Growing businesses need to be focused on solving customer problems rather than on developing a particular product or service with no regard for market demand.

Delegates at the Reimagination 2016 Technology Strategy: A Company Board's Perspective panel session heard having a strong management board that can provide a level of mentoring can be critical to ensuring an organisation remains on track and relevant in a constantly changing marketplace.

Peter James, chairman of Macquarie Telecom, Nearmap and DroneShield, told the conference that heads of start-up IT companies were often first-time managers and, as such, needed to be prepared to acknowledge their own limitations – and boards had a role to play in achieving this.

"Boards are there to assist the growth of the company," he said. "It's about driving culture. Boards of listed companies are really entrepreneurs for grownups.

"Too often, we look internally at our products and we have our developers in the back room designing products in the hope that someone wants them. My mantra as a chairman is to get people out talking to customers. You need to flip the organisation so it is customer-centric."

Building trust with board

Dr Ian Opperman, chief executive and chief data scientist at the NSW Data Analytics Centre, said it was good for young CEOs to think of boards as people "who are very smart and very strategic but are speaking a totally different language from you".

"Boards consist of people and it is about building trust with the board in order to get a strategic relationship," he said. "You need to understand how to position technology in a way that is actually understood and actionable by a board."

Richard White, chief executive and founder of WiseTech Global, told delegates it was vital that a strong relationship existed between a company's board and its senior management.

"Ultimately it is about using the power of the machine that you have, by making sure the board is right, the executive management is right, and making sure all the talent that sits underneath that is right."

White said there had been much discussion in Australia about the challenge of finding the best talent for growing technology companies and this held true when it came to the board.

Opperman agreed, saying it was also important to understand the framework in which a board operated and their appetite for risk.

"The best relationship is not to present to them but to work with them and build the relationship," he said. "You need to speak in a common language, developing things together and working together as closely as possible."