Multi-geography CTO — Media & Entertainment · anchored Africa

Position overview

Gladwin International Leadership Advisors is representing a confidential organisation in Media, Entertainment & Sports on a senior CTO leadership mandate anchored in Africa. The remit explicitly spans Malaysia, Singapore, Middle East.

This is a multi-geography leadership role requiring orchestration across time zones, matrix stakeholders, and often dual-reporting into global and regional lines.

The mandate fits a leader comfortable owning the narrative externally while upgrading how decisions are made internally.

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Context you will inherit

• Market & sector: Monetisation in a low-ARPU market — India's media companies must find creative ways to generate revenue from users who resist paying for content, requiring innovative commercial leadership
• Geographic spine: Primary hub Africa with explicit corridor responsibility across Malaysia, Singapore, Middle East.
• Organisation stage: Growth agenda collides with legacy cost base; productivity and automation are board-level topics, not staff functions.
• Stakeholders: Owners may include PE operating partners, a promoter family office, or public-market investors — each with different tempo and KPIs.
• Secondary lens: Sports commercialisation — IPL and emerging sports leagues need professional commercial, marketing, and operations leaders who can build sports businesses to global standards

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The mandate (12–24 month arc)

1. Product-aligned tech: Tighten partnership with product and GTM so roadmaps reflect customer and revenue reality.
2. Cost of technology: Drive FinOps discipline — visibility, accountability, and trade-offs on build vs. buy.
3. Innovation portfolio: Balance horizon-one delivery with selective bets on differentiating capabilities.
4. Technical standards: Publish and enforce patterns that reduce one-off solutions across teams.
5. Regulatory tech: Where sector demands, ensure systems and controls satisfy audit and supervisor expectations.
6. Leadership communication: Make technology risk and opportunity legible to non-technical boards and investors.

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Responsibilities (representative)

• Drive platform consolidation where fragmentation hurts speed or cost.
• Establish technical programme management for large migrations or rewrites.
• Improve engineering metrics — lead time, change failure rate, incident trends.
• Represent technology risk and opportunity clearly to board and investors.
• Ensure regulatory expectations on systems are met in financial services, health, etc.

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Leadership profile

• Education: Strong undergraduate grounding; MBA / advanced degree / professional qualification common at this level.
• Scale experience: Systems and organisations that grew materially under your technology leadership.
• Judgment: High signal-to-noise under pressure; ethical clarity; willingness to halt initiatives that break risk appetite.
• Communication: Executive presence in English; additional languages valued where market-relevant.
• Geographic muscle: Comfort operating from Africa with regular engagement across Malaysia, Singapore.

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Team & culture

Inclusion and psychological safety are not separate programmes — they are prerequisites for honest debate on strategy and risk. Model curiosity, direct feedback, and consequences for conduct lapses.

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Success measures (examples)

• Growth quality: Mix of recurring revenue, new logos, and cross-sell — not volume for its own sake.
• Productivity: Unit cost, automation savings, or throughput improvements with audited baselines.
• Customer: NPS / CSAT where tracked; contract renewals; reference-ability in strategic accounts.
• Franchise: Clean compliance record; reputation stability in industry and government forums.

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First 90 days (orientation arc)

• Days 1–30: Listening tour — customers, regulators (as appropriate), top team 1:1s, and unfiltered view of numbers; pause major reorganisation.
• Days 30–60: Publish a short memo on priorities, non-goals, and decision rights; align executive committee on three enterprise bets.
• Days 60–90: Lock operating cadence; fill or upgrade one to two critical seats; deliver one visible win (customer, cost, or culture).
• Commission a pragmatic view of data, cyber, and automation posture; sponsor one bounded pilot with ROI hypothesis.
• Establish escalation discipline with matrix partners — fewer meetings, clearer decision logs.
• Clarify RACI for cross-border deals, staffing, and pricing exceptions.

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Stakeholder map (illustrative)

• Internal: CEO or regional president, CFO, risk / legal, CHRO, CIO or CDO, business GMs, internal audit.
• External: Strategic accounts, channel partners, industry associations, regulators (where material).
• Owners: PE operating partners, promoter office, or public investors — pace and clarity matter as much as vision.

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Travel & mobility

Travel weighted to priority markets and quarterly global or regional forums; flexibility for crisis windows.

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Compensation

Market-aligned CTO remuneration in Media, Entertainment & Sports with performance linkage; sign-on and relocation considered for exceptional fits.

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Application process

Gladwin International is managing this search confidentially. Shortlisted candidates will engage in structured conversations with the firm’s partners before client introduction. Please apply through the careers portal with a concise note on why this geography, sector, and remit fit your trajectory.

We review every submission personally; unsolicited outreach to the end client is discouraged and may disqualify candidacy.

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Reference: media-entertainment · CTO · Africa · Gladwin International Leadership Advisors