When the vision that drives a founder to create their startup isn’t serving the market, how do you respond? Craig Crowther CEO at Cahoot Learning shares this insights into how to strike a balance between achieving your vision and adapting to the market when scaling up.

Getting your pitch right can be the difference between changing the world and getting lost in the cracks. Ferdi Reynolds is an entrepreneur, founder and investor with SuperSeed ventures who shares the inside word on what investors look for in a pitch, the common mistakes founders make, and the secrets to success.

What differentiates a legendary founder? Mary Butler is a people strategy expert who specialises in enabling founders and scaleups to build legendary leadership capability. We discuss the importance of people strategy, how to identify if you’re a lagend or a liability, and the 4 R’s that enable successful people leadership in scaleups.

Building a scalable product and proving the market is difficult, but scaling a business is harder. Whilst start-up’s are often proudly scrappy, it takes a whole new level of maturity to achieve scale. Nigel Dalton, once described as the godfather of Agile in Australia, is a social scientist in the Digital Transformation and Operations Team at Thoughtworks. Nigel share’s his views on the importance of ‘playing-up’ – a growth mindset that sees you thinking and executing one horizon ahead of your actual growth; using and implementing SaaS platforms to enable scale. Why having a platform strategy is so important to scale-ups, dealing with complexity and uncertainty, and the steps to success.

What was once our strength, a small, scrappy and agile team, is coming apart. Often we don't see it coming, then that realisation slaps you in the face quicker than an Oscars nominee can rush the stage. It's also likely that this realisation lands when you can least afford it. Those investors are expecting scale now.

More than ever before, the focus of scale-ups on their data privacy posture is critical. With the increasing demands of regulators to secure personal data, the increased awareness of consumers about the privacy and the death of 3rd party cookies many businesses conducting e-commerce are struggling to keep pace. James Taylor is an authority on the space. He is founder and CEO of Particular Audience and draws from a broad experience a founder and investor in several startups across APAC, UK, and India. We discuss the challenges and solutions around data privacy that are facing the e-commerce industry.

The key is to recognise that complexity is inevitable, and those who want to scale fast need to get ahead of it. The sooner we recognise and plan to solve these problems in the journey, the cheaper, quicker and easier they'll be to solve; and importantly, the faster you scale the business.

There’s any number of theories on how to scale engineering, but only those who’ve been on the journey can truly tell what works and where to tread lightly. Chris Venter CTO at REA Group shares his experiences on scaling engineering teams beyond Dunbar’s number and how to enable both flow and optimisation.

Is digital disruption a myth? We explored this at my executive roundtable with some interesting insights.

Jamie Pride is founder of ‘humanly agile’ and author of ‘Unicorn Tears: Why Startups Fail & How To Avoid It’. Former CEO of realestate.com.au, Jamie shares his perspectives on how scale-ups should approach organisational design learned from his 20 years across consulting, founding of six start-ups, and as an investor who’s raised more than AU$20m in capital.

In November 2020, I interviewed Social Scientist, AI thought leader and the ‘Godfather of Agile’ Nigel Dalton about his experiences of implementing complex systems as part of my research for ‘The Platform Owner’s Guidebook’. We discussed this and also the industry move to techno social.

Recorded in October 2020 as research for the book that would become ‘The Platform Owner’s Guidebook’, Mike Kasparian is CIO at Forrester Research shares his insights into the importance of governance and demand management to successfully deliver and support a customer-obsessed technology vision & strategy.

The Great Reckoning

It’s not always the best idea that wins. Often, it all depends who has the best told story that captures the hearts and minds of stakeholders. Brooke Bainbridge, Business Development & Digital Transformation Manager at Castrol, shares her own story from growing up in the public bar in regional Victoria to leading digital transformation programs, and the key elements of a story that enable visionary human centred leadership.

Part 2 of 2 in a series on organisational design. When start-up’s mature they experience the growing pains of success. Those who successfully achieve hyper-growth realise what got them this far won’t scale, and so they adapt. Xero is one such organisation. Founded in Wellington NZ in 2006, it is now global powerhouse. John Railton, GM of Customer Platforms at Xero gives us some insight into how he’s transformed their Salesforce platform practice to enable the next phase of business growth.

Part 1 of 2 in a series on organisational design. Jason van Lint, Head of Delivery at Flybuys (Loyalty Pacific) knows the struggle and satisfaction of building high performing platform teams in large technology businesses. We discuss the recent changes being introduced at Flybuys and Jason’s insights into how to successfully transform teams to an agile delivery model.

M&A activity creates both uncertainty and opportunity for businesses and platform teams. Nadia Herriott, Separation Stream Lead at Trustpower, shares some of the lessons from the trenches as she and her team navigate their way through a project to separate and then merge their retail business with the new parent company.