Think Like a Startup, Lead Like You Mean It

There's a conversation that needs to happen in UK tech, and I'm going to have it.

I've led engineering teams across the country - from the leafy lanes of Kent at Holiday Extras to the streets of Manchester at On the Beach. And I've noticed something that nobody seems willing to say out loud: northern companies understand scale differently. They understand graft. They understand what it means to do more with less.

And before anyone starts drawing lines at Birmingham - let's be clear. Birmingham isn't "the North." The true North starts somewhere around the M62. Manchester. Leeds. Liverpool. Sheffield. Places where working class roots still run deep in the culture of how businesses operate. Yorkshire values - straight talking, no nonsense, say what you mean and mean what you say - that's the foundation of proper northern tech culture.

The Lean Agile Mindset Isn't Just a Framework Up North - It's Survival

At On the Beach in Manchester, lean wasn't a methodology we adopted from a consultancy deck. It was in the DNA. Leaders like Paul Jackson (now retired) and Jonathan Smith understood this instinctively - the lean approach wasn't something you bolted on, it was how you thought about every decision.

When you're building a travel tech company in a city that remembers what it means to work for everything you've got, waste isn't tolerated. Every sprint has to count. Every hire has to deliver. Every architectural decision gets scrutinised for value.

We didn't have the luxury of throwing money at problems until they went away. We built a data acquisition solution that generated multi-million pounds of value - not because we had endless runway, but because we had to. The culture was one of survival, of wanting to try new things, of being genuinely hungry to innovate because standing still meant falling behind. There was this healthy competition too - people wanted to prove each other wrong, to challenge assumptions, to find the better way. Not in a toxic sense, but in a way that sharpened everyone's thinking. That energy is infectious when it's real.

And here's something that doesn't get talked about enough - diversity was always considered and always in a good place at On the Beach. It wasn't a box-ticking exercise or an HR initiative. It was baked into how the company operated. When you're in survival mode, you quickly learn that good ideas come from everywhere, and you can't afford to limit your talent pool based on anything other than capability.

That's what northern grit looks like in a tech context.

Compare that to my time at Holiday Extras down in Kent. Good people, don't get me wrong. But the culture was different. More comfortable. Less urgency around efficiency. And there's something else that happens in smaller southern towns with a dominant employer - you get these insular dynamics. Everyone knows everyone. People's partners work there, their mates from school work there, hiring decisions get influenced by who plays five-a-side with whom. It creates this small town energy where challenging the status quo means challenging relationships, not just processes. Fresh thinking struggles to break through when the social fabric of the company is so tightly woven with the local community. The proximity to London money just compounds it - inefficiency can hide longer than it should when there's no external pressure to change.

The Cinch Exception That Proves the Rule

Now, I have to address the elephant in the room. Cinch is a Manchester company that went through some very public growing pains around spending. But here's what people miss - Cinch is owned by Constellation Automotive Group, which is backed by TDR Capital. The money, the strategy, the pressure to scale at all costs? That came from down south. From private equity playbooks written in London boardrooms.

When I was there leading a significant engineering department through restructuring, the challenge wasn't northern leadership overspending. It was course-correcting from strategies that prioritised growth metrics over sustainable delivery. Classic southern thinking applied to a northern workforce who knew better.

The moment we shifted to proper lean agile ways of working - focusing on delivery efficiency, cutting waste, empowering teams to own outcomes rather than outputs - the transformation was dramatic. Why? Because northern engineers respond to being treated like adults. Give them ownership, strip away the bureaucracy, and they'll outperform teams with twice the headcount and five times the budget.

How Money Has Ruined Tech

My brother-in-law has this saying: "Budgets are for poor people."

It's meant to sound clever. Aspirational, even. But it's actually everything that's wrong with how people think about building things. Budgets aren't for poor people - budgets are for smart people. Constraints breed creativity. Survival instincts breed innovation. The moment you think you're above needing a budget is the moment you stop thinking critically about value.

This attitude has infected the tech industry at scale. Too much money sloshing around has made people forget what it means to build sustainably. We've got an entire generation of tech leaders who've never had to make hard choices because there was always another funding round, always another headcount increase, always another way to throw resources at a problem instead of solving it properly.

