PODCAST | Jim Eaton-Terry, Quintain CTO

Jim Eaton-Terry is developer Quintain’s first chief technology officer. After years at airline FlyBe, shoe retailer Clarks and hotel chain Premier Inn, he is now helping turn 85-acre Wembley Park into a residential project with tech at its core.

What we learned

• Eaton-Terry is focused on moving Quintain from developer to operator
• There is no such thing as a technology strategy, there is a business strategy, and technology threads through it
• The challenges a CTO faces include the need to scale processes without scaling cost
• When to build and when to buy tech
• Project management: danger is trying to do too much in one go, digital transformation programmes and three-year plans do not work
• What are the smallest components we can break this down into and get decision-making into the hands of teams doing this work?
• Tech almost never solves a problem, without the team and the process aligned with the tech you won’t get there