2 mins on... Tech Leaders
What does a brand lack when it doesn't have a tech leader?
ICYMI: This is a series of posts focused on building the best leadership teams inside of brands, check out the rest here.
For those who are new to Commerce Thinking and don’t know me, my name’s Luke Hodgson and I’m a tech leader for new luxury brands (and the creator of this newsletter!).
Inspired by my time helping brands like Stussy, LFDY, Gymshark, Toteme, Little Sleepies and many others build out their tech operations, I’m going to unpack what good looks like in Tech…
I’ve answered four simple but powerful questions to help brands without a dedicated tech leader understand what they’re missing and decide if or when they need to fill the gap:
What does a brand lack when it doesn’t have an experienced or capable tech leader?
What are the key accountabilities for a tech leader?
What are their primary and secondary KPIs?
What experience and skills does a tech leader need to be successful in a new luxury brand?
What does a brand lack when it doesn’t have an experienced or capable tech leader?
The ability for talented people to do their jobs effectively, a.k.a. operational efficiency. Without a tech leader driving constant improvements, operators in literally every department will face an (avoidable) uphill battle every single day.
Most will feel hopeless (“things will never change”) and stuck in a Sisyphean loop of spreadsheets, missing data, and just in time operations. Sustain this for too long and your business is, sooner or later, f**ked.
Simple truth: Brands need systems to scale because their operations are inherently complex and without technology a modern brand simply won’t be able to run.
Meaning at different stages of growth, brands need the right people, process and tools to continue scaling. Without a tech leader most brands mess this up - they choose the wrong systems, design their processes poorly, and fail to deliver projects despite spending tons of money on third party vendors & agencies.
Budget and control of tech spend. Tech costs money, sometimes the implementation and license fees associated with systems are big, and the time to ROI is long. All of this needs to be properly communicated and understand within the business. Senior leaders need to be aligned to the business case, committing the necessary levels of investment, and then your tech leader needs to be s**t-hot at procuring at the best possible terms.
The success of a tech leader revolves heavily around delivering the changes they commit to with other leaders in a brand, and doing this within deadlines and budget. Good tech leaders should be in a state of delivering small to very large improvements across the organisation. If you haven’t got one, you’re missing out on this force for change and problem solving.
What are the key accountabilities for a tech leader?
Make sure things work. A tech leader is, above everything else, there to support the operation. Which means making things work securely with minimal errors or downtime.
Strategic Execution. Align the business on a clear, understood tech strategy in collaboration with other senior stakeholders, and build the team to execute it. Across all back-office functions.
Enable and remove barriers to growth. Be the most proactive problem solver within the business. To identify, define and drive operational efficiency, while managing prioritisation of changes, budgets and business expectations.
What are their primary and secondary KPIs?
Primary KPIs:
Ability to handle peak sales volumes - e.g. Orders processed per second/minute through the stack
Tech benefits realisation - i.e. Were planned benefits realised on time and in budget
System uptime/availability both as % and loss of earnings
Tech spend in relation to profitability, growth, budget
Accuracy of systems and reporting, particularly in relation to stock, sales purchases and movements - e.g. Amount of monthly manual accounting adjustments
Time to market for new features - e.g. Time to launch a new, integrated Shopify expansion store
Secondary KPIs:
Team satisfaction score - i.e. How happy is their team? How satisfied / confident are cross-functional stakeholders
Security and resilience score, likely supported by external independent supplier
Tech vendor adherence to SLAs
It’s also important to clarify what Tech isn’t, and often the lines between Tech and Digital KPIs are blurred. The screenshot below provides a very reductive summary of the differences to articulate the point:
What experience and skills does a tech leader need to be successful in a new luxury brand?
Context experience. For many new luxury brands the biggest pressure on their operation is the ability to handle huge spikes in sales at peak (e.g. BFCM, product drops etc). It is a no-brainer that if you’re a brand doing >100k orders in under 24 hours, for instance, that you hire a tech leader who has experienced and solved for this before. Similarly, if you are growing DTC, wholesale, and physical retail that your tech leader understands how to build, resource and deliver tech suited to the different demands across channels.
Balance. Proven at balancing in the weeds attention to detail with the strategic vision and communication skills to drive a business forward. Traditionally, techies have a reputation for being poor communicators, stubborn, and non-commercial - there is no smoke without fire - but the best pair deep technical skills with the softer skills required to lead a team and business forward.
Culture. The vast majority of new luxury brands are scrappy af. A tech leader needs to get a kick out of being in the trenches, and a genuine thrill from the challenges thrown at them from across the business.
Deep, hyper-relevant tech stack knowledge. Has learned the (hard) lessons and knows what good tech looks like across the entire operation. They have to be hot on things like PLM, ERP, WMS/3PL, CX, Integration, Ecommerce back-ends, No-code tools, AWS/GCP/Azure infrastructure, Data Warehousing, ETL, BI and more.