An AI with a vote on the board: notes from a room of directors
An evening with directors at Foxhills, a lesson about coffee and slippers, and a sovereign wealth fund that gave an AI a vote on its board
This week I spent an evening among directors at the Institute of Directors’ Directors Connect, held on 9 November at Foxhills Country Club near Chertsey. It was an informal gathering, but one that left me both inspired and energised.
What stood out most for me was the evening’s talk on the role of the director. Its central point was the need to understand how the organisation is really doing, in the real world rather than in the board pack. The speaker’s example, from a non-executive role in a care home setting, was to check the quality of the coffee and the slippers. It chimed with my own experience in industry: you only truly understand the quality of your products and services by walking in your customers’ shoes and seeing how they show up for real people, in real time.
My conversations through the evening ranged widely, from digital marketing and measurement in the AI age, to the future of work and modern approaches to directorship, right through to Foxhills’ charitable work in the local community.
And, of course, no gathering these days is complete without an AI story. For me, the key takeaway in this arena was the speaker’s account of an AI serving as a non-executive director. Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund, Samruk-Kazyna, appointed an AI system called SKAI to its board in 2025, complete with voting rights.
It is a striking example of AI moving beyond productivity tools into roles traditionally held solely by humans. We talk a lot about keeping a “human in the loop”. Here, it is closer to an AI in the loop: a serving board member directing, and voting, amongst human colleagues.
This example also points to the governance questions I keep returning to. Every AI agent needs an identity, an owner and a limit. Supporters see an AI director as a step towards more transparent, data-driven decisions; sceptics have called it a publicity stunt. Either way, when an AI has a vote at board level, who owns its judgement, and who is accountable for the outcome? Every board will need an answer to this question at some stage, and likely sooner than many expect.
Foxhills Country Club, Surrey
Celebrate Deleting Data: Trust, Privacy and the Data MVP
Why great data stewardship starts with collecting less and deleting more: three takeaways from the Secure by Design series opener, plus a clip on the data MVP.
Most teams celebrate collecting data. Very few celebrate deleting it.
Data is about trust: trust in how it’s collected, stored, managed through its life cycle and, ultimately, deleted once it’s no longer needed. Trust is both an input and an outcome, and that’s the essence of good data stewardship.
In practice, good customer data acquisition comes down to three principles: just enough data, fit for purpose; stored safely and securely; and time-bound retention policies, linked to business need and customer tenure.
These principles were at the heart of my recent conversation with Rebecca Fairlamb, opening Product Economics’ Secure by Design webinar series. It’s the part of the conversation I’d want every practitioner working with data and privacy to hear.
Three things I’d take from it:
→ Give every data field one sentence: why we hold it, how long we keep it, and what the customer thinks it’s for.
→ Celebrate deleting data as much as collecting it. Less data means less risk, less cost and a smaller blast radius if something goes wrong.
→ Trust is an output of how a team works, so ownership has to sit with the product team, not only with compliance.
When launching a new proposition, define your “data MVP”: how much data is just enough, and why each field is justified. And remember that an MVP is about learning in the real world, with real customers, not in a simulated environment that never touches them.
That’s one of the principles in my book, Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale, and one of the key themes I discuss in the session. You can watch it in the sneak peek clip below.
→ Watch the full recording on YouTube
Related: [Data is now more valuable than oil]
Data is now more valuable than oil.
Data is now more valuable than oil, so product teams need to treat it that way. Ian Finn sets out three questions every data field should answer, and why trust is built into how teams work.
Data has become one of the most discussed topics in business. It drives more reliable, unified views of customers as they move through a brand’s ecosystem. It helps tell whether the visitor is a human or a bot. It is also now used to train AI systems. It is a valuable commodity, and many people say it is now more valuable than oil.
I read that line recently, and it has stuck with me. We all know what oil has become, yet many product teams still gather data without asking why they hold it, how long they keep it, or what it is for from the customer’s side.
At Product Economics’ recent Secure by Design webinar, I argued that trust in data is an output of how a team works, not just a policy document. Three questions I’d put to any data field:
Why do we hold it?
When does it expire?
What does the customer think it’s for?
The clip below is a short sneak peek of the full session. The complete recording can be viewed at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnE6apwToNs
In an age when data serves many purposes, including training AI systems, I believe product teams asking the key questions about customer data has never been more critical. Privacy and trust run through the whole series, and these were the themes I most wanted to explore.
Thank you, Rebecca Fairlamb, for hosting and asking the questions that matter most in this area.
A short sneak peek from Ian Finn’s session at Product Economics’ ‘Secure by Design’ webinar. Ian explores why trust in data is an output of how product teams work, and the three questions every data field should answer: why we hold it, when it expires, and what the customer thinks it’s for.
The fish pie that nearly never was: a lesson in requirements
A clear order, a confused handover, and a waiter who checked back just in time. What one fish pie taught me about how ideas get distorted as they travel through organisations, and three habits that keep the mission intact.
