hedgehog lab

As the co-founder and CEO of hedgehog lab, I grew the company from 3 people in a small corner of the North East of England in 2011 to around a 100+ people globally with major presence in the UK & US.

I'm responsible for 4 key things in my role,

- Culture. I believe that culture eats strategy for breakfast and I see myself as the custodian of culture ensuring we always have a north star in everything we do based on our culture framework of purpose, vision, mission & values. 

Key achievements include driving our employee experience programme that has resulted in a rating of 4.9 on Glassdoor and 100% CEO approval rating for me. I'm also a champion of DEI and wellbeing, starting and running key initiatives like our mental health support programs, flexible working and wellbeing support.

- Strategy. Having a great culture by and itself does not drive business performance, so I spend a significant amount of time defining and executing strategy in collaboration with my brilliant management team.

Key achievements include pivoting to mobile specialism to capture the demand & establishing,  growing a US presence now accounting for 40% of our revenue, and raising £2m+ in funding from Private Equity Investors.

- Growth. I have led the commercial and growth teams at hedgehog lab since inception including directly owning the Head of Sales role ensuring hedgehog lab posted CAGR of nearly 60% in our scale up journey. I've also been the de facto CMO of the company setting and driving the marketing vision. Currently lead the Growth teams consisting of Sales, Marketing & Client Engagement.

Key achievements include achieving a #1 global ranking for mobile app development with analysts Clutch, being named in the Financial Times Top 1000 Fastest Growing European companies 2 years in a row and raising Private Equity funding to drive scale up growth.

- Governance. As the CEO and the majority individual shareholder on the Board of Directors, I work with other Directors and investors.

Chief Executive Officer

Subject Matter Expert for Financial Services at hedgehog lab due to my expertise advising and supporting banks, insurance, wealth management and fintech customers like Aviva, AJ Bell, Atom Bank, Coventry Building Society, Cynergy Bank, Davidson Kempner, Tesco Bank, and many others.

My expertise in helping craft and work through critical digital transformation, CX initiatives and technology programmes helps me be the "voice" of FS in the business.

I believe that the biggest problem facing transformation in FS isn't a technological but a human one of culture change, mindset, skills and building high-performance teams.

I'm also one of those people that is excited at reading the FCA's annual priorities on a weekend than a magazine

Financial Services Lead

Co-founded hedgehog lab to create a place that empowers talented people to do the best work of their lives. Constantly working hard to live up to our purpose as a culture custodian.

Co-Founder

equiwatt

Supporting this exciting start-up with strategic advice on go to market strategy, marketing approach and growth plans. A great chance to combine by passion of the sustainability/EV market with digital product.

Advisor

PNE is a North East based business support organisation that enables positive social and economic change by supporting businesses to start, grow and thrive in an ethical and sustainable way. I am delighted to join the Board as a Non-exec bringing my experience of sales, marketing and scaling high growth business to help PNE set ambitious growth targets and facilitate a wider impact for businesses in the region.

Non Executive Director

BIMA (British Interactive Media Association)

Providing mentorship and advice to agency leaders & CEOs who are going through their scale-up journey using my experience and battle-tested frameworks.

Mentor

Netsells

Acquired Netsells to accelerate our Phase 2 journey to become the most respected tech consultancy in the world, backed by UK’s best growth investors, BGF.

New College Durham

New College Durham is one of the largest FE and HE colleges in the North East named by OFSTED as an Outstanding performer and with a reputation for being financially well managed and putting students first. I am a Governor on the Board of Governors helping guide the College in strategy, digital-first focus, employability for students and overseeing general governance. It's great to bring my diverse background and experience to help support the talent of tomorrow.

Governor

Mentor on the BT Ethnically Diverse Mentorship Programme helping mentor the next generation of leaders from minority backgrounds, while giving mentees a unique opportunity to develop their personal brand and receive support in furthering their careers. A chance for me to drive the DEI agenda and develop future diverse leaders.

Cheer.One

Advising a HR SaaS product start-up on Product Strategy, Culture & Growth.

