Digital:Mastered - Autumn 2018

AUTUMN 2018

digital:mastered INSIGHT AND NEWS FROM THE UP GROUP

THE FIFTH DIGITAL MASTERS AWARDS THE FOUR STEPS TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THE ROLE OF THE PRODUCT FUNCTION IN A MODERN BUSINESS INTERVIEW WITH ZPG’S CHIEF PEOPLE OFFICER FEMTECH: THE RISE OF FEMALE HEALTH INNOVATION DIGITAL MASTERS DINNERS BUPA : TURNING GREAT IDEAS INTO SUCCESSFUL PRODUCTS

The fifth Digital Masters Awards

2-7

Accelerating through Transformation

10-11

The role of the product function in a modern business

12-13

Interview with Matthew Cohan - CPO, ZPG

14-16

FemTech: The rise of female health innovation

18-19

Digital Masters Dinners

20-21

How Bupa turns great ideas into succesful products

22-24

With thanks to our 2018 Digital Masters partners

Get in touch +44 (0) 20 3005 5600 enquiries@theupgroup.com www.theupgroup.com @theupgroup the-up-group

Welcome Hello and welcome to our Autumn 2018 edition of Digital:Mastered, featuring our latest insight and a round-up of what we’ve been up to in the first half of this year.

2018 so far has seen us hit two big milestones; our fifth Digital Masters Awards, and our fifth London Board Dinner (p. 20). We’re thrilled to have seen these events move from strength to strength, and are honoured to be able to host and connect Europe’s top CEOs, NEDs and Investors from companies leveraging the digital ecosystem. We showcase the 2018 Digital Masters Awards winners, which were announced in Summer at the V&A Museum in front of 400 distinguished digital leaders (p. 2-7).

We travelled to Stockholm for our annual Board Dinner in April – attended by 70 of the most influential digital executives and investors from the region (p. 21). Look out for our other international events throughout the year!

Our calendar of Breakfast Roundtables has provided great insight into specific topics; we hosted a group of senior Product leaders (P. 12-13) who discussed how their function evolves with a business, we co-hosted a FemTech roundtable with Silicon Valley Bank and Zinc.vc (p. 18-19), and we learnt from leading CIO’s at a breakfast at The Wolseley which was co-hosted with Transform UK. At The Up Group, we are proud to be in a position to advise companies at different stages on their digital journey. In our cover article, we break down the four ways to speed up digital transformation from the inside out (p. 10-11) We’re looking forward to seeing what our next publication, Spring 2019, has in store!

The fifth Digital Masters Awards In June we hosted the fifth Digital Masters Awards, a night of celebrating the best of European digital talent. The dinner was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum for 400 leading executives, entrepreneurs and investors.

The Digital Masters Awards is a unique opportunity for the functional leaders, as well as investors, NEDs and CEOs, to come together, network and celebrate the individual talent in digital companies.

Attendees heard from Alex Stephany, CEO & Founder of Beam, the world’s first crowdfunding platform helping homeless people train up and get into work. We are thrilled to announce we raised over £10,000 for Beam on the night through our silent auction.

The Digital Masters Awards winners were chosen by a panel of 35 judges, a cross-section of the region’s leading tech investors and advisors, and excellently chaired by Daniel Waterhouse of Balderton Capital.

See the 2018 winners on pages 4-7 digital:mastered • 02

Always in awe of what an amazing event you host.

General Partner, Lakestar

The 2018 Judging panel: Chairman of the Judging Panel Daniel Waterhouse Balderton

Andrei Brasoveanu Accel Simon Calver BGF Ventures Stephen Dando Capital Roisin Donnelly JUST EAT

Nick Hugh Telegraph Media Group

Erin Platts Silicon Valley Bank

Dan Hynes Atomico

Lucian Schoenefelder KKR

Michael Jackson Mangrove Capital Partners

Peter Read Vitruvian Partners

Saul Klein LocalGlobe

Christian Saller Holtzbrinck Ventures

Michiel Kotting Northzone

Joanna Santinon EY

Rakhi Goss-Custard Rightmove plc

Mark Lewis MoneySuperMarket Group plc

Darren Shapland notonthehighstreet .com

Danuta Gray Direct Line

David McGovern Exponent Private Equity

Ciara Smyth Former King & Paddy Power Betfair

Martin Mignot Index Ventures

Sitar Teli Connet Ventures

Andrew Miller Terra Firma Capital Partners

Jane Thompson The Fusion Labs

Tracy DorĂŠe Kindred Capital David Ewing ECI Partners

Gerard Grech Tech Nation David Grigson Reach plc Manu Gupta Lakestar Maurice Helfgott Amery Capital Christian Hernandez-Gallardo White Star Capital

John Pearson Bought By Many David Pemsel Guardian Media Group

Robert Verwaayen Keen Venture Partners

Thank you for a great evening.

