Navigating a Sector Switch: Mike Skaife on His Transition from JLR to Leading Tech @ Ultimate Performance

Mike, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. Thank you for having me. Pleasure, it's all ours. Do you want to start Mike, with a little bit of an introduction to yourself, uh, your background and, Also most importantly, ultimate performance. Absolutely. Yep. So my background is as a software engineer.

So my degree is a master's in software engineering from Aberystwyth, deepest, darkest Wales. Um, and my first few roles were, you know, were an engineer of various different kinds in different industries. So mostly web focused. Um, I started out at BAE Systems, working with AIDA95, which makes me sound older than I am.

That was obviously in defense. Um, I've worked for Abstarto, done a bit of consultancy across various industries. That was, that was the first few years, very much obviously hands on engineering. Thought I'd do that for most of my career. Um, that was, that was the fun stuff. And then obviously transition to leadership.

The, the sort of main formative part of that leadership journey was Jaguar Land River. So I spent six years at JLR in Manchester. Um, So they essentially, um, spun up a new software house within Manchester, um, having, having previously outsourced software engineering in JLR to a third party consultancy that wanted to bring it in house.

So the Manchester team was spun up, um, I was the first engineering hire into that team six or so years ago. Amazing. So that was great. That was about building a team from scratch. I mean, there was literally nothing there. It was building a team from scratch. Yeah. Hiring all the engineers, doing all the architecture, setting all the engineering practices, all that good sort of stuff.

That's great. Um, it's a bit of a corny term, but we talk about building a startup within JLR. And it was very much like that. It was sort of like in on day one building things from scratch. That was really exciting. And like I say, really formative from a leadership perspective. Um, the journey I went on there again on day one, I was sort of still quite hands on.

But as the team grew, as things transitioned, I became more and more hands off leadership, um, eventually becoming head of engineering for a few years at JLR, which is great. Okay. Um, I'm sure we'll talk about that in a bit more detail, about what we did at JLR, like some, some lot of interesting stuff. Yes.

And then more recently, yeah, um, in January this year, started at Ultimate Performance, UP as a head of engineering, which is great. Again, we'll talk about that. That's the first time I'd sort of obviously moved into a new role instead of engineering, which has had its own sort of challenges. Yeah, a whole new experience.

Different to the JL arm as well. So two different kinds of leadership roles. Yes. I think ultimate performance itself. Yeah. So I guess not many people may have heard of it. We're still not very well known as a brand, I think. So we're essentially the world's leading global personal training business. So in gym, personal training, essentially.

So, Yeah, but we're global, we've got uh, 26 gyms around the world, um, we're in other big cities like we've got several gyms in London, we're in LA, Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore, Sydney, etc. As well as Manchester, London and uh, Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, sorry. Um, yeah, so we're about premium bespoke one to one personal training, okay, so yeah, and it's very different to most people's experience of personal training, you know, if a commercial gym is, you know, you spend an hour, you're spending 30 quid for an hour with a personal trainer.

They give you a few random exercises to do. They're not necessarily always that engaged. They're on the phone chatting to the next client, etc. When you're not in the gym, you don't hear from them. You see them maybe two or three times a week. Without wanting to sort of generalize it, you don't sort of tend to get the results.

You end up quite frustrated. You think, oh, I've wasted 30 quid of time, several weeks of my life. And then eventually, a few months later, you try a different PT. You don't get the results again, etc. So UP is very different because the UP not only operates in that sort of premium end of the market, which I'll talk about, but it's also much more of a sort of personal.

One to one dedicated service, right? So our sort of USP is getting those real results in a rapid, rapid space of time. Okay. We've worked with something like 25, 000 clients over 15 or so years. And we're all about, yeah, we're all about getting those results. And that could be, you know, somebody just wants to, you know, Get absolutely shredded and look good for a for a photo shoot for a wedding Whatever it could be someone who's going on a more sort of general holistic health transformation So just wants to improve their cholesterol or low their pressure wants to get fitter and healthier to play with the kids or the grandkids Right, so it's the stuff you see in a marketing material is all these big muscley blokes right?

imp? because that's what sells frankly and, but the, the, the widest our business is about, there's more holistic health transformations and, but I think the USB is about getting those results. So, when you're trained with EP, you're getting that dedicated service and a personal trainer every day of your life right?

