A little story about a property business using tech to scale-up

It’s always interesting to learn how companies plan to improve their customer experience and operational efficiency.

From IT manager to CTO

We spoke to the CTO of a fast growing Yorkshire property development company yesterday. A few months back he was working as an IT manager and was then promoted to a CTO role. His mission is to find and deliver tech that will allow the business to operate faster and more efficiently, giving a better customer experience and enabling scale up.

Looking for customer pain points

It’s pretty cool that his starting point is going around the business looking for pain points in every department. You might not have heard of Design Thinking, but it’s a great way of approaching transformation projects. Design Thinking suggests that finding customer and staff pain points is a great place to start.

At the same time as finding pain points, the CTO is getting out to conferences and potential partners to learn about the latest software technologies. This is throwing fuel on the fire for idea generation.

All this stimulates conversation and thinking, which is helping him get buy-in and input from many people in the business, which is key to any transformation project.

Leadership, scale-up and NPS

By putting someone in this role, it’s clear the business leaders have a strong commitment to using tech to raise the bar. And they’re not even technical people. They just know that the pay-off will be a much smoother customer experience, which will help them maintain their awesome NPS (Net Promoter Score), which in turn will allow them to scale up the business without seeing a drop in their customer satisfaction.

Cool stuff.

What happens next?

It will be interesting to see their journey unfold. Within months, the CTO will draw up a roadmap of pain points and possible solutions, and then the business will have to decide what it commits to.

It’s good practice to start with low hanging fruit that yields a high ROI, and this is exactly what they are doing. In fact, the first initiatives will probably be “easy” to implement.

Technically, this means they won’t have to go through the pain of replacing existing systems or doing expensive integrations with 3rd parties. Momentum is often more important than perfection when it comes to using tech to improve the status quo. At least, that’s what Lean and Agile teach us.

What about you?

If you’re a Yorkshire business on a mission to use tech to raise the bar and would like someone to bounce ideas off, give me a shout.

It’s fun talking about this stuff. And swapping stories about what we see out there in the real world.

Day to day I’m the MD of https://pocketworks.co.uk – a mobile apps company that help businesses do things better. Beyond that, I’m still a keen tech enthusiast who still gets involved with software architecture, human-centred design, agile delivery. Some days, I still experiment with code for mobile apps and web solutions. Like to keep a finger on the tech pulse 🙂