Strategic Advisor

TH_NK

Experienced in leading projects and delivering enterprise solutions in the financial services sector with a focus on Microsoft based solutions.

Role on projects:
- Defining overall system architecture and design
- Defining development standards and naming conventions
- Working with Project Leads and Project Managers to plan and create specifications.
- Define interfaces
- Define system integration points
- Work with team on requirements analysis and early systems analysis and design stages.

Technical Consultant

Was responsible for overseeing the internal planning, detailed design and delivery of quality code. This included working collaboratively with key project stakeholders within the company, third-party suppliers and the client. 

Responsibilities

Worked with key stakeholders to define internal schedule, technical deliverables and resource requirements.
Lead the team to develop quality design and code for the project.
Participated in hands-on development as part of the team effort.
Contributed to the ongoing architectural evolution in an architectural role.
Took ownership of all technical deliverables.
Optimised workload by assigning tasks to developers based on strengths and interests.
Worked with Project Management and Account Director to ensure project delivery is of high quality.
Worked with third party suppliers and manage technical channels of communication.
Attended technical reviews and meetings with client and third party suppliers.

Lead Analyst / Developer

Spark Response

Involved in building internal web-based apps for the logistics and operational departments of the company.

Web Consultant

I am a passionate and experienced entrepreneur in the digital and software industry, with over 16 years of leading and growing hedgehog lab, a human-centred global tech consultancy. I co-founded hedgehog lab in 2007 and transformed it from a small web development agency to a multi-million-pound company with over 100 employees and offices in the UK, US, and Bulgaria. As the CEO, I am responsible for setting the company’s vision, strategy, and culture and overseeing operations, finances, and business development.

In April 2023, I acquired Netsells, another UK-based tech consultancy, to accelerate our mission to become the most respected tech consultancy in the world. Together, we offer custom app development and digital transformation services to our partners, including AJ Bell, Deliveroo, Kodak Alaris, and Tesco Bank. We leverage our UXR, UI/UX, engineering, AI, cloud, and data science expertise to deliver human-centred solutions that drive real business impact.

I am also an active advisor, mentor, and non-executive director for several organisations, where I share my insights and knowledge on digital innovation, leadership, and entrepreneurship.

Important : Views shared on my LinkedIn are personal and do not reflect the views of hedgehog lab.

Sarat Pediredla 🦔

I have been saying for a while that AI is closer to an industrial revolution for knowledge work than a new software rollout. This new BCG piece, “As AI Changes Work, CEOs Must Change How Work Happens”, finally puts some structure and data around that intuition.
 
What really jumps out at me is the gap between tool use and work design. BCG’s AI at Work 2025 survey suggests that nearly three in four employees are already using AI regularly, yet only around a third feel they have had proper training, and only about 36 percent are satisfied with it. We have quietly pushed AI into the flow of work, but we have not done the harder thinking about what jobs are actually for in this new context.
 
Most corporate AI programmes are framed as “implementation”. Stand up a few copilots, run some training sessions, publish a policy, tick the board paper. The uncomfortable truth is that if AI takes on a meaningful chunk of the task load, the real work is to rethink roles, skills, org design and performance. Our current job architecture was not written for a world where every employee has a capable machine partner sitting beside them.
 
You can see this clearly in software teams. If AI can write large parts of the code, what is the human developer now optimising for? Things like quality control, judgment, problem framing, system design, cross functional collaboration and coaching models. That is a very different job description to “produce X lines of code” and it demands different hiring, training and performance conversations.
 
BCG also talks about the talent pyramid starting to bend. Fewer pure entry level roles. More specialists at the top. A middle layer that shifts from traditional people management to coaching and integrating AI into the work. At the same time, digital skills are spreading across sales, marketing and operations, while the supply of experienced people still lags. That forces a very practical question for CEOs: where in your organisation do you want scarce human expertise, and what do you want it doing alongside AI, hour by hour.
 
If we take the industrial revolution analogy seriously, the big prize is not “using AI in every function”. It is redesigning the factory floor of knowledge work itself. For each critical role, leaders will need to keep asking:
 
❓ What can safely move to AI, and under what guardrails?
❓ What higher value work do we expect humans to do with the time that is freed?
❓ How will we recruit, train and reward people for that new shape of work, not the old one?
 
