GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech From Hardware Hacker to CTO: Building Teams That Scale • Meri Williams & Charles Humble
Nov 14, 2025
Meri Williams, an accomplished CTO and technology leader at Pleo, shares her transformative journey from hardware hacker to executive. She discusses essential leadership qualities and the importance of matching team members' strengths with their roles. Meri emphasizes the necessity of effective onboarding to enhance productivity and the pitfalls of blindly emulating big tech practices. With a focus on diversity and inclusion, she highlights how representation drives product quality, making for an enlightening conversation on navigating tech leadership.
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From Hardware Hacker To Computer Scientist
- Meri Williams built her first computer from broken parts and worked on South Africa's first satellite as a child.
- That hardware-hacker start led her to study computer science and stay in the UK after meeting her wife at university.
Learn Management Before You Lead
- If you must move into management, seek books and research to learn how to do it well and avoid becoming a bad manager.
- Meri emphasises preparing for the impact you will have on people's lives before accepting managerial responsibility.
Use Proven Frameworks For Team Health
- Use Peopleware, First, Break All The Rules and Drive to shape team environments around purpose, autonomy and mastery.
- Add inclusion to that recipe to create conditions where great work can happen.