The format worked really well, and the venue, food, and company were all fab.

Senior Director, Marketing EMEA, Google digital:mastered • 03

WINNER Excellence in People and Talent Katerina Berg Spotify

CEO, Level 39

WINNER Excellence in Data

Tom Betts Financial Times

WINNER Excellence In Marketing

John Veichmanis Farfetch

WINNER Excellence In Product

Kyle McGinn Workplace by Facebook

digital:mastered • 04

Another excellent awards and dinner! As ever it was a fantastic opportunity to meet up with some familiar and some new people – all stars in their fields and brimming with value.

Amazing to meet so many interesting people, and an event which seems to strike the perfect balance between authority and humour. LJ Rich was an inspired choice of presenter.

Thanks again for a cracking evening at a ridiculously cool venue.

Co-founder, Memrise

Thank you so much for organising such an amazing event. I particularly appreciated the seating plan, which enabled me to make very interesting new acquaintances. Looking forward to next year!

Chief Product Officer & Co-founder, Fixter

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WINNER Excellence in Technology

Dr Caroline Hargrove McLaren Applied Technologies (now Babylon Health)

WINNER Excellence in Commercial Management Melissa Di Donato SAP

WINNER Excellence in Finance

Andy Botha ZPG

WINNER Excellence in General Management Pascal Gauthier Ledger

digital:mastered • 06

Marvelous as always. Great to see so many friends in the room. Such a lovely community you’ve helped build in the space.

UK CEO, HelloFresh

Thanks for a marvelous evening at the V&A. Another triumph for The Up Group.

Founder, Tutorfair

WINNER Excellence In Digital Transformation Patrick Miceli Sky

WINNER Rising Star

Alice Delahunt Ralph Lauren

Thank you to all attendees, and congratulations again to the 2018 winners. We’re looking forward to next year already!

WINNER CEO of the Year

DMA Highlights: bit.ly/DMA-2018 DMA Winners Tech Trends: bit.ly/DMA-Winners-Tech-Trends

Demetra Pinsent Charlotte Tilbury Beauty

digital:mastered • 07

Accelerating through Transformation The steps to becoming digital The challenge

Sponsorship begins at the top

As the economy becomes increasingly digital, we at The Up Group are seeing greater and greater numbers of traditional businesses undergoing transformation, with clients often asking us what can be done to accelerate this.

In talking to transformational leaders, the metaphor of the “snow plough� has come up time and time again; these leaders acting as a vehicle by which a path is cleared through the organisation to allow for change. With this in mind, and starting at the top of the organisation, the Board and executive committee must set the route and speed of this clearance by asking four questions:

The answer is not a simple one, with each organisation having its own set of legacy assets, whether that be culture, technology or talent, that defines its approach to transformation. It goes without saying that these barriers should not be underestimated and each must be considered carefully prior to action.

There are clearly many potential pitfalls on the road of digital transformation, but with planning and a commitment to the steps outlined here, the transition can be accelerated smoothly and successfully.

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Can you identify what success looks like?

How quickly do you want to move towards this?

What is your appetite for risk?

What are the biggest barriers to transformation?

Through answering these questions, leadership can begin to formulate the strong and consistent strategy required for their

Thanks for a marvelous evening last night at the V&A. Another triumph for The Up Group Founder, Tutorfair

respective journey to be successful, allowing for company-wide changes in structure, culture, talent, technology, and investment to filter through to all levels of the organisation.

disruptive companies for inspiration, it is important to be aware that this capability of a pure-play organisation is, in the vast majority of cases, significantly different to that of their own.

The results of this can take a number of different forms, one of these being the appointment of a Digital Director to the Board who can challenge the executive team and review or implement metrics to measure success. Another, and often supplementary, action taken is the formation of an Advisory Board to bring insight into areas where the business is lacking; this approach is in many cases used as a stepping-stone for the introduction of new talent, as well as, the soft adoption of cultures and metrics before more significant transformation begins.