I am convinced we will look back on this period as the biggest shift in how work happens since computers first arrived on desks. The organisations that move first will not be the ones with the most AI tools. They will be the ones that treat AI as a reason to redesign work from first principles, with their people, not just their tech stack, at the centre.
 
 More:

Sarat Pediredla 

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

Open article: As AI Changes Work, CEOs Must Change How Work Happens by bcg.com

As AI Changes Work, CEOs Must Change How Work Happens

Real Talk Studio

👩 Meet Sarah, a leader of managers at a scaling tech business. She has vast technical knowledge but struggles with giving feedback to her team. Recently, the performance of her team lead, Alex, has significantly dropped. Her anxiety spikes when thinking about addressing the topic.

Sarah is not alone. 

70% of employees are avoiding difficult conversations at work.

And the traditional classroom solutions do not help.

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Using realistic RealPlay, Sarah can practice specific conversation skills, and get immediate feedback.

These tools help Sarah feel confident and ready to have the conversations that matter most.

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🏆 Can you top the leaderboard?

Founder

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

In this global role, I focus on improving the experience of 100k+ new hires annually across diverse employee bases, including retail branch, trading, technology. Leading a product team, my focus is on the day 1 experience. Reducing the amount of time spent by employees requesting access and the time it takes to become productive.
 
Responsibilities include:

- Defining the product vision for an exceptional new hire experience, transforming from “it’s good enough” to a more ambitious vision, that connects with the business purpose to “make dreams possible”
- Increasing investment to execute on the onboarding strategy, gaining product strategy buy-in from a globally diverse stakeholder group, across many lines of business.
- Conducting user research to gather data-driven insights to understand the new hire experience and identify areas for improvement.
- Coordinating changes with cross-functional agile teams to ensure improvement opportunities are delivered in a timely and high-quality manner.
- Identifying improvements to vendor SaaS platforms such as Microsoft 365, Service Now, Oracle HCM.

Executive Director - Product Director - Employee Experience

I worked across the Employee Experience organization as a Product Coach to help teams discover the right opportunities and develop an agile plan to execute.

Responsibilities included:

- Coached product teams and product managers on their journey towards becoming self-organised, high trust, collaborative groups.
- Performed the Product Lead role on an interim basis to demonstrate best practice and mentor suitable candidates.
- Designed and implemented organizational changes required to create a highly collaborative, customer-focused culture that can deliver with a shorter lead time.
- Championed product management as a profession, educating leaders on various frameworks, models and approaches, to ensure the right thing is built in the right way.
- Identified development needs across the organization and devised workshops that addressed the learning needs of each group.

Executive Director - Employee Experience Product Strategy

Developed an internal Employee Request and Self-Help tool to support all 250,000 employees on scenarios such as password reset, distribution list management, software delivery etc. Developed in .NET and Angular.

Responsibilities included:

- Develop features across the platform both front end and backend API’s
- Build a framework to perform continuous integration and automated testing at all levels of the stack leveraging libraries such as N-Unit, Jasmine, SpecFlow (BDD), Selenium, Protractor
- Build deployment pipeline to support continuous deployment using Jenkins and other internal tools.

Associate - Software Developer and Scrum Master

Defectives

Founder and Organiser of the Defectives. A Testing focused community for the North of England. We host events where teams of software testers compete to find the most defects in a range of online and offline applications.

Join our LinkedIn Group here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Defectives-3736966

Shop Direct

eCommerce Engineering Manager for one of the UK's biggest online retailers. Shop Direct has eight online brands including www.littlewoods.com and www.very.co.uk which achieve over 700,000 hits  a day.

