Climbing the ladder - Kristian Samuel-Camps

00:00

And I gleaned all that from the kind of conversations I had, and that started formulating in my mind, well, you need to grow in terms of technology and product. You've got quite a good emerging culture there with some strong values. Yes, it's 100 year old business, but it's quite an interesting challenge to transform that in to something more modern. So that's how I, in summary of all of that, I was like, yeah, I think that's the move for me.

00:23

Maybe a good place to start is, how did you get in to product in the first place, Kristian?

00:30

Yeah, so I've been a digital delivery person for about 15 years. And when I started, I was very much a front-end developer, working for B&Q, actually. And at that time we started to experiment, and this is 2012, 2013, we started to experiment with the agile delivery frameworks and things, and the scrum, and the kanban, and all that kind of thing. And user experience really started to kick off and started to become a thing within B&Q. And there was a lot of consultants coming in saying "Consumer habits are changing," all this of thing. And from that point, that nurtured a seed, because actually it started to compress all of these things that we were doing in to, actually, it's one thing, and it's one thing to be optimized and to suit and to match a customer need and all those kind of things.

So that was the nebulous of where it started, the nucleus of it. And then as I progressed in my career through that product delivery, those frameworks, I just got more and more in tune with the dis-emerging practice, especially in the UK. I think the US had been ahead of us in that regard. But very much for myself, I started to do my reading, started to research this more, and actually how can you apply this product-centric delivery model to companies? And then I moved on to the AA, into insurance, and all that kind of thing, and was really testing and learning on a small scale. So getting permission to be able to basically fund very small scale project to product experiments, basically, and being successful in it.

02:10

Joining the AA, I guess looking back, must have been such a big moment because you then become the head of digital customer experience.

02:18

Yes.

02:19

How did you get that job in the first place and what was the process like?

02:27

Yeah, so I joined them as a UX content designer. So this was from B&Q then, that were developing content, was part of content strategy was the big thing then as well. Developing that internally, then taking those learnings on to the AA. So I entered at that level and over time just developed understanding of the insurance model, obviously coming from retail, which is a completely new set of needs and constraints and all those other things. Going in there and then just understanding actually there's a gap here whereby we're taking orders from the business to deliver stuff, and I don't think that actually what we're delivering is really meeting the need, right? They're quite short term-ist and it's quite expensive to just be feeling in the dark all the time and doing updates and app updates and deploying. And this is all very expensive without having more data to determine if it's going to be a success or not.

So over a few years I worked on all the commercial and transactional projects, really trying to refine that conversation with our stakeholders and saying, "Look, we need to get a bit more solid on customer needs and we need to get a bit more research and data in to what we're proposing. Get a bit smarter in terms of maybe testing and everything where we should go." And over those years I was able to gain trust. "This guy knows what he's talking about." We don't necessarily, but we want to learn more and we want to build on this. And that meant me landing then in a number of internal roles, just building out this function, which ended up being the customer experience function.

03:55

Why did you decide to become the head of digital at UK Power Networks?

04:02

So from there, there was a few things. As part of that digital transformation for the AA, we delivered some technology that was quite competitive. It was the CMS underpinning technology, it was quite interesting at the time. That was a fundamental part of the transformation that UK Power Networks wanted to do. So that context was clear, and it was exciting to be able to do that again. But also their challenges were very different. I like to continue learning, so I went from retail to insurance and financial services, then this was like utilities. And the challenge with utilities was that actually you have to prove your customer experience is great and that your customers are happy, or you don't get any money. And that works through Ofgem basically reimbursing the company through its incentive model.

So UK Power Networks, if you can prove to us you're providing a 9 out of 10 experience, you'll get X amount of millions in revenue from us through that. So that was quite interesting about actually putting the money where your mouth is and saying, "Actually, we are going to drive the best customer experience we possibly can do." So there was a couple of elements there. It was the technical context was similar and familiar, and I think I could drive the same value, but then also being directly responsible for a substantial amount of revenue based on customer experience was also quite compelling.

05:18

And at the time there's a certain amount of due diligence that sounds like is absolutely necessary to do at a slightly larger company to really understand what direction they're going in. And in some ways, I guess that's a luxury of a slightly larger company that does publish that information externally, and you should make use of it. How do you do your due diligence on an individual level? How do you get to deeply understand the team that you're joining and the impact that that team makes in the wider context of the company?

