When Caroline Mutuku (Nairobi, 2016–2021) joined on-demand delivery platform Glovo as Managing Director for Kenya in October 2022, the market wasn't performing well. The food business was growing in single digits, and the leadership team was worried. Within three months, Caroline wrote a strategy that was approved by both the company's headquarters in Barcelona and Kenya's biggest restaurant owners. Today, Glovo Kenya is the most stable market in the network for year-on-year growth and one of its fastest growing. The business has grown 4X in three and a half years.
Glovo operates in 21 countries, including six in Africa, where it is the continent's largest marketplace tech company. In Kenya alone, roughly 6,000 partners sell through the platform, and around 80 percent of them are small and medium-sized businesses.
Caroline's own route to Glovo was anything but a straight line. It took her through three months of medical school, a business degree at the University of Nairobi, six years in banking, six years at the Firm, and five months at a transport-tech startup. This year, she was named Tech CEO of the Year in Kenya and one of the country's Top 40 Under 40 Women. She sat down with us to talk about structure, execution, leadership as a mindset, and why sometimes the dots only connect looking backwards.
You went from banking to McKinsey. What was the hardest adjustment when you joined the Firm?
I'd spent four years at Standard Chartered, where I'd come in as a management trainee and become one of their youngest managers. Then I joined McKinsey as a Junior Associate. You can imagine the transition: you have to adjust to being very structured, very hypothesis-driven, and to generating slides and communicating your points to boards and very senior leadership teams.
Fortunately, McKinsey was new in Kenya then, and the business schools here didn't teach the consulting way of doing things. So the office ran Friday training sessions where even Senior Partners would dedicate an afternoon to coaching us. I truly appreciated that. They saw that we were smart and talented and just needed a bit of development, and they invested in it.
Is there a McKinsey habit or framework you still use?
Tech companies like hiring ex-consultants. Of Glovo's six markets in Africa, four are led by ex-consultants, and two of us are ex-McKinsey.
First, we are building an industry. The marketplace platform industry didn't exist here before, so we're navigating new problems all the time, and there's no documented way of solving them, and even if there were, it wasn't written for sub-Saharan markets. So I default to issue trees: break the problem into its constituent parts, understand which have the highest impact, whether we have the resources and capability, whether the regulatory landscape accommodates it, and how easy it is to execute
The second is execution. We set a strategy every fourth quarter for the year ahead, but then every week and every month we're asking whether we're achieving the impact we expected. We measure and we track. When people ask me what I did to make Kenya one of the fastest-growing markets in the Glovo network, it comes down to this: you have to develop a coherent strategy, but you also have to execute it. Having the discipline to execute every single week, to iterate when the real-time feedback tells you a piece isn't working, and to do that quarter after quarter, year after year—that's one of the most valuable lessons I took from McKinsey.
Tell us about your role. What does a day in the life of a Managing Director at Glovo Kenya look like?
The way I really like to think about it is that I'm part of a team building a legacy in Kenya.
Think about someone who has only one restaurant or one shop selling electronics or beauty products. Before 2022, or even 2020, most of them didn't think about the digital marketplace at all. Even now, many restaurants don't have pictures of their menus, and they struggle when you ask them to describe a dish. Seeing them start very small and skeptical, and then over time trust the process, trust the systems, and take those learnings back into their businesses: that's what I actually do.
The other side is closer to my heart. Sub-Saharan Africa has a huge unemployment problem. Government officials tell me that Kenya produces around one million young people entering the labor market every year, and the country can only absorb 300,000. So in everything we do, I ask how many earning opportunities we're creating, directly or indirectly. When I joined, around 700 couriers were collaborating with the platform. Today it's around 3,000, and growing. Kenya also wasn't a hub for Glovo. I spent a lot of time helping our headquarters teams understand the quality of talent here. Now Kenya is a hub outside Spain, with more than 600 people employed by Glovo, its affiliates, or outsourced partners, and we're planning to take that to 1,200.
I also spend a lot of time with government. I appear before parliamentary committees to help them understand what platform work is and how they can support it, rather than creating regulations that work against it. Work used to mean being employed eight to five. Now people want to be in charge of their own hours. We're going through a revolution, and they need to be part of it.
How would you describe your leadership style?
This year I've read a lot of books about sports coaches, and I'm trying to move toward that model: developing talent and building trust. I hire people who have the talent, maybe not yet the skill set, but who are smart and have the right attitude, and then I spend a lot of time training and coaching them.
What that means in practice is that I step in when I'm needed and step out when I'm not. I lead leaders who lead teams, so my job is to develop those leaders and give them the tools to execute.
What's the best piece of advice you ever received?
There are two. The personal one is that the dots always connect looking backwards. What you need to worry about is whether, at this moment, with the information you have, you're making the best decision. You weigh the risks, you check with your mentors, and you move.
A colleague from Standard Chartered who'd moved to McKinsey told me, "I think you'd make a good consultant," and encouraged me to apply. After six years at the Firm focused on banking, a transport-tech company looking specifically for a McKinsey EM hired me as a general manager. That company exited Kenya five months later, but when Glovo came looking for someone with a consulting background and a bit of tech, there I was. I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined I'd work at a company that delivers food. But I'm at Glovo because I was at Swvl, and at Swvl because I was at McKinsey, and at McKinsey because of a colleague from banking, and in banking because after three months of medical school, I didn't want to do medicine.
The professional one came from Senior Partner Tawanda Sibanda. I had just started as a junior engagement manager, and he wanted to go on holiday. I said, "You cannot go on holiday and leave me alone—I'm just JEMing." He said, "My friend, leadership is a mindset. The moment you know you're in charge and the buck stops with you, you will learn how to make better decisions more independently."
He went on holiday, and I realized he was right. I'd been over-reliant on him. That helped me enormously as an EM, and it helped again when I moved from consulting to running a P&L, where you second-guess yourself a lot. I see a lot of junior managers struggle with that transition: ‘I've been made a leader, but I'm scared.’ I had the same issue. Now I always remind myself: this is a mindset. If I believe I can do it, and I leverage people who've done it before, I can accept that I'm a leader now.
What's your superpower?
Strategic thinking. It's being able to build strategies and, in building them, to identify patterns that aren't obvious. Some people call it intuition; I don't think it is. It's seeing how the dots connect between different moving parts, breaking a big problem into small solutions a team can implement, and articulating it in a way that creates trust both with my teams and with our restaurant partners.
What advice would you give to someone who's thinking about joining McKinsey?
If you have the opportunity to join McKinsey, please join McKinsey.
First, for the way of thinking. Structured, hypothesis-driven, issue trees, top-down communication: McKinsey is the best in the world at this way of solving problems.
Second, for the networks. You're surrounded by very, very smart people who push you to improve your level of thinking, and those networks keep working after you leave. When I want to solve a problem, I'll sometimes call an Associate Partner and ask if there's a publicly available document on a topic. It's also how I got both of my post-McKinsey roles.
Third, the brand gives you credibility. I'm in marketplaces now, and my McKinsey work was in banking. But whenever I say I was at McKinsey for six years, there's a level of credibility it gives you immediately, and I don't think anyone can ever take that away.
Thank you so much, Caroline. It's been a pleasure.
Thank you.
