Joel Williams joins Red Badger as Managing Director
Fast-growing UK consulting firm Red Badger has appointed Joel Williams to its leadership team. The former CTO of Cognizant subsidiary Zone takes on the role of Business Unit Managing Director alongside Monika Koziol and Ben McLeod.
Red Badger is a digital transformation and technology consultancy focused on clients in the retail, media and financial services sectors. As the firm looks to continue building on its growth over its first nine years in business, Red Badger has been engaged in a recruitment drive, which has seen its headcount grow from 78 in 2016 to more than 100 today.
Late in 2018, this saw Kevin Jenkins, the former Managing Director of Visa UK and Ireland, and Chris Brauer, Director of Innovation at Goldsmiths, University of London, join the advisory board of the digital consultancy. Now, as Red Badger aims to continue its rapid growth trajectory, which has seen it listed as one of the fastest growing businesses in Europe, the firm has appointed a new Business Unit Managing Director to its leadership team.
Joel Williams brings over 15 years of experience in digital development to the role, which he takes up alongside fellow Managing Directors Monika Koziol, who joined in 2015, and Ben McLeod, who has been at Red Badger since early 2018. In his new job, Williams will lead a business unit which is responsible for a number of strategic client engagements. He will also join Red Badger’s leadership team, assisting in the company’s next phase of growth.
Williams was previously in the employ of Zone, a customer experience agency inside Cognizant. There, he spent four years as a Technology Director before being promoted to CTO Experience Platforms practice lead in 2018, where he was in charge of the creation and leadership of a new go-to-market Experience Platforms proposition across Cognizant Interactive in the UK. Williams has overseen a number of large digital transformation initiatives for businesses such as BMW, Barratt Homes, Centrica, Electrolux, Gatwick Airport, Virgin Media Business and RSPB.
Commenting on the appointment, Shelley Quinn, UK Managing Director for Red Badger, said, “We’re pleased to welcome Joel into Red Badger and our leadership team. Joel brings many years of experience consulting alongside a depth of technical knowledge. This will be invaluable to Red Badger as we continue to be catalysts for change for our large-scale enterprise clients.”
Williams himself added, “Red Badger have a fantastic reputation in the market for their lean approach to digital product development. Their drive to do the right thing for clients by focussing on quality and value really resonates with me and differentiates them from traditional consultancies. I'm really looking forward to working with the awesome product design and tech talent at Red Badger and building on their great successes to date."
