and results

Resilience

This week, we had the privilege of getting Up-Close with Rico Surridge, the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Which?.

Throughout Rico's fifteen-year career, he has held Product leadership roles at a broad range of companies including BBC, ITV, Sainsbury's, Vodafone, Photobox and Accenture.

What is your career highlight to date? How has this influenced you as a leader?

I have been lucky enough to work on so many amazing products over the course of my career, so it’s really tough to pick just one! Launching innovative new apps and experiences for both the BBC and ITV was certainly a highlight and one that illustrated to me the scale of impact that I could have. In the last few years, however, helping Which?, a 60+ year old organisation transform its digital offering has been my focal point and a real joy. My time has been spent on improving ways of working whilst also simplifying and modernising the technology estate to enable the business on its journey towards growth. This has been a challenging but necessary phase of the organisation's evolution and the role has made me tangibly more resilient as a result.

“My time has been spent on improving ways of working whilst also simplifying and modernising the technology estate to enable the business on its journey towards growth”

In your opinion, what are the top three attributes of a great digital leader?

There are so many important attributes to being a great digital leader, however my top three would be:

1) Being outcome centric – with crystal clear clarity of what it is you’re trying to achieve,

2) Honesty in communication – over communicating in simple terms, transparently taking the whole organisation on a journey, and

3) Bringing alignment – having a genuine set of upfront discussions about what you want to achieve with the right group of people, encouraging them to have difficult conversations early on so that you can all pull together to succeed.

How do you create a high-performance culture? Any examples you have put in place that have been effective?

In my opinion, a high performing culture is born out of action and role modelling the behaviours that you want to see in others. I think the key is ensuring that there is ownership and collaboration across all levels of the team – people don’t like to be told what to do and how to do things, so I always focus on empowering my teams to take full accountability for their own objectives. It is essential to set the tone from day one and create a psychologically safe environment where people are happy to put their hands up and ask questions or challenge something.

What have been the most important leadership lessons you have learnt over the past year?

My lessons from the last year have been more evolutionary than revolutionary. I keep coming back to starting small – I am a big believer in gaining credibility through delivery and this begins with small but incremental action. Next, I recommend holding your nerve when recruiting and investing time in bringing the right people on board relative to the organisation's needs. However, the most notable lesson during my first Executive level leadership role has been to always keep learning and broadening knowledge. I recently got a great deal out of attending a Finance for Non-Finance Executives course, enabling me to make better, more rounded decisions and contributions.

The role of a Product leader is still fundamentally about vision, strategy and delivering value for an organisation, however, I think the day-to-day role itself has changed quite a bit and only continues to mature. It varies from one organisation to another, but I do think that there is now a greater emphasis put on Tech and Product Engineering and I’ve seen a few examples of CPOs and CTOs becoming CPTOs. Unless the company is specifically providing a tech product, having everyone under one function makes a lot of sense to enable alignment and can get rid of unnecessary friction. More broadly, I’ve also seen a shrinking of traditional commercial functions as expectations of Product Managers has become more holistic, focused on growth and the value they are driving for the users and the business.

Do you think the role of a Product leader has changed throughout your career?

“I do think that there is now a greater emphasis put on Tech and Product Engineering”

Diversity matters for so many reasons, but for me, I have had first-hand experience that the highest performing teams are the ones with the most diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives. I’ve found that diverse teams bring an explosion of conversation and discovery – this social discovery leads to product discovery in a really organic way. I also believe that it is very difficult to understand your user base if you only have one type of person building the service. I saw this with BBC iPlayer where I worked with a fantastic software engineer who was visually impaired – he added enormous value by applying his lived experience to tailor the product for blind people.

In your opinion, why does diversity matter?

“Diversity matters for so many reasons, but for me, I have had first-hand experience that the highest performing teams are the ones with the most diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives.”

What do you think Product and Tech leaders can put in place to solve the challenge of limited diversity across leadership teams?

I think the approach to creating a diverse team will vary from one organisation to another. If the company is mature and has well established leaders throughout the Product & Technology function then investing in junior roles and providing training can be a great way to build a more diverse pipeline for the future. In a less established company there will need to be more emphasis on the senior recruitment process. This is where I would recommend getting external help; there are loads of great organisations and networks out there (including The Up Group), you really don’t have to build everything from scratch. Internal, employee-led, networks are also really helpful – I would encourage people to set them up and ensure that they listen to them.

Any suggestions of great books / podcasts / content?

Start with Why by Simon Sinek, Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke, User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton, Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Sprint by Jake Knapp and Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim. Also, Zapp! The Lightning of Empowerment by William C. Byham with Jeff Cox – an older book but written in a really fun narrative; or you can also check out my blog!