“Strategy Isn’t Winning. It’s Choosing a Direction.”

TLDR

• Justine Scodellari became COO of LittleBig Connection in January 2026, after a finance-led career through Spain, Italy, and Cape Town, and a CFO role inside the Mantu group.

• Her clearest leadership thesis: the worst decision is no decision. Strategy is choosing a direction, holding it, and being willing to fail.

• The hardest call she has had to lead at LittleBig Connection: deciding when to stop building in-house. It took years, and the lesson was to actively look for evidence against her own instinct.

• On AI, she is unsentimental. It is a building block, not magic. Her framework splits it into three layers: selective in-product investment, broad internal evangelisation even when ROI is weak, and structured integration via AI partners such as Dust.

In 2022, LittleBig Connection’s revenue jumped from €200 million to €300 million in a single year. By 2025, the company was targeting €500 million in turnover, operating across 50 countries with an international team of around 400 people behind it. The marketplace sits inside Mantu, the Geneva-headquartered consulting group of 12,000 people in more than 60 countries, with a turnover of €1 billion.

Inside that growth story, Justine Scodellari has just taken on the operations brief.

Appointed COO of LittleBig Connection in January 2026, she joined the group after stints with Amaris Consulting and a period as Mantu’s Head of Group Finance Operations. Her starting point on the question of growth is unfashionably plain.

“The strategy of winning isn’t a strategy. Strategy is choosing a direction, sticking with it, failing, and maybe succeeding. The worst thing is the non-decision.”

It is the kind of line that lands awkwardly in a market full of bold visions. It is also, on closer inspection, the philosophy that has shaped every difficult call she has made.

From Lyon to Cape Town, by Way of Finance

Justine is based in Lyon and trained at TBS Education in Toulouse, where she completed the Programme Grande École with a Finance and Audit major. Her career started outside France: management control in Spain, then two years in Italy inside the Amaris Consulting group, managing the Italian subsidiaries. She moved next to South Africa to help develop Amaris’s Cape Town hub, then joined Mantu’s group finance operations in 2020. She became LittleBig Connection’s CFO, then its COO at the start of 2026.

She has, in other words, spent her entire career inside one thesis: international growth, organic and acquisitive, executed across very different markets. What she has taken from it is not a method. It is an instinct for when growth starts to break.

“At the start, growth is almost easy. Then you reach a certain size, and you realise the decisions you take don’t infuse as fast. The people you can no longer interview personally. The recruitment choices you wouldn’t have made. The change management that doesn’t work the way it used to. The fundamentals start to drift.”

Management as a Discipline

If there is one word that comes back through her conversation, it is fundamentals.

In her view, management is not a personality trait or a question of natural authority. It is a discipline. A practice. Comparable, she says, to sport.

“When you apply the methods, when you revisit the basics, it works. Frequent feedback, not loud feedback. Rituals. Recurrence. Clarity. Management for dummies works. The day a team starts to drift, it is almost always because someone, somewhere, has stopped doing the basics.”

The reason she emphasises it is that she has watched it stop working at scale. The early stage of a company forgives a lot. The scale-up stage forgives nothing. When a senior leader can no longer be in the room for every recruitment, every key client, every cross-team decision, the only thing that holds the operation together is whether the layer of managers below is, in fact, managing.

She is direct about the tension this creates for senior leaders.

“It is a mix of letting go and putting up a wall on the right and a wall on the left. The question is always: where do you put the walls?”

The Build-Versus-Buy Decision That Took Years

Inside LittleBig Connection, the hardest decision Justine has helped lead is one most leaders will recognise. When does a company stop building things in-house?

At Mantu, the cultural default has been to build. The group has its own developers, its own product teams, its own platforms. The instinct, she says, is to own as much as possible. That instinct is rarely wrong, until it is.

“We had certain components of the product that we were used to developing ourselves. And at a certain point, the question becomes: is it still relevant to build this? Or is it better to put it in the hands of a market tool?”

The answer was the harder one. Stop building. Buy. But getting there took years.

Two pressures made it slow. First, the technology teams who had built the original work felt, understandably, that they were being asked to give up part of their craft. Second, top management was not unanimously convinced. The projects involved are expensive, the risk profile is unfamiliar, and the consequences of getting it wrong are heavy.

What she found is that the decision could not be carried by instinct alone, even when her instinct was strong.

“I have learned to do the opposite of what most people do. Once I have an instinct that this is the right direction, I deliberately go and look for every signal that points the other way. No, not that. No, not that. Until I have the full picture. Then I can say it really is the right call.”