05:52

Yeah, so it comes down to the conversation, in my experience, right? I know when I'm talking to someone, I'm looking them in the eyes, be it virtually or in person, and asking them questions about their team. And if you get vague answers, I mean, I suppose it depends on the seniority and what level you're asking at and the levels in between, but if you're getting vague answers and platitudes, then that starts to tell me, actually, you're not really engaged on what happens at the level I'm asking at. And it starts to send me the wrong signals. How on point they are, and when they talk about their team, if they're of leadership and management level, there are things in place that they would've put in to make sure that team is functional and performing, and therefore they should be able to talk about those quite compellingly. Because it's a heart and minds thing, if it's not compelling, it's not going to hit either one of those. And I think that it's the dynamics of that interaction which you start to feel out, actually, what the team's like, what the culture's going to be like, what are the things that matter on a personal and a business level? It's all of that. It's very sensory. It's not something that's quite textbook, I think you have to feel it out.

07:07

When you are trying to figure out where to work, what data do you draw upon to make that call?

07:15

So, yeah, I do my research with the company. I'll look at the roles that they're advertising. So if it's just the role that I'm interested in, that's a bit more difficult, but if there's a number of roles, you can start to sense, that actually, what functions are they building? What disciplines and capabilities are they trying to build? Those kind of things. Because then, as a product delivery person, I can start saying, "Well, actually, if you're hiring a load of senior devs, that means then actually there's a capability that's very new and able to be shaped. And therefore actually that could be quite compelling for me because I can shape that myself and we can work as a team and we can build that together." If there's not so much of that, then you've said, actually, you've got to spend, there's going to be a lot more time getting those working agreements and practices and that stuff. So look at other roles that they're advertising. I would look at those business statements that they make.

What other data points would I use? Obviously the ones that we talked about in terms of the sense, how the conversations go and the dynamics of those conversations is another one, and a very important one. And then I suppose if it's a business of which is delivering products and online experience and all that kind of thing, get familiar with it, and then try and equate yourself, obviously, with the product and the experience that they own, that they're selling. Try to understand what could be the problems with this, try to understand how would this role drive that or improve that or whatever. Those are the key ones, I would say.

08:46

Like you said, this is the, looking back, one of the... you've gone through this experience at the AA, which is one of the best experiences of your life, making the decision to do something new, it's so huge, how did you even start that process of figuring out what you wanted to do after such a personal transformation?

09:07

I think it was a few things. So being able to learn. Learning is a big driver for me. So to be able to constantly challenge and learn new things, challenge myself, learn new things through that. I've gone from a developer to learning about UX and design and kind of product design and then onto more technical infrastructure related things that products then leverage. And in the opportunity, I was trying to identify actually I think I could learn quite a lot from doing this. And I think there's a strong purpose behind what UK Power Networks do, they're a utility, they look after a substantial amount of customers in the south. An they've got a very quite compelling purpose to provide upmost customer service and look after vulnerable customers and make sure that customer supplies are as uninterrupted for as long as possible, those kind of things. So it was all of those things in one, that then yeah, actually this feels like a good footing. It was quite a good, and I had a few conversations with the then CIO, who was a very smart chap, who, again, that turned me on as well, it was his focus and his purpose that inspired me to say, actually, this could be quite an interesting role.

10:31

Other than learning, what other things do you take into account when you are deciding where to work?

10:40

So having been in delivery for 15 years now, always delivering stuff, and hopefully stuff that will make tangible impact to people's lives, a noble statement as that may be, but purposely, that was what fuels me. We can all deliver stuff, we can all make stuff live, we can all push it out, but actually aligning that to having a company that aligns those outcomes to its strategy and to be able to articulate actually as part of this role, you'll have a fundamental part in reaching outcomes that we need to make as a business or our customers need to make. That's a big part of it. I've been in projects through my career where it's was just like, there's been no tangible end to it. There's been no return. We've just done it. And I think actually having a stronger line of sight through to actually this is the outcome that we want to achieve as a business and this is how you can feed into that.

11:28

How do you figure that out in an interview process? How do you know that the company's outcomes are-

11:32

Research.

11:33

... Okay.

11:34

Yeah. So, I mean, hopefully the company has some papers, some either [inaudible 00:11:39] or investor papers, you can see where they're trying to go.

11:41

Do you ask for those?

11:42

You start to feel like their purpose. For the businesses I've worked with, they're quite big. So I think a lot of them, they have shareholders, they all publish these reports annually, or every six months, and you can read. And that's what I did with the AA and this is what I did with UK Power Networks. You read through those business plans and through those stakeholder engagement [crosstalk 00:12:03] and things that they have.