» Client Responsibilities include:

Supporting Seven Scrum teams throughout the Sprint process including Sprint Planning, Scrum of
Scrums, Impediments, Demo's and Retrospectives.
• Mentoring and supporting Sprint Testers and Software Test Automation Engineers within the Sprint
Process(On and Offshore)
• Ownership of Test Automation Strategy to ensure appropriate technical test solutions are implemented
to achieve the desired business benefits.
• Monitoring Continuous Integration Pipeline for any “Red” Build/Deployment/Test stages.
• Managing AWS hosted Test Environments to achieve optimum availability and uptime
• Supporting Developers with Test Driven Development(TDD) Framework to ensure desired Unit Test
Coverage is achieved and test failures at compile time investigated.
• Ensuring adequate information available to Product Owners and Business Stakeholders
• Identification of required test resources and subsequent recruitment. Including engaging with third
parties(IBM, EPAM, Rullion) CV screening, Interviewing and final candidate recommendations to
client.

eCommerce Engineering Manager | Agile | Continous Delivery | Cloud

National Trust

Managed all phases of testing for an upgrade to the Horizon Property and Finance Management system which deals with all the Trusts Properties and Land assets. The system also deals with the billing and financial management of all the Trusts tenants.

» Client Responsibilities Included:

● Introduction of Testing best practices and processes to the organisation.
● Planned and devised Test Approach for all phases of testing including SIT, UAT, NFT, Data 	Migration, Cutover.
● Managed User Acceptance Testing with Property Managers and Rural Surveyors across 	multiple locations.
● Trained and Mentored team of Business Analysts on Testing methods, techniques and tools.
● Daily reporting to Project Management.

Test Manager

Nationwide Building Society

Worked on a large Data Migration project following the acquisition of Portman Building Society. Responsible for managing all Defects raised through testing and ensuring a quick and accurate resolution. Held regular meetings and delivered daily and weekly reports to management on defect statistics.

Defect Manager

Worked for the UK's largest Home Shopping retailer as a Test Analyst. Projects included Corporate Name Change, telephone speech recognition and Customer Futures Project which re-engineered the customer ordering process both online and via telephone. Each project required analysis of business requirements, creation of test design documents, development and execution of test scripts to validate requirements and clear reporting on progress to management. All testing on each project was delivered within the set deadlines.

Software Test Engineer

Curious about whats possible when you ask more, tell less.

👩 Meet Sarah, a leader of managers at a scaling tech business. She has vast technical knowledge but struggles with giving feedback to her team. Recently, the performance of her team lead, Alex, has significantly dropped. Her anxiety spikes when thinking about addressing the topic.

We equip you to help Sarah solve challenges like this.

- 70% of employees are avoiding difficult conversations at work.
- 53% of employees are handling "toxic" situations by ignoring them.
- 55% of people are scared to discuss diversity and inclusion at work.

And the traditional solutions are not helping!

💥 What if instead:

Sarah had the confidence, clarity and competence to lead the conversations employees value most at work. Becoming the best coach her team has ever had. Without spending hours in the classroom, unable to recall what they learned when it matters.

🤖 That's what we do:

We've built an AI learning platform that makes difficult conversations easier.

Sarah can practice specific conversation skills and get immediate feedback.

She can also use RealPlay conversations to simulate the conversations she fears the most.

These tools help Sarah feel confident and ready to have the conversations that matter most.

Try a demo now:
https://www.realtalkstudio.com

Toby Sinclair

Lately, I’ve been hating working from home.

Every day feels the same - grey skies, cold cabin, and:

The creeping temptation to crawl back under the duvet and hibernate.

So I’ve started exploring a few co-working spaces.

And my favourite so far?

Fraser House Hub, Lancaster.

It’s not the:
- free coffee
- beautiful building
- affordable pricing

(though all three help).

It’s the people.

Especially Rory Southworth and Kathleen (Kay) Parker

Who somehow manage to make every visitor feel like an old friend coming home.

And as a bonus, it's full of tech companies.

So it’s easy to bump into brilliant people like Will Faithfull over coffee.

Shame it’s just too far to be there every day.

🏡 Anyone else struggling to work from home?

😴 Any tips to stay motivated?

#coworking #lancashire #founder

Create AI Video Roleplays for Training | ex-JP Morgan Chase Director

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The Battle

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Toby Sinclair

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Posts

Engagements

Likes

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