Tech Talks Daily

How do you build enterprise software for the companies that keep the world turning, while also building a leadership culture where people can actually thrive?
In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I spoke with Kerrie Jordan, Group VP of Product Management at Epicor, about her journey from studying literature to helping shape cloud ERP strategy at a global software company serving more than 20,000 customers worldwide. Kerrie's story is a reminder that there is no single path into technology leadership. Sometimes the foundations are laid in unexpected places, through storytelling, creativity, and a deep curiosity about people.
Kerrie shares how her early career in product lifecycle management opened her eyes to the human side of software. Interviewing customers and writing case studies showed her that behind every system implementation is a personal story, a career milestone, or a business trying to survive and grow. That perspective still shapes how she approaches product and marketing today at Epicor, a company recently recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises for the third consecutive year.
But this conversation goes far beyond market recognition. We talk openly about burnout, resilience, and the reality of leading through pressure. Kerrie reflects on the importance of protecting time, creating space to reconnect, and building a culture where empathy is practiced, not just discussed. Her view of leadership is grounded in communication, psychological safety, and being tough on problems rather than people.
Mentorship is another thread running throughout our discussion. Kerrie explains why powerful mentorship is not passive. It requires vulnerability, preparation, and a willingness to hear difficult advice. A single phrase from a mentor early in her career, "stick-to-itiveness," continues to shape how she approaches hard problems today.
We also explore the future of women in manufacturing and technology. Kerrie highlights the need for intentional change across education, early career development, and leadership visibility. She believes technology, particularly AI, can expand access, enable upskilling, and introduce flexibility that supports long-term career growth. At the same time, she makes a simple but powerful point. Women in tech want the same thing as anyone else: the space and autonomy to do their jobs well.
From customer co-innovation and community-driven product roadmaps to inclusive leadership under commercial pressure, this episode offers a candid look at what it really takes to lead in enterprise technology today.
If you are building products, leading teams, or questioning your own next career step, I think you will find something in Kerrie's story that resonates.

Why do so many of us feel busy all day, yet struggle to point to the meaningful work we actually completed?
In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sit down with Tomás Dostal Freire, CIO of Miro, to unpack a challenge that quietly drains modern organizations. Tomás brings experience from companies like Google, Netflix, and Booking.com, and now leads both IT and business acceleration at Miro. His focus is simple but ambitious. Move beyond AI experimentation and rethink how work itself gets done.
We explore new research revealing that for every hour of creative work, employees lose up to three hours to meetings, admin, emails, and maintenance tasks. That ratio is more than an inconvenience. It affects decision-making speed, employee satisfaction, and ultimately a company's ability to compete. Tomás argues that future candidates will choose employers based on how much unnecessary internal work they are expected to tolerate. In other words, reducing busy work is quickly becoming a talent strategy.
One of the biggest culprits? Context switching. With dozens of browser tabs open and information scattered across tools, teams spend more time stitching together fragments than making decisions. Tomás describes how duplication of work, outdated systems, and a lack of shared context quietly erode momentum. AI, he believes, should not create more noise or another standalone tool. It needs to be embedded where collaboration already happens.
We discuss the difference between single-player AI moments, where individuals use tools in isolation, and multiplayer AI collaboration, where shared context allows teams to move faster together. At Miro, this philosophy has shaped what they call an AI Innovation Workspace, a shared canvas where human insight and AI assistance coexist in real time.
Tomás also shares practical advice for leaders who want to reclaim creative time. Start by identifying tasks you dislike doing that could easily be handled by someone junior. That list often reveals what AI can already automate. Then focus on building transferable skills like cognitive agility and first-principles thinking, rather than chasing every new tool.
If you are wrestling with burnout, fragmented workflows, or wondering how AI can genuinely improve collaboration without overwhelming teams, this conversation offers a grounded, optimistic perspective. And yes, we even add a Beatles classic to the Spotify playlist along the way.

How do you protect millions in revenue during your busiest hour of the year when your entire business depends on digital performance?
At Perform 2026, I caught up with Alex Hibbitt, Engineering Director responsible for the customer platform at Storio Group, to unpack what happens when observability moves from an engineering afterthought to a board-level priority. Storio Group was formed from the merger of Photobox and Albelli, bringing together multiple brands and five separate e-commerce platforms into one unified customer journey. That consolidation created opportunity, but it also exposed risk, especially during peak trading from Black Friday through Black Sunday and into the Christmas rush.
Alex shared what it really looks like when downtime is non-negotiable. At peak, Storio's platform can generate up to 1.5 million euros per hour. A single poorly timed incident is not simply a technical problem, it is a direct threat to revenue and customer trust. Before partnering with Dynatrace, the team was relying heavily on centralized logging, processing over a billion log lines a day and depending on engineers to manually interpret signals. It was reactive, labor intensive, and left too much to chance.
What stood out for me was how cultural change led the transformation. Rather than imposing a new tool from the top down, Alex and his team built a maturity model engineers could relate to, created internal champions, and framed observability as risk management and business protection. The result was a reported 65 to 70 percent reduction in log costs, a 50 percent drop in mean time to detect overall, and up to 90 percent improvement for the most severe incidents.
We also explored how unifying logs, metrics, and traces into a single AI-driven platform helped Storio move from reactive firefighting to proactive detection. During one Black Sunday alone, three major issues were identified early enough to avoid an estimated 4.5 million euros in potential impact.
This conversation goes beyond tooling. It is about protecting customer experience, safeguarding revenue during peak demand, and building an engineering culture that embraces change. If your organization is wrestling with cloud costs, fragmented monitoring, or the pressure to deliver flawless digital performance under load, there are some powerful lessons here.