In the previous section, we discussed the importance of change to the leadership team in terms of new appointments, but what is also key here is the introduction of digital talent below the C-suite. In many organisations this is done through the creation of so-called “catalyst roles� designed to speed up the process of innovation, with such titles as Chief Data or Customer Officer.

Following on from these hires, proper succession planning must take place so as to ensure this digital talent is given exposure to the higher workings of the business, thus allowing them to transform from the top when the time comes.

A new approach to talent The hiring of talent and its management are central to the process of change. For traditional businesses looking to

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Bringing innovation from the outside, in Openness to change is often cited as one of the key elements of a sustainable transformation. In any organisation experiencing this, there will always be a tension between incumbent legacy assets that will remain relevant and those which will have to undergo reinvention.

One approach to this is through the adoption of an acceleration or incubation model. Here the business will create a semiautonomous unit or team that adopts the culture of a start-up in order to solve for problems faced by the organisation, but without the constraints of the aforementioned legacy assets. These internal start-ups do not face the problems common to their external counterparts such as restricted cash flow, limited office space or lack of loyal customer base; however, the difficulty here is that it is often these challenges that drive the ruthless innovation necessary for a start-up to disrupt and thrive in the first place.

In the face of this, partnerships are often a cost-effective way for businesses to expose themselves to new technologies, cultures, customers and market approaches in a way which requires less direct investment than acceleration or incubation models.

A prime example of this being the recent partnership of M&S and Microsoft exploring the use of A.I. in the retailer’s customer experience offering.

Regarding new hires, a greater focus must be placed on attracting talent from companies with proven digital capability and track record wherein candidates will have knowledge relating to product, people, technology, culture, commercials and the market critical to the application of transformation lower down. This action feeds into the aforementioned “catalyst roles” at senior levels of the business both in terms of the creation of teams for these positions but also in a succession sense through the development of a pipeline for the function’s continued growth in the business.

How quickly do you want to get there? and ★ Advisory Insight Capability Digital ★ Structured Talent Management

- Advisory Board - Digital Board Members

- Succession Planning - Catalyst Roles in ★ Outside innovation

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- Partnership - Incubation & Acceleration Capability identification and creation - Innovation Talent Pipelines - Best in class Digital Assessment

How far do you want to go?

For the few, and the many

Knowing when to stop the plough

The three previous points have all been aimed at senior levels of management, but it has to be remembered that digital transformation cannot be successful without support from the rest of the organisation.

In our experience, we have seen that the companies that are most successful in their transformation are those that know there must be careful planning to action, a sequence in which they are carried out and acceptance of a realistic pace at which results can be achieved.

The best way to go about ensuring its adoption is to have effective communications between all areas of the business with every employee brought into the new strategic and directional fold of the firm. In conjunction with this educational process, new processes and metrics must be implemented so that performance can be brought into line with the new digital goals.

This not to say that taking the time to formulate a comprehensive strategy indicates a lack of ambition, no. There is a cultural strength in this approach, and returning to the metaphor of the plough, the skill is in knowing your destination and the best speed to get you there, while still clearing the snow but not tearing up the road.

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Find out how we could help E: ukenquiries@svb.com T: +44 (0) 20 7367 7800 svb.com/uk Silicon Valley Bank is authorised and regulated by the California Department of Business Oversight and the United States Federal Reserve Bank; authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority with number 577295; and subject to regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority and limited regulation by the Prudential Regulation Authority. Details about the extent of our regulation by the Prudential Regulation Authority are available from us on request.

Product

The role of the product function in a modern business

Product management has changed out of all recognition in the past decade. As digital start-ups blossom into large listed companies and digital products are placed at the heart of more and more corporate strategies, all companies need a senior exeuctive to manage all aspects of their digital output.

We gathered some of the UK’s leading CPOs to talk about how they built their functions and how to work with the rest of the business. Companies included Just Eat, ZPG (formerly Zoopla), Tesco, Ticketmaster, Brandwatch, the Financial Times, Amazon, CNN, Moneysupermarket, and Worldpay. The conversation centred on four themes.

Establishing the product function as its own discipline All the CPOs round the table agreed that a fundamental part of the challenge is getting buy-in from the rest of the executive team and colleagues throughout the business. The key to doing this is to prioritise. One participant said, “don’t do everything at the same pace;” advising getting quick wins, and building from there to show people at all levels how you can make their jobs easier and, fundamentally, help the company with its goals.

