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Temitope Sadiku may have landed in tech, but she began her professional journey in a different space altogether.
“I started out on a more traditional path,” Sadiku says. “My undergrad was in accounting, finance, and economics, and then I became a chartered accountant and took on a number of different roles throughout finance.”
Her innate curiosity pushed Sadiku to continue exploring new opportunities, including a role at the Kraft Heinz Company that brought her into IT. Today, she is the multinational food and beverage company’s global head of digital employee experience—a significant departure from her career’s starting point, and one that speaks to the passion she has since discovered for the myriad ways in which people and technology intersect.
Sadiku’s first role out of university was as a general merchandise trader at Asda, a UK-based supermarket chain. She branched out into other areas of finance through subsequent roles at consumer-packaged goods companies Reckitt and Kerry before joining Kraft Heinz in 2017.
“I look at how we can use technology to remove friction, enable flow, increase productivity and efficiency, and, ideally, give people time to be creative and inspired.”
Temitope Sadiku
After dipping her toes into IT as a senior technology finance manager for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), Sadiku became Kraft Heinz’s head of tech for Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe. She returned to the EMEA zone to lead its technology center of excellence around the same time that she went to business school.
“I started to focus on how we could drive change through the things we were doing in tech to make sure that we were providing a delightful experience for our employees,” Sadiku explains. “That was when I started to lean into the ideas of behavioral science and employee experience.”
A few years into her tenure at Kraft Heinz, Sadiku received an offer to move from the UK to Chicago to step into her current role. “I look at how we can use technology to remove friction, enable flow, increase productivity and efficiency, and, ideally, give people time to be creative and inspired,” she says of the position. “We’re really trying to focus on how we can run the business of IT in a way that’s also mindful and beneficial from an [environmental, social, and governance] perspective.”
Sadiku has completed several major projects to date. She sat on the team that shifted Kraft Heinz from Skype to Microsoft Teams to ensure enhanced communication and collaboration during remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, she contributed to the company’s return-to-office efforts and led technology enhancements at the Chicago office.
“I would call myself incurably curious. I never want to be called an expert; I want to die on that incline of always wanting to know more and never thinking I know everything.”
Temitope Sadiku
Sadiku credits her desire to remain current as a driving force in her success. Beyond keeping up with the latest industry trends and research, she serves on the boards of organizations such as Chicago Innovation, the Illinois Science and Technology Council, the Institute of Science and Technology, the Institute for Work and the Economy, the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, NextUp Chicago, and the YWCA to stay involved and give back.
“I would call myself incurably curious,” Sadiku says. “I never want to be called an expert; I want to die on that incline of always wanting to know more and never thinking I know everything.”
