Venturi's Voice: Technology | Leadership | Staffing | Career | Innovation

Phaedra Marshall is Vice President of Technology at Critical Mass, a digital experience design agency with a particular focus on the customer. For more than two decades, Critical Mass has been designing meaningful customer experiences in the digital space that transform clients’ businesses through interactions that are convenient, useful, simple, and entertaining. Their expertise spans Strategy Consulting, Experience Design, Marketing Communications, Implementation, and Marketing Science, and has been recognized as a leader in digital experience design with agency rankings from Advertising Age, Warc 100 and Gartner, among others. With over 17 years of experience in developing software, architecting solutions, and managing technical projects, Phaedra is a subject matter expert in speaking engagements, industry events, and thought leadership ideas and publications. We discussed how technology and creative people collaborate and how to lead them effectively.

Pete Reis-Campbell is the CEO and Founder of the award-winning Kaizen. He has worked with global brands including River Island, Symantec and 888.com on innovative content marketing campaigns. He built his first website at 11, pretends to not be totally addicted to video games, and is a regular speaker at digital marketing conferences including SMX, BrightonSEO and SASCon. Kaizen's work for TotallyMoney.com won a 2016 Drum Content Award for the best financial content marketing campaign and Pete previously won a Travolution award for his SEO strategies for travel brands. Kaizen was also named one of the Top 50 UK Startups by Startups.co.uk in 2017. 1:00 - Where Kaizen fits into the growth marketing space 1:40 - Pete's career journey, building websites for fun at age 11 2:40- The transition from £0 investment to £1.5mil revenue at Kaizen 4:40 - Responding to problems when building a business 8:38 - The motivation for starting the business 10:06 - How Pete has created a successful working culture at Kaizen 13:02 - Pete's life in the early stages of the business as a solo agency owner 19:00 - How to let people go from a business respectfully 24:29 - Establishing trust with clients 26:30 - Cybercrime targeting the business, and how to avoid it 33:20 - The pressures of being a solo agency owner 36:30 - Valuable advice from Pete to grow your business

Andy sits down with Daljeet, Compass’ Director of Engineering. On the show, the pair discuss transitioning from a hands-on role to engineering management, diversity in India and more. Daljeet has several years of experience providing Technical Architect Solutions for Business Applications (J2EE Applications) which includes designing, development, building Frameworks. With extensive experience leading Development teams across geographic locations and delivering high-quality code. Also representing Dev Teams while working with product owners, clients, stakeholders and vendors on regular basis.

Emily Dresner is Chief Technology Officer at Upside Business Travel. Emily has built and scaled a department initially of 5 engineers to a team of 60 across 11 teams including multiple product development teams, a machine learning/AI team, DevOps, data engineering, security, infrastructure and quality engineering. Upside Business Travel is revolutionizing travel management for small to mid-sized companies. We hear about how Upside is in place to react and adapt to the current pandemic that has affected the logistics of the travel industry greatly. Showtimes 0:50 - The service Upside Business Travel Provides 1:49 - Emily's role as Chief Technology Officer and career background 4:26 - How Upside is recovering and rebounding from the pandemic 5:38 - How the pandemic has created permanent change in the travel industry 7:00 - How Upside has adapted to 100% remote working and the tech used to make this a smooth transition 9:48 - Remotely recruiting and taking on new staff 10:55 - An overview of the products under Upside 12:51 - Supporting multiple products 13:59 - Where Emily finds inspiration when taking on new challenges

Brad Woodward is the Business Intelligence Manager at Superdry. As one of the biggest fashion brands on the planet, we spoke about the data that Brad and the team work with at Superdry and how to navigate around the sheer quantity of it.  We also spoke about how data is helping not only the eCommerce shop but also the brick & mortar experience too. These two areas of the business now cross-pollinate as they are now more able to collect important data from the physical store, and they get the most out of that information to create a seamless experience. “Even going back as shortly as a few years ago, they were two separate entities. The way that things are going now it really important, It needs to be a seamless experience. Data has a really important part to play in that”  Showtimes  0:56 - What Superdry is, and Brad’s role within the business 2:25 - Do you treat a physical store and eCommerce as two totally separate entities?  4:00 - Gathering data from in-store purchases 5:10 - The types of data Brad manages at Superdry  7:00 - How the pandemic has affected what people purchase from Superdry  9:30 - Are all decisions at Superdry driven by data? 14:30 - Is there a skill to finding the best answer in data? 22:00 - The balancing act of being a manager 23:00 - How lockdown has affected the tech team at Superdry  27:30 - Wildcard question

Richard Hiscutt is Head of Product at edtech startup Lingumi, helping to bring the world’s best teaching experience to every child’s home. Previously, Richard founded the digital agency Fantastic Thinking and sold it to The Engine Group in 2011, and was the one who made sure they created amazing looking experiences for clients such as Evian, The Times, Laya Healthcare and Rolls-Royce, as well as testing, researching and sharing insights and innovative thoughts and techniques to the rest of the company. Richard's mission with Lingumi is to make learning English effective, affordable, and fun for the next 500 million children before they reach their first classroom. At an incredibly exciting time at Lingumi, we hear how the app is prepared to scale to deliver great learning outcomes to a mass of users.

Martin Permantier is an entrepreneur, author and keynote speaker. He has been accompanying companies in their strategic alignment and positioning for over 20 years. His experience as an entrepreneur and managing director of SHORT CUTS GmbH design + communication, which today has around 40 employees, is the basis for his pragmatic approach and implementation competence.  In his new book "Attitude Decides" Martin shows how we can shape the development of leadership and corporate culture in such a way that we will continue to operate successfully tomorrow. Based on the knowledge of modern developmental psychology, he has developed a vivid and practical model.  We discuss leadership it’s different forms, and how leadership has changed and developed over time. The future of business and leadership is changing, in recent times office culture and mindsets have collectively changed, and working remotely has become normality. But how has this affected the way we lead in business?

Philip Miller is a Senior Architect, Analyst and Engineer with over 20 years' experience in the Financial Services industry, focusing on creating elegant solutions to tough problems. Philip has specialised in high-performance computing, massively parallel computing, complex event processing and system integration. Recently at the leading edge of real-time regulatory compliance for Dodd-Frank and other real-time regulations. Philip has worked on some of the biggest, most complex challenges in modern banking, and is now the Co-Founder and Director of Solidatus.

Valentin Vincendon is the Vice President of Business Intelligence at Checkout.com Valentin’s career and outlook on success are truly inspiring, we hear the principles, habits, and mental models that helped Valentin reach his goals in the past 15 years. After following a career path around the globe, we discuss how to step outside your comfort zone and embrace different working cultures around the world, and the importance of being prepared to act on decisions quickly to further your career and not stagnate.

Ross Bray leads Alps Education's Software Development and Data teams and is responsible for the Product Roadmap. We discuss the challenges of showing young minds the value of technology in our everyday lives, to inspire them to take an interest in seeing tech as a viable career option.