This weekend, I ordered a fish pie in a gastro pub. Nothing out of the ordinary there, you might think. But then events took a rather surreal turn.
Feeling more peckish than usual at the end of a packed week, I was bold enough to order a fish pie with a side of chips. Double starch, you might observe, but the appetite demanded it. The waiter took the order, went away, and conversation at the table resumed. What happened next is the nub of this tale.
The check-back
A few minutes later, a different (seemingly more senior) member of staff appeared at our table. "Just to check the order you gave my colleague: you wanted the fish pie without the mash topping, and a side of chips instead?"
Now, I don't know about you, but a fish pie with no mash topping does not a fish pie make. My unhesitating response: "Ah no, a complete fish pie please, with its topping, and a side of chips."
"Right, I see," he said. "I did think a fish pie with no topping was a bit odd, which is why I came over to check." And just as well he did. A fish pie, mash topping and all, duly arrived, with its intended side of chips.
Clear at source, distorted in transit
So what can we learn from this? The blurb for my book, Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale notes that "most products at scale don't fail from lack of effort; they fail from lack of clarity." This little fish pie interlude was that scenario playing out in miniature. The order was clear when I gave it. Everyone involved was trying to get it right. Yet somewhere in the handover, the one detail that mattered most changed meaning, and nobody would have known until the plate arrived.
It reminded me how intent and focus frequently get diluted as they pass through an organisation's flow lines: cross-team requirements discussions, or ideas travelling up and down functional chimneys. Usually the stakes are higher than whether a fish pie arrives with its topping, or whether the chips become the topping in a moment of improvised innovation.
Take an idea that starts in a product team as "let's reduce registration friction". Discussed with an adjacent team the outcome depends on, it becomes "so let's drop some data capture at sign-up", without noticing that key early-life propositions in the customer lifecycle depend on that data being captured at the outset. By the time it reaches senior leadership, the question has become "so how can we reduce the cost of registering customers?"
An idea that starts out pure, with a specific problem to solve, gets progressively reshaped by each group it touches, until it addresses a different problem entirely, often one that was never a problem in the first place.
Keeping the mission intact
So what's the answer to this creeping distortion? In my experience of leading products at scale, three habits make the critical difference:
Tell the story with conviction. Be clear about where we are, where we're going and why the journey matters: the what and the why. Evidence-backed stories work best, and this is where data and insight earn their place.
Stay on mission. As the story travels across teams and levels, make sure it arrives intact rather than morphing into some other set of jobs to be done. That avoids a diluted MVP, scope creep, or both.
Play it back. Like the waiter who checked my order, ask people to restate what they've understood before they act on it. A quick playback is the cheapest quality check there is. I've seen a five-minute playback at the end of a planning session, on the focus and shape of a six-month plan, save weeks of rework and wasted diversions.
Staying curious
So there we have it: how one fish pie that nearly never was got me thinking about the product world, where a distorted mission can lead teams to solve a very different problem from the original one, so different that the solution bears no resemblance to what the customer asked for.
By the way, the fish pie that did arrive was hearty and delicious, all the more so for its fluffy and flavoursome mash topping. A circuitous route to get there, maybe, but the check-back averted an unwelcome surprise. It pays to stay curious along the way.
How even a fish pie order in a pub can lead to distorted requirements.
Photo by Ryan Scott on Unsplash
Every AI agent needs an identity, an owner and a limit
Every AI agent needs an identity, an owner and a limit. Cited in The Security Shift from Change Makers Club, here is why most organisations are getting the order wrong.
I’m pleased to share that I’ve been cited as a contributing voice in a new industry report from Change Makers Club: The Security Shift: Your agents have the keys. But who secures them?
It draws on a roundtable of senior technology, security and product leaders held in London in September 2026, and the full report is available to download below.
The conversation in the room
Most organisations have moved past asking whether to use AI. The harder question now is what happens when AI stops simply answering and starts acting: booking, buying, approving and changing records on someone’s behalf. As the report puts it, AI agents are being handed access faster than anyone can say who they are, what they may do, or who answers for them.
“Identity and Access is now the control plane for every decision AI makes.”
The Security Shift, Change Makers Club
My contribution
My contribution, on page 4, is a simple test any organisation can apply today:
“Every AI agent needs an identity, an owner and a limit. Many organisations are deploying the first element before they’ve decided on the other two.”
Identity, owner, limit: why the order matters
Identity. An agent isn’t the user, and shouldn’t borrow the user’s credentials. It needs its own identity, so you can see what it did, on whose behalf and when. This is the part most organisations get to first, because the technology makes it easy.
Owner. Someone has to be accountable for each agent, in the same way a product leader owns a roadmap. Without a named owner, risk falls between teams, and nobody notices when an agent’s behaviour drifts.
Limit. Every agent needs a defined boundary: what it may access, what it may decide on its own, and when a human has to step in. Limits should be refined as an agent proves itself, not set once and forgotten.
Deploying identity without the other two is like issuing someone a building pass without saying who they report to or which floors they’re allowed on. The pass works perfectly, and that is the problem.
