Sharon Lynch Podcast Transcript
Sharon Lynch joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Sharon Lynch. Sharon Lynch is the CEO of Modus Create, bringing 27 years of experience helping organizations design and deliver technology products that meet real-world needs. She’s passionate about building cultures where collaboration and innovation thrive.
Before Modus Create, Sharon led Slalom’s product engineering organization, overseeing strategy and scale for a team of over 1,300 people across the Americas. Earlier, she held leadership roles at a software company and at Accenture, delivering technology and communications projects globally. Experience that shaped her inclusive leadership style and her knack for uniting diverse perspectives to drive results.
Sharon is drawn to hard problems, bold ideas, and teams willing to challenge the status quo, spending her career blurring the lines between IT and business, strategy and execution, empathy and ambition. She leads with curiosity, conviction, and the belief that empowered people are the greatest catalyst for growth.
Well, good afternoon, Sharon. Welcome to the show.
Sharon Lynch: Good to be here.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much. I appreciate you, Sharon. I know you’re hailing out of Seattle. I’m in Kansas City. We just took a big loss from you about a week and a, week and a half ago.
Sharon Lynch: Sorry.
Brian Thomas: It’s okay. It happens. I’ve always liked the Seahawks as well.
Let’s jump into your first question here. Your path spans 27 years from a management information systems degree and seven years at Accenture to building professional services at a software company to 12 years leading Slalom’s builds product engineering organization of over 1,300 people, and now CEO of Modus Create.
What’s the through line across all of that, and what drew you to step into that top job at Modus at what you’ve called such a pivotal moment for the industry?
Sharon Lynch: When you say all that, it, it sounds very impressive. So thank you. It is.
Brian Thomas: It is.
Sharon Lynch: The through line through my entire career, starting with that MIS degree that I got at Washington State University, just a s- small call-out, has always been technology and love of technology.
So no matter what in my career, I’ve always come back to building something and creating a solution for a client, with technology has always been my love. And the second one is clients. I was recruited out of college to go to Accenture, and I never even knew what consulting was. And I, when I got my first project, I was felt so honored to be invited into a client to do work for them, and I’ve just felt that way through my entire career of like, these companies need us.
They either need us for scale or a specialty skill or help in some way. So that’s really been the through line technology and helping clients. So at this moment, as I did that career, as you said, moving through the chain of doing the work, helping lead the work, and then helping lead the businesses that do the work, I found that I really loved leading teams and could do both the things of strategy and business leading the teams, which brought me to Modus as the CEO, which is being able to define the culture and the process and how we were gonna go and work with our clients with that deep empathy and do with mentality while making sure I was always bringing the best quality talent.
And this moment is the moment you can turn all that on its heel. And our methodology has always been not the same, but we’ve been doing Agile for so long, and everything is changing. I can’t imagine a more exciting time to lead a company in the digital age than now. So, all your career movements move to a moment.
So I think this is a pretty amazing moment for me.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And you do have an impressive background, so, don’t be too humble there. I, I appreciate that. What I really took away from this, Sharon, is obviously you had a passion. You were educated in technology, and that’s awesome. But, the thing that makes people excel like you is the fact that you’re able to connect with people.
You’re able to lead people, and, and when you do that, that really fulfills you, gives, gives you purpose in your drive to do what you do today, so thank you. Sharon, Modus Create published a study of more than 500 leaders titled Rushing AI, Missing ROI, Revealed: What’s Actually Slowing Production Innovation.
What did that research uncover, and where are companies most consistently going wrong in their rush to adopt AI?
Sharon Lynch: It’s really looking at speed and equating that to value and really creation and being done. So there was this rush of, “Look at how amazing,” especially when Gen AI come out, it was like, “Look what it can do.”
And people got so excited, especially when they saw these POCs and these demos. And a lot of leaders were like, “You need to put this into your technology. You need to use this. Look how, how more productive you can be or what you can bring to customers.” And so there was this emphasis on speed versus value and getting the technology right and making sure you were building it, well, in the right way, in the foundations in the right way, and with the right business cases.
So a lot of things were a bit gimmicky, to be honest. It wasn’t what customers needed or your users needed. So when you, you step back and every single product and software, software that you build really needs fundamentals of what does your customer or user need? What are those feature sets? And what’s the right tools that you need to get there?
And AI is an amazing tool, and it helps us build software faster, and it enables features that we couldn’t have imagined three years ago, but it’s just a tool. So if you look at s- at speed, and it doesn’t exactly equate to ROI, unless you look at that as the use case. So that’s what we found, and many of my clients, they get pressured to use AI.
So I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s do that, but let’s make sure we find the cases that bring you the most value.” And sometimes, it may not be AI, it may be something else. But I always tell them, “I’m not gonna build you software unless we make sure that it has value attached to it, and it has an ROI.”
‘Cause at the end of the day, that’s what your board’s looking for, that’s what your CEO is looking for, and that’s what you’re gonna be judged on, bringing value to your company, whether it’s dollar value, business value, team value, efficiency value. So speed does not equate to value. You need to make sure that that’s what you’re not being, judging yourself on or your company on.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you, and I appreciate you doing that work and publishing that study, and you’re absolutely right. I’ve been in technology, I’ve been a CIO many years, and you can’t rush things. You gotta have the fundamentals right. You gotta do your, your planning, your pre-planning and all that.