12:03

Where do you find them?

12:05

Online mostly. A lot of them will have them on their corporate websites and things like that. Not the transactional commercial ones necessarily, but you'll always find the investor ones. And just try and read up about directionally, where those companies are going and try and understand that segment. If you're brand new to, you're going to be feeling your way through it. It's going to be a lot harder. But I think if you've experienced a sector, then you'll know roughly, what the guardrails are and what the levers are. And then it's seeing how the company's going to go through that. Yeah. I think start there and then, I don't know, just being an active learner and just go... social media or whatever you can read up about, just try and find it out. I think if you go into it too blind, it's not going to be as useful to you.

12:57

I'd love to know more about the move that you made then to legal in general and how that came about and how you made that call?

13:08

Yeah. So UK Power Networks, it was a building of function, it was a function that didn't exist before in terms of that digital capability. So that's what drove me to that role, as I explained before. With legal in general, it was the flip of the coin, right? It was a much bigger investment in product delivery that they were making. They were delivering a new platform, which was transformational for them at the time, they had a lot of legacy tech. This new platform was going to be leveraged to start cutting that legacy away. But a core part of the role was also building the function. So it's like five product teams that needed to be recruited and managed. And so that was, and again, it was a new challenge, new sector... well, I suppose, financial services, it was vaguely familiar, but actually in terms of investment, it was completely different kettle of fish. You're talking about stocks and shares, and buying and selling. That was a lot of different dynamics that, again, was unknown to me, but an interesting challenge.

So through a number of conversations I had with legal in general and the leadership that I had with legal in general, I was confident that actually they're building out the right kind of practices, I wanted to get more hands on with the technology. So in terms of the practices, actually through a lot of the technical conversations, I've got a real good feel for that, what platforms they were choosing, what vendors they were choosing, what technology parts and things they were going down on.

But then I also started asking them, "Well, what's the mission? What's the what's thing here?" Because again, I don't want to just deliver for delivery's sake, what was it that we're doing? And they had quite a strong view on legal in general as to what their purpose is. They have a very strong social vision about being inclusive and they have quite strong behavior statements around being purposeful and straightforward and responsive. And I gleaned all that from the conversations I had and that started formulating my mind, well, you need to grow in terms of technology and product. You've got quite a good emergent culture there with some strong values. Yes, it's a hundred you old business, but it's quite an interesting challenge to transform that into something more modern. In summary of all of that, I was like, yeah, I think that's the move for me.

15:21

What does it mean to you to do your best work?

15:28

So I get quite a lot of personal purpose out of work. And I like to work hard, play hard. It's an old cliche, but it's true. I get a lot of a personal benefit from doing a hard day's work that's purposeful and really trying to drive change, that's what I get out of it.

15:48

Where do you get that purpose from? Because it comes, I think from different places for different people.

15:55

Yeah. Yeah. So my purpose is, as I say, it's about me being able to be productive. So if I'm able to be productive and improve things for the business, for the customers that we have, I get a lot of personal satisfaction from that. I get a lot of personal satisfaction from the interactions with my colleagues. My peers, but also reports in where you can feel like we're improving together, improving understanding of things. That's where I get my personal fulfillment from and purpose. You can get purpose at a company level as well, whereby some companies are quite strong on setting purpose and an agenda around purpose and making sure that the work and the culture is tantamount to that. So I think it needs to start from within, but I think it always helps if a company can help really define what the company's purpose is to help you then slot into it, if that makes sense.

16:49

How does your definition of best work inform how you find it?

16:58

Yeah, so I mean, it helps me hopefully challenge. And I think challenge with colleagues and everything else is very important. So being able to very respectfully challenge each other to do the best work that you possibly can needs to happen. You need a quite transparent and non hierarchical working environment for that to happen. So that's-

17:18

So you look for transparency almost during that process to make sure that it's there?

17:23

... Absolutely. And it goes way back to those scrum and agile delivery days where those are formative principles of those very much, you need to be transparent and data needs to be... decisions need to be empirical and all those kind of things. They're nonnegotiable. You need to be able to challenge each other on doing the best work possible, not just all falling in line with the party line or whatever that may be, or the strongest person's opinion. Yeah. You need to have that space.

17:50

It's a really interesting thought that you could take the principle behind agile and scrum, and you could bake that into your search as those key fundamental pillars. So when you're deciding which companies to even interview for, you almost benchmark that company against those core principles.

