The power of efficient workflows

Speaker 1:
Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech? Welcome to the XTech podcast, where we connect you with the sharpest minds, and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations, and insights that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster:
Hello, and welcome to the XTech podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m the CEO at the Tech Talent Charter and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion, and innovation in the tech industry.

Today I’m delighted to be joined by Andy Sturrock. He’s the Chief Technologist and Chief Technology Officer at Atom bank. Andy, thanks for joining me today.

Andy Sturrock:
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Debbie Forster:
So Andy, in the audience, we love to hear about what you do, but we love to understand who you are. And one of the great ways that I found of getting to know someone is to understand how they found their way into tech. Was it you woke up one day, and you’re surprised that you found yourself in tech? Or were you one of those people born with a keyboard in your hand? How did you get in?

Andy Sturrock:
Well, yeah, I suppose close to the latter, actually. So yeah, I always say I started my career I think when I was probably about seven or eight. I had to go into hospital for a couple of nights, I can’t remember why, but I remember I wasn’t very happy about it, and to kind of cheer me up, I remember my father saying, “Oh, I’ll get your present when you get out, so what do you want?” And I said, “I want a computer,” which I suppose, very generously, my father said, “Okay, fine.” And he got me this computer, and that would’ve been the early ’80s. So the computer I got was a Commodore VIC-20, which was a brilliant home computer. Back in the ’80s, the explosion of home computers, there was BBCs… And or BBC B was the main one, wasn’t it? And then, yeah, the VIC-20, and then followed by the Commodore 64, so I had one of those as well, and ZX Spectrum, and all that kind of stuff.

So yeah, started with that, and that was really the days… There were lots of computing magazines around, and they had listings in the back, and you typed them in, and then there was these games that you typed in. And invariably they had a mistake in the listings, or maybe you miskeyed something, I suppose, and so to fix that, I just got into understanding what the commands were that I was typing in, and learnt some basic. So we were a Commodore family, and I think we had a Commodore 128 as well, I think. And I think if I remember, that had a built-in assembler and disassembler, so I then started writing with some machine code, which was quite hardcore and then did some C, and all that stuff. So yeah, really early childhood, I suppose, just computing as a hobby. And then after that, I thought I might as well do this, my hobby, as a degree. So went to Manchester University, did a bachelor’s and master’s in… It was called systems integration, but it was basically computer science, that was sponsored by a old English computer company called ICL, who’s now part of Fujitsu.

So yeah, four-year degree. So learned software engineering, and some other stuff there. So that was really cool, actually. I remember choosing which university, and I chose Manchester because there were bits… It was where the computer was invented, so there were bits of the first computer ever that were just in the corridor, so I thought that was pretty inspiring. So yeah, did that, and then started my career as a software engineer after that. So yeah, started my career when I was seven.

Debbie Forster:
You were hardcore, all right. And I know there’ll be some youngsters in the audience listening, thinking… Having no idea, but I know you just kicked off a whole wave of nostalgia from some of our audience of, “Oh yeah, the backs of the magazines,” and “Oh, my Commodore,” et cetera. So there’s going to be a lot of people digging through attics for old kit. So you started as a proper software engineer, but you didn’t stay there. Talk me where your hobby then became a career, and then brought you to where you are today.

Andy Sturrock:
Yeah, so yeah, started as a software engineer. I was a software engineer for about 10, 12 years, and it was only accidentally that I turned to the dark side, and ended up being a manager. And I absolutely consider myself a frustrated software engineer who accidentally ended up doing this kind of management stuff. I write code in my spare time, I’d say I identify as a geek, that’s who I am. But anyway, I ended up doing this management stuff. And I only did it actually because… And it really was an accident. I was doing a piece of work, I was working at Bank of America at the time, so I’d worked in various investment banks and hedge funds, and yeah, for 10-plus years, as a software engineer. And then I was just doing a piece of work, and it was just too much for me to do by myself. So my boss at the time said, “Okay, well, go and hire someone.” So I hired someone, and two or three other people to have a little team, and yeah, so it was a real accident.

But I always say actually that, because I never intended to be this manager person, that actually that really benefited me. So say HR never got hold of me and gave me the course on how to be a manager. And the reason I think that’s benefited is I didn’t know what to do to be a manager, and so I had these people working for me, and the only thing I could think of doing was doing the stuff that stopped me being a software engineer when I was doing my job as a software engineer before. And it turns out that’s now a thing, and it’s called servant leadership, but I didn’t know what it was, I just did it by accident. And I think that served me really well actually, that I just regard my job as taking the blockers out of the way of the people who are doing the real work. The real work is done by the software engineers, the BAs, the architects, the testers, the support people, whatever it is. They’re the real people who do the real work, I’m just overhead.