In my own experience of running identity at scale, every entity acting in a system needs its own identity, whether that is a human user, an authenticated service, another non-human entity or, now, an AI agent. Only then can the system strike the right balance between access, productivity, security and risk.
Building trust into products at scale is one of the threads running through my book, Product Truths, and it was good to see the same theme come through so strongly from such a varied room.
Read the full report
My thanks to George Whittington and the Change Makers Club team for bringing the conversation together and turning it into something practical.
[Download The Security Shift report (PDF)]
If you’re working through how identity and trust need to evolve as AI agents take on more, I’d welcome the conversation.
𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗮 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 𝗮𝘁 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀.
On 8 September, a technical fault in the UK's air traffic control flight data system led to around 2,000 flight cancellations. Resilience is designed in advance, not on the day, and the Three Ps framework shows how.
On 8 September, a technical fault in the UK’s air traffic control flight data system led to around 2,000 flight cancellations, grounded aircraft and widespread disruption. I saw it up close: a colleague visiting me from overseas was caught up in the chaos.
I can't say how NATS prepared internally, and I won’t speculate. But as an outsider looking in, it reinforced a point I come back to often. At scale, resilience has to be designed in long before the worst day arrives, through an operating model that can ‘Plan, Prepare and Perform’, and adapt to whatever form unexpected events take.
A month before the outage, I published my framework on exactly this: The Three Ps of Performant Systems. It now feels worth revisiting. The original, in full framework, is reposted below.
→ Plan: map the blind spots, the unhappy paths and the ‘what if?’ scenarios.
→ Prepare: stress test your runbooks and escalation paths while the sun is shining, not once the storm arrives.
→ Perform: the final 10% is how your team acts under pressure, so rehearse it and build the crisis muscles before they're needed.
Forewarned really is forearmed. Resilient systems give you more than hope: if the worst happens, the way back to normal is a clear, well-trodden path.
Original Three Ps of Performant Systems publication post here:
https://www.ianfinn.co.uk/perspectives/2026/8/4/your-next-incident-wont-define-your-systems-fortunes-your-work-before-the-storm-will
The Three Ps of Performant Systems Framework (© 2026 Ian Finn. All rights reserved.)
The Identity Paradox: Reflections on AI from the boardroom and from the back of a taxi
A ChangeMakers roundtable on non-human identities and AI governance, and a taxi ride home that put the same question in miniature: can the systems we trust actually be trusted with what matters most?
Privileged and invigorated to have been part of lively debate this week, on the very topical thread of non-human identities, now proliferating across organisations as a consequence of the AI adoption surge. By 2027 it is predicted that 74% of organisations will be using AI Agents (Deloitte study, 2026).
The event was a #ChangeMakers round table on ‘The Security Shift’ that is consequently underway, as non-human identities proliferate at pace. The discussions progressed through the AI adoption curve, governance considerations, practical challenges and looking to ensure cross-org alignment, whilst the pace of change is more rapid than the process, procedures and guardrails that follow in its wake. I offered a point about the conundrum proposed by the ‘Identity Paradox’, whereby organisations experience intense downward exec pressure to implement AI at pace; but the balancing capabilities in controls and checks and balances are often stretched to keep up.
The quality of discussion in the room was excellent and perfectly on point for this critical topic - bringing together tech leaders operating where bleeding edge Identity, AI and Security intersect.
With AI now being such a pervasive element of modern life, it was perhaps not a surprise that even the taxi ride home was ‘on topic’. Travelling back in a cab from Guildford station, I found myself in conversation with the driver, who was telling me his own AI story and the impact it had on the lives of both him and his family, particularly for his daughter, who was experiencing learning difficulties. Utilising AI to research and uncover local authority and other support resources, he relayed how AI was an accelerating force in helping him navigate the hugely complex routes to securing help for his daughter, via untangling a web of complex processes.
That's the identity paradox in miniature. In the room, we debated how to govern non-human identities before they outpace our controls. In the cab home, AI was already, quietly, helping a father navigate a system built for humans, on behalf of a daughter who needed it most. Two very different rooms. The same question: can the systems we trust actually be trusted with what matters most to us?
AI and Identity discussions in the room
Scoring with your very first touch of the season feels great. But the scoreboard only tells a fraction of the story..
A hockey team's first match of the season and a memorable win reveal three lessons that translate directly into product and portfolio leadership: shared mission, invisible teamwork, and the discipline of fast, effective decisions under pressure.
New Season, new pitch (a glorious freshly-laid astro) blazing September sunshine – the perfect setting. The perfect stage for the start of our Fleet & Ewshot hockey team’s new campaign last Saturday. New season, but the same rules in play. It was about the team, and the unifying mission that is the beating heart of any successful group.
