78. Changing Culture Through Technology

Code[ish]

Chris Castle is a developer advocate at Heroku, and he's interviewing Jonathan Lister Parsons, the CTO from PensionBee. PensionBee operates in the fintech sector, and focuses on bringing a stellar experience for workers managing their retirement funds. PensionBee deals with an industry that is very reliant on paper and ink, and has sought to bring fund management in the UK out of the 19th century and into the 21st.

PensionBee's efforts to change an outdated model isn't just limited to their external business. They also find ways to use technology to improve their company culture. Jonathan believes that technology is at the core of any attempt to reach one's goals. He points out that while many companies say that customer success is their greatest priority, those efforts are often limited in their scope. In order to bring visibility into how they're doing as a company, PensionBee funnels all feedback from their website and apps into a Slack room. When positive praise comes in, teammates celebrate each other. When negative experiences occur, support and engineering band together to address the customer's concerns.

Most software isn't made by people with empathy for their users' goals. All too often, they're built by organizations who are motivated by things other than ensuring user efficacy and contentment. Meanwhile, people are still using tools and processes that are too complex and confusing. There's an innate problem in the corporate world, where decades of investment in IT have still resulted in stagnant productivity rates. For Jonathan, PensionBee striving to resolve that paradox both helps his business and provides a much needed service to its users.

Links from this episode

• PensionBee helps its UK users manage their pensions
• The slides from Jonathan's QCon conference talk
• Armie is PensionBee's robot that translates a users' digital signature into one on paper and ink