And where I can be least overheady, overhead is to make their jobs as productive as possible.

Debbie Forster:
So went to the dark side, but you’re staying true to your roots, and we’re not going to have a, “I am your father moment.” This is more… You’re still trying to hold, resist the dark side, and going across this. So interestingly, having gone from big organization to big organization, done some transformational work, you came to Atom. Now, I’m very familiar, I’ve worked in and around Atom bank from when they were the newbies on the block, but not everybody in the audience will tell me about it. Can you give me a little bit of who and what Atom is, and then we’ll talk about what you did when you came there?

Andy Sturrock:
Yeah, so Atom… People have probably heard this phrase, neobanks, and there were a few of them started around 2014, 2015 time. We were actually the first one to get a banking license, so the first one to go from being a fintech to actually being a bank. So founded by a few different people, but particularly the guy who’s still the CEO, a guy called Mark Mullen, he’d worked in various big organizations, and he just wanted to create a better bank. And now we still talk about changing banking for the good… Better for everyone. And so he founded this bank, in a way, to do banking better. And we’re an app-only-based bank, so we don’t have branches. First to get the banking license. So yeah, 2016, I think, got the banking license, so coming towards 10 years old now. Profitable now, so we made a profit the first year last year, so just looking to… Yeah, grow.

Debbie Forster:
You’ve reached the Promised Land.

Andy Sturrock:
Yeah.

Debbie Forster:
You’ve reached the Promised Land.

Andy Sturrock:
And I can’t take any credit for it. I joined just as we started making a profit, but yeah, I mean, now the key thing is to grow and be able to help even more customers save and get mortgages and business loans as well.

Debbie Forster:
So that’s actually a really interesting time to join a company because it’s all very well being part of that startup. Just get in, get it done, hack it, get it out, and that journey. You’ve come in at a point where, as you say, they’ve just started becoming profitable, and it’s 10 years on. So it’s starting to be a proper company, and you’ve come from big company back to this world that’s startup, but more, it’s no longer just startup. So what were your priorities when you came in?

Andy Sturrock:
Yeah, so I actually think wasn’t always great at working in a big company. I often was fighting against the big company thing of not being able to get stuff done. So I always felt I was working in a quite entrepreneurial way, despite the big company. So I think that that’s at least made my transition to a smaller company a bit easier. And to a reasonable degree, I mean, that’s why I was hired, to take the technology part of the company from being that startup to scale up, or grown-up company. So I’ve been at Atom just over a year now, so spent probably the first two or three months just looking, trying to understand what was going on. And that inflection point is quite obvious, actually, or at least it was to me. And we certainly don’t want to lose that energy and just joy of a startup, but we have to just do things in a different way, otherwise, we’re not going to be able to scale and grow at the ways we want. So a few examples of that, things that I noticed.
So first thing is it seemed like everyone was frantically busy, just running around, but a bit headless chicken running around. So very, very busy, but not actually producing much. So not much output, in terms of working software, and changes getting to our customers, and not achieving the outcomes that we really wanted. So really, one of the first things to do was stop that huge amounts of work in progress, and focus on a few things, and stopped starting and start finishing. So I mean, that phrase “work in progress” is a lean thing, and I’m a massive fan of lean as a way of thinking. And the thing I would say about lean is it’s a bit unfortunate, there’s quite often the intuitive solution to a problem is not the right one, from a lean perspective, and you can prove it actually, sometimes mathematically. So I said about starting lots… Lots of things had been started because intuitively, well, the sooner you start something, the sooner you finish. I mean, clearly that just makes sense.

Except, when if all you do is start to never finish anything, and you never finish anything, because you’re just too busy jumping from one thing to another, and you don’t actually finish anything. And similarly, we didn’t have a problem with incidents causing change, but often, change causes incidents. And so the intuitive thing as well, you do fewer changes then, batch stuff up into change and do fewer of them. Well, unfortunately, that’s just wrong as well. The way to have fewer incidence that result of change is to do loads of change until you get really good at it. So we were definitely exhibiting a few of those lean anti-patterns. So other things, we were quite functionally siloed. So there was the architect team, and the business analysis team, the engineering team, the testing team, and they were handing work between each other. And anytime you get a handoff of work in that flow, then you get a break in the flow of work, and the work stops often. And again, that just leads to not achieving those outcomes, and the flow of work is not very good.