So unlike actually Pharmaceutical? Seeing a PT three times a week and never hearing from them again when you're with UP. It's a dedicated service. They're with you every single rep of every single exercise that you're doing. They're checking in with you every day on things like your nutrition, your sleep, etc.

And that's how we get those results. It's like, I guess it's accountability, that dedicated premium service that we get. So it's expensive. It's an expensive premium at the market, but Our, yeah, our USP, our real selling points, we get those results now. There's so many fantastic results you can see on the website, but that we've achieved over the years, that's the real difference.

Um, so that's UP, yeah, yeah. So, where does tech come into a global fitness business? Because, naturally, everything, uh, you know, let's, let's go back an era, everything moved into, everything's got to have a mobile app. Right, and that was the craze. So, talk us through and talk our listeners through where tech sits and the importance of tech um, at Global Fitness, which may differentiate it again to other, um, competitors in the market.

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, we have got a mobile app to talk about. Um, yeah, so tech in UP particularly is quite interesting, so. So, again, with our position in the market of being that sort of premium bespoke one to one service, the core product of UP isn't tech, right, we're not a tech business. The core product will always be that in gym experience, right, so it's interesting.

The tech has to sort of exist alongside that, almost be additive to the experience, right? So, I tend to liken it to the experience of chatting to a chatbot online, that's very tech driven. Automate, that's great, but it feels very different to picking up the phone and speaking to a person, right? Of course.

UP is much more towards that personal service, I think, so the tech can't necessarily be front and centre. There's a risk, I think, that it can feel too tech driven and almost too generic a service and then you lose that bespoke touch, right? JLR actually had a great phrase, which was, It's high tech, high touch, so you've got the tech, but you've also got the person, so it's about how do you maintain that.

Exactly. A bit of a battle in a digitalised age, really, and in your market, which has to be personalisation. in person has to dominate. Absolutely, absolutely. And again, if you think about the kind of clients that we're working with, they tend to be sort of, again, quite affluent individuals. They've got all the latest gadgets, like the, the whoops, the Aurora rings, et cetera.

They're interested in the tech, they're interested in the data. To your point, they, they expect a tech element to be there. The important part is to say it's, it's supporting, it's additive to the, to the actual in gym experience. So in terms of what that looks like, um, yeah, we have got a mobile app, as I say, um, that's the main sort of tech that the clients experience.

So that's, their main tool for tracking and managing that transformation. So they're, they're recording everything they eat in there, all the food goes in there. So people will probably heard of MyFitnessPal. It's very similar to that in terms of logging all my food, tracking my progress, etc. That's a part of it.

Um, they can see all of their workouts in the app. So every single rep of every single exercise is recorded by the trainer. They can see that through the app so they can track their progress in the gym, how they're progressing, you know, lifting more weight, etc. doing more exercises. And that sounds quite high tech in comparison to others out there in the market.

Yeah, exactly. Um, You know, that's very intricate. Yeah, um in terms of tracking I'm really intrigued to know about your backgrounds at JLR because obviously you said that you were one of their first Techies as it were and you built that team up to was it a hundred person team? About a hundred or so in Manchester, yeah, and there's some offshore capability as well and then we have both teams.

Okay Which is a whole other ballgame in itself, but that's an amazing achievement and you obviously had a fantastic career there Yeah, So I'm really intrigued to know how has the transition been from that position to now a team of, you know, of smaller, smaller number, it's about 12? So how's that transition been and, um, you know, what were your thought processes behind it and what sort of invigorates you now to, to work on?