People are… It’s, it’s like, AI is… It’s almost like a, I hate to say it, a, a virus here. Everybody’s got a, “Oh, what, what are they doing? I better adopt something now and show people that I’m using AI.” So I appreciate your insights here, really do. Modus sits at the intersection of technology and business impact from building cloud infrastructure for a new credit card launch to creating a visualization tool that boosted digital purchases for a major automaker.
What separates a digital product that genuinely real world needs from one that looks great in a demo but fails to deliver?
Sharon Lynch: I’m gonna slightly repeat myself from the last question. I don’t kinda mean to. Actually, I was just… I often bring up stories that I was just doing. But I was talking to a former colleague of mine who’s helping a client, and he’s asked us to do assessment, and this client is stuck and can’t move forward because they didn’t do the right foundations two years ago, and now it’s hampering all their development.
This is the answer to the question. So every time you’re gonna do something, you need to think about the development. And throughout my whole career, it sounds like yours, it’s kinda all been the same. You need to do the right product strategy, you need to do the right design, you need to think about it, and you need to do really good development, and you need to figure out how you’re gonna maintain that with the right technology.
And now it’s all different pieces that help you do that. Like I have an amazing woman who works for me, and her brain is in product strategy. What she can produce now in a very short period of time would’ve taken weeks before. So, but it’s still solid product strategy, and she’s developing features where she can do research to get to that value faster to help clients.
Like, that’s not as valuable, or look at the research I did overnight, and that type of stuff. And we can build faster and, but you’re building still using the most modern skills that are out there, and not the gimmicky ones. There’s so much out there right now where platforms are saying, and there’s software coming out, and they’re, they’re kind of all the same.
Just make sure you’re, you’re using the ones that you think are gonna be there in two years. So there’s just a, there’s so much noise coming at our CEOs and CTOs and CIOs. So again, I think it’s slowing down to go fast and build the fundamentals. So anyone can vibe code a POC. Honestly, I could. And that’s scary.
Anyone can do it, and they can make it look really, really good, and I think that’s a really good tool. We use it in sales a lot to go, “Is this what you mean? Is this what you’re thinking?” Bring it to life. But that prototype or that POC does not mean what it will look like in production. It’s just to visuali- visualize what they’re talking about.
You need to do all those sound fundamentals. It’s just faster once you get that design down. We can do that strategy faster, we can build faster, we can do testing as part of that, and we can make sure we can do sound fundamentals to get it into production, which is still hard, which is still very, very important so that, security is there, your users can use it, your data is safe.
Those are still really, really important. So you need to make sure that you’re choosing a partner that knows all of that. But everything does go faster. Project that used to take a year is now taking four months, and that is exciting. I love it for my clients. That brings value to them faster. Little bit longer answer than you wanted, but you know, a demo doesn’t go into production, a POC doesn’t go into production.
Real software goes into production. So just make sure that whoever you’re working with or your team knows the difference between that and something that’s very real
Brian Thomas: Amazing. Thank you. You’re absolutely right, demos don’t go into production, right? Tested, thoroughly tested and planned out software goes into production.
I just love how you are leveraging AI, but again, once you have a good sound process and framework for that, you can move a lot quicker with the technology today, and that’s awesome. Obviously, you’re delivering a lot faster for your customers, so that’s amazing. Sharon, the last question of the day, you’ve said your mission is to help clients modernize, adopt next generation technologies, and thrive in a rapidly changing digital era.
As we look ahead 5, maybe even 10 years, how do you see the work of digital product engineering as AI matures, and what will separate the companies that turn AI into real business impact from those that still stuck chasing that ROI?
Sharon Lynch: Five years ago, I could have given you a very solid answer what 5 or 10 years would look like, and I would’ve been wrong, right?
So here’s, here’s my answer today, which I think I might be actually correct on this. Professional services will al- will always be here to, and should be ahead of our clients, learning new technology, being nimble, investing so we can help partner with our clients, ’cause they’re, they’re focused on their business.
So my belief, that’s why we’re here. So we can always jump in and help them and co-create with them, ’cause they sometimes do fall behind or they need help. So we always need to be ahead. And I believe that the companies that are going to survive never say, “Well, in the past we,” or, “My job shouldn’t change.”
They will be nimble, they will be curious, and they will, will be thinking about, “It doesn’t matter what I did before. What am I gonna do in the future?” And being multi-skilled and being willing to change and adapt and lean forward and lean into new opportunities and new roles and, and just keeping a learner, I think those are the people and the companies that are gonna change.
And that’s who I look to hire, people that just have that curiosity. You mentioned empathy and, and learning. That, that’s who I am, and that’s what I look for, and that’s what I want my people how to treat my clients. So I think it’s adaptive. I don’t know what it’s gonna look like anymore. I know that’s the type of companies that are going to survive, that are willing to also take risks, try something new, seek out the opinion of their customers.
Those are the companies that I think are gonna really thrive in the new world.
Brian Thomas: Thank you for that answer. Appreciate the insights. Obviously, as technology professionals, Sharon, we could look back, like you said, five years and be like, “Yeah, I know what it’s gonna be like.” But we can’t today, especially with the leapfrogging of this AI technology.
It’s just crazy. You’re spot on. I, I totally agree with you on the curiosity part. You gotta… How do you reinvent yourself sometimes? How do you always look to change something, do something different? You gotta stay ahead. You gotta stay in the middle of that in order to survive, and that’s just amazing.
Sharon, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Sharon Lynch: Thank you, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Sharon Lynch Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
