Having it all: How to be a technology expert and a business leader

In the most recent episode of First Person, we met with Eamonn O’Neill – CTO and Founder of Lemongrass. Eamonn told us he is as excited about tech today as he was decades ago when he got his first Spectrum computer, and suggested that this is the key to his success.

You can view our interview here, listen to it here, or watch in the box below:

The technologist business leader

“I enjoy technology. And I like to position myself as a technologist,” Eamonn told us.

“The cool thing about technology as an industry is that there’s always new things coming,” he said. “If you’re the kind of person who enjoys that it helps not just in your career, but in working day to day with people. It gives you a little bit of freedom when you tell people you’re a technologist to focus on trying to understand technology and explain it to other people.”

Eamonn told us that he has seen a shift in the technology industry. Where once there were managers and there were doers, now technology leaders can be technical experts.

“When I started out, there was a sense that to really progress you had to be a manager. You had to leave your toys behind and get on with the serious business of being a manager,” Eamonn said.

“The truth is that a lot of very successful leaders are technologists who are very passionate about technology and about their product or their area. And that passion is really important. A technology company that doesn’t have that is very dry and rarely innovates and succeeds. The attitude of embracing change is in itself becoming more important.” (See also: How to be a great Chief Product Officer.)

Building a career as a technologist

You have to do the work. Understand the detail. As Eamonn puts it: read the manual. (See also: How to start a career in the age of AI.)

Eamonn told us that his excitement about technology started in childhood. “I can see a direct line from when I got my first ZX Spectrum through to getting to computer club in our school and then into engineering.”

“The reason I did engineering (at university) was that I wanted to learn how a computer works,” Eamonn said. “We did everything from generating the power to run a computer, through to programming it. All of the layers through machine code into more advanced programming languages that set me up really nicely for my first job.”

Perhaps surprisingly from someone who was inspired by his personal computer, Eamonn found his passion in business software. He liked the scale of the impact he could have.

“The thing I got a real kick out of, and it’s the same as we talked about with coding for the Spectrum, is when you can get a technology to work at scale, you get a real buzz when you see the reaction.”

Of course with great power comes great responsibility, and as well as understanding the tech you need to see the greater context. Scale can go in two directions. Eamonn recalled a change made in good faith that led to delivery trucks blocking a motorway in Germany which reinforced that message.

“One of our team made a change to the production system for a company in Germany. A defect that got in prevented delivery notes from being printed,” Eamonn recalled. “That slowed down the loading of the trucks, and the trucks were backing up on to a motorway. This closed the road and the police had to get involved.”

The lesson to be learned?

“The thing about enterprises is you see these huge scales of impact,” said Eamonn. “Hopefully you’re on the right side each time of that.”

Agreed.

From coder to founder and leader

Eamonn told us that he transitioned from his initial role into contracting for IBM. He said he enjoyed the freedom contracting allowed, and that in turn inspired him to build his own organization.

“Freedom encourages you to try things,” Eamonn said. “I set up a company with a few other colleagues back in 1998. And then we set up a consulting company that was doing the same sort of thing we were working on, but via ourselves and for customers in Ireland. It was really good fun. Tough, but you learn a lot doing that.”

Eamonn sold that original company and then set up Lemongrass, his current organization. This time he knew that wanted to work in a company that was focused on technology.

“We are very focused on the underlying technology for enterprises. Cloud, automation, and AI. These are all things that I enjoy doing,” Eamonn said.

“We get to work with some of the biggest companies in the world. We get to influence bigger things,” Eamonn told us. And that works for him. “I still absolutely love to roll my sleeves up and learn the technology myself.”

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