I'd say Jello was a great experience. Building that team from scratch was awesome. And I actually thought I'd be there for a lot longer. I probably got a bit complacent about thinking it was like a job for life. It taught me a lot about being prepared for change because something did happen. Um, so yeah, we built that team from scratch.

So it was about a hundred or so. Um, the transition came about because the decision was made, ironically, to outsource things again to a consultancy. I think these things tend to go in cycles in the corporate environment, right? So it'd been five or six years since we insourced it. Yeah. Um, the decision was made to then outsource it to a consultancy, the same one, I think.

Um. Um, and at the time I thought, you know, I didn't really want to manage a bunch of offshore engineers. It wasn't something I was particularly interested in. I'd kind of got my joy at JLR from building that team and building the relationships with the people in Manchester, helping them develop their careers, and that obviously would go out the window with, with the offshore, but that's kind of what triggered it, I guess.

And then at the same time, it just happened that the UP opportunity came along as well, was presented to me, and I knew the UP brand, I'd, I'd heard about it. I've been interested as a client from a few years ago, couldn't afford it, frankly, but that's another story. Um, so I, I knew about UP and I'd followed kind of the, the founder who was quite well known and I'd followed the kind of philosophy.

So when that came along, I was thinking, Oh, I can do head of engineering role for UP. That's really cool. So it was kind of a, a great opportunity at the same time as thinking actually what's going on with JLR. I'm not quite sure I want to be a part of that going forward. So it was kind of those, those two things combined.

Yeah. That makes sense. They, they are very different to your point there, right? I mean, it's very different to, to go from a big. Corporate environment, although it was a smaller team within the corporate environment going from that to UP Which is a you know 40, 000 people compared to it's only a hundred or so in the central office in UP is very very different but that was also quite an attraction because I think um And then that's just possible where I got a bit jaded with the kind of corporate environment to some extent.

I like, I'd say I'd worked in a startup and smaller companies before, that's why I was kind of attracted to going back to that kind of faster paced world, more impact, et cetera. That was very appealing as well. And again, the, the fitness, health and fitness aspect of it is something that I'm interested in as well.

So that was a real sort of appealing factor. And the fact that where UP is, which we'll talk about, the journey that they're on with scaling up, there's a lot of interesting opportunity there to have an impact, I think, and grow that. Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. Which we'll definitely unpack. I'm intrigued to know what were your initial hurdles or blockers or challenges that you had when you entered as head of engineering at UP?

As we've said, very different landscapes, um, different sizes of corporations, um, Yeah, what were your main blockers or hurdles you had to overcome? What were you looking at and then dissecting? Yeah, so I think the really interesting thing there is, I'd say it's the first time in my career I've started a role as a head of engineering, um, going into an existing business with an existing team.

So again, JLR, I'd say it was day one, there was no one there. UP is an existing team. Someone else has built, um, there's existing systems. Someone else has designed and built. Um, so it's all that context. It was about that they've been on a bit of a journey, UP as well with tech. So they had quite a bit of churn in terms of engineering leadership at the time.

Um, They themselves had outsourced stuff in the past, they didn't source it, they'd used contractors. So they'd been on a bit of a journey on the tech side of things. Um, they'd also had a bit of a, I guess a bit of a big failed tech initiative a few years earlier. So there's a sort of a reputational element there of having to rebuild the reputation of tech within UP to some extent.

Right. Was another challenge to sort of face there. So walking into that situation was really kind of quite challenging. Um, Earning the trust of the team, understanding how that worked. Um, they also were sort of crying out for some stability themselves. Cause I say that with that churn in engineering leadership, they'd not had a head of engineering for about six to nine months before I rocked up.

So they were just crying out for, you know, some leadership, someone to advocate for them at the sort of senior levels of the company, give them that stability, give them that sort of long term vision of what we were doing. So that was a challenge, but also a great opportunity as well. Um, and then the other aspect of, again, which we'll talk about the business, the journey the business is on.

