Embracing a new Challenge: My Journey in an Interim Leadership Role

During the first half of 2024, I had the opportunity to step up and embrace a new professional challenge. The end of July, with the arrival of a new CTO, marks the end of this experience, at least in the current setup.

Growth, both from a professional and personal perspective, is a key driver for me, with learning as one of its fundamental aspects. So, I decided to write this article as a way to reflect on what I did and, more importantly, what I learned. I hope others can benefit from it or encourage others to share similar experiences.

Context

I joined Moneyfarm in 2021, during the peak of post-pandemic economic euphoria. I started as a Delivery Manager to improve our delivery processes. I was then promoted to Engineering Manager and shifted my focus, starting to lead three of our teams. Eventually, I took on the role of Head of Program Delivery, to support our strategic proposition expansion. Lots of different interesting challenges and no time to get bored—great!

But it's not 2021 anymore. From a broader perspective, the last couple of years have been very challenging for many tech companies, including multiple fintech firms, due to the global economic environment. Although Moneyfarm continued to perform well, at the end of 2023, we faced organizational changes and leadership transitions that impacted team morale and performance metrics. As the senior person in Tech, I started reporting to the CEO and took on an interim role in addition to my primary one as Head of Program Delivery.

My new priority was to stabilize and improve the Technology department, focusing on people and organizational alignment.

Objectives and Streams of Work

I believe that alignment on the direction of travel is fundamental to success, especially in turbulent times. At the beginning of my interim role, I agreed with our CEO on my objectives and major streams of work. As a result, we focused on two main areas:

1. People: Understand major causes for dissatisfaction and address longstanding issues.
2. Business Alignment: Enhance the use and effectiveness of clear goals within the Technology team.

Actions Taken

People: on this area, I followed different steps starting from analysing the current situation to acting with concrete changes.?

• I prepared a causal loop diagram. This helped map and explain my perspective on the department's reality to others. This allowed me to clarify my assumptions, approach and actions.

• I then created a simple framework to assess motivation and mastery and with it, I conducted a set of interviews with all team leads and Engineering Managers to gather insights and get a comprehensive view across all our teams. Worth noting that throughout the process, I involved all major stakeholders to foster alignment and accelerate decision-making.

• I organised workshops with all our teams to collect different perspectives on the root causes behind some recurrent sources of frustration and asked for ideas and suggestions.
• Based on the insights, we selected five main areas and implemented several changes or improvements. Here are a few examples:

1. Lack of alignment: We started regular Tech All Hands meetings with a clear and recurring agenda on key topics (People, Tech Strategy, Teams' Achievements). The leadership team, including myself, began having more regular one-on-one meetings and conversations with our team leads and members. We continuously monitored, analysed and answered async feedback and questions.
2. Poor recognition: We began to celebrate our successes more frequently. We tried different approaches, such as sharing a collection of public kudos on Slack each week, leveraging our all-hands meetings to highlight wins, and experimenting with non-monetary benefits for significant achievements.
3. Low business knowledge: We organised sessions with experts from different teams in our company to share their views on important business topics.
4. Simplification and removal of outdated practices: To reduce the number of delivery updates, we consolidated a new format and agreed with all relevant stakeholders to consider it the source of truth. We acknowledged that one old recurring appointment focused on continuous improvement had lost traction and replaced it with a more mature Tech Strategy.
5. Individual challenges: We engaged in challenging and honest conversations. We did our best to understand the issues, clarify expectations, and agree on a set of actions.

Business Alignment: With the help of my peers in the leadership team, we reviewed our previous goals and highlighted a few recurrent issues:

• They were almost entirely output and delivery-driven, mostly a repetition of our roadmap (e.g., "Deliver Initiative ABC by the end of Qx") or expressed as actions rather than measurable results (e.g., "Arrange meetings XYZ in all tech hubs").
• More often than not, they were not clearly linked to our strategic priorities (e.g., "Build a dashboard with this and that").
• They were perceived as a bureaucratic exercise rather than an approach to increase focus and commitment.

