Interim Regional Chief Product and Technology Officer — Integration (Logistics and Infrastructure)

Three tests for every investment, and the hard calls behind them

The Interim Regional Chief Product and Technology Officer, accountable to the Technology Committee Chair for 18 months, will apply three tests to every regional product and technology investment. Will people use it? Will it hold up under stress? Will it produce value someone can point to? The tests are simple to state. The judgement lies in what happens when an investment fails one of them.

The most difficult call is the popular project that is not being adopted. It has sponsors, a team and momentum, and ending it feels like admitting failure. The officer holds executive authority to decide which inherited product and technology commitments go on and which are paused or ended, and should be able to show what capacity a closure releases. A second call concerns resilience. Resilience work rarely has a visible feature attached, and the officer must decide when to fund it anyway. A third is the boundary between regional and local decisions across eight or more countries. Here the officer agrees which thresholds stay with each country, decides what evidence will govern investment, delivery capacity and controls, blocks any proposal that leaves another team holding cost or risk with nobody answerable, and declines investment that says nothing about uptake, what it hinges on or its downside. The officer also signs off who leads each regional product line and how problems are raised, and brokers agreement when the committee and operating leaders pull in different directions.

Eighteen months, measured against the three tests

Adoption, resilience and value tests should be in place for every regional product and technology investment by the close of the first ninety days, in terms the committee and the operating teams both understand. Around month nine, each investment should have been reviewed against those tests, with work that is not being adopted paused or ended. At month 18, the region should have an integrated product and technology portfolio governed through investment reviews, each part led by someone answerable for its results.

An officer who has ended something people liked

You have led technology through cost transformation without letting the board narrative separate from the operating evidence, in a business of $425 million or more in revenue, 2,400 or more people and eight or more countries. Digital transformation and turnaround complete the experiences we will explore. Risk judgement will be tested at level 4; data and AI governance, product delivery and architecture at scale, all at level 3. We want an example where you redrew who decides while the operation kept running and could not stop. In an organisation its members own, closing a well-liked project also means explaining it to people who feel ownership of it, and we will ask how you have done that. Come ready to talk through a well-liked project you closed: why the evidence said stop, and what the freed-up capacity achieved afterwards.

Into the room with the people who decide

Selection takes three weeks. The Technology Committee Chair begins it in week one, privately and on video. In week two the Regional President gives you a case to work, set in the realities of running a regional portfolio. In the third week you meet the Investment Committee in person. Our response to each step comes in writing within five working days.