I keep coming back to the same problem. There are a lot of brilliant technologists who can’t draw a line between what they’ve built and what it’s worth. And a lot of businesses who’ve never had someone in the technology seat who could show them what that function is actually capable of producing commercially. Both sides lose, and the gap between them is where most technology leadership hires go wrong.
This is the problem we started Innova to solve. Not because nobody else is placing technology leaders, but because the market keeps matching the wrong people to the wrong situations, and neither side can see why.
The two sides of the disconnect
On one side, you’ve got technologists who are genuinely talented. They build impressive platforms, lead strong teams, modernise complex estates. They’re not bad at what they do. But ask them what it delivered for the business and you get architecture decisions, not commercial outcomes. They’ll tell you about the migration, not about the margin it protected. They’ll talk about the team they built, not about what that team produced in terms the board could measure.
I’m not saying technical depth doesn’t matter. It’s the baseline. But the leaders who hit their ceiling are the ones who never fully understand that commercial outcomes come first at this level. They can’t bring the SLT on the journey with them. They can’t translate what they’re building into terms a CFO or a PE operating partner understands. That limits how far they go, and it limits what the business gets out of them.
On the other side, you’ve got businesses that have treated technology as a cost centre for so long they don’t know what a commercially grounded technology leader actually looks like. They’ve never had one. The brief describes the technical function because that’s all they’ve seen the role do. They hire for what they know, get the same result, and assume that’s what technology leadership is.
The disconnect sits between those two positions, and it’s been there for a long time.
Why AI changes the stakes
What’s different now is that effort and process are becoming a commodity. A lot of what justified technology headcount and budgets over the last decade, the sheer volume of work, the complexity of managing it, the process around delivery, is being compressed by tools that didn’t exist two years ago. The organisations that understand this are already asking harder questions about what their technology function is actually producing.
In that world, you can’t hide behind good process or time and materials or the amount of work done. The value a technology leader creates has to be obvious. Not buried in a roadmap or justified by activity, but connected to something the business can point at.
This isn’t a future problem. It’s happening now, and the technology leaders who haven’t made the transition from technical operator to commercial operator are going to find the market less forgiving than it was.
What PE actually hires for
This is where the gap becomes most visible. PE-backed businesses hire a technology leader for a specific mandate, with a defined timeline and a commercial outcome attached to it. The question isn’t whether someone understands the industry. It’s whether they’ve done the actual work: taken a business through transformation under pressure, made the compromises that delivery requires, and come out the other side with the exit thesis intact.
Most candidates misread this. They assume sector experience carries them. I’ve run enough of these searches to know it rarely does. A technology leader who’s delivered a genuine transformation in a different sector is often a stronger candidate than one who’s watched it happen in the right industry. The battle scars are what PE is buying. Sector familiarity is a nice-to-have, not a hiring criterion.
That catches people off guard. They’ve spent years building credibility in a vertical and expect it to count for more than it does. But a PE fund with a three-to-five year hold period and an exit multiple to hit doesn’t care whether you know their industry. They care whether you’ve been through something hard and delivered a result with a number on it.
The boardroom translation test
The other thing that separates the candidates who succeed in these environments from the ones who don’t is what happens when they walk into a board conversation about a significant technology investment. PE-backed businesses typically have lean governance and impatient investors. The technology leader reports into a CEO who reports into a fund. The board cares about the commercial outcome. They don’t care about the technical decision that produces it.
I’ve seen technically excellent leaders lose board conversations not because they didn’t know the answer, but because they answered the wrong question. The board didn’t need to understand the technology. They needed to trust the decision. Those are different things, and the leaders who understand that difference under pressure are the ones PE funds want.
The leaders who earn trust in this environment can leave the room having given the board exactly what it needed. Not a technical briefing, but a commercial case: why this spend, against this outcome, at this point in the business’s journey. That’s the exec presence test. It’s not about being polished. It’s about being credible on the terms your audience actually uses.
This is not about killing idealism
I want to be clear on this because it gets misread. I’m not saying you can’t be purpose-driven or care about building something excellent. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Some of the strongest technology leaders I’ve placed are people who care deeply about the quality of what they build and can also tell you exactly what it delivered commercially. That combination is what makes someone genuinely senior.
What I am saying is that idealism without commercial grounding is a risk at this level. If someone’s definition of success is a well-built platform rather than a business that’s worth more because of what they delivered, they’re the wrong hire for most of the businesses we work with. It doesn’t make them a bad operator. It makes them a bad fit for a situation where outcomes have a number attached to them.
The culture question
There’s a related assumption I push back on regularly. Commercial intensity does not mean toxic culture. PE-backed businesses and fast-growth environments get a bad reputation. Some of it is earned. But the best versions of these environments are places where people are energised by the pace, where there’s a shared outcome everyone’s pulling toward, often equity-based, and where the scrappiness is the point, not a symptom of dysfunction.
That’s the sort of place I’d want to be in. Not somewhere slow with too much bureaucracy where nothing gets decided. The people who thrive in the environments we work in are people who get out of bed because the work matters, the pace is real, and there’s a clear end goal. When it’s done right, everyone’s pulling in the same direction. That’s not toxic. That’s alignment.
What we test for
This is where positioning becomes process. It’s one thing to say you place commercial operators. It’s another to actually test for it.
The way I assess technology leaders throughout a search is built around this gap. I’m probing for the link between what someone built and what it delivered. I’m looking for battle scars, the evidence that they’ve operated under pressure, made hard calls with resources they didn’t have, and come out the other side with outcomes they can point to. Good theory doesn’t cut it. I need the specific moments where it was difficult and they made it work anyway.
The real question the process is designed to answer is whether someone is actually up for the hard yards to exit, or whether they only think they are. Most candidates believe they are. Fewer can show the evidence. What distinguishes them isn’t the CV. It’s how they talk about specific decisions under pressure: what they prioritised when resources ran short and the timeline compressed, whether their definition of success is a well-built platform or a business that’s worth more at exit than it was when they joined.
The strongest preparation for that conversation isn’t learning the language of PE. It’s having an honest, no BS account of those moments: what the pressure was, what you did, what it cost, and what happened. If those moments exist in your background, a good process will find them. If they don’t, no amount of preparation will manufacture them.
The candidates who come through that process well are the ones who have already made the transition from technologist to commercial operator. They don’t need to be taught to think commercially. They’ve been doing it, and the evidence is in how they talk about their work, not in their CV.