Chris&Sree

Together since 2020 · A Travelopia story

Chris&Sree.

// from inside a technology transformation · real stories · together

We're Chris Storey and Sreekandh Balakrishnan — two technology directors at Travelopia, scaling and transforming a tech organisation that follows the sun across five continents. We write about leadership, transformation, scaling distributed teams, and what AI is changing about all of it.

Illustrated portrait of Chris Storey and Sreekandh Balakrishnan with AI-themed design elements around them

Fig. 01 · Sree (left) & Chris (right) Ideas · Data · Impact // Coffee · Curiosity · Code

The Credo

Explore. Experiment. Share. Inspire.

What we're working on.

Four threads run through everything we plan to share here. Some weeks one will dominate, others another — but together they describe how we think about technology, teams, and the road ahead.

Leadership

Leading technology teams across timezones, cultures, partners, and contexts — and what that takes day to day.

Transformation

How real change actually happens when tech, process, and people move together — the wins, the plateaus, and what we got wrong.

AI in practice

Building with foundation models in production — what's working, what isn't, and the surprises along the way.

Scaling tech orgs

Distributed teams, value streams, and the org design behind the engineering. How tech grows up.

From the notebook

Writing.

Sree Balakrishnan

No. 008 · Co-authored · May 2026 6 min read

One puzzle at a time.

Building a global, high-performing tech team isn't about grand rollouts or overnight changes. It's about placing one piece, one brand, one squad at a time — and realising you've only just begun.

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No. 007 · May 2026 5 min read

AI in the engine room.

Cloudflare pointed a security-focused AI model at live production infrastructure and published what they found — including where it fell short. That honesty is worth paying attention to.

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No. 005 · May 2026 5 min read

What's an FDE — and why your AI vendor keeps mentioning one.

A plain-language explainer for non-tech leaders: what a Forward Deployed Engineer actually does, why every AI vendor is hiring them in 2026, and what it changes for the leader writing the cheque.

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No. 004 · May 2026 6 min read

Nine lessons from scaling AI.

Two years into scaling AI at Travelopia, here are nine things I wish someone had told me at the start — about hype, fluency, what AI is actually for, and what it means to lead from experience rather than from policy.

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No. 003 · May 2026 6 min read

What I'm sensing in AI.

Eight threads I'm tracking right now — what's actually shifting in pace, architecture, risk, and how the wider world is reading it. A snapshot from inside a tech transformation, with the live picture in field notes.

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Chris Storey

No. 006 · May 2026 5 min read

Both in the room.

The tech side and the people side of AI transformation aren't separate conversations. They never were. What it actually takes to run them together.

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No. 002 · May 2026 6 min read

From tasks to transformation.

Most organisations are getting measurably better at tasks — and measurably nowhere on transformation. Why early wins quietly become "thinking small", and what changes when AI is pointed at flow instead of tasks.

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No. 001 · May 2026 5 min read

Why the hard part of AI isn't the technology.

AI initiatives stall not because the tooling is wrong, but because organisations treat them as a technology rollout instead of a behaviour change. The first in a short series on what I've learned at Travelopia.

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The Story

How we got here.

Sree joined Travelopia as a consultant in 2011, came on full-time in 2018, and stepped into a group role in 2020. Chris started in 2015 with Travelopia's marine business and moved to the group at the same time. We've been scaling the technology together ever since.

Today we lead a technology organisation that doesn't fit neatly on a single map. Not one office. Not one timezone. Not even one continent. Instead — a constellation of engineers, designers, and partners stretched across the United Kingdom, the United States, India and the wider Asia region, Cape Town in South Africa, and Costa Rica in Central America.

Add to that a network of remote teammates and trusted partners working from places we've never set foot in, and what emerges is a twenty-four-hour engine: when one part of the team logs off in London, another is just opening their laptop in Bangalore; when Cape Town wraps for the day, San José is finding its rhythm.

And right now, all of it is being reshaped — by AI, by distributed work, by what it actually means to lead technology now. New tools, new workflows, new questions about what software development even looks like. This site is where we plan to share what we're seeing — the experiments, the lessons, the things we got wrong, and the things that genuinely changed how we work. Real stories. Together.

Compass

Double engine.

Different backgrounds. Different cultures. United by tech. We can go weeks without speaking — but ask either of us the same question and the answer usually lines up. We don't think the same. We share the same compass. Sometimes Chris leads. Sometimes Sree leads.

— People

One team, real partnership.

Different identities, shared compass. We work as a single unit.

Co-own the outcomes.

Wins and misses, together. Nobody's on the hook alone.

No blame. Deliver and learn.

Hard problems get easier when the room is safe.

— Customer

Start with business impact.

Always. The work has to matter outside the room.

Do right by the customer.

Internal and external — both count, both compound.

Be bold. Prove it, then scale.

Conviction without recklessness. Evidence beats opinion.

— Method

Agile by default. Lean by instinct.

Ten Agile principles. Not nine. Plus Lean's clarity on waste.

Value stream first.

Optimise the flow, not the task. That's where it compounds.

Clean metrics where we can get them.

Measure what changes the work. Ignore the rest.

Six places, one team.

Our colleagues, partners, and remote teammates collaborate across timezones, languages, and cultures every day — a twenty-four-hour engine. Here's where everyone is right now.

Live · Following the sun

Idle

San José

Costa Rica

—:—

UTC −6

Idle

New York

United States

—:—

UTC −5 / −4

Idle

London

United Kingdom

—:—

UTC ±0 / +1

Idle

Cape Town

South Africa

—:—

UTC +2

Idle

Bangalore

India

—:—

UTC +5:30

+ Remote · ∞ Everywhere else Find a meeting time