I first stepped into the CTO role at Storio role less than six months after we had completed a merger. I had previously been VP Engineering for one of the merged companies and had acted up into the role for periods before that. It is something I had wanted for a long time but it felt very different when I was finally in the hot seat.

Overnight my engineering scope doubled and expanded to include Data, IT and Security for the first time. I became accountable for two different organisations, Albelli the company we merged with was based in Amsterdam which brought cultural differences I hadn't anticipated. For the first six months all I wanted to do was not make any mistakes. Especially with our first peak season coming where we made a significant amount of our profit.

Finding My Voice on the Executive Team

Stepping into the Executive team broadened my focus and I was forced to engage in a number of topics that previously I hadn't. This was one of my first challenges. As a technology leader how much should I engage with commercial, operational and strategic topics that I had limited context on?

There is no right answer to this but my personal value is to only speak when I am adding value. It is easy to feel like you need to have an opinion on everything when you join a senior leadership team. I chose not to and still take this approach to this day. It took time to build the context needed to contribute meaningfully outside of technology and I think that patience paid off.

The Importance of Face to Face

With a distributed workforce one of my first tasks was to get around to all of our locations and meet everyone. This can be quite daunting for someone on the introverted side of the personality spectrum but it was hugely important.

Human connections forged face to face are so beneficial when you are going through change. Not because of the small talk but because you need to find the people who will give you honest feedback. The ones who will tell you what is actually going on rather than what they think you want to hear. Those relationships became invaluable and I could not have built them over video calls alone.

The Culture Lesson That Changed Everything

One of my bigger challenges was navigating culture. Country culture, company culture and functional culture all intertwined with each other and I underestimated the complexity of this.

My biggest insight came from a Principal Engineer about six months in. I had really felt like I was being ignored in a number of areas and could not figure out why. Digging into it I learned that my default approach of giving my opinion first and then asking for others to challenge and adapt based on logic was not working. Culturally it felt like I was telling everyone what to do. So it was ignored.

Simply by inverting that approach to asking for others opinions first and then sharing mine the impact I was able to have changed dramatically. It sounds so obvious written down but when it is your default communication style it is a hard thing to recognise without someone being honest enough to tell you.

Setting the Direction

Things really started to click when we began writing our first Technology Strategy. Rather than debating approaches in meetings, we wrote down our processes, principles and cultural expectations for how we work with technology. Having it on paper meant both teams could engage with the ideas without it feeling like one side was imposing on the other. It depersonalised the conversation and began the long process of standardisation.

That foundation helped us navigate our first peak season as a merged entity successfully. We made minimal changes and focused on validating load and features before the traffic spikes. It was not glamorous but it worked.

The process of creating that strategy was genuinely valuable for bringing people together. The strategy itself? That's a different story.