Bringing a vision to life

We were joined by Matthew Montero, Head of Enterprise Data Services at Gen Re.

At 4:23, Matthew started us off with sharing the time that focusing on a vision and defining the strategy around that really clicked for him.

“When I worked in pharmaceuticals, I had the pleasure of having a manager who was very focused on vision. So that’s when I really got a feel for once you have a vision and you can sell that vision, then you have the ability to build as big a team you need. You have to be able to back that up with either ways to improve the business or ways to even improve the organization as a whole. 

With the knowledge I gained through the experience of dealing with getting consultants, onboarding new hires, and defining the strategy for that vision, I moved on to my current company, Gen Re. It fostered from there, let me take this vision and further define the way I feel it should be at this company and build a full strategy around that. 

This was about figuring out, from day one when you get the data in ➡️ all the way to building applications that use that data ➡️ the self-service route of other people wanting to use that data for their analytical purposes. Let me build that strategy around there. 

Being able to both build out strategy and communicate that to executives, to different business units, the heads of different business units, moved me up relatively fast in a sense. It’s being very confident in that vision and in the strategy and even the principles around that as well. 

It’s really laying out the whole vision of how everything is going to be. You don’t go into the technicals yet of how you actually accomplish that, it’s just how you view what it all looks like. And that’s the first thing you got to sell because at least if you have a vision, you have something you can communicate to everyone. 

And then that’s when you break down now what’s that strategy to accomplish that vision because you can’t do all that in one day. It’s going to take some time. So you have to have individual steps or a strategy to accomplish that. 

When I was earlier in my career, my boss asked – “You know my vision. How are you going to make that vision happen?”

Once I was given that, I sat down and actually really thought through that. That’s the moment it clicked in my head. Like, this is my next step. I want to be able to both define that vision, define the high level strategies to it, and then work with teams to actually make that happen. That was a couple years back and the time it really clicked for me.”