Bold and Big, Humble and Small

Niraj had been comparing notes with a friend — someone at a company over in the UK — about AI. What it was doing to their world, what it was doing to ours. How their place worked, how our place worked.

And he came back to me with a question that sounded simple and wasn't.

What is it we do that's actually different — the thing that makes us move faster? You should write about that.

So I sat with it. Not the flattering version of the question — the real one. What do we do differently? I went looking, honestly, the way you'd dig through a drawer you haven't opened in a while. This is what I found.

I should tell you where my head starts, because it colours everything else.

I've grown up hearing every story — history, family lore, advice handed down — with a pinch of salt. Not cynically. Just with one question running underneath it: what was the place, the time, the situation that made this true? Because something true there isn't automatically true here.

There's a phrase for it — desh, kaal, paristhiti. Place, time, circumstance. Nothing is true everywhere and always. So when someone hands me a best practice, my first instinct isn't to adopt it. It's to ask where it came from, and whether here is anything like there.

That instinct has a shape at work. And the shape is two people.

Chris is careful — deliberately, valuably careful. His instinct is to do right by the brand: safe, scalable, dependable. Mine runs the other way. I push the boundary. I want to know what's just past the edge of whatever we did last time. Mike sits between us and holds the balance.

Mike told me once, plainly, that they expect me to be the challenger. That isn't where we started. We earned those roles by playing them, over years.

We expect you to be the challenger. That's not a complaint. It's a job description.

Here's a belief I hold, and I'll say it plainly because it's a little unfashionable: technology gets paid more than most other parts of the business. So the minimum job of a technology leader — the floor, not the ceiling — is to think bold and big, and then be humble enough to test it at a small scale.

That's not a slogan. It's where I come from. I'm a lean and agile person down to the bone. So when a big, audacious idea shows up, the very next question is never "how do we roll this out everywhere." It's: can I find a sponsor? A small brand? One project where we can test and learn before we scale a single inch?

If I distil how Chris and I actually work, I don't think it was ever a plan. It just happened. He's the rock-solid foundation — do right by the brand. I'm do-right-by-innovation, push the boundary. Same problem, two completely different lenses.

And here's the strange part: we're aligned almost without talking. There are stretches where Chris and I haven't spoken for weeks. But if any one of you walks into his room, or mine, for a decision or some backing — you'll come out with roughly the same answer. How we build teams. Where we build them. How we back a brand. Aligned, and complementary.

We didn't start there. Day one, we had no idea we were complementary — we had different styles, different cultures, and all the friction that comes with both. What carried us through wasn't chemistry. It was a question we kept coming back to:

Can we deliver something small — something tangible, something the business can actually see — and then quietly replicate it?

Let me make that concrete, because it's easy to nod at and hard to do.

When we did the WordPress build, we put our best BTP on it — and she and the tech team delivered the site for one of our brands. The marketing director at the brand was a sceptic at first, and then a believer. He said that for the last ten years, no one had delivered anything there. The day it went live, I went back to him with exactly one ask. Not a case study. Not a roadmap. Just: if you liked what we built, would you tell the other marketing directors? And if any of them want to come talk to you, would you share what it was actually like working with the platform and the team?

He said yes. That one yes did more than any deck ever could.

our Voice IQ was the same shape. Venky and Sreenath built it over a quiet weekend — there's a whole story in how Voice IQ even came about, but that one's for another day. Then James and Matt, on the sales side, talked about it in the company's sales forum. And the rest is history — every brand has a version of sales IQ today. Same with Radar. Same with nearly every project that stuck.

The pattern never changed. Build something small. Don't shout. Prove it has business value. If it does, scale it. If it doesn't, be humble enough to learn from what you built — and move on.

Now the part that surprised me when I went looking for Niraj's answer.

I've been in this industry since 2011. Parik and I have spent the better part of ten years figuring out what actually works. And my biggest learning in all that time has almost nothing to do with technology.

A decade. And the lesson was change management.

How do we influence? Whom do we influence? What will actually make an impact? How do we pick the right project to begin with? I've spent more hours sitting with those questions than with any architecture diagram.

It's why we built the cohorts — product, engineering, BTP. People look at them and see training. They're not training. They're change enablers.

And I'm a believer in leading up the chain of command — the idea from Extreme Ownership that you don't just manage the people below you, you influence the leaders above you too. So while we stay heads-down on the innovation, we keep one eye on how the change is going to land: in the brand, and with the senior leaders. Mike has been kind, and genuinely brave, in backing the crazy ideas.

So — Niraj — here's the honest answer to your friend's question.

My role here is the accelerator. I help the place move through change — technology change, specifically. Chris's role is to take the small things we've tested and learned, and scale them across the brands. We're yin and yang. Neither of us works without the other.

And none of it works without Mike on the leadership team, or Kaz on InfoSec quietly saying yes to ideas that could so easily have been no's.

One more thing, and maybe it's the realest part: none of us has been chasing money. We like transformation. We like making a dent. We've stayed together five, six years now — long enough to know each other's styles, long enough to give each other hard feedback and shove each other in a better direction without any of it breaking.

So that's the long story short, Niraj. You asked what we do differently. I don't think it's a method. I think it's two people who see the same thing through opposite eyes, a habit of testing the bold idea quietly before we ever say it loudly — and a circle that stayed in the room long enough to trust each other.

Place, time, circumstance. Ours just happened to line up.

Bold and big. Humble and small. The same people, holding both.