0:03

Technology, in my mind, should always

0:05

be speeding up, and we should keep pace with that and never

0:07

get complacent. Everybody wants

0:09

that page so a second, especially on

0:11

a mobile device, that's where the traffic lives. That's

0:13

where people are connected all day, and I think

0:16

in a fitness realm, that's what you're

0:18

really looking to do. People aren't carrying their laptop

0:20

or their desktop to the gym, and so

0:22

whether you're on a tract, the opportunity to leverage

0:24

that mobile device is still extremely

0:27

important. It's got to be performant, it's gotta be reliable,

0:29

it's gotta work every single time, and it's

0:31

gotta work wherever you are. Welcome

0:35

to the restless Ones. I'm Jonathan

0:37

Strickland. As you may know, I've

0:39

spent the last fifteen years covering

0:41

technology and learning how it works, demystifying

0:44

everything from massive parallel processing

0:47

to advanced robotics and

0:49

everything in between. Yet it's

0:52

the conversations with some of the most

0:54

forward thinking leaders, those at the

0:56

intersection of technology and business

0:58

that fascinate me the most. The

1:02

average person, when shopping for workout

1:04

clothes or athletic gear, might

1:07

not give much consideration to how

1:09

large a role tech plays

1:12

at under Armour, but in fact,

1:14

the scope and depth of under Armour's

1:16

technology strategy is astounding.

1:20

Clearly, there's some traditional tech

1:22

involved. You need the equipment to design

1:25

and make the clothing and other equipment.

1:27

You need the computer systems to run operations

1:30

and provide services to employees, and

1:32

under Armour has those. But the company

1:34

also relies on tech in innovative

1:37

and surprising ways. Whether it's

1:39

analyzing how a design for a shoe

1:41

performs as an athlete sprints

1:44

down a track and under Armour

1:46

tracks every metric you can imagine,

1:49

or an entirely new way for store

1:51

operators to visualize their shops in

1:53

a virtual environment. Under Armour

1:56

is putting tech to work. Then

1:58

there's the athletic gear that's equipped with Bluetooth

2:00

modules and accelerometers and

2:03

gyroscopes or apps

2:05

that play a part in digital fitness

2:07

and the quantifying of the self. It's

2:09

almost shocking the kind of technological

2:12

innovation going on at the company that started

2:14

in the ninety nineties with the entire business

2:17

packed in the trunk of a car. I

2:19

learned a lot about under Armour's use

2:21

of tech when I spoke with Danny Miles,

2:23

the CTO of the company.

2:25

We dove into challenges under Armour faces

2:27

as the company strives to meet ever expanding

2:30

customer expectations in a world

2:32

where even our clothing can be part

2:34

of the Internet of Things, and I learned

2:36

how under Armour is taking the initiative to

2:39

transform what it means to be a company

2:41

centered on athletic equipment and apparel.

2:44

But I also learned about Danny himself, his

2:46

thoughts as he transitioned from being

2:48

on the tech side of operations in business

2:51

to becoming a leader in them, his values

2:53

when it comes to his approach to work, and

2:55

what it takes to be successful when executing

2:58

a company's tech strategy. But

3:00

before we dive into all that, I wanted to get

3:02

some background on Danny himself. Danny,

3:10

I want to welcome you to the Restless

3:12

Ones. Welcome to our podcast. Thanks

3:14

for having me. It's excited to be a part of the conversation.

3:16

Oh, we're excited to have you here, and

3:19

we're gonna be talking about your job

3:21

and your responsibilities and we're going to get to

3:23

all the exciting things going on and under Armour.

3:25

But before we do that, I always like to get

3:27

to know my guest a little better. So

3:31

I'm curious, when did you first start

3:33

getting interested in technology?

3:36

Yeah? You know, so for me, I grew up

3:38

in New Orleans and I was pursuing

3:40

music and that was my thing. I was studying

3:42

music for a long time, and

3:45

you know, really I got into digital

3:48

music and that really was kind of the beginning

3:50

of me connecting devices

3:53

and understanding how does all these different

3:55

hardware need to communicate, from

3:57

digital effects to synthesizers to recording

4:00

equipment. And that kind of just got me

4:02

into a space that I felt really comfortable

4:04

with, and that evolved

4:07

into being the guy that

4:09

everybody had computer questions for it. I

4:11

think the difference maker for

4:13

me was when I realized, probably that I

4:16

have this passion for how things work. I have

4:18

to understand them completely. And

4:21

when it came to the I T side

4:23

of the house, I realized at some point that

4:26

I wanted to go much deeper into how

4:28

things worked, which meant programming, which meant

4:31

taking the operating system apart. I remember

4:33

the days I used to tell people for

4:36

the first four or five years of my career, I got used

4:38

to rebuilding my computer every week

4:40

because I would destroy it. I would replace

4:42

operating system files. I would mess with the Windows

4:45

registry, I would tweet drivers and

4:47

really had to have a deeper understanding. I wasn't

4:49

satisfied with just installing

4:51

something and it working. I had to know why it worked

4:54

and what it was talking to and what made it

4:56

take And so that just kind of progressed,

4:58

and that really drove me deeper in too, eventually

5:01

going back to school for computer science studying

5:03

obdiculate your programming and design, and

5:06

from there, I guess, you know, until she wrote,

5:08

gosh, you know, and just just to think,

5:11

Danny, we could be sitting here talking about middies

5:13

and moves and all sorts

5:15

of stuff that I'm really passionate about

5:17

too. But can you talk a little bit about your

5:19

early days as a software engineer.

