Meet Eddie Pecker – Our Group CTO

How can we make working at GSG even better?  

This question actually brings me back to the pandemic, something that has been devastating for all of us across the world, but something that has also made two major changes that will hopefully influence the future of our working lives. 

First, it’s always given us time to press the reset button on how we live, work and shop. It’s pushed companies like ours to think longer term whilst being flexible enough to react faster to the situation. More companies are broadening their approach, becoming more agile and most importantly, putting people first – both employees and consumers, and I welcome this as it proves that humankind is kind. 

Secondly, It’s opened up possibilities that just two years ago seemed impossible. What not everyone remembers is the fact that it’s always been hard to find the right people, and in the past, one of the biggest difficulties was that we were limited by our locations. Most companies didn’t think it was possible for a large team to function when they weren’t in the same geographical location. This is something that has been proved wrong over the last year and a half, as we have all explored the wonders of Zoom, Slack and Skype. Sure there have been bumps along the way. We’ve heard stories of people turning up in other people’s zoom meetings, people forgetting that they were even still in zoom meetings, but on the whole, the experience has been pretty liberating. For myself, it has meant that I’ve been able to save hours commuting daily in London in the rush hour, which I can tell you is something I will never miss. It’s great to spend more time being a father to my children.

Programs like GSG’s flexi-time empower people to live much further from their office, knowing that their journey isn’t a daily one, and like me, people are using this to define their perfect work-life balance. This flexibility is helping us not only make the lives of our teams better, but it’s also helping us to reach out further to secure the right people for the right positions.

However, balance again comes into play because we still need those moments together in the same room, face to face, challenging and pushing each other. It feels fantastic when you see someone’s thoughts gradually evolve into a great idea across a table in the real world.

What is your view of the perfect relationship between product and tech?

My view is that the product and tech teams need to work really closely together, bridging imagination and engineering. We need to have identical goals, and most importantly, we need to forget stereotypes because the best people in tech understand the customers’ needs. Tech and product need to connect at key points from beginning to end and always put the customer first. The late Steve Jobs hit the nail when he said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.  

Is there a new technology that you think is central to GSG’s consumer-centric vision moving ahead?

 Okay, I’m going to say cloud computing, which might not sound that new and, to be frank, isn’t that new, is the one thing that has enabled us to do more and still has so much more potential. 

Before cloud computing, we had to build massive hardware systems that could cope with peaks but lay mostly dormant and unused in our low periods. As companies expanded, they found it hard to build up the systems they needed to future-proof their success.

Today we are so much more flexible. We can contract or expand at speed to meet the consumer’s needs for tomorrow, whatever the future brings. 

There have been more and more stories about breaches in security and people’s data being stolen and misused. Is there a solution?

The only secure system is a closed one. The moment you open it up, there is a risk of a breach. But we can’t seal ourselves into a closed system, so we must ensure that the benefits outweigh the risks. We need to be prudent, and being prudent means we need to always think like and put ourselves into the minds of people who want to be empowered by what we provide, whilst also putting ourselves into the minds of people who want to exploit our system and the valuable data it holds. To add another layer of valuable protection, we work together with top security providers that don’t just protect us. They test us too. So no, there can never be just one solution to protecting people’s data. The best selection is multi-layered.