And those silos were quite project oriented, and so we changed all of that around to be much more product oriented, and we now have multidisciplinary teams that are aligned to business value streams. So we’ve got teams around savings, business lending, residential mortgages, and then some of the other back office stuff, and underpinned by a horizontal platform organization. So that really helped. And actually, those multidisciplinary teams are truly multidisciplinary as well. So this was changes we made not just in the technology organization, but across the rest of the organization as well. So we’ve brought in product managers, and people with really good digital product management skills, and now we have people… Whether they’re from the commercial team or ops, product, technology, whatever, all working together properly as a multidisciplinary product or value stream aligned team. And that’s working really, really well.

Debbie Forster:
And I mean, all of those things are really valuable, whatever the company size, isn’t it? I mean, because I think for so many of us, if we turn around and look at our team, whether we’re in a big multinational or we’re talking about a startup, and it happens easy in startup, but it’s very easy to get complacent, “Oh, we’re startup, we’re lean by definition. That’s in our DNA.” But I love that thinking about, as a good leader and manager, even if it is the dark side, it is stepping back and watching, and just understanding that distinction between busy and delivering is powerful. And looking at… I love the way you really talk about, this is about cutting through intuition, and to really look… And sometimes slower is better, sometimes nothing is better than something, stopping is better than going. And being willing to challenge those things. And that’s really… As you say, that is what undercuts all of lean, it is that anti-pattern, it’s that stopping and thinking, and that’s something that any organization, any size, can be looking.
And I think it always is sensible for us to one, when we’re coming to a new organization. But I think it’s important for us as managers to step back sometimes, to look at where we’re comfortable, and look in that way. And the last thing, that multidisciplinary approach. That shift, I’m hearing again and again from guests, of rethinking this, not projects but products, building teams that are multidisciplinary, of breaking down those silos. And it’s important to remember, as you say, only 10 years old, not a big multinational. We, as humans, naturally start building our silos. And part of our jobs, if we’re going to be great in tech, is about always looking to tear down those silos, those patterns, that relying on intuition, and busy must be good, I think, is really, really powerful.

Andy Sturrock:
And I just say, we need to focus on optimizing for the things that matter. So the thing that really matters is actually the outcomes we’re trying to achieve, which for a technology organization, and I absolutely regard the whole of Atom effectively as a technology organization, we’re really a tech company with a banking license. The outcomes that matter is working software in the hands of our customers that our customers love. So does it actually matter whether every individual person in Atom is busy at any one time? No, it absolutely doesn’t. Optimize for the flow of work, not for everyone being busy. Because if everyone’s busy all the time, then you won’t really get much flow. There is a way to actually really visualize that, actually, which is, think about a motorway. You can either have utilization or you can have flow. Maximum utilization of a motorway is when it’s at a standstill, in the M25 in rush hour, there’s no flow. And not only that, the wait times have gone to almost infinity.

So don’t aim for 100% utilization because you’ll have no flow, and you’ll wait forever. So that’s actually a way that you can actually visualize it and think of it intuitively.

Debbie Forster:
Keep an eye out for tailbacks, right? Keep an eye on [inaudible 00:17:34]. So another thing that I have absolutely loved about Atom, and with my work on diversity and inclusion, they absolutely jumped on my radar not long ago, because in the midst of everyone rethinking virtual working, hybrid working, and flexible working, Atom took an exponential leap ahead on this experiment of moving to a four-day week. Can you talk to me about that, and how it’s going? Because me and a lot of people are leaning back wanting to know how has that worked? Because you properly shifted the organization, everyone, to a four-day week. Talk me through that.

