Moonpig Technology Podcast · Moonpig Tech Podcast

Episode 26 - My journey to CPTO

·37 min·1 clip

You can't be what you can't see—we need more women showing that you can be both ambitious and kind.

Georgie starts with the obvious. She grew up in Melbourne in a classic Aussie household with her brother, mum, dad, and dog, went to Melbourne Girls College, and studied at a state school that was deliberately pushing STEM, even though she later chose an arts degree in history and sociology. That contrast matters. It frames the rest of her path as a series of practical jumps rather than a straight technical ladder, and she talks about not being afraid to step into work where she did not yet have all the answers. She learns fast. One of the funniest moments comes when she remembers googling what CPM meant on her first day at REA, which makes her point about learning on the job feel concrete instead of lofty. She is not embarrassed by that. The conversation uses that example to show how she thinks about leadership: if she cannot do something herself, she assumes she can learn it, and if that is not enough, she will try to find someone who can teach her, or step back if needed. That pattern repeats. It shows up again when she describes how she got to her current role at Moonpig and how the same habit of saying yes has also carried into advising and investing in startups. The key question arrives. Leon and Ariella ask whether you need to be an engineer to lead technical teams, and Georgie answers plainly that the answer is no, while also stressing that it depends on the role and on the decisions you are expected to make each day. She does not dodge the nuance. What you do need, she says, is respect for technical skill, curiosity about how it works, and the discipline to make sure those skills exist in the right places across the organization instead of being ignored by leadership. That is the spine. She also points out that as leaders move higher, it becomes less realistic to hold every skill personally, so the job shifts toward judgment, prioritization, and knowing when to rely on specialists. A section comes up too. Georgie talks about a section on timely decision making that helped her think about when a skill is underused and when it is overshot, and she applies that idea to her own storytelling instinct, which she can lean on too hard if she is not careful. The tone stays warm. By the end, the interview feels like a relaxed but useful conversation about confidence, humility, and the practical work of leading technical people without pretending you know everything they know.

As heard by us

A practical look at technical leadership from someone who built it without an engineering background.

Georgie Smallwood's episode makes a clear case for technical leadership without the usual straight-line career path. She talks through growing up in Melbourne, studying arts with a history and sociology major, and learning to step into unfamiliar work by asking basic questions,…

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Why you'd press play

You want a calm CPTO story about technical leadership that feels learnable.

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