Currently Open to - Non-exec, Chair and advisory roles.

After nearly two decades building hedgehog lab, I stepped down as CEO at the end of 2025. I am now taking a breath, exploring new horizons and rediscovering who I am beyond the singular identity of founder.

When you build something for twenty years, it becomes hard to know where the company ends and you begin. Stepping away has meant rediscovering the edges of my own identity. It is uncomfortable and quietly exciting in equal measure.

What I built at hedgehog lab still matters to me. We grew from two people with laptops and borrowed furniture in a warehouse unit to a global digital product consultancy working across the UK, US and Europe. 

Along the way we raised nearly £10m across three PE transactions, navigated two major turnarounds including Covid and the 2023 market crash, acquired a company, and built a culture that consistently earned recognition as a great place to work. I am proud of what we created and the people who made it possible.

Today I serve as a Non Executive Director at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, where I focus on digital transformation and governance. I also chair Health Call, a digital health company building products that improve care across the NHS. 

Both roles reflect something I have believed for a long time: technology is most meaningful when it serves people.

I continue to mentor founders and leaders navigating the messy reality of building and scaling businesses. I am also open to advisory and non executive roles, and curious about what else lies beyond the horizon.

If any of that resonates, I would love to connect.

Sarat Pediredla

📢 Some BIG news from me to begin 2026! 

After almost nineteen years at hedgehog lab, I have reached the moment where it feels right to step aside and make space for the next chapter of leadership. 

This company has shaped almost every part of my adult life. It has stretched me, grounded me, humbled me and given me more purpose than I ever expected when we started with two laptops, some broken furniture and a warehouse unit that rattled in the wind.

The journey has been full of moments I will never forget. The early scrappy wins that convinced us we might actually make it. The years of learning how to lead while building a culture that felt human. The surreal milestones where we found ourselves working with global brands or opening new offices. The tough seasons too, from painful restructures to the burnout I walked through in 2023 and 2024. Each high and low shaped me in ways I am still processing.

What stands out most as I look back is the people. There are far too many to thank in a single post, and I am not going to spam your feed with a long list, but please know this. I will reach out to each of you, because none of this would have existed without the countless hands, minds and hearts that helped build what started as a twenty five year old’s pipe dream.

I believe now is the right time to hand over the reins. I am proud of the Executive team we have built. They bring clarity, energy and a renewed sense of direction and I have complete confidence that they will take the company further than I ever could. I will step down as CEO immediately and support the business as an Advisor for the next twelve months.

As for what comes next, I am going to slow down. My family has carried the weight of my ambition and identity for many years and they deserve more of me now. 

After some rest, I will take my time exploring where I want to spend the next 20 years of my professional life. In the short term, I am open to advisory and non executive roles, so if you feel my experience could help, I would love to talk.

I leave with immense gratitude, pride and joy. Titles change. Chapters close. But once you learn to be the hedgehog, you never quite stop. 

#foreverahedgehog

Sarat Pediredla 

CEO & Founder in Consulting w/ PE experience | NED & Chair | Scaling digital companies through culture, growth, turnarounds & transformation | 🏆 AI 100 UK | 🏆 BIMA 100

💡 Excited and nervous to share this finally! I've had this idea for 10 years. I'm finally building it.

If you've spent the last three years running a consultancy or agency, you know how hard it's been. I've watched friends make redundancies they never thought they'd have to make. Studios closed. Founders burn out or sell for less than they deserved.

And through all of it, the tools that were supposed to help? Most of us see them as a necessary evil at best.

I'm building something different. A thinking partner for consultancy leaders, not another database to administer.

It's called thredspan. Professional Services Intelligence.

We've got 3 early pioneers helping shape what this becomes. I'm looking for 7 more to complete a founding cohort of 10.

I wrote about why in this article. If you run a consultancy or agency, I'd love to know if it resonates.

