Experienced operators who built careers in technology are moving into financial services, consumer businesses, logistics, investment groups and other established industries. They bring experience from organisations that were forced to scale quickly, operate across markets and continually rethink how work gets done. For traditional businesses, that represents an opportunity but only if they understand what they are actually hiring.
Madelynn Loo has experienced that transition herself. Before becoming Chief Executive Officer of Singapore-headquartered La Royale Group in February 2025, she spent much of her career at Uber and TikTok, working across strategy, operations and customer experience in Europe and Asia-Pacific.
She believes the most valuable thing technology executives can bring into other industries is not knowledge of particular platforms or tools. It is a different way of approaching how businesses operate.
“Technology changes incredibly quickly, so you become accustomed to questioning how things are done,” Madelynn says. “You look at a process and ask: Why does this exist? Can it be simplified? Can technology do part of it? What happens if the business becomes ten times bigger?”
Those questions are increasingly relevant far beyond the technology sector.
What actually transfers from tech
The technology industry has developed its own vocabulary: agile working, experimentation, automation, data-driven decision-making and, more recently, AI-native organisations. Madelynn argues that importing the terminology matters far less than importing the thinking behind it.
“People sometimes focus on the tools and vocabulary because those are easy to identify on a CV,” she says. “What transfers much better is how someone breaks down a problem, how comfortable they are challenging assumptions and whether they can build something that continues to work as the organisation grows.”
Working inside a rapidly scaling technology company can create a particular kind of operating discipline. Processes cannot remain static because the organisation around them keeps changing. Teams are often expected to make decisions without perfect information, while problems that appear insignificant at one scale can become material very quickly at another.
That experience can be particularly useful to established companies now confronting their own periods of technological change, and artificial intelligence is accelerating that convergence.
Businesses across sectors are asking questions technology companies have wrestled with for years: what should be automated, how small teams can achieve more, where data should replace intuition and how organisational structures should change when technology removes layers of manual work.
“The opportunity isn’t to turn every company into a technology company,” Madelynn says. “It is to take some of the operating principles that technology companies learned through very rapid change and apply them intelligently in a different environment.”
But not everything should move at technology speed
Moving from high-growth technology into a more established or regulated organisation also requires understanding what should not be imported.
“The instinct you sometimes have to unlearn is that speed is always the answer,” Madelynn says. “There are situations where moving quickly creates an advantage, and others where governance, regulation or the consequences of the decision mean you should deliberately move more carefully.”
That distinction has become increasingly apparent to Madelynn since moving into an investment holding environment.
A consumer technology company can test a product feature, measure the response and change it again. Capital allocation, governance and regulated activities can involve decisions whose consequences take considerably longer to emerge and are harder to reverse.
Technology operators entering other industries therefore need adaptability in both directions: the confidence to challenge unnecessary complexity and the judgement to recognise complexity that exists for a reason.
“The best operators don’t arrive and assume everything is broken because it is slower than their previous company,” Madelynn says. “They understand the business first, and then decide what should change.”
What businesses should actually hire for
Rather than asking whether someone comes from a prestigious technology company, employers should understand what the candidate actually learned there. Madelynn suggests looking beyond brand names and job titles.
“A well-known company on someone’s CV tells you where they worked. It doesn’t necessarily tell you what they built, what decisions they owned or how they performed when things became difficult.”
One useful approach is to ask candidates about something that did not work. High-growth environments can make it difficult to separate individual performance from favourable market conditions. Failures reveal more about how someone diagnoses problems, responds to evidence and changes course.
Another is to test whether candidates can translate their experience. Technology companies often develop highly specific internal terminology, systems and processes. Someone capable of explaining the underlying business problem without relying on that language is more likely to have understood the principle rather than simply learned the system.
But Madelynn believes businesses also need to be honest about whether they genuinely want change.
“A company can say it wants a technology mindset, but that means being prepared for people to question existing assumptions,” she says. “You cannot hire someone because you want a different way of thinking and then become uncomfortable when they think differently.”
Combining two kinds of experience
None of this means technology experience is inherently superior to traditional industry expertise. In fact, Madelynn believes the more interesting opportunity comes from combining the two.
Established businesses often possess deep sector knowledge, long-standing customer relationships, institutional memory and an understanding of regulation and risk that technology companies may take years to develop. Technology operators can complement that with experience in automation, scaling, experimentation, data and organisational design.
“The strongest combination is not tech replacing traditional experience,” Madelynn says. “It is putting people with different operating experiences around the same table.”
That combination is likely to become increasingly valuable as artificial intelligence changes industries that historically adopted technology at a more measured pace.
The next generation of business transformation may therefore look quite different from the last one. Rather than technology companies disrupting established industries from the outside, more of the change may come from inside existing businesses, as leaders and operators who developed their careers in technology bring those practices into new sectors.
For Madelynn, that is ultimately the opportunity.
“Technology gave a generation of people a very particular education in operating through change,” she says. “The interesting question now is what happens when that experience is applied to businesses and industries that are entering their own period of transformation.”
