Role of the VP, Technology
● Strategy & ideation – define technology choices, strategy and ideas necessary to build a high performance technology organization consisting of various departments like
DevOps, Cybersecurity, Data Science, AI, UX and Enterprise architecture
● Team Leadership – provide the necessary guidance, handholding and solutions for issues and challenges of the technology team as well as defining the roles and responsivities of the team
● Development & Execution – define and build the work environment necessary for programmers, engineers and data scientists to work effectively and seamlessly
● Senior Management collaboration – work closely with senior management including the CEO, head of product, head of experience, etc. to deliver on the strategic business outcomes
● Clear ownership of financial, customer, leadership and execution agility KPIs
● MMI – implement highest standards of man machine interactions for optimum user experience for all stakeholders involved – users, employees, management, etc.
● DDD – implement Data Driven Decision (DDD) making across the entire organization in collaboration with Head of XP (Experience Portfolio) and Head of Product Management
Education
● Bachelor of Engineering/Science – Computers, Information Technology or related discipline
● Masters or PhD is preferred Experience
● Minimum of 10 years’ experience of working in a startup or private-sector IT organization.
● Strong knowledge in consumer-facing mobile app design, development, and support
● Using principles such as design thinking
● Highly business-focused and committed to delivering clear business outcomes
● A strong technology generalist, who is able to envision how emerging tech could provide new ways to further the business goals
Competencies
- Business and Information Behavioral Technical
- Mapping technologies to business vision, strategy and roadmap
- Communicating, public speaker, listening and information gathering
- Understanding digital technologies, relevant vendors and product knowledge
- Digital business literacy Results orientation Designing and guiding solution development
- Strategic planning and budgeting
- Emotional intelligence Applying lean startup/agile methods
- Knowledge of customer behaviors, needs and expectations
- Decisiveness Integrating solutions
- Broad network of business relationships
- Accountability EA methodologies and Designing modular architectures
- Knowledge of social and ecosystem data
- Coaching, delegating and developing Digital product development and management
- Web application knowledge
- Mobile application knowledge
- Database knowledge
- Business acumen Influential and persuasive Cybersecurity
- Collaboration/teamwork Business continuity management and disaster recovery
- Out-of-the-box thinking Configuration management systems
Reporting relationship: Direct reporting to CEO
The VP of Technology will report to the CEO and will play a key role in providing the technology vision, strategy and roadmap that serves the business and customer needs. He/She will be responsible to build the technical and engineering team necessary to deliver products on time, on target and will lead most of the organization’s technology innovation activities. He/She will be working closely with Head of Product, Head of Experience and Head of Operation to achieve speedy growth
and accelerate the business to scale.
Primary Responsibilities:
● Technology stack & Innovation
● Define the technology strategy, vision and roadmap in alignment with the business needs
and long term strategy. Drive innovative and strategic thinking for the company such as
enterprise architecture, innovation management and R&D, while supporting other
innovation efforts.
● Identify technologies that would help the organization deliver its business strategy. Lead
technology innovation to explore how these emerging technologies can accelerate
growth and scale. Leverage trendspotting to anticipate how technological trends could
help the organization prepare for and navigate change and disruption.
● Develop and evolve the architecture to support the introduction of new technologies to
enable the digital execution. Create new digital business technology platforms or provide
the technology to build them.
● Product Engineering
● Working with product management to understand customer and market requirements in order to translate them into digital products that enable defined business models and drive strategic business outcomes.
● Focus on quality with definition and implementation of highest standards of quality assurance (QA), testing, governance, risk control and cybersecurity standards
● Focus on speed of digital execution with implementation of intelligent and agile architectural principles and use of latest tools and frameworks like cloud native and microservices.
● Focus on managing infrastructure and operational costs by leveraging elastic infrastructure, use of containers/kubernetes, etc. to minimize the technology debt and technology overheads
● Use of cutting edge Data Science and Artificial Intelligence technologies to create the most sophisticated digital platforms for optimum man-machine-interaction and user experience
● Technology Leadership
● Development organization – defining, hiring and building the best technology team required for development of digital products and platforms
● Developer efficiency – defining the necessary KPIs for ensuring that all developers deliver highest quality of coding with minimum reworks based on agile delivery, frequent releases and CI/CD pipelines
● Tool choices – ensuring that the best in class tools are made available to the developers for most the cost effective, highest quality and agile execution of the digital product development and operational support