Amee is CEO of Stello AI, an AI-fueled compensation platform that drives savings and increases retention for progressive organizations.
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Over the past decade, I have had the privilege of leading teams at a few of the world's fastest-growing technology companies like Uber, Expedia and IBM. I have noticed how expectations around leaders managing teams have changed drastically.
The Risk Of Disruption
Today’s tech company leaders face a very different challenge than their predecessors. Just from a business model perspective, today’s technology companies, even the most innovative ones, face the risk of getting disrupted overnight.
What is causing this?
• New and emerging technologies
• Access to technology and the internet for almost everyone in nearly every corner of the world
• Rise of AI, which is on the verge of automating work that traditionally needed many people and teams to accomplish
• Old operating models that no longer make sense in a world where customers want speed, agility and an on-demand experience.
This has led to technology organizations having very specific needs from their leaders, different from what they needed a decade ago.
Five Key Leadership Areas
In my experience, today’s tech organizations want their leaders to have the following five primary skills:
1. A Strategic Mindset
This is important so you can understand your company’s business model (how the company generates profits and market share) and also the actions of your competitors. This gives you the ability to steer entire teams and products in the right direction.
2. The Ability To Shift Between Strategy And Tactics
The basis for many tech companies’ success is innovation and brilliant execution. Even in large companies, innovation is often done by small teams, with little to no funding but a lot of inspiration and a complex problem to solve. On this type of team, the leader has to roll up their sleeves and be open to managing the work directly, making their own decks and Excel files, running initiatives on accelerated timelines and unblocking when things aren’t moving forward.
They need to have an athlete’s ability to go between two modes: highly strategic, to sell the vision to the world; and tactical, to dive many layers deep and execute the vision.
3. A Deep Understanding Of The Customer
New technologies are fascinating, and what they can accomplish is truly impressive. However, not all of them will help your customer. In fact, what will help your customer may not be a tech solution at all.
A good tech company leader needs to understand the end customer deeply and potentially first solve their problem in a non-scalable way and then figure out how to build technology around it to automate that solution. Truly successful leaders know their customers inside and out—their wants, their desires, their spending capacity—and can envision what technology should do for that customer.
4. Continuous Learning—And Unlearning
Technology companies may have the common thread of tech, but each one is incredibly unique in its own way. Each one has a different reason why it started, a different business model, a different way to sell, different reasons for its success and, as a result, different reasons why its customers buy.
Consequently, if a leader has succeeded in one company, it is unlikely that the same approach will enable them to succeed in another. This is the core reason why each time a leader joins a new tech company, they may need to actively unlearn what they know and learn what will work in the new company.
5. Knowing Your Numbers/Data
Today’s technology companies have a vast spread of metrics that describe the business. As a leader, you need to learn to read these numbers, understand what they mean, identify trends that predict the future, know which ones denote red flags and change direction proactively. Especially in a world where the push for profitability is very real, understanding the numbers and data is an important skill for a leader.
Final Thoughts
It can be both exhilarating and immensely overwhelming to be in a leadership role in a high-tech environment. But for those with the right mindset—those who find thinking through problems deeply inspiring, love the fast pace and enjoy the major impact your company's solution can bring about—being a tech company leader is the ride of a lifetime.
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