I tried to play both sides. And there was some lack of authenticity. There was me not staying true to my values. And one person in particular called me out.

I learned that lesson in a pretty harsh way. And I thought I'd lost quite a close friend because of it. And I will never forget that.

Welcome to The Gaming Leader, where we bring you insights from C-level executives and industry experts to help make iGaming a place where high-achievers can thrive.

Today, I'm joined by Rob Fell, who many of you will know. Someone that has worked at Netent, GVC, Paddy Power and many more. In his 13 years of gaming experience, he has seen it all.

He shares with us lessons about authentic leadership, about the challenges that he's faced, and some of the pivotal moments that have gotten him to where he is today. Please join me for an exciting interview that will leave you inspired to take action on your journey in your iGaming Leader career.

Hey Rob, super excited to have you on The iGaming Leader. Welcome to the podcast. I wanted to start off with asking you, what were some of the, perhaps, the misconceptions that you had early on in your career about leadership in the gaming industry?

I think initially, when I started a product role, definitely within Europe and within gaming, product managers was a new term, right? People were like, that's something that people on the West Coast of the U.S. do. And there's like startups in Silicon Valley that have product people.

So it was all new. My misconceptions were that the people who were in more senior roles than me were absolute experts in that role. They were absolute experts in methodologies and understanding why, and these people were like product gods in some regard.

And I think actually what I'd learned over time was they were really no different to me or you. And they were someone who maybe had been around even months longer than you, not even years longer than you. We're all figuring out stuff as we go.

I kind of looked up and almost idolised some people. I've had some really good mentors and that's been amazing. But actually the people that I kind of looked up to at the time, you're like, well, I could have done that.

I think the message to people coming up through the ranks and doing these things is: we're all learning together and we're all trying to be better versions of what we're doing. And there is no real kind of jump between here and here and here. It's just the fact that someone maybe got there a little bit before and thinks in a slightly different way.

So really the misconception was that I idolised a few people and really there was no difference between me and them at that point.

How has that affected you, Rob? As you were progressing through your career, most of the people I speak to — and I experienced it myself as well — go through this feeling of being an imposter, right? And feeling that you have to have it all figured out.

And the reality is that none of us do, right? None of us have it figured out. And we make it up as we go along. Tell me a little bit about how that's affected you mentally and personally.

I think that kind of imposter syndrome thing is quite natural in most people. I think there's obviously going to be a few people who don’t feel like that, or claim they never feel like that.

I think it does go away. And I think there are sort of key moments where you go, well actually, yes, I don't need to feel like that anymore because I've proved myself. We've done this, that's great. Delivered this as a team.

And then you have that kind of moment of retrospection and you go: actually yeah, I do understand this stuff. I am quite good at it. I've got somewhere because of it. And I think you have those moments of retrospection, you get to that.

But actually I think having that kind of imposter syndrome and it always coming back keeps you humble. It keeps the sort of humility there. And it allows you to really empathise with other people and to have proper discussions and be more authentic around it. I think it's a good thing.

I think you need to have those moments where you go, actually yeah, I'm doing a good job. But having that imposter syndrome does keep you humble.

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. So tell me a little bit more about that progress that you made in your career and what some of the key steps were that you took that perhaps helped you make that progress. Was it all luck? Was it performance? Was it skill development?

What were some of the key attributes that helped you progress quickly through your career?

Luck definitely has a part to play and timing definitely has a part to play. And obviously we're going through cycles of this industry.

And I think I was very lucky that I joined when iGaming was very, very new. If I look at when I joined Paddy Power, we were in a division called Paddy Power Non-Retail. And we were sort of about 10%, 15% of the total business.

We struggled to get any resources within the wider organisation. So you have to be very resourceful. And I think that really helped me, in that we didn't have any BI support. We didn't really have any dev support. We didn't really have any sort of shared functions that were helping us.

So a core team of us taught ourselves everything. We taught ourselves SQL on how to pull and build reports. We taught ourselves how to use all the comms tools. We built out journeys and flows and ran reports at six o'clock in the morning to engage with VIP customers.

So I think that was a key part of the journey — that I covered so many different aspects of an iGaming operation and product role that I really truly understood them.

And then the next part was, I then made a conscious decision that, so I started in bingo and I had no experience of online bingo. I'd never played bingo before, but I started in bingo. That's where I ended up. I was very fortunate to get that role.

And then I said, well, I want to move across to Live Casino. I want to move across to RNG Casino. I want to experience wider parts of the business. And especially when I got to both Dublin with Paddy Power and then Gibraltar with Gala Coral, I made it my goal to learn the finance role, to learn business intelligence, to learn how my part of it interacted with the wider organisation.

And I think that's when you can start to go from really being a manager and focusing on tasks and focusing on sort of lower-level stuff to really then embracing a vision and understanding the wider business. And I think that was definitely by design rather than luck — that I spent time learning every part of the organisations I was part of. So I think that helped.

And then, after that, I basically then kept on with that and thought, well, I've done this with this type of organisation. I then wanted to go and get experience. And I think that the Lottoland role was a key one, understanding something completely new — like secondary betting on lotteries and scraping lottery results from Hong Kong and using results to then make other types of games, and building out games and payment methods for Brazil.

Like all of that was something I'd never done before with a business like Gala Coral. So it broadened my experience. And then it's then led on to the other things that I've done and get a really sort of holistic view of the industry, which has definitely helped.

Yeah, love it. I often call it T-shaped knowledge. You know, T-shaped where the vertical bar is your in-depth knowledge when it comes to your specific product area, in your case. And then the horizontal bar is your breadth of knowledge around how that interacts with other functions of the business. Which is, I think, absolutely crucial because it helps you to understand how you can actually shape an organisation and apply your unique understanding to it.

Okay. So what's one of the most surprising lessons that you've learned over your career when it comes to leadership? What are some of the things — you know, perhaps a project that you ran or a decision that you had to make — that was really surprising to you?

I think the surprising thing in a very fast-paced industry is actually being patient. And I think it took me a while. It's very natural for me as a person, and I think within this industry, that you want to rush, you want to get things done, you want to deliver, you want to be proving that you can get stuff done and see results.

I think actually one of the most surprising things, especially over the last couple of years, is learning how to be patient and learning how to get that message across to the teams as well. That yes, we are doing what we can do to grow the business, to generate revenue — but in some regards you have to be patient and you have to wait. Especially where regulation is involved, and licensing and other compliance factors.

Being patient and learning how to lead teams through those challenging times when they all want to rush ahead at a million miles an hour and you really can't. So it's like: how do you pass stuff back? How do you keep delivering what you need to deliver? How do you pivot and focus on the things that can happen, whilst the bigger picture is: let's be patient. Let's wait for this state to regulate. Let's wait for this to happen. Let's wait for this approval or whatever it might be.

And I think that's really the thing that I've learned over the last couple of years. Quick wins are probably less sustainable. And once you get into that sort of patience…