She has a name for what this resists. Intellectual laziness. Intellectual dishonesty. The bias of only listening to the signals that confirm what you already want to do. In a scaling business, she argues, that bias is the difference between a decision that survives contact with reality and one that collapses two quarters later.

AI Is a Building Block, Not Magic

LittleBig Connection’s market sits squarely in the path of generative AI. The platform matches large enterprises with smaller intellectual services providers, freelancers, and consultancies. Both sides of that marketplace are being reshaped, fast.

Justine is precise about the role AI plays inside the company. She is equally precise about the role it does not play.

“AI is not an end in itself. It is not a magic word. It is a building block. An essential one, but a building block. And a company doesn’t get value just by saying AI is at the heart of its product.”

Her practical framework breaks AI work into three layers.

The first is selective in-product investment. There are specific processes inside the LittleBig Connection product where the company has decided to build proprietary AI capability. Those efforts are run by small, focused teams with clear ownership. They are expensive, and the company has been deliberate about where it places the bets.

The second is internal evangelisation. Asking every team to experiment with AI tools. To try. To fail. To talk about it. This layer, she acknowledges, will not produce a strong return on investment. It is essentially a change-management exercise. But without it, she argues, the rest of the AI work has no hope of being adopted internally.

“You have to ask people to try, to fail, to assume that it won’t have a long-term impact. It is part of the change. It is how you get the concept embedded in the company.”

The third is structured integration into business processes, working with AI partners such as Dust to apply real automation to specific operational workflows. Clean database structure, well-defined objectives, proof-of-concepts at small scale, then deployment. This, in her view, is where the actual value lives.

What she pushes back on, hard, is the version of AI that forgets the user.

“The mistake is to project our anxieties onto our clients and our providers. To tell ourselves what they need, when in fact we could simply ask them. They know. And they don’t appreciate being talked over.”

Managing Across Four Continents

LittleBig Connection’s teams sit in France, Switzerland, Mauritius, Tunisia, and across Asia, with Vietnam and Singapore now part of the international footprint. Mantu’s broader presence stretches across more than 60 countries.

After more than a decade of working across markets, Justine has formed a view on cross-cultural leadership that she states bluntly.

“The stereotypes are mostly noise. Yes, there is a small cultural veneer to take into account. But at the margin. Each manager, in each country, has the same needs. Mutual respect. Clarity. A wall on the right and a wall on the left. Whether you are in France, in Mauritius, or in Asia, that doesn’t change.”

It is a position formed in practice, not in theory. She started her career in Spain. Spent two years in Italy. Worked on the development of the Amaris hub in Cape Town. Now manages distributed teams across multiple continents. The pattern she has seen is consistent: cultural framing matters at the margin, leadership fundamentals matter at the centre.

The Inverted Pyramid

There is one shift she singles out as the hardest part of senior leadership, and it is not a strategy point. It is about the texture of the role.

“The further you go in the hierarchy, the smaller the safety net. Your manager isn’t your safety net. They are your partner. You bring them solutions, not problems. You can only count on yourself. And that takes time to accept.”

She describes a period, when she first stepped into a C-level role as CFO, where she over-corrected. She started doubting her own instincts. Listening too much to authority. Treating her own judgement as less reliable than it was.

The course-correction came from the same logic she now applies to every major decision. Trust the instinct. Then go and look for the evidence against it. Then commit.

“The worst case is the non-decision. There are people who think they are doing strategy by saying their strategy is to make more revenue. That isn't a strategy. There isn’t a single company whose strategy is to make less. Strategy is choosing an axis. Holding it. Being willing to be wrong.”

What Comes Next

Asked where LittleBig Connection goes from here, Justine is careful. The mission, she says, does not change. The transparent connection between large enterprises and the smaller consulting actors who serve them. That stays.

What changes is the toolkit. AI has lowered the cost of building things meaningfully, which alters what the company can offer, how quickly it can iterate, and how much of its old technical debt is still worth defending. he same one she opened with.

“You take an axis. You stay on it. You fail. You maybe succeed. That is the job.”

Justine Scodellari is Chief Operating Officer of LittleBig Connection, a marketplace platform connecting large enterprises with consultancies, freelancers, and external providers worldwide, and part of the Mantu group. She was interviewed by Francine Nyamba of Talent Business Club, the community for talent leaders and recruitment professionals. LittleBig Connection is listed on Talent Business Partners, the review-driven platform where specialist agencies prove their expertise with client-verified results.