Another important piece of advice is to show how typical product disciplines, like a test-and-learn approach, especially via A/B testing, can pay huge dividends. One CPO said that their team had linked a “dollar value” to improved user satisfaction metrics, and then showed how various product innovations and improvements can ultimately contribute to revenue growth.

Another participant outlined how the best way to introduce new processes into a diversified and fast growing company was to show value further down the company hierarchy. Demonstrating to people doing the day-to-day work of the company how product disciplines can benefit them will in turn persuade senior management of the value. This is especially the case if a CPO wants to show the power of the product function to a newly acquired business.

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Educating the business on modern product management disciplines

come down to what sector the business works in but more its organisational structure and ways of working.

A lot of the discussion focused on the power of product roadmaps.

CPOs suggested that the roadmap can reframe executive discussions from “here’s my list of things I want Product’s help with” to a discussion about what outcomes they are trying to achieve. This allows product specialists to think of a new way to approach a problem, and potentially find a better outcome.

It was widely agreed that the product function must be well understood throughout the company if there is to be synergy between the two functions. Sometimes the CPO would benefit from having P&L responsibility, sometimes they should take on more of a support role to the rest of the business. The key is to embed the right product disciplines and understand how the Product function can best contribute to business goals.

One attendee recounted a time when a business unit team were convinced that a website plug-in was helping them make more sales. When the product team A/B tested it with a different solution, the plug-in was found to actually be costing the company a significant amount of money.

Counter to the business unit team’s “gut feel,” even just turning off the plug-in was more beneficial than leaving it on, let alone using something different to perform the same function. It was mentioned that telling stories like that can help educate other areas of the business.

How Product and Technology should work together The participants differed in their view of how the product and technology functions should work together. Some suggested that the two functions should be combined, removing the chance of disjointed decision making otherwise. Others suggested that you needed two different functions working together but independently.

Ultimately, it depends on the nature of the business and how it has evolved over time. A B2B business that deals with highly technical customers, for example, would benefit from an experienced CTO with an engineering background but other businesses may need someone to take a product-first approach. Participants agreed that this decision didn’t necessarily

Getting more women into product roles The participants discussed how to best get more women into product roles (full disclosure: only one of the roundtable participants was female). CPOs talked about how there had been success in bringing women across from different functions.

Sometimes in product roles it can be more important to have a deep understanding of the customer than it is to have a technical understanding.

To that end, participants said that they had people from account manager and marketing roles transitioning very well into a product role. They also spoke about how important it was to create “great stories” about what product teams were doing and how they were helping to build successful companies. These kinds of narratives can be incredibly powerful. Finally, they spoke about the importance of creating full career paths for product roles and using these at university milk rounds to get women into the discipline at entry level too.

And from the above it looks like the world’s product functions will need all the recruits they can get in the coming years.

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Interview with Matthew Cohan

Zoopla’s Chief Product Officer on his role and the future of the function Matthew Cohan is Chief Product Officer at ZPG, owner of the Zoopla brand alongside others such as uSwitch and PrimeLocation. He joined the company in 2014 following its debut on London’s stock market, and talks about his role as one of the most prominent CPOs in the country.

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What attracted you to the CPO role at ZPG in 2014?

thinking differently about the profile of people that we’re bringing in.

The vision and challenge first and foremost. Before taking the role, I was chatting to a friend of mine at Zoopla who wasn’t a product professional and he was describing some of the challenges the business was facing as it was heading towards IPO, and then – probably more importantly – just after IPO. One of the bigger growing pains was around the product function, and while he rightly couldn’t give me a whole lot of detail, he gave me enough to believe that I could make an impact, so I arranged to have an initial discussion with Alex [Chesterman, Founder and CEO].

The second is helping people understand what we’re trying to do and aligning them to our goals, at all levels of the organisation. Ensuring that we have a vision that people understand and buy into and therefore feel completely motivated to work hard to achieve. In a large and acquisitive business, there are many different brands, ways of working, and cultures, so alignment and some level of integration are really important.

Following that great conversation about the vision and ambition for the business, through the recruitment process, I met the senior management team at the time, who were very transparent, as you need to be when asking someone to come in to assess and lead Product through significant changes. Throughout the process, I became more intrigued. On top of the product challenge, and what I was sensing was needed, the vision of where Alex wanted to take the business was both interesting and extremely ambitious.

