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Damian Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Podium Analytics

Damian Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Podium Analytics

What has been your path to power?

After doing a degree in Computer Science at Bradford University, I worked in a number of defence roles before going civilian. From then to the present day, I would divide my career into three chapters:

Firstly, I started out as a technical consultant with data, analytics and information management technology providers where I built data warehouses and analytics systems in a variety of sectors including defence, healthcare, telecoms and financial services.

The second chapter of my career saw me move into management consulting, initially with KPMG Consulting, and then as an independent management and strategy consultant where I gained exposure to huge projects and business transformations in an even wider variety of sectors, including financial regulation and financial services including retail and investment banking, London market and retail insurance, mining and petrochemicals, media, sport and many others.

The third and current chapter of my career is in senior management roles in technology and data where I’ve been lucky enough to sit on some incredible leadership teams and put it all into practice, in financial services, fast moving consumer goods and latterly in sport. Here at the Podium Analytics, an NGO, we get to combine all of our collective knowledge of elite sport, academic research, medicine, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data and analytics, bio-engineering and innovation to solve a very timely and important challenge – making sport safer and helping people to enjoy a life-long association with sport.

What impact has the pandemic had on demand from your clients?

Podium is a start-up, and was two people strong when the pandemic started. Our initial recruitment and building of the team was conducted under lockdown, and depending on when they joined, team members went months before meeting each other face-to-face. Our clients include schools and sports clubs, where we monitor sporting activity and injuries through the use of data collection technologies ranging from apps to video and wearables. Our biggest challenge was that, during the pandemic, there was no school and there was no sport, so it was impossible to get practical feedback on our apps and platforms.

Since schools have returned, they have had the almighty challenge of simply managing day-to-day activity in the face of ever-changing Covid rules, recommendations and protocols, and we have had to be very respectful that Podium is not their number one priority. Despite this, we have been astonished at how helpful, motivated and committed teachers, headteachers, coaches and pupils have been to the Podium mission, and we have continued to make dramatic progress over the last 12 months. The pandemic has definitely cast into the spotlight the importance of the health and wellbeing of young people and what life is like without sport.

Do you get a seat at your clients’ strategic discussions? If not, what will it take to get you there?

As well as schools, our clients include national governing bodies and international federations for various sports. We have been amazed at the openness and generosity of these organisations to welcome us in and share their challenges in the area of youth sports health and wellbeing. We are very conscious that we will only achieve systemic change if we work collaboratively with organisations, understanding their environments and the things that keep them awake at night, so that we most effectively bring to bear the resources of all stakeholders to make an impactful and lasting difference.

What are your key areas of focus for the business in 2022?

2022 will see the use of the Podium platform expand into hundreds of schools and recreational sports clubs, gathering data about sports injuries in young people that has never been collected before. The data gives us valuable insight into where to focus our research efforts as we also get the new and tremendously exciting Podium Institute for Youth Sports Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford up and running. This is where we bring the combined disciplines of orthopaedic and trauma medicine, bio-engineering, experimental psychology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and big data together to hopefully crack some of the trickiest challenges relating to youth sport health and wellbeing.

How do you apply your leadership skills a) within your own business and b) on behalf of your clients?

Leadership is often about hiring very bright and capable people, jointly crafting challenging objectives and then providing them with the necessary support, tools and resources to perform at their best, and otherwise just getting out of their way. It is also about fostering a completely open culture and psychologically safe environment where people are encouraged to provide honest feedback without fear of negative consequences.

One of the advantages of working in a start-up is that we get to create the kind of organisation that we all want to work for. We also need to be very alert to our own behaviour, ensuring that we model the highest standards that we aspire to. As human beings, we don’t always achieve those high standards, so it is also about being forgiving and understanding, celebrating those things that we have learned from, instead of regarding them as failures.

What key skills or attributes do you consider have contributed to your success in this role?

I attribute a lot of my success to an ability to translate complex technical concepts and jargon into plain English. I have also been fortunate to have been surrounded by incredibly capable teams and suppliers who have successfully delivered truly transformational technology, and all I have had to do is to create the space, and the cover, they have needed to get on with what they do best.

How did you develop – and continue to develop – these skills or attributes?

Creating an organisation from scratch that we would like to work for has enabled us to create a learning culture within Podium. Acknowledging that we don’t have the answers but that there is probably someone out there that does contributes to our collaborative philosophy. It has always been important to me to continue learning and seek out those people that have attempted things that I would like to achieve. It is also not necessarily important that they have been successful as there is a lot to be learned from unsuccessful attempts as well, although finding people who will talk about those projects candidly can be challenging.

How do you ensure that your proposition keeps pace with your clients’ goals and requirements so that you are leading rather than lagging behind their demands?

We don’t have usual client / supplier relationships. We have very close partners and collaborators and we involve them in as many ways as possible. That may be as simple as running hackathons in schools to involve students in designing our apps and user experiences. We spend a lot of time at clubs and schools observing how sport is conducted and talking with coaches and teachers so that we have a really good understanding of the reality of using platforms in real-life. Nothing beats the principle of “Genchi Genbutsu”, going and seeing for ourselves, and hopefully the end-products and quality of data reflect this.

Damian Smith
has been included in:

100 Brands 2019 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2020 (EMEA)
100 Enablers 2022 (EMEA)