Um, just having gone through some private equity investment, um, that meant there was a lot of change going on in the wider business as well, and sort of figuring out where tech fitted into that as well. It's kind of an interesting thing to kind of start to, to dissect and understand to, to your words there as well.

So there's a lot, lots going on, um, again, very, very different to JLR. I think, um, I've learned a lot having, having made that transition for the first time. Yes. Going into that world, earning the trust of an existing team, getting things working effectively, understanding that context as quickly as possible.

In, in a, in a sort of fast moving world. It's been kind of really exciting. Yeah. How do you earn trust from a team that's already established going in that question? off piece as well. I didn't send you, that's all good. Um, yeah. So yeah, so my approach is to leadership resort. It's been about transparency, right?

So, right. I'm, I'm all about integrity, transparency, so I think if you, you know, if you're sort of open and honest people about. what your plans are, what your vision is, what you're doing, and you're involving them in that journey, I think that helps. Um, all those sort of earlier meetings with the team are really crucial, so it's sort of, it's just about building relationships and getting to know people isn't that what I was kind of really open and honest about.

You know, why I come in, what my vision was, my kind of, I guess, philosophy for how I approach leadership and tech, etc. And they seem to be kind of aligned with that. I guess you're looking for those early wins and those early ways of kind of advocating for the team. So again, we'll talk about that, about how I was sort of introduced to a few things like postmortems after incidents, etc.

To start to demonstrate trust and show that I trusted the team to deliver. Um, and even if we made mistakes, still sort of demonstrating, you know, I've got your back. I'm here to advocate for you. That's something. It's something you can't rush, right? It's something that takes time, but it's just about, um, yeah, that transparency and that, that demonstrating trust in them helps them to build trust in you, I think.

Definitely. So would you say that you had, or you now have, Maybe on reflection. Uh, let's say first 90 days blueprint as a head of engineering, because I know that a lot of our listenership are, uh, the techies at that level. So I'm curious if you've got any key markers and you have said that, you know, they needed structure.

Uh, advocacy, um, what, what would be your 90 day blueprint? Yeah, there's a great book actually I read called First 90 Days by, uh, Michael Watkins, I think it is. Um, the, the main thing for me is you've got, you've got to be a sponge essentially, right? So the, the temptation when you're going in to roll out is to want to have an impact ASAP and sort of show your value, sort of validate why they've hired you almost, but you've got to kind of restrict yourself in doing that.

So it's all about being a sponge, absorbing as much information as you can do. The first. Month or so, it was literally just talking to as many people as possible, understanding as much context and information from the business as possible. Not, not just my tech team, but everyone else across the business.

So, uh, finance, HR, marketing, et cetera, all the directors. Um, I'm actually understanding the context cause I was conscious that what worked at JLR, you can't necessarily just lift and shift that to another team, right? Every team and every business has got its own context, its own differences. So it's understanding that first and foremost was the key thing.

Um, Speaking to people and then I think looking for those quick wins. So I'll mention it again. One of the big things I introduced was, um, around incidents to put a bit more process around that. So how we, how we managed incidents in production, how we kind of reread them afterwards and learn from them.

That was, that was a big sort of change initially that was big impact, but it's kind of minimal impact as well in terms of it didn't disrupt too much, the ways of working. So it's looking for those quick wins. Um, but it's also like I say, it's resisting the, to make significant changes too quickly before you've got that context.

Yeah. Part of the blueprint. So it's almost what you don't do to that extent, I suppose. Um, and then once you've understood enough about the context and particularly the politics of the company, so how things work on the people side of things, it's not just about the tech, once you understand that, then you can start to build your vision about, okay, what, what are the main problems here?

How can I go about solving them? Some of the experience from JLI helped because obviously I'd seen a few things there from building a team and changing a few things But it's understanding that you actually can't just lift and shift that, you've got to understand the specific context of the business and spend your time doing that.