*]:pointer-events-auto scroll-mt-(--header-height)" dir="auto" tabindex="-1" data-turn-id= "3c98e6f5-1dbf-46a0-be22-7f5411922664" data-testid= "conversation-turn-1" data-scroll-anchor="false" data-turn="user"> *]:pointer-events-auto scroll-mt-[calc(var(--header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]" dir="auto" tabindex="-1" data-turn-id= "request-WEB:d2d484c3-b4bf-41d3-90b0-9faafbd8dc01-0" data-testid= "conversation-turn-2" data-scroll-anchor="true" data-turn= "assistant"> How do you design financial infrastructure that keeps running when the unexpected hits, whether that is a regional outage, a regulatory shift, or a sudden spike in digital demand?
In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Katsutoshi Itoh from Sony and Masahisa Kawashima from NTT, both representing the IOWN Global Forum, to unpack how photonics-based networks could change the foundations of digital finance. Speaking with me from Kyoto, they share how the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network vision is moving beyond theory and into practical, finance-specific use cases.
Financial institutions are under constant pressure to deliver uninterrupted services while meeting ever tighter compliance standards. Yet as we discuss, many existing architectures still rely on asynchronous data replication and layered resilience added after the fact. On paper, it works. In a real disruption, gaps quickly appear. Itoh and Kawashima explain how synchronous replication over ultra-low latency optical networks can reduce the risk of data loss while simplifying disaster recovery and lowering operational complexity.
We also explore the role of Open All-Photonic Networks and why reducing packet forwarding layers can dramatically cut latency and infrastructure costs. Instead of concentrating compute and storage in dense urban data centers, photonics enables distributed computing across regions while maintaining deterministic performance. That shift opens the door to improved resilience, better infrastructure utilization, and new approaches to scaling without constant over-provisioning.
Sustainability sits alongside resilience in this conversation. Rather than treating energy efficiency as a compromise, the IOWN vision distributes power demand geographically, making better use of locally available renewable energy and reducing concentrated load pressures. It is a subtle but important rethink of how infrastructure supports broader societal goals.
Looking ahead, we consider what this could mean for digital banking platforms, AI-driven risk management, and cross-border financial services. If infrastructure limitations fall away, institutions can design services around business needs rather than technical constraints.
If you are curious about how photonics could underpin the next generation of financial services, this episode offers a grounded and thoughtful perspective. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts after listening.

Have you ever wondered why "compliance" still gets treated like a slow, spreadsheet-heavy chore, even though the rest of the business is moving at machine speed?
In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sit down with Matt Hillary, Chief Information Security Officer at Drata, to talk about what actually changes when AI and automation land in the middle of governance, risk, and compliance. Matt brings a rare viewpoint because he lives this day-to-day as "customer zero," running Drata internally while also leading IT, security, GRC, and enterprise apps.
We get practical fast. Matt shares how AI-assisted questionnaire workflows can turn a 120-question security assessment from a late-afternoon time sink into something you can complete with confidence in minutes, then still make it upstairs in time for dinner. He also explains how automation flips the audit dynamic by moving from random sampling to continuous, full-population checks, using APIs to validate evidence at scale, without hounding control owners unless something is actually wrong.
We also talk about what security leadership really looks like when the stakes rise. Matt reflects on lessons from his time at AWS, why curiosity and adaptability matter when the "canvas" keeps changing, and how customer focus becomes the foundation of trust. That theme runs through the whole conversation, including the idea that the CISO role is steadily turning into a chief trust officer role, where integrity, transparency, and credibility under pressure matter as much as tooling.
And because burnout is never far away in security, we dig into the human side too. Matt unpacks how automation can reduce cognitive load, but also warns about swapping one kind of pressure for another, especially when teams get trapped producing endless dashboards and vanity metrics instead of focusing on the few measures that actually reduce risk.
To wrap things up, Matt leaves a song for the playlist, Illenium's "You're Alive," plus a book recommendation, "Lessons from the Front Lines, Insights from a Cybersecurity Career" by Asaf Karen, which he says stands out for how it treats the human side of security leadership. If you're thinking about modernizing compliance in 2026 without losing the human element, his parting principle is simple and powerful: be intentional, keep asking why, and spend your limited time on what truly matters.
So where do you land on this shift toward continuous trust, do you see it becoming the default expectation for buyers and auditors, and what should leaders do now to make sure automation reduces pressure instead of quietly adding more? Share your thoughts with me, I'd love to hear how you're approaching it.