What is the hardest thing about your job?

Two relatively mundane but difficult things. The first is our ability to hire the right people to fulfil our growth plans.

Whether it’s engineering, product management, UX, design, any discipline within product teams is really difficult.

That’s not only this business but every business has to be thinking about alternative ways of solving their product problems, whether it’s hiring locally or

So a lot of what I try to do, and try to encourage with others, is simply talk to each other and make time to communicate: ask questions, be inquisitive and offer to help. That’s important in a public company where we have to stay focused on quarterly and annual revenues but balance that against the right investments in growth and innovation to ensure we build great products.

As the company matures, and you create and manage a larger product portfolio, has your role changed?

When you acquire successful businesses, you have to decide what level of autonomy or independence you’re going to grant them. Unless there’s anything fundamentally broken or needing improvement within that business, there’s no real compelling need to rock the boat as it were, to make change for the sake of making a change. What you do look at is trying to align product sets, driving some of the synergies across those products.

But from a product perspective, I don’t look at it as “I need to be running Product across all these businesses,” and in fact, I don’t. There are different areas of the

Building products, and the way you go about building products, doesn’t really change in my estimation, regardless of whether you’re public, private, small or large. It’s more about the people doing it and the scale at which you’re operating business, and we work on bringing those together to make sure we’re aligned around common themes.

In terms of your team and the product managers that you’ve had to hire, do you think you look for a different skillset in an earlier stage environment than you do a more mature business?

Building products, and the way you go about building products, doesn’t really change in my estimation, regardless of whether you’re public, private, small or large. It’s more about the people doing it and the scale at which you’re operating.

In a start-up, it may be one person doing three roles and then in a larger, more mature business with a set of products, you start to focus and specialise within certain disciplines, and people usually own different horizontal areas or product verticals.

To be effective and efficient, we continue to be a relatively flat organisation. You do digital:mastered • 15

Interview with Matthew Cohan need to have various levels of experience – across team management and working in certain structures. And you can’t have a team full of senior people, so it’s important to have a mix of ability and experience in each area. As a larger company (we’ve grown four times in the number of people in just over three years – now nearly 1000 people) we now have career frameworks to help people develop and grow both within their teams and more frequently now across teams.

You mentioned earlier that, being a public company, you have to think about quarterly targets and meeting revenue and profit numbers, does that affect how autonomous the product teams can be in their decision making?

Yes, you do need to be more focused on making sure that teams understand they need to deliver to meet their revenue targets and balance this with innovation.

Although I’d argue that we figure out additional ways to be innovative. We know we cannot do everything we would like to do on our own, so what we’re doing as part of an answer to that is investing in, and working closely with a number of PropTech start-ups. That’s one mechanism that we use to keep our awareness and involvement in some of the new stuff that’s happening in the sector, while the core business focuses on building products that deliver our key metrics.

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How are you and ZPG looking to build the next generation of talent in the product group?

It’s a good question, and I don’t have an easy answer for it. One thing that we do is to hire from within. We’ve had several people transition from customer service roles and, to a person, they have worked out extremely well. Coming from customer service means they’ve got a deep appreciation of either the customer needs – whether the customer is a B2B partner or a consumer. So they come already inbuilt with that kind of empathy that they need as a product person. We don’t just move them, we find a place for them that will suit them, and ensure they can shadow a relevant product team member for a period. Whether it’s a week or a month, we negotiate with their management and make sure that they can take the time to do it.

I’m also now willing to take a bit more of a gamble on external people. I’ve seen in companies where teams end up with the same group of people hiring and, a year later, you look at the group and they all seem to be the same types of people as their bosses. So you do need to hire for capability and attitude. I don’t think you can use a strong culture filter as an eliminator anymore because you can easily rule out 75% of the market based on that bias when many of those people would have likely worked out very well.

To many, this may seem an odd point of view but I feel sticking to some basic cultural principles and hiring a diverse group of people delivers the best result.

Do you see the role of CPO being markedly different 3-5 years from now?

Will it exist? Yes. Will it be different? Yes. In start-ups and small companies, the product ‘director’ will likely be similar to what we see today – a founder and/or a shared role. However, in mid-size and large companies which will likely have more people experienced in product development processes and skills, the CPO role will be more around guiding the vision while supporting, challenging and growing a more distributed product capability throughout the organisation.

