'Successful CIOs are product leaders', says FT CPIO
Cait O'Riordan, chief product and information officer at the Financial Times, explains that every business is dependent on technology to deliver growth, and successful IT leaders understand product strategy and focus their efforts there
Modern, successful CIOs focus on product strategy, and creating new products to deliver growth.
That's the opinion of Cait O'Riordan, Chief Product and Information Officer (CPIO) at the Financial Times, speaking exclusively to Computing recently.
O'Riordan joined the FT in 2016, having previously worked as VP of Product at music discovery service Shazam, where she built its product team in London "focusing on products and services to deliver growth in an already high-growth business," as she describes.
"I see my role at the FT as making sure we have the right strategy to deliver the growth the FT needs to be a profitable media company in 2019 and beyond," O'Riordan adds, which she contrasts with more traditional CIOs who are more focused on ensuring their organisations employ the right security, networking, SaaS platforms and other systems.
Whilst she admits that these conventional tasks are still important, she argues that successful modern technology leaders are more focused on product.
"Really successful CIOs are product leaders who work with board colleagues to ensure the business has the right product strategy to deliver growth. As we're all technology companies in 2019, every business has a huge dependency on technology deliver growth. So successful CIOs understand products and place their focus there.
"I ask other technology leaders where their responsibility begins and ends. Wherever you put a divide, it creates a barrier and you end up with a technology leader who spends time negotiating. That's fine, but I'd rather focus my effort focusing on how best to balance ensuring our existing products and services are in the best possible shape, versus how I deliver growth.
"If you have single person responsible for all of that, which is my role at the FT, then the accountability is very clear. I'm not sharing the responsibility with someone else or blaming someone else, it starts and ends with me.
"It's a big responsibility, but I'd rather have a conversation with the board where I represent how I think we can deliver growth, whilst being clear on how we invest in existing products, rather than leaving it to them, as they're not best placed to make those recommendations, I am. So it's about not having to mediate between others who see that as their role."
She describes the question of how to deliver growth as the biggest challenge facing CIOs today.
"Any good IT leader will be thinking about how to deliver growth, or how to tread the fine line between supporting existing services and delivering growth. I was excited to join the FT in 2016 because it has a clear understanding of what near-term metrics it needs to move in order to be successful.
"We are a media publishing business, but we're also a digital subscriptions business. In that way we're no different from Netflix or Spotify. The FT is really good at delivering year on year double digit growth to the content business, and acquiring and retaining subscriptions.
"If you're running a subscriptions business, if you're not measuring engagement levels when it comes to renewals, and if your subscribers see no value, they'll unsubscribe. The FT, through a strong data science department, understands what metrics we need to drive to reduce that churn. If we can encourage people to get value from us they'll continue to subscribe.
"And if the product leader is in that business, you have a chance of success. If my product team knows that increasing engaged readers will increase the bottom line, and we can measure that and see the relationship between building products and services and engagement, then there's a strong chance of delivering that growth.
"So the biggest challenge most businesses have is not understanding that relationship between products and services and growth."