Andy Sturrock:
Yeah, so I think that this is one of the reasons that the founders founded the bank, was to actually just be able to try stuff like this. Very rarely in a career actually get to actually really run an organization and think, “Hey, this might be a good idea, let’s try.” So the thinking was everyone would be happier and more well, if that’s the right way of saying it. A better wellness, mental health, particularly… So we did this tail end of the pandemic. Obviously, lots of people had a really rough time, and mental health had taken a really big hit for a load of people. It’s not entirely altruistic, in the sense of that there’s nothing in it for the bank. It really helps our talent attraction and retention, because who wouldn’t want to work four days rather than five? So the way that it worked was, so they did a big trial first of all, and I actually joined in the middle of the trial, I suppose.
So the actual way contractually it worked was the normal contractual hours were something like 37.5 Hours, I think, over five days, it’s now switched to 34 hours over four days, so basically 10% less time. So 10% fewer hours, but for the same pay, but split over four days rather than five, so each day is normally slightly longer to make up the 10%. So you can choose to really have Monday off or Friday off. It helps if everyone really, at least in a group, takes the same day off. So in technology, we really mainly work on Monday to Thursday, and pretty much everyone has Friday off. Obviously, we have to cover Friday technology and the customer service team, all the rest of it. But we were doing that over Saturday and Sunday anyway, so it really was only an extension of a existing on-call rota, and all that kind of stuff, so really that’s not a big deal. So yeah, we tried it, we were quite a metrics driven company, and so had lots and lots of metrics about sickness, and actually what we were achieving, and all the rest of it.
So absolutely no drop in achieving the outcomes, and getting work done, and all the rest of it. Hugely happier people, we questioned something about do you look forward to starting work on a Monday? And it went through the roof. So people now just… They feel so much more rested after the weekend, that people are now really raring to go on a Monday, or Tuesday, depending when they started. I mean, from my point of view, on a Friday… I got three girls, they’re all at school on a Friday for most of the year, so I get an actual Friday to myself, which means that I’m feeling less… Well, I don’t mind being the taxi driver at the rest of the weekend at that point, because I’ve had my day to myself. And then by Monday, yeah, I can’t wait to get back into it. So every metric is positive and we’re just never going back.

Debbie Forster:
And Andy, I love the way you go about it, because I remember when you were talking about it, and I would mention that Atom bank was doing this, you get the gas because there’s always these myths. “Ooh, you can’t be doing that.” And it’s really powerful, because you cut through a lot of those myths because you had your metrics. Because it was interesting when people would say, “Well, surely productivity is going to go down.” But a lot of those people when I’d ask and say, “Well, how are you measuring currently your productivity?” You’d get a bit of, “Um,” and “Ah,” and so it’s, “Well, okay, do you even know how engaged your workers are? Do you know how productive?” So it’s setting and understanding what is productivity mean, and your focus on delivering versus busy. It’s understanding, and it’s something I powerfully believe in. What I’ve seen in my work here with the Tech Talent Charter is it’s not just about social justice or being nice to people, that actually what we’re discovering in really factual metric to given ways, is this is smart business.
And so being clear about the business benefits here, because this is helping you with recruitment, this is helping you with retention, this is helping you with engagement and motivation, and those sorts of things. And then you started as an experiment.

Andy Sturrock:
And we made it very clear that there was an experiment, and that it wasn’t a done deal, but it turned out it was a very successful experiment, and now it is a done deal. So we’ve made the changes to everyone’s contracts, and that’s it. So we’re done, it is successful.

Debbie Forster:
Lovely. All right, and I throw that down as the gauntlet for companies to look at because it’s something that, in my background in looking at this, we’re always looking for those examples of success, and cutting through the myth, and you’re showing it can be done. Not just be done, but it can be successful. So fantastic, I want to talk to you about that as time goes on. Let’s take a step back. I love to hear, when I’m talking to technologists like yourself, think a little bit about the horizon, beyond what’s just to the world of Atom, and et cetera. What’s in the horizon in tech that worries or frustrates you at the moment?

Andy Sturrock:
So it’s probably not a specific thing that frustrates me. I mean, right now there’s a whole load of stuff about generative AI, and all that. And yeah, it’s a pretty big thing and we need to make sure that we’re going to use it in the right way, and I’m sure there’ll be huge morally looking obviously, and we’ve got some good ideas about how that can really help us, and help our customers. That, along with every other new bit of technology, the thing that frustrates me is that will not be some magic silver bullet. And I think it’s too often that people are just constantly looking for the next big thing, and well… Yeah, just looking for a silver bullet and some shortcut to glory. I mean, I don’t know whether this sounds depressing or not. I just think that technology, most of the time, is just really bright people working hard and keeping at it. And I’m sorry, there is no magic silver bullet. I love what I do, so I don’t really feel like it’s that hard work, but I’ve been doing it for really quite a long time now.

Yeah, so it’s good job, I love it. But there hasn’t been any magic silver bullet and I just don’t think there ever will be. So I think that’s the bit that frustrates me, that every time something new… With blockchain, or quantum, or whatever it is, it’s like… Those people go, “Oh, this is it now. We’re done.” It’s like, “No, none of the other things were. What makes you think this one is?”