So the role will evolve but the direction that evolution takes will depend on the company – what the greatest need is for that business, and where that need lies in the organisation.

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FemTech

The rise of female health innovation Silicon Valley Bank, Zinc.vc and The Up Group recently hosted a breakfast on ‘Female Health Innovation’, often known as FemTech. The event brought together the ecosystem of founders, investors, scaled organisations and advisors and was chaired by Nooman Haque, MD at Silicon Valley Bank.

The rise of female founders means we’re seeing more ‘women making products for women’

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Opening the discussion, it was clear this is an underserved segment. Recent analysis from Frost and Sullivan shows this market to be worth up to $50bn by 2025. This is driven by the fact that 90% of primary healthcare decisions are made by women. Women are also 75% more likely to use digital tools for their healthcare and spend 29% more per capita on healthcare compared to men.

Reaction of Health Authorities There is a perfect storm for FemTech to emerge now. Firstly, national health organisations around the world have less money to spend than ever before.

Therefore some of the solutions which involved long term low cost solutions are being looked at closely to reduce these costs which would otherwise be absorbed. Secondly, direct to consumer wellness is forcing health organisations to look at how they respond to and leverage these types of innovation.

Finally the combination of female founders, ‘Women making products for Women’ and a period of sustained innovation in connectivity, data and hardware has meant more products

coming to market and getting funding to begin their growth journey.

The link between physical and mental health Many of the attendees stressed that when women experience physical health problems, there are almost always mental problems that link to that also. Whether that be loss of confidence, relationship or sexual problems. The long term impact of this can be far greater than the treatment of the physical symptoms. This has also meant the ability to attract talent and resource to this group of companies has been easier given how purpose driven many of these organisations are.

Most health businesses are really tech businesses Many of the founders in the room immediately looked to find a Co-founder who would be the CTO or Head of Product from day one. The challenge in the room is that you have to be really careful on making recommendations about health unless you are very, very,

The FemTech market is estimated to be worth $50bn by 2025 very sure of your data. There is not a clear line between what would be B2C wellness and what would count as a health care product and therefore be subject to approval by the likes of the FCA. Unlike quicker pizza delivery or improved download speeds, getting health data wrong means more than cold pizza and buffering.

The group will continue to meet and create the ecosystem in a segment which is attracting more investor attention and can solve problems in an historically underserved market.

A huge thank you for Silicon Valley Bank for hosting the event, and to all those who attended for such an open and insightful discussion: Aida Health, Atlantic Therapeutics, Bold Health, Elvie, HypnoBirthingWorks, MobileODT, Octopus Ventures, One Health Tech, PregnaPouch, Sunday Times, Uniq, Zinc.vc

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London BOARD DINNERS

In February, we hosted our fifth annual Digital Masters Board Dinner in London at The Dorchester Hotel. We were thrilled to bring together key players from the UK’s most disruptive, most successful and most transformative companies, despite the snow settling outside!

300 CEOs, Investors and Board Members, from VC-backed, PE-backed and corporate companies, all of whom are leveraging digital technologies for growth and transformation, came together for an evening of informal networking.

London Board Dinner Highlights: bit.ly/London-Dinner-2018

Another great night – amazing turnout again, which is testament to you all and the work you’ve done to make the event a key one in so many peoples diaries.

CFO, ZPG

It was an amazing event – great atmosphere, faultless organisation, and I met a number of really interesting people.

MD, OMERS Private Equity

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Stockholm BOARD DINNERS

We hosted our fourth annual Digital Masters Dinner in Stockholm at Bobergs Matsal. The dinner was attended by 70 CEOs, Board members and investors, bringing together a range of company sizes, sectors and business models to spark new conversations and further build relationships between investors, NEDs and executives in Stockholm.

Attendees included: Altor Equity Partners, Barnebys, Bonnier Ventures, CLVR Works, Consortio Fashion Group AB, Creandum, eBay, eEquity, EQT Ventures, Ericsson, FishBrain London Board Dinner Tech Trends: bit.ly/London-Dinner-Tech-Trends

Thank you for organizing such a great dinner. As always plenty of interesting people!

CTO & Founder, Tictail

Thank you and congratulations on an outstanding evening. It really was a who’s who of the Stockholm eco-system, I was delighted to be involved.