Our team picked up from where we left off last season, in our first encounter against a formidable Alton side. Cohesive, looking for the gaps, the hidden opportunities and the best routes through a tight opposition defence. I was fortunate to score with my first touch of the match (and therefore of the season) to net our first goal, in a memorable 3-0 win over our local rivals. At the other end of the pitch, our debutant Goalkeeper made an improbable penalty save – something rarely seen in game of hockey. But it’s never just about the team member who applies the final touch. A team wins or loses based on the cumulative effects of everyone who shows up, whether that’s on the hockey pitch or at the product management or portfolio coalface.
> A shared mission – one common overarching goal:
Pulling together as one for compounding effects requires clarity of purpose and shared endeavour behind a unified mission. On the pitch, it’s about how do we score more goals than we concede. In product and portfolio teams, there needs to be a ‘higher purpose’ for a work group to rally behind in pursuit of excellence. Whether that is about creating a secure but frictionless experience for users logging into a platform to start the user journey or about building out a holistic ‘suite of solutions’ all in one convenient place (think Revolut), the defining purpose shapes the way for the ‘how’ teams best come together as one.
> Invisible Teamwork:
The best teams bring a blend of the talents, and a way of working that creates a magical multiplier effect which is much more than the sum of its individual parts. In a game of hockey, the striker applying the final touch for the goal is the cumulation of the building work of the defence and midfield behind them. Great product teams are no different, the amalgamation of well-grounded customer understanding to help shape a clearly defined and balanced solution path combined with the engineering excellence to help deliver the ultimate realisation of that solution. The cohesive collaboration behind the common purpose brings the value.
> Instant interaction:
Just as in hard-fought hockey games, so too in fast-paced B2C retail or fintech markets – often decisions need to be made quickly, but still effectively, in the moment. A hockey team coming back from the summer break for their first game back together doesn’t have the luxury of time to discuss in advance each permutation the game might take. It has to improvise and then iterate. So too with cross functional product teams assembling to address the latest business critical problem to be solved: initial insight > interact > iterate > invigorate is often a well-advised model to either build momentum early, or fail fast in pursuit of other better bets.
The executive takeway:
Whether you’re battling on the hockey pitch for each hard-won goal (or goal prevented) or leading product teams into complex cross functional digital transformation to replace a creaking legacy platform, the same rules ring true. Success isn’t an individual sport within a team construct; it’s about the power of the team to create accelerating multiplier effects in unison that help deliver the final result. As one, cohesive and mission-aligned unit.
Data Sovereignty, Resilience, and a Danish Pastry: Reflections from a Morning at the Embassy
Earlier this week I had the privilege of joining a Technology Leaders Breakfast at the Danish Embassy in London, hosted by Ambassador Kristina Miskowiak Beckvard and the team at Denmark in the UK, on data sovereignty in a cloud and AI-first age.
The room was genuinely exceptional: CIOs, CISOs, and senior technology leaders from across sectors and government, all wrestling with the same tension I see daily in identity and platform work. How do you build systems resilient enough to withstand real disruption, whilst keeping trust and sovereignty intact for the people who depend on them?
It's a tension that doesn't resolve itself with a single framework or a single vendor. Data sovereignty sits at the intersection of technical architecture, national policy, and commercial pragmatism, and the organisations that navigate it well tend to be the ones who treat all three as inseparable, rather than solving the technical problem in isolation and hoping policy and commercial reality catch up later. That's true whether you're a retailer managing customer identity across markets, or a government department managing citizen data across borders, the underlying discipline is the same: resilience isn't a feature you bolt on, it's a property of how the whole system, technical and institutional, is designed from the outset.
The event also brought back fond memories for me of my time building out globalised technology solutions, across 110 countries, to support international trade for the UK government a few years ago, in the post-Brexit phase. That work taught me a version of the same lesson from a very different vantage point: platforms that need to serve multiple sovereign jurisdictions at once can't treat "compliance" as a downstream concern. It has to be architected in from day one, or it becomes the thing that quietly breaks under real-world pressure, exactly when you can least afford it to.
It was genuinely great to see states and business converging so seamlessly to discuss pivotal shared concerns like this one. Too often these conversations happen in separate rooms, technologists talking to technologists, policymakers talking to policymakers, when the actual problem sits squarely in the overlap between them.
And yes, discussions were well-fuelled by the obligatory and freshly-baked Danish pastries, which were, without question, the best I've ever tasted.
Grateful for the invitation, the warm hospitality, and the calibre of thinking in that room. Conversations like these are exactly why I believe identity, trust, and resilience belong at the same table as commercial strategy, not somewhere further down the agenda, or in a different room entirely.
Why Product Leaders Should Stay Current in Marketing, Not Just Technology
A CIM CPD renewal is easy to file under housekeeping. Ian Finn argues it's actually a case for something rarely said aloud: staying current in marketing discipline isn't a detour from product leadership, it's foundational to doing it well.
I renewed my Chartered Marketer status with CIM this week. My CPD for the year has been assessed and approved, and CFCIM stands confirmed for another twelve months.
It would be easy to file that under housekeeping. I think it's worth more than that.
