Leading the Future: Jared Owen on Tech & Teamwork

Jared’s career in technology began as a Conversion & User Experience Specialist in the world of digital advertising. After creating his own business that ran a range of successful sites, generating much-viewed content, he joined RedBrain in 2019. An affiliate business, Jared scaled Redbrain to become Google’s No1 shopping partner across Europe, rapidly growing revenues to £40m a year. 2 years ago, he transitioned from Chief Revenue Officer to Managing Director, working with some of the world’s leading brand, as the business’s growth shows no sign of slowing.

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What are the key skills required to be a successful technology leader in 2025?

It’s too easy to get caught up in the numbers, but it’s important to step out of them at times and ask yourself: ’what are we trying to achieve?’ You need to be able to consider the perspective of your business, what are the risks of implementing a change? Don’t see things only from technological perspective.

Ultimately a big part of your job is to solve problems – what is the problem that your change is going to fix and will the solution be effective? Will it ultimately be worthwhile? I spend a lot of time not only talking to our customers but also talking to ‘non-customers’ to understand their perspective. If you decide a course of action is correct, execute it quickly. I firmly believe that you must take people on the journey – for me that includes our finance and customer success teams – allow people to understand why we are doing something.

What is the key to building a successful IT team?

Culture is a huge part of our success at Redbrain. It’s all too easy to hire on technical skills but in my experience, that doesn’t work. When considering who to hire, I always want to understand if they share the same values as the team.

Jeff Bezos said ‘simplicity is a superpower’ and this is so true – the ability to explain ‘how’ and more importantly ‘why’ is critical. Articulating the mission and vision for your team / business is equally important – it needs to be exciting, regardless of the sector your work in. For us at Redbrain, we are genuinely trying to move the needed in the industry, through change and innovation – that is a really exciting ambition for our staff to buy into.

You also can’t force culture – it’s not necessarily about bean bags and a pool table, sometimes it’s about having honest, direct conversations – you might have incredibly talented people but if you accept behaviour that damages the culture it creates an inevitable ripple effect.

I firmly believe that you must take people on the journey – for me that includes our finance and customer success teams – allow people to understand why we are doing something.

What predictions do you have for the future?

Speed of execution and the increasing use of cloud resources will only improve – the ability to build things and iterate has got so much quicker, whilst tools that allow things to run more quickly, that used to rely on people are now in the cloud. Redbrain operates in 23 countries as a truly global business all from the UK – technology makes things quicker and easier, ultimately enhancing people’s contributions.

The generative AI evolution has been the defining change of recent years, it has produced tools that allow for much quicker generation of content, however there is a danger that the potential of AI can be overhyped. Ultimately, the suggestion that engineers aren’t needed in technology is an example of this, and we’ve seen examples where it merely leads to the creation and proliferation of bugs in programming.

Technology will continue to increase productivity and add more value, ensuring people get more out of their day; speed and efficiency will continue to be the order of the day.

Looking to our sector, online retailers will increasingly become marketplaces, selling a larger proportion of products that are not their own, Amazon has shown the way and many other major retailers are already following. We’ll also see increasingly curated content for individuals – ultimately providing a better, more personalised experience for us all.

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Our special thanks to Jared Owen for his insights, ideas and valuable contribution for this article.