Delivering the things others say can never be done.
Eighteen years. Three FTSE 100s, two Fortune Global 500s and a major international — six senior leadership roles in total. Five turnaround and first-of-kind proof points. A combined £1.7 billion+ of incremental value. Author of Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale (2026). Currently leading Tesco's identity platform — serving tens of millions of customer accounts across five markets, and across multiple Group subsidiaries.
A thread across this career: being the person called on at genuinely consequential national moments — leading Brexit-era trade infrastructure at the Department for International Trade, and helping scale Tesco's online grocery platform through the defining pressure of the pandemic. Two of the most disruptive periods to hit the UK in the last decade, and I was instrumental in driving the product response to both crises.
The through-line isn't a sector or a technology. It's a capability: taking the programmes that have stalled, the deadlines that can't move, the complexity that defeated others — and delivering them to a standard nobody thought achievable.
What I do
Identity & IAM at scale
Authentication, access management, and anti-fraud solutions for tens of millions of customers. Billions of API calls monthly. The invisible infrastructure that makes digital commerce just work.
M&A integration and separation
Both sides of major corporate transactions — platform separation for the £700m Tesco Bank divestiture, and the first-ever Group identity integration at Tesco. Fixed horizons, complex legacy, zero incidents.
Platform transformation
Multi-market platform rollouts, post-divestiture integrations, and turnaround programmes across retail, financial services, government, and telecoms.
AI-driven product strategy
ML-based risk signals, personalisation at Group scale, behavioural data in real time. AI as infrastructure, not decoration.
Recent highlights
→ £700m Tesco Bank divestiture enabled — identity separation delivered on time, Christmas peak, zero incidents
→ Tesco's first-ever Group identity integration — 2 million customers migrated, 60% adoption in five months
→ Online fulfilment scaled 800k → 1.4m weekly orders — underpinning £2.3bn of incremental sales
→ Retail Platform expansion into Central Europe — several million customers added, £900m of incremental value
→ UK Government Global CRM programme ('Data Hub') — turned around in four months, still live seven years on with 4M+ interactions across 120 countries
→ Annual Report citations across six organisations
Further engagements
Further engagements have included two interim mandates at Vodafone (2012 and 2016) — leading digital transformation and self-service web platform delivery for 3 million customers under significant delivery pressure — and the Global CRM programme ('Data Hub') for the UK Department for International Trade, used across 120 countries by trade and diplomatic offices, and underpinning the UK's £1.3 trillion FDI pipeline against Brexit-era deadline pressure.
Writing
Author of Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale (2026) — available at all leading digital bookstores: books2read.com/producttruths Ongoing writing on product, platform, and AI at scale — Product at Scale, productatscale.substack.com
Speaking
Speaker — Customer Experience in Financial Services · London · June 2026
Panelist — CIO & CISO UK Cyber Roundtable · London · June 2026
Keynote Speaker — Tesco Ignite Global Technology Conference · 5,000 colleagues live · September 2024
Find me:
linkedin.com/in/ianfinn · productatscale.substack.com · github.com/ianjfinn · ianfinn.carrd.co
Contact me:
Please use the 'Connect' page: ianfinn.co.uk/connect
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