Meri Williams: From Teen Hardware Hacker to CTO | Subscription Heroes #25

Meri Williams’ path to becoming CTO at Pleo is anything but ordinary. Growing up in South Africa, she began her tech journey as a teenage hardware hacker, soldering a component for South Africa’s first satellite. After moving to the UK for university and meeting her future wife there, Meri built a decade-long career at Procter & Gamble.

Although P&G offered stability, Meri wanted to return to the cutting-edge tech she loved. A well-timed call from Tom Loosemore led her to join the UK’s Government Digital Service, where she scaled the Gov.uk team from 30 to 300 people in just nine months. She then took on CTO roles at M&S, MOO, Monzo, and Helix before joining Pleo in 2022. Unlike her past scaling-focused roles, her work at Pleo has been about efficiency, delivering 300% more work with the same headcount while becoming 40% faster.

Why Scaling Isn’t Always the Answer

Having worked in environments ranging from massive corporates to early-stage startups, Meri has found her sweet spot in scale-ups — companies that have product-market fit but are focused on sustainable growth or profitability. Early-stage chaos can be overwhelming, especially without structure. In a scale-up, she thrives by making things better, faster, and stronger without constant pivots.

Her approach to profitable growth in engineering focuses on two key principles:

• Keeping engineers close to the customer through direct involvement in user conversations and feedback loops.
• Developing commercial awareness so engineers understand trade-offs between building and buying, as well as financial concepts like CapEx and OpEx.

At Pleo, customer obsession is part of performance reviews and promotion criteria, ensuring the entire engineering team stays connected to user needs.

Staying Grounded in Times of Change

For Meri, leading through uncertainty also means guiding her teams through industry shifts like AI. While AI tools can boost productivity by 10 to 20 percent, she cautions against overestimating their impact, especially in maintaining complex, existing codebases.

Beyond technology trends, her most valuable career insight is to find what you cannot stop yourself from doing and build your work around it.

She is also a strong advocate for rest in high-burnout fields like tech, seeing it as an essential part of sustaining performance. In a rapidly changing industry, she believes there is as much opportunity in improving and maintaining systems as there is in building brand-new solutions.