Being a technology leader is nothing like the cliché of an out-of-this-world-inspired person who can invent a great app every day or one who knows all the latest tech news on the market. To lead a technology team, you need to be someone who can constantly exchange ideas with colleagues from all areas of a company to understand how to make technology an integral part of every department.

Although many people might think that this means creating systems to automate manual processes, the job is more complex than that. Digitizing manual processes is like wasting time thinking about how to make a wagon faster instead of concentrating on building a car. 

Technology needs to change the game, not just speed it up. If each department in a company hires a few technology professionals to separately create ten systems, you’ll end up with ten problems. Each of these departments may be better locally than before, but the company overall will be in a situation far below its potential due to a lack of communication and integration.   

Digitizing manual processes is like wasting time thinking about how to make a wagon faster instead of concentrating on building a car.

The COVID-19 vaccine distribution mishap

The distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States during the pandemic is a case that demonstrates how not thinking intentionally about innovation can hinder project execution. Once the long-awaited COVID-19 immunizations were manufactured and made available to the public in early 2021, the government distributed them by sending batches of vaccines to the country’s pharmacy chains. The chains then divided the shipments that they had received among their branches.

As a result, some areas of the same city had more vaccines and others less, possibly depending on the number of different pharmacies and residents there. For the consumer, it was necessary to go to the website of each pharmacy chain to search and find out in which region near their home or work they could schedule their vaccination.

If a single distribution and information system had been created, the service would have been much simpler and more convenient for the user/citizen, as well as more effective in reaching the government’s goal of vaccinating as many people as possible in the shortest possible time. A single central system could have sped up the population’s vaccination schedule and streamlined the whole process.

As the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic was unparalleled in recent history, no one had planned a vaccine distribution protocol that could have been quickly implemented and scaled up. The process wasn’t designed to make technology an active and essential part of what was being done, and it’s precisely in this kind of situation that it’s possible to see how a lack of strategic technical direction impacts the desired results. 

Technology can’t be an accessory to the project; it must be central to it. There’s no point in developing a service or product and then thinking about how technology will fit into it. With a technology leader involved from the outset, the possibilities for execution are multiplied.

Technology can’t be an accessory to the project; it must be central to it.

There are situations, though, in which a company’s resistance to the implementation of a technology leadership model is so strong that, even in the face of a well-intentioned and informed manager, the digital transformation stalls. If there is no room in the company for a technology leader to head an ambitious project because no one there really understands the role of technology in their business, then it might be a case for not only a technology makeover but also a deeper cultural transformation.

Leading culture change with technology

When Microsoft was born, in 1975, the internet for the masses didn’t exist, software was sold in boxes, and there was no concept of online services or cloud computing. A lot has changed since then, but the company is still relevant today, and perhaps more than ever, because it is constantly reinventing itself. 

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella’s insight was to understand that their old model of thinking, in which each part of the company ran its projects as if it were an independent business, even competing internally with other departments, no longer worked. Satya realized it was necessary to generate synergy to maintain a leading role in a new environment where everything is connected, a process of culture change he recounts in his book Hit Refresh (Harper Business, 2019).

In very general terms, the role of a technology leader is to envision, communicate, and implement the mechanism that will facilitate change, gaining the cooperation of employees along the way by showing that the future holds bigger incentives. This involves working with a technology team along with the rest of the company, which needs to start seeing technology as a partner area fundamental to transforming and scaling the business. 

In the context of a technology leader’s mindset, there are various aspects of corporate culture to consider, including:

All these things impact the company’s culture, and maintaining culture is a daily exercise. As Satya Nadella says, the day we declare the cultural transformation over, it will start again—the company and the technology organization are living organisms that require constant care.

About the author

Marcus Fontoura

Marcus Fontoura is a technical fellow and CTO for Azure Core at Microsoft, and author of A Platform Mindset. He works on efforts related to large-scale distributed systems, data centers, and engineering productivity. Fontoura has had several roles as an architect and research scientist in big tech companies, such as Yahoo! and Google, and was most recently the CTO at Stone, a leading Brazilian fintech.