There's a common assumption that product leadership and marketing discipline are adjacent but separate: one builds the right thing, the other tells people it exists. In my experience that's a false separation. The best product decisions I've made have drawn on marketing fundamentals as much as technical ones.
Personalisation isn't just a feature to ship. It's a discipline built on genuinely understanding audience segments, how their needs and wants differ, not just having the data infrastructure to act on them. Segmentation thinking, knowing precisely who you're building for and why each cohort differs from the next, shapes better roadmap prioritisation than usage analytics alone ever will. And audience understanding, the ability to read what a customer actually needs rather than what they say they want, is a marketing instinct I've relied on as often as any product framework.
Staying current in these disciplines, through CPD, through active practice, and simply by not letting the fundamentals atrophy, has made me a more effective product leader, not a distracted one. The two disciplines were never as separate as they're often treated.
Grateful to CIM for the annual discipline of reflection this renewal requires. It's a genuinely useful exercise: an honest account of a year's learning, rather than letting it pass unexamined. It's also a habit worth recommending to any product leader who assumes marketing rigour is someone else's job. The ability to segment audiences, target them with personalised propositions, and build a coherent go-to-market strategy is fundamental to doing product well.
The CIM’s CFCIM professional badge
The 'Personalisation Phases Paradigm': A Framework for Personalising at Scale
Most brands treat personalisation as one thing. It's actually three, past, present, and future, each with its own data, its own tactics, and its own payoff. Here's the framework.
-Ian Finn on Personalisation-
Personalisation is the modern day elixir. The ability for services, preferences, recommendations, gamification, and loyalty to all be tailored and individualised for the specific customer being targeted. It's the ultimate in one-to-one marketing meeting relevant experience: targeting bigger basket sizes, and supporting "retention via relevance" across the customer life cycle, all at the same time. Personalisation strategies are proven to move the needle; industry research consistently links strong personalisation to measurable gains in conversion and retention. And consumers desire such personalised experiences too: a global survey in 2024 of 23,000 consumers by BCG found that 80% of them were comfortable with personalised experiences, with most of them expecting brands to offer them.
All worthy outcomes for brands at scale to target. But how can brands truly succeed in a marketing-meets-tech discipline where, by its very nature, success hinges on cutting through the wider noise?
A framework I have developed and found to work well across sectors is to base both the inputs and outputs of a personalisation strategy on key "phases" of the customer life cycle itself, the very chain of events, and phases of data availability, that provide the fuel for a personalised strategy in the first place.
The key starting premise is segmenting the customer life cycle into three "phase views," which provide the inputs for the personalisation tactics to play out. It's an approach I call the Personalisation Phases Paradigm. Let's break it down.
To succeed in personalisation, we know it's all about being relevant, in the moment, on as individualised a basis as possible, often in as close to real time as possible. This is where the Personalisation Phases Paradigm comes into its own, because it's naturally defined by time.
The Personalisation Phases Paradigm in practice
1. Personalisation Phase P1 (the past): Personalise based on what's gone before
This phase leverages the most reliable and most available data and modelling of all, because it's about things that have already happened. That gives it the added benefit of being the phase with the highest potential for accuracy.
It's about taking what we know of an individual and applying a next best action, based on our read and interpretation of the past, to drive an outcome of value.
Examples here would include personalising based on past consumption, like Spotify's annual "Wrapped" in-app carousel, telling a one-of-a-kind story about a user's year of content consumption, or a brand's mobile app summarising which retailers or brands loyalty points were earned with.
Great for: loyalty and retention plays, brand engagement, deepening consumer interest.
2. Personalisation Phase P2 (the present): Personalise based on what's happening right now, in the moments of truth
This phase is about being as relevant and tailored to the current moment of interaction as possible. It's personalisation's biggest test of mindfulness, because it's about the right here, right now. Data systems, timeliness, and how systems interconnect and hold current-state awareness all have to be genuinely on point.
Examples of this one would include the Starbucks coffee that arrives at the end of the counter with your name already on the cup, without you needing to say "my name's Max," because it's been pre-printed from a scan of your loyalty app while paying. Another would be an ecommerce basket's "additions" recommendations, which dynamically adapt cross-sell nudges by modelling likely customer thinking as items are added or removed in real time.
Great for: brand engagement, moments of truth, building trust and deepening customer relationships, cross-sell and upsell.
3. Personalisation Phase P3 (the future): Personalise based on what's yet to be
This phase is about personalising for potential outcomes that the personalisation itself helps bring about. These tactics include overlaying algorithms or "propensity models" onto historic, verified data, to influence and change behaviours. It's about blending measured data points from the past with likely future scenarios, and leveraging both together for competitive advantage.
Because this phase relies most intensely on data leverage, signalling, propensity rules, and orchestrating touches by cohort, it's also the phase that can most usefully harness AI as a genuine force multiplier.
Examples here would include a personalised home page on a Sky TV web account, suggesting a more suitable subscription package for the household, or a tailored "next best action" nudge in a digital banking app, suggesting a switch away from paper statements when blended with data on which customer cohorts feel strongly about environmental issues.