#thredspan #seearoundcorners #focusongreatwork

For 19 years I ran hedgehog lab, a digital product consultancy. And for most of those years, I wrestled with a problem I couldn't solve. It wasn't the

Open article: thredspan - Building Professional Services Intelligence by Sarat Pediredla • 3 min read

thredspan - Building Professional Services Intelligence

Accenture acquiring Faculty for billion dollars (or so) is one of those deals that tells you more about where the market is heading than about either company individually.

Faculty has spent a decade building something genuinely AI-native. Not AI bolted onto existing services, but AI as the foundation. Their work with the NHS during COVID, their safety work with OpenAI and Anthropic, their decision intelligence product. This is what it looks like when AI is the starting point rather than the add-on.

The signal here is clear. There is no separate “AI market” anymore. AI is simply how technology gets built now. Every digital product, every software platform, every consultancy engagement will be AI-native or it will be irrelevant. The days of AI as a distinct service line are ending. It’s becoming the water, not the fish.

Marc Warner becoming CTO of the entire company is the tell. This isn’t a tuck-in acquisition. This is Accenture admitting they need to rewire how they think about technology from the top.

The question is whether Faculty’s culture and approach can survive inside a 784,000-person organisation built around a very different model. Specialist acquisitions by large consultancies have a mixed track record. The thing that made them special often gets absorbed into the machine.

What I find most interesting is what this signals for the market. If Accenture needs to acquire AI-native capability rather than build it, that says something about the opportunity for consultancies that are AI-native from the ground up. 

Plenty to still play for. Feels like the mid 90s with the Internet. Exciting times!

For most of my early years at hedgehog lab, I was the primary commercial driver. 
 
When I co-founded the company in 2007, I did not think of myself as a salesperson. I was a technologist who happened to start a business. But the work needed to come from somewhere, and for most of the journey, that responsibility sat with me.
 
I originated most of our key accounts. I led the pitches. I built the relationships that turned into long-term clients. For a long time, I thought this was just what founders did.
 
Over 18 years, I learned a few things that might be useful if you are in a similar position.
 
𝗟𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴. The best opportunities I ever won came from understanding what the client actually needed, not from presenting what we wanted to sell. I used to walk into pitches with a deck full of capabilities. The wins came when I put the deck down and asked better questions. What is the real problem you are trying to solve? What does success look like for you personally, not just the business? What have you tried before that did not work?
 
𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘀. Some of our biggest clients came from connections I made five or ten years earlier. Not because I was strategically nurturing them, but because I stayed curious about people and kept showing up. Consultancy sales is a long game. The founders who treat it as transactional tend to struggle.
 
𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲. We spent years chasing new logos before I understood that the clients who already trusted us were the real growth engine. Referrals and repeat business built most of what we became. The energy I put into new business would have been better spent making existing clients genuinely successful.
 
𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳. This was the hardest lesson. I was comfortable being the commercial engine. It felt safe. But it also meant the business depended on me in ways that were not sustainable. I started building broader commercial capability later than I should have. If you are the founder and you are also the primary seller, that is fine for a while. It is not a permanent strategy.
 
If you run a consultancy and you recognise yourself in this, you are not alone. Most founders I mentor carry the same weight.
 
The path to distributing commercial responsibility is not obvious. But I think it starts with being honest about the dependency.

hedgehog lab

Chief Technology Officer

Ripple&Co

Board Advisor

Deep Medical

Within the leadership team I'm responsible for product management, platform architecture and overall technology delivery. Specifically:
- Hiring and managing our core engineering team
- Product design, roadmap, UX
- Data platform architecture and client data integration
- Analytics and insights tools and development 
- Tech operations on a stack of NodeJS/ReactJS/Python/AWS/Postgres and others...
- Compliance, security and accreditations
- Tech governance, budgets and programme management

Chief Technology & Product Officer

Accenture

I led the product and technology organisation at Xoomworks Technology, part of Accenture. This was mainly about making sure we did great work building fantastic products for our clients, but I was also responsible for sustaining and cultivating the strong culture of our 200-person team of engineers, designers and product managers. The strategic angle to the role involved securing Xoomworks' relevance in the future by promoting skills growth across the organisation, particularly with regard to emerging technologies. I also worked with prospects and clients to support our sales and delivery activities, strongly advocating for an agile product-focused mindset to create things that people love using.

