to be the whole package that you think about yeah, and I I firmly believe that.
Speaker 1:You know having a purpose and a challenge and interesting work where people are learning that it should always outweigh. You know pure, pure monetary where you can. You know the different industries you can go to for that. But you're not going to get the same benefits of like, say around around the purpose of the work you're involved in. So I want to bring it back to you, andy, just to talk a little bit more about yourself and perhaps some advice you might be able to pass on to others. So, as you've, as you've detailed, you've transitioned through multiple roles and you've moved into leadership roles. Perhaps it wasn't where you saw yourself going at the start, but that's certainly where you find yourself today and you've you've got there over time. Do you have a leadership philosophy and um or anything that stands out and, and if so, how has that evolved throughout your career?
Speaker 2:I'd say my job is to set the direction as clearly as possible and to help remove as many blockers as possible, and I think the closest thing to that is probably something like servant leadership. I'm not sure I fully buy into all that is in something like servant leadership. I'm not sure I I fully buy into all all that is in the textbook definition of that. Yeah, I think there is, but I do think there is an incredibly important part around it of um set the direction, remove the blockers, try and help and encourage and coach people along the way and work out why things aren't working.
Speaker 2:Um, it's very easy for people to be who are close to a process to spend a lot of time optimizing for problems that they've accepted and I think being able to just ask those gentle questions and sometimes pretty direct questions of why is X and Y happening, I think there is something here that you might want to consider. It's not necessarily about telling people what to do, but being able to ask and coach and nudge them in the right direction, generally speaking, has worked pretty well for me. As we've talked about, I'm not necessarily particularly strong at a lot of the things my team do, but I know what good looks like at the end of it all and if I can help them get better at what they want to do. That's incredibly satisfying great good advice.
Speaker 1:What advice might you give to somebody who is perhaps hesitant about stepping into a leadership position?
Speaker 3:And Digital is on a mission to close the digital skills gap.
Speaker 2:We do that through working with our clients to deliver digital transformation through better upskilling and reskilling through better upskilling and reskilling, and I think it's pretty common historically that the only way to progress beyond senior something was probably into a people leadership role, and a lot of us aren't cut out for that it is. You need to want to engage with other people, you need to care about what's on their mind. People leadership should be an active choice, and I think if you're up for it and you're interested in it, it can be incredibly rewarding. But it can also, if you're used to a more binary problem-solving situation, it can be incredibly challenging because people are very different and even people who normally react quite logically to things can have outsized reactions to stuff that they can't control. So being I think, if you want to be a people leader, take all of that stuff into account and do it.
Speaker 2:It's incredibly rewarding. But if you are much more on the technical side, I think a lot of organizations now are forward thinking to realize that there might there might well be a ceiling of how far an individual contributor can progress, but that ceiling should be pretty high really and let people be good at that. There is a really strong need for technical leadership and people who can coach others and you could argue that's a kind of people leadership, but I think it's very different to the pastoral care side of things yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think you're saying there's, there's multiple areas that you can take leadership roles into. It doesn't have to be always about people, it's can be this way your profession is. Go with that. If you're interested in complexity and ambiguity which may come in a people lead role, stick with that.
Speaker 1:If it's something you're more natural and prefer things clearer, then you know kind of follow your, follow your your craft, so to speak exactly, yeah okay, last question and as I opened, uh, without digital, with my and title, which tells us a little bit about our, our whole selves, or more about you know part of ourselves. That is something we do outside of work and, uh, we want to share with others. So I might be able to guess yours, but I probably already know it. But I'll ask you anyway if you had an antitle, what would it be and why?
Speaker 2:I think it would be. Uh, um, mountaineer. My passion, everything I do in terms of having a job, is to be able to spend time in the mountains, and do that more and more comfortably. I used to be able to spend months in the mountains living like a dirt bag. These days, I can do it much more comfortably and that's because of because the the job and everything I do, yeah, anything in the mountains, whether it be um climbing, running, mountain biking, skiing, um yeah, favorite mountain or mountain range uh, favorite mountain range would probably be the um the grande gérasse massive in the back of mont blanc area.
Speaker 2:Favorite mountain would probably be the north face of ben nevis in scotland in the winter good, yeah, I've been to both.
Speaker 1:Well, not the north face, I was. I was going up there. I'm not sure what they call the main path, but I I took the.
Speaker 1:I took the long scenic route up it's a long way up there yeah, that was, uh, yeah, it was a good, uh, a good day hike, especially for my five year old who, who did the whole thing, so kudos to him. There's a lot of sweets getting up there. Okay, there is one last question, and yes, so, andy, lastly, what is one thing you'd like listeners to take away from your story as a digital leader?
Speaker 2:I think it's.
Speaker 2:It could be pretty obvious to say that change is hard and it can be really tempting to jump into it and learn as you go, that that feels quite agile but actually large-scale change doesn't work well that way.
Speaker 2:It might work at a team level to jump into it and learn as you go and experiment and test and iterate.
Speaker 2:But the more time you can spend on aligning on the outcome you want and the vision you want and making sure that that leadership team technical and non-technical, it is all saying the same thing so that you can actually make sure that the, the guidance you're giving and the briefing you're giving to people is consistent and is all pointing in the same direction and you can keep reiterating what is that message and why do we want to do it and what outcome do we want and it stays the same and that the guidance stays the same. And, yes, you may well need to course correct as you learn new things, but consistency, particularly for people who are not necessarily as commercially aware and are used to wanting to work on one thing until it's done, being able to keep giving them complementary guidance until you're probably getting quite bored of saying it. They will be beginning to listen to what you're actually saying. So consistency matters and spending more time up front on how to communicate it, not just what you're communicating, I think brilliant, good place for us to close.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, finally, just like to say thank you, andy, for for sharing your experiences and, and, um yeah, your and your stories around transformation. It's been a really engaging conversation. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:That's everything for this edition of the Good, Bad and the Ugly of Digital Transformation podcast. Thanks again to our guest Andy, and if you've enjoyed this episode, please follow or subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode to enjoy and digital is on a mission to close the digital skills gap.
Speaker 3:We do that through working with our clients to deliver digital transformation through better upskilling and reskilling.
