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From audit to Sr. VP of IT: The non-technical path to IT leadership
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Table of contents
About this episode
Stacey Moore didn't come up through engineering. Her path ran through Big Six audit, an MBA, and seven years in management consulting before she moved into IT leadership. She's now Sr. VP of IT at Flock Safety and has led IT through five consecutive high-growth startups, and that background shaped how she sees the job.
"IT leadership is more business leadership than it is technical."
That view shows up most clearly in how she runs major deployments. You can call go-live a success, but if the business doesn't pick it up and run with it, the project failed. So Stacey builds change management into the project plan at kickoff, not after configuration. Stakeholder mapping, end-user demos, training plans, and downstream impact analysis belong alongside integrations and testing. On complex deployments, she's seen that work take up more than half of the total project effort.
She also walks Matt Peters through how she develops directors into VPs. She brings them into budget meetings before they ever need to run one, covering capital versus expense, software spend, and vendor negotiation. Most have never seen those conversations before, and she asks nothing of them except to take it in.
"Nothing is expected of them but to sit, listen, absorb and learn."
Stacey closes with the forcing function she uses to make her teams think about scale. She asks every team member what would break if the company tripled overnight with its current headcount. "Hire more people" isn't an acceptable answer, and that constraint is what actually drives AI adoption on her teams.
What you'll learn in this episode
- Why IT leadership is more business leadership than technical skill
- How a path through audit and consulting can lead to IT leadership
- Why go-live isn't the same as success
- Why change management can be 60% of a major IT deployment
- What belongs in the project plan from kickoff
- How to prepare directors for VP roles by bringing them into budget meetings
- The question that forces your team to think about real scalability
- How headcount constraints drive AI adoption
About Stacey Moore
Stacey Moore is Sr. VP of IT at Flock Safety. Her career spans Big Six audit, an MBA, seven years in management consulting, and IT leadership across five consecutive high-growth and startup-stage companies. She specializes in change management, organizational alignment, and scaling IT functions ahead of business growth.
Resources mentioned
- Fostering Innovation: How to Build an Amazing IT Team by Andrew Lodato
- The New Automation Mindset: The Leadership Blueprint for the Era of AI-for-All by Vijay Tella, Scott Brinker, and Massimo Pizzini
- Connect with Stacey Moore on LinkedIn
About the host
Matt Peters is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fixify, where he's redefining the IT help desk for the AI era. Before founding Fixify, he was Chief Product Officer at Expel and held senior leadership roles at FireEye and Mandiant, where he helped pioneer some of the earliest managed detection and response services.
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