Meet the Masters - Rui Pedro Silva, ERIKS Digital

RUI PEDRO SILVA

Rui Pedro Silva is the Group Chief Digital Officer and Managing Director of ERIKS Digital, the global technology and data hub of ERIKS who are on a mission to digitally transform the world of industrial services. In his interview with Frankie Greenwell, Consultant at The Up Group, Rui explains how product and technology is viewed in the industrials world and the inspiration he takes from Clayton Christensen’s Milkshake Theory.

In your opinion, what are the top three attributes of a great product leader?

Product leaders need to be able to think ahead of the game. They cannot just focus on the next rollout or quarter; they must be fundamentally good at running current projects and able to think three years ahead. They should be able to understand the business and work backwards. Then, they need to be able to provide and deliver this vision energetically across the business, to convince people that this is the right thing to do.

So, I would say the most important attributes are business acumen, strategic thinking, and collaboration. They are very cliché words, but it is incredible how much we do not do that in general.

When you are hiring for product resources, how do you test for these attributes?

I use a very simple exercise. I do not ask them about technology. I ask them for an example of something they are doing in life and what they think will happen with that in three years’ time. I ask them to convince me why I should put money into it. For example, if someone is renovating their garden, I want them to tell me what they want it to look like and what it will bring to their life. I want them to tell a story that will convince me that I should invest in that. It is hard to find people who think like that as we are living in a world where people are so focused on what you can accomplish in the next month.

How do you set the culture and create an environment of forward thinkers within your team?

You need to build a leadership team that are viewed as friends and not managers. I try to break the usual leadership roles. I believe that the culture I create is the reason why I have been successful. Finding a balance between friendship and leadership will then create trust. You will influence people by the way that you work. Common behaviour drives common thinking – you can start creating an environment of challenge where people start thinking in the same style, getting a feel for the philosophy behind it, how things are done, and then follow suit.

How do you stop hiring on cultural fit? People tend to hire people that fit their style, how do you get around that?

It is very hard to control that, as it is a natural instinct to connect with people who you recognise. I try to lead by example and hire people that have other ways of doing things. For example, on the engineering side, I need people that can be highly driven by creating great technology, and design the best solution; however I want people that are strict on following a plan, that can work with ambiguity but seek to get out of it and finds an executable plan. Yet on the product side I need people who are able to shake it up, but in multiple ways. When you are hiring for roles, I usually say you can teach skills, you cannot teach smartness. I look much more into how people can tell a story to convince me of why we should do things a certain way; if they can do that then they can learn the rest. I do not want to hire the best people in the market, I want to hire the ones that want to work with me.

How does your approach differ when you inherit a team rather than building one from scratch?

You need to find a model in the organisation which will fuel your whole team’s vision. We often forget that we need to fuel people, every single day. Leaders should think about what their people want and what strategies they can use to motivate their team. Different people have different motivators, and we should meet people’s individual needs to connect the whole team. Rather than changing the way people work, we need to find ways to make people happy, and then find that common target.

I work in an environment that has different backgrounds, some more “structured” some more “disruptive”, and often that might come as a challenge on how to put it together as one culture. The answer is, I do not. Why should I? We need both. We need sustainable delivery, but we also need disruption in some areas. We don’t have two cultures, we have multiple cultures within those backgrounds, and rather than making them a different person, we need to try to find common ground.”

Has anyone influenced this different way of thinking?

Clayton Christensen - I call him the father of disruptive strategy and he was a professor at Harvard. He changed my mind. He does not believe in customer segmentation; he believes in product segmentation. It is not about the product you are building; it is about your way of thinking. His milkshake theory highlights the importance of adapting your product to meet customers’ needs, which will then increase product demand.

What does diversity mean to you?

People often look at a leadership team and notice gender diversity. However, there are many other areas of diversity which are equally as important. Of course, gender diversity is important, but you also need to focus on cultural diversity and diversity of thought. For me, diversity is all about balance.

When you look at your career, what is the product you are most proud of?

There was one product we built for Tesco when I was at Maersk that has saved them a huge amount of time and will keep on doing so in the future. They were having a problem with a delay on uploading invoices after containers were released. It was causing a massive delay in the process, and it was consuming huge amounts of people’s time. So, we created a product that would take the files, put it into a zip and send them a minute after the containers were released. Within three days, our NPS went from -25 to + 10. It wasn’t a sexy product, but I am very proud of that as we probably made hundreds of people working in those containers happy. For me, that is what we in product should be doing – solving people’s problems.

You obviously deliver products in a different world to a classic software delivery environment; do you find product and technology is viewed differently in the industrials world? In your opinion, has this brought about any issues or confusion?

The product world is very tough, it can mean different things in different companies but generally in the B2B world there is still a very traditional monolithic way of looking at technology as applications that you have to manage and configure. This causes a shorthand view where you do not necessarily look at a long-term vision which you can then work backwards from. We tend to look into things in a very separate way. If we moved away from that we would focus more on technical holistic strategic thinking, to scale up technology which will improve your visibility and decrease your issues.

How do you move from that applications way of looking at the world to a more platform product way?

One of the most important ways of thinking which I would suggest that you should implement into your teams is to stop talking about applications. Personally, I do not like to talk about SAP. I care about supplier management, procurement management, PO management, warehouse distribution and supply chain controlling- that is what is important. SAP is just a platform to get it done. If you do not think about how those other aspects can maximise your business then SAP will not make anything, it is just a package that you are installing. Most companies make a roll out plan for SAP’s. I do not necessarily tend to do that, as I will just get a system that does not help me. I want people to think about where we want to be in the supply chain in the next three to four years. And from this, what they need to invest in their technology to do that. The entire investment plan should not be project based on SAP rollout; they need to look at the bigger picture. Do not micromanage projects like SAP, manage overall strategy.