18:13

Yeah, absolutely. When I go in there, the first questions I ask is what are your challenge? What are your challenges? What are you facing? And we need to have a quite transparent conversation as to if I'm to do the best work possible for you, I need to understand what challenges... because I might not be the right person for the job, and you need to go into that conversation knowing that as well. You might do your research, all signs point to this is a great company to work for. You listen to the challenge and you go, oh, I don't think that's for me. Or I don't think you'll get the best out of me if I go for this. So transparency's got to be up there.

18:47

It must be even trickier finding that kind of transparency on the projects that you'd be working in if the company is larger, how do you go about almost piercing open that conversation so you can get to the heart of what you would be working on when the companies are that bit bigger.

19:07

Yeah. So a lot of my role is, so to put quite a non-attractive term around it, it's fight to cover up for teams. You're working in a big business, there's a lot of noise that can be generated internally within the business and our experiences throughout my career, both in terms of a developer and then as a stakeholder and [inaudible 00:19:26].

19:29

When you look back on all of the decisions that you've made to find work throughout your career, are there any moments that you regret making that you... perhaps moments where you wish you'd done more due diligence or where you missed out on something?

19:55

Yeah, I think at the AA, I think we had a lot more to do. I think we could go deeper into that business, as head of that experience function, I think we could have gone deeper into that business. We'd solved the simple front end aspects of the experience if you like, but then when you point to the business logic and you point to those underlying layers, with experience hat on, you can redefine those things to be a lot more modern, a lot more modular and then accessible, if you like, from a systems, process and people point of view,

20:24

How do you decide when the right moment is when the opportunity cost becomes greater than the opportunity in front of you?

20:32

Yeah. I think for me, it's when I look back and I say, "Am I still learning?" Even through the tough times, right, and I've been through some tough times. Right? And you have to show resilience through these things, especially in a head of position where you're looking after multimillion budgets and all that kind of stuff. Resilience is a key factor of it. But throughout those difficult times, you need to, am I still learning from this? Am I still able to positively influence? Am I still able to make impact? You should have at least tried, and tried for a good long time to try and get those conversations open to get that [crosstalk 00:21:11].

21:10

How long is a long time?

21:12

Yeah. I mean, it depends on the business, right? So for the AA, it was a year of proposals and pitching things and it's just not landing. I mean, there were other organizational things happening at the time, which are to boring to go into now. But just wasn't landing. And I think, for UK Power Networks, it was a lot shorter amount of time because I've been here before, I was like, "I know exactly what's happening."

21:36

Interesting. So you knew from the AA, how? Okay.

21:41

Yeah. Yeah. I was plugged into the C table and you understand the dynamics at the table, and then once you understand those and you're trying to pitch these things in, from that feedback, you can start understanding actually what's the game plan here. And then make those informed decisions again, whether you move on or you stick it out or try a new tact or whatever.

22:02

And what advice would you go back and give yourself? Specifically when it came to finding work, in those moments, would you go back... what would you say to yourself in those moments that you know now?

22:20

So I'd be a lot more, I think... I've definitely, at the start of my career, just farmed out CVs here or CVs there. And I think I'd probably not waste so much time and actually listen to the feedback and then be a lot more targeted in your approach. Understand what it is that actually you want to get out of your next opportunity, have that solid in your mind. And it could be more money, which for a lot of people it is. But actually, what, in terms of experience, could you look to get out of your next potential role? Go into that with eyes wide open and really... grass isn't always greener, so really scrutinized the point that actually are you done here where you currently are and it's time for a move? I'll think about that.

I would ask advice more as well. So through your career, build up some contacts that you are happy to talk to outside of the confines of your current work. Just even if it's just a message, a social message or whatever, just say, "Hey, how's it going? I'm thinking about making a change. It's for this, what do you think?" Those people know you, they might spot something in you that you... as a blind spot for yourself. And actually, through that, I've got a number of contractors who are 10 or so years older than me who are my sounding board for this kind of stuff. But they are seasoned program directors and they've been in all the big businesses and some small ones as well. And if I'm thinking about an idea or I've got a recruiting challenge, or I want to move on, I've used that network to then say, "Well, what do you think about this? Or what do you think about that?" And it's been useful feedback. So I think I would've done a bit more of that when I was younger.

24:04

It's been fact hearing about your process to deeply understand the slightly larger companies that you've ended up working in. And I've loved going through it. Thank you so much taking the time out, Kristian.