An important aspect to consider is that the intentions behind the goals were positive; they were meant to formalise what we considered our priorities or important tasks. However, coherence with a broader vision was inadequate. Therefore, we started changing, adapting, and fixing our goal-setting process:

• We paid particular attention to ensuring our Tech goals were in sync with the company's objectives and priorities. We started from a sub-set of company-level strategic objectives and defined our Tech goals accordingly.
• We redefined the format to focus on outcomes ( e.g., "Effort on type of work <X% for all teams") and business results ( e.g., "Number of active customers on Product ABC increased by X%").
• We customized the goals for all Product Engineering teams.
• We organized several sessions to clarify the approach and gather more input, feedback, and constructive complaints.

Results and Further Improvements

People: All our engagement metrics improved significantly. For example, participation increased by 20%, and our eNPS improved by 11 points. I believe the trajectory is right, and it’s more about continuing and consolidating rather than changing.

Business Alignment: The quality of goals increased significantly both in terms of their definition, usefulness and alignment with the company strategy. However, there is still room for improvement, particularly around involvement, collaborative definition and clarity on dependencies with other teams.

What I Learned

Reflecting on this period, several elements helped me succeed, while others posed challenges. Here are my main takeaways:

1. The Right Mix of a Clear North Star, Simplicity, and Coherence: My ultimate goals were clear, which allowed me to maintain momentum. This clarity enabled me to focus on a small set of well-defined target metrics, a lightweight approach, and a limited number of top priorities. In the context of noise and uncertainty, this overall simplicity proved highly effective. At the same time, I faced a few challenges. Stopping old habits, like traditional events or ways of sharing updates, can be as tricky as gaining traction for new ideas. There will always be someone very attached to the old ways, potentially for valid reasons. The idea of stopping something so traditional seems wrong. Also, even though doing a few things well is appealing, I often asked myself, "Am I doing enough? Should I do more or something completely different?". I feel like this tension can be healthy if it doesn't translate in additional confusion.
2. Stakeholders and Support from Others: Achieving such an ambitious goal cannot be done in isolation. Understanding my main stakeholders' needs and perspectives, keeping them involved with clear information, collecting their inputs when needed, and asking for their support to remove obstacles was crucial. I prepared a stakeholder map, that was specific for the new role, and made deliberate decisions in my stakeholder management approach, prioritizing relationships strategically. No team is an island, so a decision that works well for my audience (the Tech team) could negatively impact other teams or be incompatible with broader constraints. Maintaining healthy relationships with stakeholders minimizes the risk of optimizing locally at the expense of others. However, playing within constraints is not always enjoyable, as it can significantly reduce available options.
3. Clarity of Mind and Calm in Decision-Making: Decision-making in complex situations involves trade-offs between accuracy and speed, balancing numerous pros, cons, and constraints. A big responsibility inevitably brings pressure, which can lead to mistakes. Personally, maintaining clarity of mind through high-intensity sports and a pragmatic decision-making process made a difference. I balanced data collection and feedback with decisive action, remaining accountable for both good and not-so-good decisions. Was it a relaxing time? Definitely not. In hindsight, I recognize that multiple times I closed a conversation by saying, "Okay, I’ll sleep on it and let you know," and that's what happened. (For clarity, I must admit that I’m an early bird, and it's a lot easier for me to make key decisions first thing in the morning. However, making decisions while sleeping is a different story…)
4. People are just one part of the system, even if fundamental:?we are working in a socio-technical system, and the relationships between all parts are as crucial as the parts themselves. Forgetting the relationship between these different but interconnected aspects is counterproductive and risky. Although I focused on the people and alignment side of things the technical aspects are the other side of same the coin. The constant collaboration and alignment with my peers in charge of the technical strategy have been fundamental to making sure all changes and improvements are coherent with a broader vision. This is where having someone trusted to talk openly with and able to find synergies makes a huge difference.

Conclusion

Overall, this temporary role allowed me to explore different challenges, face new issues, and engage with various stakeholders in new ways. Although intense and sometimes out of my comfort zone I am grateful for the trust my company placed in me. This experience has been an amazing learning opportunity I’ll leverage going forward. But, even more important than that, I’m sure that what we achieved over the last few months has set more solid foundations for our next phase in Tech. There is still a lot for improvement and we can build upon the successes, failures and lessons learned. In other words, I see it as a step of a longer and ambitious journey.