What is speed? If you've got clarity, that is going to increase your momentum in how quickly you can do something. Having clarity of why you're doing it, having purpose and thinking about where it fits into strategy, those will all start to help you move more quickly in terms of what you're doing. Because you don't end up building the wrong thing or going off down the wrong path. Bleddyn Williams, I'm Head of Engineering within Sainsbury's Tech. The space that I look after is Buy, Fulfil and In Store. We touch a lot of customers in the job that I do. That is very much a leadership role from a digital point of view, so whether it's people who are coming in store or shopping online, we interact with customers throughout their journey with our group of companies, whether they're in Sainsbury's or in Argos. So you could say that does make us a digital leader. We're trying to bring together all the different parts of the business, from our user experience side, from our engineers who are building code, from our product teams. We're trying to bring all that together and build the right interaction with customers and do it in a way that is going to work both for the Sainsbury's and the end user. There's almost the tip of the iceberg. The bit everyone will think about, if you said digital experience, is what it means to me as the customer, maybe when I'm on my phone. But to get to that, you want everything else to help in maybe the speed, the performance, the scalability. It doesn't matter whether I'm shopping with you, and it's quiet, or whether it's busy. I still get the same level of performance. And all those things go towards the experience of the customer and also how how you then bring about change in that digital experience. So do you have downtime, when you're releasing that change? Is there an easy way perhaps for you to roll back? Then there might be something you put out that causes a problem. One of the things, you are constantly innovating. You shouldn't be afraid of it. And pushing the boundaries of what is possible. I think we still see it in what we do now, we'll ask questions of the technology. Don't just take "there is only one way to do something". If you're a good team, you will challenge yourself in your thinking. Don't just do the obvious. So whether it's your own technology that you're trying to build or if you're working with somebody else's technology, ask questions about what it can do and push the boundaries of the product. That's quite important. Don't just settle for: "Someone's done it this way before, and that's the only way to do it." I think if we look too inward, we'll always do the same things. I think the one bit I can say is I bring a lot of experience from what I've done over the years. And although the technology changes and at times, I'm quite a long way from some of that technology compared to what the engineers are doing, the thinking and the way you try to solve the problems doesn't change that much. So the experience is really useful to bring to a situation to help us get to the point where we're making decisions and thinking: Are we going to buy it? Are we going to build it ourselves? What's the right approach to take? How are we going to bring the teams together? Those things stay the same. I like cycling, so I also go and watch cycling. I even watch cycling on the TV, and when you watch how they do things, you've got lots of different people who go to creating the overall win for a team. It's not just down to that one person that won. When they do win, you very rarely hear the person who's won just talk about themselves. They talk very much about the team. In business, it's exactly the same principle. Someone is going to need to make decisions, to lead things that are taking place. But it's not that person who's got the win who's delivered the successful product. It's everyone together that does it, no matter the role that they're playing. If that team doesn't function, if Product and Engineering don't talk to each other, and there's a divide between them, and I've seen it, as a team, you won't work well together. You've all got to pull together to get something delivered. I think if we go and select a third party to work with, it's important that we're clear on what we're looking for and where we're going. And the same applies to the third party. We want to know where they're going. If you've got a good partnership, it will make the solutions you build even stronger. We've been talking a lot about badgeless teams. And I think that's really a good way to talk about how the partnership is. No one should say, I'm from company A, I'm from B, I'm from C. You're just all trying to work towards the same outcome. I think if it's done right and you can build those relationships... We talked about partnerships between... You know, a third party that you're engaging. I think it's a similar thing from a business point of view. It is very much about getting that partnership and that understanding because it shouldn't be that either side has more power than the other. That's what you should be trying to achieve and be open in terms of where you are and what's taking place. That's what I'd be... That would be the holy grail of this. Over the last years, thinking about long- lived teams is part of the agile concept, but thinking long-live teams so that you get some ownership in there. For example, you'd have a team that owns Search, or a team that owns Check Out. They are long-lived. That long-live gives people ownership and an understanding of what they do. If you've got a good understanding of strategy, which is typically going to come from higher and down, that is going to help align everyone in terms of what they're doing. If that doesn't exist, it makes it a lot more difficult for people to see where that fits in. When we think about outcomes now, we try and align our outcomes to that strategy. Rather than it just being something that sits there because a person has said, "we need to do this," we can say, "here is an outcome," and we can prioritize these outcomes, because they go against that part of the strategy. Because in a big organization, you've always got priority. You've got to make those decisions around what's the thing with the biggest priority. We get a huge amount, like any big organization, of requests to do things. If you can link them back to the strategy and the priority and that's come down, it is then easier to have a conversation around which one is going to have priority against all the different things that you're being asked to do. I'd say if in an organization you can get that right, it helps why we're going to prioritize this differently and then get the buy in front. You've got to go to the senior execs in the company sometimes and say: "Yes, we can see why you're doing that and we agree that that's the thing that's going to really drive what we want to do within the organization." I think for me, it is be pragmatic in what you do. Yes... If if you said to an engineering team, "open checkbook, build it," they'd love you, and they would always go after the build approach in there. But there's times where you're going to want to invest in technology, work with a third party who provides something that you can then really invest... Instead of in doing that, you can invest in the thing that will make you different. So you can buy... a payment orchestration. You can buy the content system. But what you can do on top of that is build the things that are going to differentiate you as a business. You need to be pragmatic. If you're standing up engineering teams, they will want to build. But put the investment there into the things that will make a difference for you. That's really important. Don't put the investment there into something that is a commodity that you could go out and do a selection process and find the best offering out there. You could find the company that you're going to have the best partnership with. Instead, let the engineers do the thing on top of that that is going to make a difference for you. That's where you want to be putting the money.