In my previous post, I shared the lessons from building my first technology strategy — around connecting to company strategy, building a shared understanding of the current state, managing complexity, and getting input from the wider organisation.

The strategy had a number of merits — it brought two recently merged engineering cultures closer together and gave us a shared focus during a complex migration period. But it wasn't the decision-making tool I'd hoped for, and I knew we could do better.

When it came time to start our strategy refresh, those lessons shaped every decision about how we approached it.

What we did differently

This time we had a clear company strategy to anchor to. Storio2030 (our company vision) gave us the end state that was missing the first time around. That meant the technology strategy could focus on the "how" rather than defining the "why" or the "what" — those were already established.

We also made a deliberate choice not to build a functional strategy. Technology at Storio is an enabler for almost everything the business does. A strategy created by technology for technology would repeat the same mistake. This needed to be an organisational enablement strategy with input, challenge and feedback woven in from across the business.

Finally we were clear up front about what success looked like. Not a document that sat on a shelf but a strategy that enabled better and faster decisions by the teams closest to the work. That meant the output needed to be accessible, actionable and something people could engage with without a thirty-page read.

The vision I shared internally

To kick off the process I wrote a foreword for the organisation framing why this strategy matters and how I wanted us to approach it. Here it is as I shared it.

I first started writing code to solve business problems in the year 2000, during the dot com boom. I was frustrated with having to manually aggregate electricity meter data from thousands of sources to accurately trade energy. It quickly became clear to me that leveraging technology for efficient solutions would soon become the standard approach for every business.

Fast forward 25 years and that prediction has been proved right. Sure, the technology has moved on quite a lot — from Excel VBA macros to LLM-generated code — but finding efficient and scalable solutions to enable happier customers and successful business outcomes is still the fundamental reason why we exist as a Technology function. Technology is an enabler to almost every facet of Storio. This strategy aims to ensure success through aligned context, a clear vision for where we are going, and repeatable ways of both finding and solving the biggest blockers and opportunities on our path to Storio2030.

This strategy will primarily be focused on the "How" Storio approaches building technology. The "Why" is derived from our company vision, and the "What" is defined by our core business outcomes: the Storio2030 vision and other strategic themes such as our Digital Experience Strategy (a cross-functional strategy defining our customer-facing product direction). Crucially, this is not a siloed Technology functional strategy; it's an organisational enablement strategy. My ambition is for it to influence and empower everyone who uses technology across Storio — Product, Operations, Commercial, Marketing, Finance and HR. There will be functional elements, but this strategy's creation process cannot happen in a vacuum. We need to actively weave input, challenge, and feedback from the entire organisation.

Storio was created during the Web 2.0 era, enabled by the seismic shift from film to digital. At the same time web capability improvements removed friction — no longer did you need to download an application — significantly widening our customer base. AI is poised to enable the next, equally significant capability shift. This strategy will ensure that once again Storio can capitalise on a technology shift to significantly accelerate our ambitions.

Ultimately, this strategy's success won't be measured by its documentation, but by the quality of the decisions it enables to make Storio2030 a reality. Those decisions must be made quickly and efficiently by the teams closest to the work. To achieve this, the strategy needs to be created in a way that enables wide input and challenge to create a clear vision and actionable tenets. This will be both top-down and bottom-up, combining our ambitious aspirations with the practical reality of where Storio is today.

Why this framing mattered

Sharing this foreword was deliberate. It set the tone for how the strategy would be created — not handed down from technology but built collaboratively. It gave people permission to challenge and contribute from day one.

The impact showed up quickly. Working group conversations shifted from "what does technology want to do?" to "what do we need to enable?" and the engagement at our offsite showed people felt genuine ownership of the direction. That was the signal we were on the right track.

In future posts I'll share the structure that emerged from this process — the framework we used to turn this vision into actionable tenets and how we kept the organisation involved throughout.