Chief Product & Technology Officer - Xoomworks, part of Accenture

Xoomworks Ltd

The business grew fast so things were reorganised a bit. I led the practices for innovation, digital transformation and solutions. I managed around twelve teams building products for all kinds of nice brands and also did a fair bit of customer consulting on innovation and transformation. We became super proud of our distinctive team culture and created a bit of structure so we could keep growing healthily.

Global Director, Solutions

My first really strategic role. The mission was to create a new business unit specialising in digital product development. I had to create new capabilities within the company and focus everyone on building amazing products. In the first 1.5 years we engaged a handful of clients, grew the team from 4 to 35 people and beat all our revenue targets. It wasn't all plain sailing but we delivered some beautiful apps.

Director of Services

I led a couple of teams building ecommerce integrations for this fintech and payments company. We focused on efficiency by getting things right first time. In the end we built dozens of integrations and we could turn each one around in a few days. My teams were distributed across Eastern Europe so I got a lot of practice managing remote development and helping teams to be autonomous.

Senior Consultant for Powa Technology

Expedia, Inc.

At Expedia I discovered working in the corporate world. I was part of the tech organisation but the role wasn't especially technical - I managed product launches, systems migrations and decommissioning projects. I worked with teams all over the world and got good at managing communications flows between groups and building momentum for my agenda. All our major decisions were supported by solid data - a great way to work.

Consultant programme manager

Charity Consortium Network (CCNet)

This was my first foray into technology operations. We had tons of physical infrastructure and WAN connections, and many users to support. I had to learn really fast about building scalable systems and running a service desk. We had to develop a diverse range of skills within a small team and there was a lot of relationship management with suppliers, clients and staff.  The pace was frenetic so a lot of the job was about prioritisation and managing everybody's time.

Operations Director

JNA Consulting

I was part of the founding team building a product to manage Early Years information for local government. Web-based systems were very new and there was no StackOverflow so we had to figure a lot of the technical stuff out ourselves. The product turned out pretty well in the end and we were proud of it. We sold the business to Tribal Plc.

Technical Director

I'm a scale-up CPTO / CTO with a background in software engineering and specifically focussed on working with purpose-led businesses.  A geek at heart but also a "people person", I'm passionate and energetic about using technology to improve our world.

I've served in tech leadership roles through two successful exits and five successful funding rounds. I enjoy the challenges of business growth, particularly around achieving scalability and embedding meaningful culture.

Joe Thompson

Corporate innovation has always been super hard. Pressures such as burning platforms, stakeholder FOMO and competitive erosion force ever-riskier maneuvers. Stability and interia, the very things that bring corporations safety, become liabilities in their own right. I wrote a thing about this nearly six years ago (link below) and not much has changed but the buzzwords.

In this context, it's wildly exciting to be bringing Label Sessions into the hedgehog lab fold. A truly distinctive approach to supporting clients innovating through difficult problems, that derisks projects and brings world-class, domain-relevant insight and perspective right where it's needed. Paired with our award-winning digital design and engineering outfit, it's incredible to contemplate the range of challenges we can solve together.

https://lnkd.in/eXEPRTZD <-- My antique writings...

🚀 We are excited to share that hedgehog lab has acquired Label Sessions

This marks an important step in our growth journey, bringing together hedgehog lab’s expertise in AI delivery, product design and software development with Label Sessions’ proven innovation methodology and global network of more than 500 experts.

While this is a strategic move that strengthens our ability to support clients from idea to scalable, AI-enabled products, it is first and foremost a meeting of minds. After working closely together for several years, it was clear that our people, values and ambition are strongly aligned. Together, we are creating a one of a kind innovation consultancy built for real-world impact.

Welcome to hedgehog lab, Label Sessions 💙

👉 Read the full announcement here: https://bit.ly/48V7j4A

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