Leadership is the secret sauce

In a highly competitive and saturated market like broadband services, it’s essential to find small pockets of opportunity and new engines of growth. Having spent 12 years building an exciting career in Singtel where he spent the last 5 years in Home Marketing, Danny Theseira, our Director of Broadband Product Marketing, shared that the secret to uncovering these gems is by helping managers become leaders in the organization.

As a leader himself who has led successful implementations of various launches within the Mobile, Roaming, IDD, Fixed Line, IOT and Broadband space across various sales channels, vendors and business units, Danny’s people-centric formula for success is a tried and tested one.

“The most enjoyable part of my role is the people I work with every day. The opportunity to bring the team together, empower and get exciting projects done makes it all worthwhile.”

“At present, I’m the Director of Broadband Product Marketing and is responsible for the Broadband, Home Solutions, Fixed Line and IDD Business. This includes strategy, roadmap, pricing, policies, and new engines of growth to deliver Home Marketing revenue and market share goals. “

Singapore’s broadband market

The broadband market in Singapore has been severely disrupted in the past few years. In a small market like Singapore, we have 7 existing operators and competition will only intensify with a new market entrant expected to enter the fray by the end of 2019.

As Broadband price pressures continue to intensify, Danny and his team operates on a weekly basis that consists on daily monitoring of business drivers, exhaustive Go-To-Market plans and careful execution to help mitigate this downward pressure.

What a typical week looks like

We asked Danny to share what a typical week looks like, and we realised that the only commonality that exists is the extensive people element where he needs to lead, influence, and negotiate with a wide spectrum of stakeholders every day of the week.

Here’s a breakdown of a typical week for Danny:

• Mon: Monitor last week’s performance
• Tue: Review plans for the week/month, management meetings
• Wed: Planning continues, Align with stakeholders in the business
• Thu: Further Go-To-Market preparations, management meetings
• Fri: Final launch readiness, communicate to all stakeholders

Eradicating WiFi deadzones

“In Broadband we look after customers throughout the entire lifecycle as WiFi is a critical necessity today. WiFi dead zones was our No 1 issue – the bane of many customers with homes that are large or have multiple levels - can be attributed to router placement, home layouts, wall thickness, bomb shelter and even interference from neighbouring homes due to high rise living.”

“We had to rethink the home WiFi strategy from the traditional single router in the living room to multiple nodes in a home. Timing was important too as demand and data consumption increased, more customers switched to video, gaming and had numerous IOT devices. To solve these issues, the team worked to launch AirTies’ Wi-Fi Mesh.”

This is a technology that helped to improve home wireless coverage and performance by expanding and optimising Wi-Fi connections through its mesh, ‘client steering’ technologies and support HD Singtel TV.

With the launch, Singtel was the first operator in the world to utilise mesh technology and the business we embarked on generated a new source for revenue growth.

Bringing home global accolades

In 2018, we won two awards at the Operational Excellence (OPEX) Week: Business Transformation World Summit 2018 organized by the International Quality and Productivity Centre (IQPC) in Florida, USA.

The OPEX Global Awards are cross-industry awards that recognise major achievements in the field of Operational Excellence.

Finalists had to present their projects to panels of judges before the winners were selected, and we were delighted to receive the accolades in recognition of our effort to improve our operational excellence so that we can provide the best experience for our customers.