06 July 2026

Talking tech, diversity and canoeing with Heather Payne, Immediate’s new Chief Technology and Product Officer

Long before Heather Payne was appointed as the Chief Technology and Product Officer of Immediate Media, she adored the company’s magazines.

 “Growing up we used to get Radio Times every Christmas and I would go through it and mark everything we were going to watch,” she recalls with chuckle. “I was the youngest of seven, so I would circle stuff and then write an hour-by-hour viewing schedule – that’s how organised I am!

“I remember my mom also being a big fan of Good Food and there was this period where I tried everything in Olive magazine, so my journey with Immediate started at an early age and has continued right up until now.”

Having gone from reading mags to helping to manage them, Payne has hit the ground running at Immediate as she sets about building the company’s digital capabilities, including modernising subscriptions and data platforms and developing a broad range of products to drive audience growth and engagement.

Unsurprisingly, AI integration is at the top of her to-do list.

“It’s a really exciting time for publishing in general and particularly the blend of AI and publishing,” she says. “How can you get rid of the more manual stuff we do and create a real platform for our journalists while keeping that human voice?

“My job is really to look at how I help the teams at Immediate use technology to the best effect and balance the human and technology elements. We really want lean into

humans being the voices and faces of our brands, but equally behind the scenes, not having to do the admin stuff.

“That’s the balance everyone in publishing is trying to do. The thing is – how do we really make our talent shine and help the whole organisation just to be a bit quicker in terms of our underlying tasks that we need to do? Pace is a real theme for me.”

As a member of the Responsible Technology Futures (RDF) team – a collaboration between the University of Nottingham and people in business to find ways of aligning digital innovations with societal values – Payne is particularly well equipped to spearhead Immediate’s digital development and strike the right balance when integrating technology.

“There a lot of work going on at the RDF in terms of setting up AI frameworks and making sure we’re looking at morals and ethics, and I really feel like I’m at the forefront of that – working with academia and then trying to operationalise that back into business,” says Payne.

“My work at Immediate will definitely help to bring more of that forward. It’s something I’m very passionate about and I have a really good collaboration, both across the network that I have and in terms of University of Nottingham, to just make sure that we at Immediate, and me as a technologist, stay at the leading edge of how do we do this and make sure we do it in the right way.”

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AI for all

For Payne, part of using AI the right way is to make it accessible to all. She has been an outspoken advocate for using AI and digital systems for social impact and getting minorities into tech.

In 2022 she co-founded Toast91- now called Save Online Support (SOS) – a social impact start-up to provide young people facing abuse, mental health challenges and other life struggles with easier access to digital support. Her passion for making AI more accessible comes from personal experience.

“I grew up in quite a low-income family, and I felt really out of place in quite a lot of circumstances,” she says. “I’m also neurodiverse, and again, that makes you feel like you’re not fitting in. It makes you feel a little bit odd or different from other people.

“Because I’ve come through that it makes me really consider – are we being inclusive?

Are we making sure that everyone is represented in this? And equally, some of the best people I’ve worked with are people that dropped out of school or didn’t get qualifications. So, there’s a lot that make you think – who am I hiring for or what is this website for?”

Payne has also been frustrated that AI that hasn’t been built by women is failing on a lot of women-centric products.

“I guess it’s built in from the challenges I’ve faced both as a female technologist and in terms of my background. So, I’m just passionate about making sure everyone’s voice is heard, but equally making sure everyone’s at the table and is able to have their voice heard.

“I also mentor quite a lot of people in my spare time who are going through those challenges. I keep myself grounded with – what are people feeling? What does the world look like for people that are underrepresented? So, I can really advocate for them at a senior level, through the jobs that I do.”

Paddle power

Early in life, Payne channelled her drive into competitive sport. As a former canoe slalom athlete, she competed in youth divisions throughout the 1990s and featured three times in the Scottish Slalom Championships.

Experiencing the high-pressure environment of sport has given Payne an insight into how best to handle stressful situations in the workplace.

“It’s something I’m really interested in and one of my pet projects to look at the psychology behind what makes people work effectively, across any age. How do we actually manage our own energy and manage the stresses in our lives?

“It’s something I fight with constantly. Every job I’ve been in is quite stressful. So, I’m always looking at how I balance the stress that I have, the home life that I want, and the energy and feeling I have in my body. And for me, sport has been a really effective way to manage that.”

Before joining Immediate, Payne held senior roles at DMG and Sky, as well as working as a consulting CTO/CIO advisor and executive coach, supporting scale-ups, founders and boards on technology strategy, platform design and operating model transformation.

As CTO at DMG, she led the transformation of its content systems, established a company-wide innovation lab and oversaw the Daily Mail’s first launch on Alexa. At Sky, Payne was Director of Digital Technology, scaling the team to support the launch of Sky Glass. Both positions came with invaluable lessons for Payne.

“With both of those, pace was the real struggle, and it was trying to activate this rapid development and continuous improvement,” she explains. “The key things I’ve learned are focus on your people.

“So often with these big projects, when there’s speed, teams can be quite pushed. And if you don’t listen to teams, that can really create a lot of friction, a lot of tension, and you end up losing people that you shouldn’t have.

“I always spend time just making sure that no matter what that project is, I’m still listening and adapting and making sure that people are okay.”

Another lesson Payne took from her time at DMG and Sky is to “just forget perfect”.

“The thing I always push back on is perfection. We always want to strive for perfection, but when you have a clear date, something has to give. Amazon, I think, are very good at that. They push out a lot of things that that aren’t perfect.

“The first Alexa in the UK was very buggy. It was absolutely awful. And I was thinking – wow, they’re putting this live.  And they very quickly, towards the launch, improved that.

“You can step back from your ego and go – this is not going to be perfect, I’m okay with that. What does good enough look like? And then fix things going forward. Obviously, you want it to get towards where you started, but you can do that afterwards and you can do that in different ways.”

Coming full circle

After a number of twists and turns in her career path, Payne now finds herself at a company that instantly felt like a good fit. Not only has Immediate been part of her life from an early age but part of the lives of her children as well.

“When I had my own kids, we used to have this ritual every Sunday where I would not be doing the cooking. We would go to the local pub-y type place, and we would order and then I’d take the kids to get CBeebies magazines. That was our routine.

“And even now, when I went to the interview with Immediate, I was sending them pictures of the CBeebies magazine because one of the interview rooms I was in was literally the kids’ section. And they were so excited.

“It was brilliant when I was interviewing because I’d sit in reception waiting and there’d be all these great magazines. I’d be flicking through it, and I’d be called for an interview and I’d be like, aaah, I have to put them down.”