Leona Pais

“Leona operates with a quiet determination that turns complexity into clarity”

Part of the Tech Women Celebration 50 – a curated list of some of the most inspirational women working at all levels of tech

Leona Pais is a Data and Advanced Analytics Leader with 15 years of experience driving insight and value across diverse industries, spanning Retail, e-commerce, Finance, CRM, and Web Analytics. She has a strong track record of transforming data ecosystems into modern, scalable platforms, moving organisations from legacy environments to cloud-based solutions that make businesses truly data-ready and positioned to leverage data as a strategic asset.

Tell us about the nominee's biggest achievement to date

Before Leona came into TFG London, the brands operated without a data infrastructure - each brand reporting in isolation, insights buried in static spreadsheets, and no single source of truth to drive decisions at pace. Leona set out to change that.

As the driving force behind the modern data platform, she led the design and delivery of TFG London's first cloud-based Modern Data Platform - built on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. she delivered a fully consolidated Sales and Product dashboard bringing Phase Eight, Hobbs, and Whistles into a single, live reporting environment for the first time in the company's history.

What makes this achievement significant is not just the technology - it is the cultural shift it represents. Business users who relied on manual Excel processes now have real-time, self-serve analytics at their fingertips. Decisions that once required days of data preparation now happen in minutes. Phase 2 is already underway, extending the platform into inventory, forecasting, and other systems.

What is the most significant challenge the nominee has overcome?

One of the most complex challenges in delivering Project Altitude was not technical, it was human. Across TFG London's brands and functions, the same metrics were being calculated differently, named differently, and interpreted differently. There was no shared language for performance.

Leona tackled this head-on by designing and leading a series of cross-functional KPI alignment workshops, bringing together senior stakeholders from Commercial, Buying, Merchandising, Customer Care, and Finance. Rather than imposing definitions from above, she created a structured collaborative process, facilitating open debate about what each metric meant, why it mattered, and how it should be calculated consistently across the business.

The workshops surfaced long-standing misalignments that had quietly distorted reporting for years. Through careful facilitation and a willingness to challenge established assumptions, she guided teams to a single agreed set of definitions, documented in a Business KPI Glossary now embedded directly within the platform itself.

The result was transformational. Not only did it ensure the data platform was built on solid, trusted foundations, but it created genuine cross-functional alignment and shared ownership of performance data, something no technology alone could have delivered. The workshops turned a potential blocker into one of the programme's greatest strengths.

Tell us something about the nominee people would find surprising

What is most surprising about Leona is not any single skill, it is the extraordinary breadth with which she operates, and the seamlessness with which she moves between worlds that most professionals never inhabit simultaneously.

She is architecting an enterprise-grade cloud data platform on Microsoft Fabric, writing DAX and PySpark, and designing semantic models, work that would typically belong to a team of specialist engineers. Yet in the same week, she is in the boardroom negotiating supplier contracts, managing vendor relationships, and holding external partners accountable to their deliverables.

She designed and led cross-functional KPI alignment workshops with Commercial, Buying, Merchandising, Finance, - not as a facilitator brought in from outside, but as the person who identified the problem, created the solution, and drove it to resolution. She built the business case, defined the roadmap, recruited for her own team, and is now delivering a platform that has never existed in the organisation before.

Most people at this level are strong in one or two of these areas. Leona operates across all of them, largely independently, and with a quiet determination that turns complexity into clarity.