Debbie Forster:
And again, it’s just a hype curve, it’s another hype curve, and I think the world of the way media has moved more and more towards clickbait, and that outrageous talk. And we just have to understand within tech, hold our nerve, do what we know, which is know your job, know your business, know your problems, know your users, and then adapt and use whatever tech is throwing at you next. It’s another tool.

Andy Sturrock:
So I’m not for a moment saying that ignore all the new things. So cloud was the big new thing at one point, and we don’t have any data centers or legacy kind of stuff like that. At Atom, we’re entirely cloud-based, and I can’t even contemplate going back to being data center based organization, because there’s massive advantages of being in the cloud, but it hasn’t meant that I’ve suddenly got no engineers doing anything. I mean, they’re just doing things just in a different way, and a more effective way, and a more productive way, and AI will be exactly the same as that. I don’t think it’s going to replace software engineers, or testers, or architects, or whatever it is. It’ll make them loads more productive. So the copilot stuff, it’s brilliant, it really helps you write code. It doesn’t write great code all the time, and you still need someone who understands whether it’s good code, all that kind of stuff.

So I think it will make people massively more productive, but it’s not going to be the thing that, “Okay, we’re done now.” We will never be done, it’s bright people working hard for a long time.

Debbie Forster:
Keep calm and carry on.

Andy Sturrock:
Absolutely, yeah.

Debbie Forster:
So that’s the message from Andy. Good. Is there anything that you’re excited about or makes you feel hopeful?

Andy Sturrock:
Yeah, I mean, I suppose from an Atom point of view in particular, we’re profitable now. We’ve got loads of really great growth plans that we are absolutely confident of achieving them, and I think we’ve proved we can do that not at the expense of our customers or our staff. So we have market leading rates for savings in particular, we’ve got a big social media campaign at the moment called “Get paid, not played,” which just talks about how we’ve passed on the rate rises to our savings customers way more than any… And other smaller banks as well, to be fair, but way more than the big banks. And we’re just being more fair, I think, than some of the big banks. So we’re not profitable at the expense of our customers, and we’re not pleasing our customers and doing great stuff at the expense of our staff, because we have people who work four days a week. Our engagement scores are absolutely brilliant, so that makes me really positive. I love my job, and long may it last.

Debbie Forster:
And I think it is, there’s so many times where we can see all the bad news stories in tech, but then you can see companies who are doing the right thing, doing the right thing by customers and their people, and being profitable. So there are good news stories, and we can still love our jobs, so. And then thinking more broadly, because of course, top of the list would be this podcast, but is there anything else you’re reading, or watching, or listening to that inspires you? Gets you excited, you’re interested, gets the brain going?

Andy Sturrock:
Yeah, well, so I mean, reading wise… Again, so from a work point of view, I’m a massive fan of all the IT revolution books. So I mean, I’ve got a few on my desk right here. So I’ve got the John Smart Sooner Safer Happier book, I’ve got Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, I’ve got Team Topologies, I’ve got The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, that’s the predecessor to The Phoenix Project. So all of those books, I think, are absolutely brilliant, and a load of the ideas about changes that we’ve made, and are made several companies really, come from that, so I thoroughly recommend those to people. Outside of that, so our office is up in Durham, North East of England, and I live down south in Surrey, so I have quite a long drive every two or three weeks when I’m up there. So I do listen to a lot of podcasts, actually. So really good ones, recently, I suppose I listened to 13 Minutes to the Moon, so it’s a BBC World Service podcast, talks about when the Apollo 11 capsule was in lunar orbit, and they said, “Go for powered descent.”

And then the 13 minutes after that till they actually reached the moon. That was a brilliant, brilliant series, I recommend that to everyone. There’s another one called Lazarus Heist, it was about North Korean hackers, and how they’re just using Bitcoin, and fraud, and all sorts of stuff to fund North Korea’s nuclear power program, which is scary, but really interesting how they’ve gone about doing that. So it’s right now, How to Win the Ashes, because I’m a massive cricket fan, and I’ve got the score on one of my other monitors, and the England batsman are doing quite well this afternoon. So we’ve probably lost a couple of wickets since we’ve been having the podcast, but I’m hoping not. Fingers crossed. Because we need to avenge Edgbaston, and get back to even in the ashes.

Debbie Forster:
All right, well, we’ve covered it all. We’ve talked computer since there’s seven, going over to the dark side, four-day week, and finishing with cricket. Where else but the UK would we have one like that? So listen, Andy, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of XTech.

Andy Sturrock:
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Debbie Forster:
Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at xtech@fox.agency. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster, and you’ve been listening to the XTech podcast.

Speaker 1:
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