Great for: building and growing transaction volumes and value, increasing share of wallet, and influencing customer behaviour in mutually beneficial ways.
So there you have it. A framework for personalisation across the phases of the customer life cycle, leveraging data, models, and AI progressively as more data points become available over time. I've found it highly useful in building personalisation strategies across a range of industry sectors.
Personalisation succeeds best when context, data, tools, AI, identified need, and trust all intersect. The Personalisation Phases Paradigm provides a framework to succeed at that, at scale.
> Searching for more ways to compound the benefits in your product? More in the book, ‘Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale’. Available at all major digital bookstores (Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books):
www.Books2read.com/producttruths
Insight referenced in article - BCG 2024 consumer study into personalisation preferences:
https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/what-consumers-want-from-personalization
The ‘Personalisation Phases Paradigm’ 2026 Ian Finn. All rights reserved.
If compound interest is the 'eighth wonder' of the world, what's the ninth?
Compounding. The art of creating accruing benefits of stability, performance, resilience and impact, because your product or system simply shows up more of the time, falls over less, and bounces back quicker and more gracefully when it does fail.
- Ian Finn on Resilience -
I've always loved the idea of compound interest. Once capital is invested, even just by sitting there, value accrues by what's often called 'the eighth wonder of the world': he who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.
It's actually very similar in product management, where there's a fundamental, under-leveraged truth, one often overlooked under the weight of 'busy work' or building the latest feature, yet arguably the one that delivers the greatest benefit of all. Compounding. The art of creating accruing benefits of stability, performance, resilience and impact, because your product or system simply shows up more of the time, falls over less, and bounces back quicker and more gracefully when it does fail. That's compounding, right there.
So how do we 'compound', and realise these benefits for the products we lead? Like many things in product, it can flow from a framework, and a framework can provide the scaffolding your product needs to win in an ever more complex and morphing world. Let's compound.
The framework I've developed in this area, applied to products I've led across four different sectors, is one I call the Four Fs.
I built this framework from watching priorities in product default to the 'highest profile thing', the 'noisiest thing', or the 'flavour of the moment'. All of this creates its own noise, and distorts what a product is primarily set up to do. (Bonus tip: leaning into your Product Vision in such moments is never a bad idea either, or even stress-testing it to check it still holds true). The cost is ignoring the baby elephant in the room, until it grows into the proverbial elephant in the room. I call that ‘inverse compounding’.
1. Front Foot Forward
I've always liked Covey's maxim, 'start with the end in mind'. This F is similar, but different. It's the foundational F, and it asks for acceptance of two continuums: continual progress, and continual improvement. That's the very definition of compounding in product, moving forward deliberately rather than reactively, before the next fire forces your hand.
Once a team accepts and aligns with that principle, the art becomes unlocking the compounding benefit. That's where the other three Fs come in.
2. Foresight Is Your Friend
This one's about thinking ahead, before you need to, or before events force you to. It's about being the devil's advocate to your own product's set-up, build and architecture, or getting others to play that role for you, if necessary.
What you're trying to baseline are three things: what could go wrong, how likely is each thing to go wrong, and what other dependencies and wider considerations affect your product performing well under pressure, peak load, unexpected events, macro factors, or attacks and threats from outside.
Use these to baseline what comes next.
3. Fire-Risk Prevention
This is the one I've seen too often overlooked, yet it's often the biggest opportunity in products at scale. The dedication and precision to take what's found in Foresight and counter those risks accordingly, so the ‘elephant’ never fully grows in the first place. Modernisation, patching, refactoring, all components of this F. But so too are more nuanced plays: test and learn rather than fail and burn, and genuinely mapping your true dependencies, have you really mapped every endpoint?
This is the richest opportunity in the Four Fs, and it sets the stage for the final one.
4. Forearmed
We all like to sleep at night, don't we? Product leaders, engineering leaders, teams building and running products, or supporting them in live.
Forearmed is more than the sum of the other three Fs, it's the defining principle. It's taking what they've developed and asking, honestly: does this range of optimisations, enhancements and preventative plays really give our users the most performant, reliable product we can provide? Or does it still fall short? If it falls short, return to the first F and work forward again. Your users, your business, and general karma will thank you for it.
Four Fs, four principles, four ways to build products for tomorrow, not just today. That's the ninth wonder: not compound interest, but compounding capability, deliberately built, ‘F by F’.
>So what's your take? How do you apply foresight and forearmed thinking to your own products? And what's the cost of not acting, if you don't?
> Searching for more ways to compound the benefits in your product? More in the book, ‘Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale’. Available at all major digital bookstores (Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books):
www.Books2read.com/producttruths
The Four Fs of compounding products. 2026 Ian Finn. All rights reserved
Your next incident won't define your system's fortunes. Your work before the storm will
Your next incident won't define your system's fortunes, your work before the storm will. Introducing the Three Ps: a framework for engineering resilience at scale.