Um, I was quite fortunate in terms of

Quite fortunate in terms of when I joined the business, they were going through this private equity investment, so There was a big piece of tech due diligence work going on that I got thrown into in my first week. It's like Hi Mike, welcome to UP. Can you just help us with all the due diligence about these systems you've never seen before?

So that's a challenge but also a really awesome way of kind of accelerating the onboarding so that that helps sort of build the context and build the understanding of the systems as well. I think accelerated things that it would have probably taken longer to get up to speed if I hadn't done that.

Right. Trying to understand all the systems in countryside but it was being friendly that the d pen was, was, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it because it was quite full on but I think it was really effective way of kind of learning more about the business which is really exciting. Yeah you have to be a certain type of person to be able to grab that with two hands and just lean in and go for it without fear.

Um, you know you're leading a team of 12 people and And on the podcast we haven't actually spoke about leadership in a few episodes now. So what would you say like your leadership, leadership style is, what would you say your leadership style is and the main challenges you have with running a more intimate team or perhaps the positives of running a smaller team?

Yep, yep. I think I probably use the word democratic, I probably describe my leadership style the best. My personality doesn't really lend itself to being any more kind of dictatorial or micromanager. I'm very much about trusting the team and empowering the team essentially.

So there's a great book called, um, Turn the Ship Around by, it's by a U. S. submarine captain who essentially talks about building a team of leaders, right, so I'm a massive fan of that. Um, he talks about essentially, he sets a vision, sets the goal we need to get to and then empowers the team to work out how to get there.

So I kind of figure, you know, I've got a team of really smart people. They don't need me to tell them how to work and what to do. They need a goal to aim for, they need some guardrails to work with them if you like. So we're using the right tech stack, we're aligned with a more strategic architecture. But beyond that, you people figure out what we need to do.

So I'm a big fan of that kind of leadership. It's about empowering the team. Um, and enabling them to do their best work and not getting out of the way, but essentially just sort of being there to support and sanity check. And if I, if I see things go off track, I can start to nudge the team back in the right direction.

So it's sort of very much taking that approach. The other thing that kind of impacts my leadership is I'm a very kind of introverted person in general, quite a quiet kind of guy. Um, to the point where a lot of my friends are surprised I even do this for a living. Cause it's just, it's not something that comes naturally to me in this leadership thing.

Right. But, um, I think I've learned a lot about, you know, There is space for introverted people to be a leader. I think it's particularly common in the tech industry. There's probably quite a few people listening who are, you know, engineers considering leadership potentially thinking, oh, I couldn't quite do it.

I've not quite got the personality for it, etc. Um, but I've been on that journey about it. It's been really kind of empowering and I've learned a lot about, I've developed a lot as a person. Yeah. Um, taking on a leadership role as an introvert. I think, um, Things like, I think it makes me a good listener, which is really important to the point about building trust of the team.

I think a big part of that is, is being someone who people can talk to and who they feel, feel listened by. I think that's really important. You tend to think of a leader as having to be really extroverted and outspoken, but actually There's room for someone to be a bit more quiet and reflective and who can listen to sort of, to lead the team there as well.

Um, I think things like, um, Um, being sort of quite reflective on, in terms of making decisions, so I don't tend to rush into decisions, I can be a bit more thoughtful and reflective and, and that, that helps. That doesn't help in every situation but it helps in some scenarios. Um, I think it also gives me empathy to sort of recognize other quiet, introverted people on the team and give them a voice and make sure, make sure that they're here.

That's an important thing for a leader. If, if you're a leader, Thank you. A bit more extroverted, maybe you're dominating conversations a bit more, whereas I'm more prepared to kind of make space for other people there as well, I think. Um, so that's been, yeah, that's been really cool. Um, learning how an introvert can move into a leadership role.

Um, there was something else I was going to say there as well. Uh, I guess I think I mentioned the positives of running online. Oh, sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Going from JLR, say, bigger team to a small team, I'd worked in smaller businesses before. I think I'm really attracted by the fact you can have a lot more impact in a smaller business.