We need to think like startups again. Not the WeWork fantasy version of startups where you burn cash to chase vanity metrics, but the real version. The "we need to survive to learn" version. The version where every pound spent has to generate value because there might not be more pounds coming.

What Southern Tech Cultures Get Wrong

I've sat in enough leadership meetings in southern companies to see the pattern:

1. Process for process's sake and the curse of big tech org structures - Layers of governance that exist because "that's how big companies work" rather than because they add value. And don't get me started on the role inflation that's infected the industry. VP of Engineering? What does that even mean in most contexts? A Head of Engineering should report into a CTPO or CTO - someone who owns both the technical and product vision. Instead, we've imported these bloated American big tech structures where you need three layers of management between the people doing the work and the people making decisions. Flat structures work. They're faster, they're more accountable, and they don't require an entire management layer whose primary job is to exist. DHH and 37signals have been proving this for over two decades - you can build world-class products with small, focused teams and no middle management. The instinct to hire your way out of problems rather than solving them properly is killing tech companies, and these ridiculous org structures are the symptom. I've written about this before - overgrowth is the enemy of engineering success.
2. Comfort with inefficiency - When there's always another funding round on the horizon, the urgency to be lean evaporates
3. Distance from the customer - London-centric thinking that forgets real people with real budgets need your product to actually work

Northern tech culture, at its best, has none of this. It has directness. It has pragmatism. It has an allergic reaction to waste. Yorkshire values running through the veins of how decisions get made.

The Scotland Question

I need to talk about where I am now. Edinburgh. And Scotland more broadly.

There's massive potential here. Genuine talent. Good universities producing sharp engineers. But there's also a challenge - the dominance of finance houses and financial services in the Scottish tech scene. That sector brings money and stability, sure. But it also brings a certain... conservatism. A risk aversion that seeps into the culture.

When your biggest employers are banks and insurance companies, the default mindset becomes one of governance, compliance, and doing things the way they've always been done. That's the opposite of lean agile. It's the opposite of the experimentation and hunger I saw at On the Beach.

I'm actively trying to bring proper lean agile thinking up here. It's needed. Scotland could be a genuine tech powerhouse, but it requires breaking free from the financial services mentality that treats change as risk rather than opportunity. The talent is here. The infrastructure is here. What's missing is that northern survival instinct - that willingness to try things, fail fast, and iterate.

The Leaders Who Get It (And The Cultures That Don't)

The best tech leaders I've worked with in the North share common traits. They've usually done the hard yards. They understand that a small, highly motivated team will outperform a bloated department drowning in process. They know that lean agile isn't about standups and Jira boards - it's about relentlessly eliminating everything that doesn't add value.

At On the Beach, we built something genuinely valuable by being ruthlessly focused on what mattered. The culture of experimentation, of wanting to push boundaries, of healthy competition and proving each other wrong - that's what made it work.

At Holiday Extras? I'll be honest. No matter what I tried, I failed to shift the culture. You can implement metrics. You can introduce SLAs. You can bring in frameworks and processes and all the tools that should work. But when the culture is fundamentally incestuous - when challenging ideas means challenging the bloke whose wife works in marketing, or the manager who's been there since school - none of it sticks. The antibodies are too strong. The resistance isn't even conscious half the time; it's just the natural immune response of a system that's optimised for social comfort over performance. Some cultures can be changed. Some need to be escaped.

The Point

This isn't about geography for the sake of it. It's about culture. And culture is shaped by history.

Northern cities were built on industries where waste killed businesses. Where efficiency wasn't a nice-to-have but the difference between survival and closure. That mentality doesn't disappear in a generation. It shows up in how northern tech companies operate, how northern leaders think, and how northern teams deliver. Yorkshire values. Lancashire grit. Mancunian hunger.

If you want to build a tech company that scales sustainably - that delivers value without burning through capital - look North. Look past Birmingham. Look to where lean isn't a framework but a way of life. Look to where people still remember that survival is the prerequisite for everything else.

And if you're a Scottish company wondering how to break free from the financial services mindset? Find leaders who've lived the northern way. The ones who know that lean agile isn't a methodology you implement - it's a survival instinct you either have or you don't.