- Ian Finn on Resilience -
One question I'm often asked: 'how do we create performant and resilient systems, at scale?' It is a sound question to ask.
But behind this query, there often sits an uncomfortable truth. Many large-scale systems morph and iterate over time, often without embedding the 'preventative and performative' elements that ensure high levels of service quality, availability and experience for the end user. This is a material risk to large-scale systems today, and systems at scale can literally live or die by it.
So important, then, that the 'real world readiness' of the system to react, adapt and bounce back at scale is built into its very core, by design.
This is why I developed the 'Three Ps' Framework, for performant systems. It's the set of guardrails and 'silent scaffolding' I apply to my products at scale, to not only ensure high levels of performance and 'non-functional' robustness when the system is live and running, but also to power its recovery and bounce-back when it goes down. All systems experience such moments, at some point or other. Best, then, to be prepared. Enter the Three Ps.
The Three Ps of Performant Systems
Plan: map out blind spots, the risk areas, the unhappy paths, and run through the key 'What If?' scenarios, to stress test your system in advance. This 'P' serves a cunning twin purpose: it helps prevent many problems from hitting the system in the first place, whilst also providing the fuel for a further 'P' to be built and readied in advance: Prepare.
Prepare: for the worst, whilst always hoping for the best (the worst will often happen anyway, so best to be ready). Your disaster management and recovery systems, your runbooks, incident and escalation paths that need to play out in real time, need to be stress tested whilst the sun is shining, not once the storm itself arrives. They need to be documented, and easily accessible too, ready for those moments of truth when they hit.
Perform: the final 10% of how you act in the moments of crisis, or when the system is tested. Even this can be dry run or rehearsed (part of 'Prepare'), to build the crisis management muscles before they're ever even needed. It's like how fire crews don't just sit idle waiting to attend the next fire or incident, they train, they rehearse, they develop new smarts to counter emerging threats. So too with resilient systems at scale. The 90% readiness comes from the first two Ps; the remaining 10% comes from how your team performs in those moments of truth.
Over to you: how do you engineer your systems at scale to be highly performant in the 'usual' times, but able to react and recover when the system is under real world stress?
>More Product Truths in the book, 'Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale'. Available at all major digital bookstores (Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books): https://books2read.com/producttruths.
The Three Ps of Performant Systems: Copyright Ian Finn, 2026
Can We Build It? Wrong Question.
Ian Finn talking about AI-powered personalisation, at Customer Experience in Financial Services 2026.
Two days at CXFS26. One thing stuck with everyone who spoke there: the conversation has genuinely shifted — from "can we build this" to "can our customers actually trust it?"
Arena International have just released their official highlight reel from Customer Experience in Financial Services 2026 — a good snapshot of where senior leaders in the sector are actually spending their attention right now: AI and the invisible infrastructure customers never see but always feel.
My contributions are in there — on personalisation in the age of AI, and my reflections on the show as a whole.
What's your take on where AI-powered personalisation is headed in the next 5 years?
⬇️ Watch the full video here →https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQok5QQ3bps&t=73s ⬇️
No one photographs the planning. Only the peak.
Ian Finn on top of Irton Pike, Cumbria, July 2026
Setting out on a day's hike last week in Cumbria with my great friend @DavidPull – the preparation was extensive and wide-ranging. Before we even set foot on the trail, there was more planning than most people would ever realise. New walking boots, spare laces, a pre-chilled bottle of water for the forecast heat, a fully charged phone and battery pack.
Summiting the peak is just the final, visible part. The part that makes the memorable photo, the soundbite or the outcome summary.
What no one sees is the journey before the ascent: the compounding experience of previous hikes, checking local weather conditions in advance, the specific kit choices for the day – even who you choose to climb with.
That same invisible preparation is what separates robust, resilient systems from fragile ones. The great systems – the ones that scale seamlessly and bounce back quickly when tested – are the product of stress-testing every angle in advance: informed trade-offs, fall-backs ready to deploy, contingent processes that kick in at exactly the right moment, and the right people on the team. That's what lets a team react gracefully under pressure – an incident, an unexpected outage, a system taking an unexpected turn – rather than scrambling in the moment.
The best, and safest, hill climbs don't just 'happen'. The planning, preparation and forethought account for most of the outcome long before the summit comes into view. Systems at scale are no different – the day-to-day micro-actions of optimising frameworks, honing documentation, and keeping run books slick and ready for the worst. That's no accident either; it's by design.
The next time you see a clean outcome — a summit photo, a smooth incident response, a system that just works — remember you're only seeing the final 10%.
+ Plus Perspectives
Whether it's climbing a mountain or operating a complex system at scale, the steps to success are similar:
Photo: me on top of Irton Pike, near Stanton Bridge, Cumbria, July 2026
Photo: Irton Pike, Cumbria - panoramic view, July 2026
Not every retail obituary is permanent
Not every high street brand that disappears is gone forever. Some endure — and even bounce back from apparent oblivion — and deserve to.