I tend to wear a few more hats in UP than I did at JLR maybe towards the end, so I'm doing much more around kind of architecture. Tech leadership, et cetera, than I would have been in JLR. So that's been really exciting. And I think, you know, a hundred or so people at JLR, the team got to a point where I didn't necessarily know every single person individually, whereas now I can really start to build those relationships with the team.

I find that really cool because a big part of what I enjoy about leadership myself is helping people develop themselves and develop their career and get to know about their goals and ambitions, support them etc. I can do that a lot more with a smaller team than I was potentially able to before at Trail Arts.

That's kind of something else that really motivates me. So that's been really cool. And how important is failure in the process? And even more so, I guess, how it's handled or Yeah, I love this subject. Anyone who's worked with me for more than five minutes will have heard me banging on about psychological safety because I love it.

Um, I've actually written about this in the tech hiring report from Bernstein, which is available for download now. Um, yes, it's a big passion of mine, a big, big advocate for, I think, learning from failure is so important. I guess I've worked in environments in the past where It wasn't safe to fail, right?

There's been directors that have been literally looking for people to blame. I've seen people get fired for making mistakes with cloud billing, for example, and it's all kinds of wrong, right? It just creates completely the wrong environment. So I'll always, as a leader, be about advocating for Environment where it's safe to fail and safe to learn from those mistakes, right?

It's so important. So so I say one of the first things I actually changed at up was when we had production incidents Putting a bit of a process around that where we can a we can record the incident as it's happening So we're logging everything as we go. We're being really kind of open about what's happening And crucially we're reviewing it after the instance finished So we have what we call a blameless post mortem, which everyone talks about but they're quite difficult to actually put in place So there you're you're you're you know You're sort of, again, you're really honestly and openly reviewing what happened during an incident, right?

The important part there is, is that we're blameless. So you're always asking what happened, why it happened. You're never asking about who that's the crucial thing, right? People have got to feel safe to talk about what happened. You, even if an individual engineer made some kind of mistake, there was still a process or a system gap that enabled that to happen.

So it was about making sure you're avoiding personal blame. And that situation is about how you get to that point. Um, if people feel safe to then talk about failures, You're going to learn a lot more about it. You're going to put mitigations in place to stop that failure happening in the future. And you can actually change the whole culture of a company, I think, because in a world where it's not safe to fail and people feel that they're going to get blamed for making mistakes, I find it really stifles innovation.

It can actually slow down the whole progress of a business, right? Whereas you want people to feel safe to take risks, safe risks, but you know, to take risks and to feel like if something does go wrong, my leader's got my back. We're going to learn from it. I'm not going to get blamed, et cetera. It completely changes the culture of a business.

It takes time. But even at UP now, we're starting to see, you know, that there was maybe previously a bit of a blame culture. Some of the directors would be out for sort of trying to find people to blame. But now we've, we've already started to change that by being really open about this. So when you've done that post mortem as well, it's really important to sort of share that far and wide within the business.

And say, you know, hey, this thing happened, this mistake happened, here's what we've done about it, here's what we're going to do in the future, etc. And the end. It doesn't necessarily make you untouchable, but it makes, it completely changes the approach of other people to you as a team. They can say, okay, yeah, those guys messed up, but they, they learned from it.

I feel confident they know what they're doing. Yeah. You can start to then see that spread around the business to the point now where other teams in UP have started to do the same sort of thing and share their own failures, which is, which is awesome. That's what you want. You want, you want that fit. You want, I don't want to say you want failure to be a part of the culture, but you want, you want it to be a safe environment where you can take risks in the way of failure.

Um, is approached in the right way. It's really, really important. If people aren't failing though, perhaps they're not trying new things. They're not maybe pushing to the limit that they could push. Exactly. That's the point about stifling innovation, right? You can sometimes, if I have an engineer and I'm terrified to make a change, it's going to take me longer to make it because I'm going to spend Months and months, QA ing it, et ce