Partner, Silicon Valley Bank digital:mastered • 21

How Bupa turns great ideas into successful products The healthcare group has an interesting and successful approach to innovation, based on helping the business get the most from its creative projects

Businesses thrive on three things: ideas, people and process. This is as true of a big public company as it is of a two-person start-up. Find a winning idea that customers want, get the right people on board to create and sell it, put the processes in place to make it commercially viable, and any firm is off to a winning start.

The best lesson corporate firms can learn from start-ups is the ability to prioritise a customer problem

While established companies have all this in place, they are constantly on the lookout for ideas that will open new markets and establish themselves further in existing ones. The problem is that sometimes the other two parts of that triumvirate – people and process – can get in the way. New ideas often require new ways of working, and different types of roles to make the most of those ideas.

Big companies try many ways to solve this, many of which are not successful.

However, Aviva’s “innovation garage”

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is one notable exception and Bupa’s “customer lab” is another.

The international healthcare group purposely locates its customer lab within the company because its aim is not just to come up with new ideas but to help the business – people and process – transform itself around those ideas.

Customer lab John Moore is an Australian who set the lab up in 2017. He comes from a background of services marketing and digital roles in banking, telecommunications and insurance.

He explains how he created a small team of 12 people with complementary skills.

They employ a designer to take a structured approach to what they do, an actuary to make sure that the ideas they’re working on will be a commercial success, a technologist to help make the ideas work within Bupa’s technology

stack, and a storyteller to bring to life the work the customer lab is doing. All this is supported by Product Owners and some strategy staff. John says that not all firms would need an actuary, he would recommend a strong finance member, but this is useful to Bupa as an insurance provider.

He also explains that he didn’t choose to call his team an “innovation lab” as that implies ideas that aren’t necessarily rooted in business reality. John points out that one of the best lessons that corporate firms can take from start-up culture is a company founder’s ability to talk about a customer problem.

He says that they don’t talk about what the business is trying to do but what the customer wants help with. John is yet to meet with a start-up who doesn’t clearly start the conversation with the “customer problem” their idea solves.

The customer lab work focuses on three elements: business acceleration, their “B table” work and how they rethink the system.

Business acceleration – a 90-day programme Business acceleration is how the team solve business problems. They select an area of the business to work on by looking solely at what problem or challenge has the most backing from senior managers to solve it. John says that this often the best predictor of whether a team will have success and also – crucially for the customer lab – that they create a product that will “see the light of day”. The team tend to make sure they have a project sponsor from the executive team to indicate the importance of the project to the company as a whole and another sponsor in the business in which they are working.

Once they’ve selected an area of the business and a specific problem to work on, they run a 90-day programme with high-performing product owners and product staff. This ensures that not only are they coming up with new ideas and embedding new ways of working but also training big groups of staff on new product development skills and showing them the power of agile working practices.

The B table As well as working with colleagues in Bupa, the team also work with external start-ups. The “B table” refers to a desk in the team’s office where they discuss ideas. John explains that they’ve steered away from the traditional “Dragon’s Den” type approach as, although this can lead large companies to find some great ideas, they’re not necessarily ideas that the business can make use of. digital:mastered • 23

How Bupa turns great ideas into successful products Instead, they ask start-ups to base their pitches on how they will solve a real business problem that Bupa has and also how they will work with Bupa to solve it.

Each of the winning start-ups that they select has a sponsor in the business and these start-ups then sit in the relevant business unit for 10 weeks, contributing to a project aimed at solving a particular challenge and learning a lot more about how Bupa operates. At the end of this period, Bupa will decide whether it will use the start-up as a supplier and, if it signs an agreement to take on a sufficiently big order, the company will often take an equity stake in the start-up as well.

Rethinking the system Rethinking the system is where the customer lab team looks ahead in time to see “what could be possible if…”, says John. “We focus on no more than two topics each year and, while this piece of work is only a small part of everyone’s role (similar to Google’s 20% time rule [a famous management decision that let employees devote a full day a week to side projects that help the firm]), it is designed to educate Bupa on what is coming and what could be possible if we took advantage of cutting-edge solutions out there.

All three of these elements combine to make an “innovation” programme that is about far more than just new ideas or exciting technology. While the customer digital:mastered • 24

lab certainly does help Bupa come up with novel ways to solve customers’ problems, it is just as much about reinventing the company’s processes and how employees get their work done.

The ideas are unlikely to be ideas Bupa is ready for today, however they have the potential to shape our strategy for the future.

digital:mastered INSIGHT AND NEWS FROM THE UP GROUP

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