One such retailer is Joules —known for colourful British country clothing, eye-catching polo shirts, divine dresses and wonderful welly alternatives to Barbour and Hunter.
Rescued by Next in 2022 from what appeared to be the end of the brand, it's a continuing joy for me to see their brightly coloured shops adorning selected high streets — and they're not just surviving. Reports this year point to Joules being on track for its first profit since 2022, alongside a fresh UK and Ireland store expansion drive.
Not every retail brand can weather prolonged economic headwinds. Not all make it — think Debenhams, Wilko and others in recent times. Under these conditions, it's always a heart-warming feeling when one of our favourite brands survives — or in this case, resurfaces and rebuilds. Like the need for resilience in retail technology systems, so too there is the need for strategic, brand-level resilience as tastes, economics and trading headwinds morph and change. Bouncing back with new stores, and returning profits, is the commercial equivalent of resilience in action. Technology resilience is often measured by uptime and recovery. Brand resilience is measured by something much harder to accomplish — whether customers care enough to come back.
I happily did my small bit — and picked up two eye-catching polo shirts while passing through Ambleside. Supporting brands we genuinely value is one of the simplest ways we can help write their next chapter.
It's a useful reminder that resilience isn't just a technology capability. It's a commercial one too.
Which high street brand are you most pleased to see survive—or wish had survived?
📓 If brand-level resilience is a topic that interests you, I dig into it (as well as four other principles) in my book, Product Truths — books2read.com/productruths
Photos: author's own — the Joules store in Ambleside, Cumbria
‘Product Truths’: My First Review
- Ian Finn on Product Leadership-
Something small happened this week that mattered more to me than I expected: Product Truths, my first book, got its first review.
Five stars, from a reader who took the time to write something genuinely thoughtful rather than a one-line courtesy note. She called it "accessible and easy-to-read," and picked out something I truly cared about getting right - that customer understanding is a strategic asset, easily overlooked under pressure, even though it's the foundation for better decisions.
There's a particular kind of validation in a stranger reading your work and understanding exactly what you were trying to say. Not because I needed permission to believe the ideas were sound - but because writing them down and putting them into the world is a different kind of exposure than living them out in a career. You don't fully know if it lands until someone tells you it did.
One review doesn't make a book. But it's a good reminder of why I wrote it in the first place - not to add to the noise, but to write the thing I wish someone had handed me earlier in my own career - to help cut through it.
Onwards.
Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale eBook : Finn FCIM CMkr MIoD, Ian : Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
Most companies think trust is a feeling. At scale, it's an architecture decision."
- Ian Finn on Trust & Identity -
After years building enabling platforms serving tens of millions of accounts, here are 5 aspects of trust that actually hold up under real scale
At scale, it's an architecture decision.
Twenty years. Five principles. One book.
- Ian Finn on Product Leadership -
I'm genuinely excited to share that my first book, 'Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale', is now out in the world.
It distils twenty years of product leadership learnings across a range of FTSE 100 companies, three Global 500 organisations, and three UK government departments into five principles for building products that survive contact with real-world complexity — not just the ones that look good in a deck.
Writing it required the same discipline I've used as a practitioner — finding the pattern under the noise, then simplifying until only the essential structure remains. Turning that lens on my own experience has been one of the most satisfying parts of it all.
One of the quotes that opens the book, from Lewis Hatchett, is the one that actually got me to start writing it in the first place:
"Make decisions your 8-year-old self would admire, and your 80-year-old self would be proud of."
It's not a bad test for a product decision either. Finishing this book certainly felt like one of mine.
📖 Available now everywhere — one link here:
https://books2read.com/producttruths
𝐌𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐆𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐀𝐈. 𝐅𝐚𝐫 𝐟𝐞𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐆𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝
- Ian Finn on AI -
A genuinely thought-provoking evening at the Waracle 'Future Visions AI in SDLC' Panel in London — great to catch up once again with Brian Graham and a strong room of industry peers in an event thoughtfully scheduled to not clash with the key England World Cup game the next day!
The topic: the AI-Enabled SDLC.
𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐞:
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭: The 'Getting Excited → Getting Grounded → Getting Going' framework landed well. Too many organisations let excitement outpace the identification of compelling use cases. Grounding matters.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞: Sovereign AI came up — echoing themes from London Tech Week. With significant data stewarded in overseas domains, unfavourable trade deals or tariffs could start affecting AI-enabled organisations in ways few are planning for yet.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐡𝐨: People remain central — not just product and process. Research suggests the optimum human-AI blend tends to be younger, more senior humans paired with agents. My contribution to the room: don't forget the human in it all, as a key mantra in both adoption and embedding.
Token spend approaching Cloud-level costs in some organisations makes the governance and value questions more pressing than ever now.
A fabulous evening of lively debate and stimulating discussion — with the most pleasing of London skylines as the backdrop. Thanks to the entire Waracle team for your wonderful hosting.
#AIStrategy #ProductLeadership #SDLC #SovereignAI #FutureOfWork