5:22

Yeah, you know, in my day it was about going

5:24

down to Barnes and Noble, sitting

5:26

there on the computer aisle reading

5:28

these three inch thick books on

5:31

C plus plus and databases. It

5:33

was interesting for me. I would know what I was

5:35

wanting to solve for usually during the day on

5:37

my job and fighting for stuff, but

5:40

I always, you know, it was a double edged

5:42

sword, and that I would go home at night and be

5:44

like, I've got to figure out a better way to do this. I've

5:46

got to understand something. And in those

5:48

times there wasn't formal education.

5:50

I looked at what a lot of the colleges were

5:53

doing, and they were teaching how

5:55

to build an ATARI if you basically

5:57

went in and study computer theory and

5:59

CP processors and how all

6:01

the hardware and access layers work. But there

6:04

wasn't a structure design domain driven design

6:06

object on your programming. You had

6:08

to really go get that from the network,

6:10

from people that you can talk to, from books,

6:12

from people you could follow and meet. It

6:14

was a very, uh kind of like club

6:17

that you just started to get into, know who to reach

6:19

out to to ask questions, and

6:21

so yeah, that was what it was like for me in the early

6:23

days. It was almost a black art I

6:26

remember first, you know, and this is dating myself,

6:28

but definitely in the nineties we were trying to

6:30

figure out how to charge credit cards and process credit

6:33

cards in a time when that was black box.

6:35

The banks didn't have open a pi is. There was no

6:37

protocols for doing that stuff,

6:39

and everybody did it different and you

6:42

really had to get in and look

6:44

at the data and the messages on the wire,

6:46

figure out how to decrypt them and figure out

6:48

which packets of data have to be where

6:51

for me to get this thing to go through and come

6:53

back with a valid response. I appreciate

6:55

those times because it fed my need to understand

6:57

how things worked at its core. But

7:01

I tease a lot of the developers today that they

7:03

have a lot of training wheels that I didn't have. I

7:06

I crashed a lot. There

7:08

are a lot more programming languages now too.

7:10

How would you describe your role at

7:13

under Armour if you're talking to a

7:15

casual acquaintance, you

7:18

know, a casual acquaimance. I usually tell people,

7:20

and it's hard when you have so much going on at

7:22

the top level, but you just I'm just responsible for

7:24

all the technology, everything

7:27

from our data platforms to our e

7:29

commerce platforms, retail supply chain,

7:31

finance infrastructure.

7:34

I basically lead a team of other

7:36

technical leaders that help us run all

7:39

of the technical platforms for the business. And

7:42

usually that gets boiled down to something much simpler.

7:45

But I do get friends, especially in the

7:47

investment community startup community, They want to know deeper,

7:49

like, well, what are you actually doing, what are you transforming?

7:51

What are you there to do, and when I look at

7:53

an opportunity, I'm always looking for the

7:55

difference that I believe I can make, and so

7:58

particularly with under Armour, it really is about

8:00

the transformation of their business that's underway

8:03

to really become a direct to consumer

8:05

player in a strong way to really serve

8:07

athletes and really help make

8:09

them better. The lanes that I've chosen, I've

8:12

always felt like there's always something behind it

8:14

behaviorally that drives me to kind of improve

8:18

someone's life through not just selling them

8:20

products, but through providing content and really

8:22

being able to connect to, you

8:24

know, an audience from a brand perspective that attracts

8:26

me to it. So I think we have a lot of things we talked about

8:28

in that lane of how does our brand really

8:30

make athletes better? How do we really understand

8:33

their needs and to end not just from

8:36

what they need to wear and not just what they need to

8:38

wear in the gym or on the field,

8:40

but what do they need throughout their day

8:42

to prepare for that to recover from that?

8:44

Right, So we think holistically about how we

8:47

can kind of make people better, and that's one of the things

8:49

that gets me excited because I believe

8:51

technology can really serve the

8:53

brand well there and helping achieve

8:55

that vision with under

8:57

armor in mind. You mentioned cloud computing

9:00

obviously has been an enormous

9:02

transformative force in all

9:05

businesses, across all industries. Can

9:07

you talk a bit about how cloud

9:10

computing has transformed the

9:12

industry of retail? Well, I think

9:14

obviously it's a transformative thing for

9:16

all technology. It's just such a huge transformation.

9:19

For me, I think that

9:22

was just one of the most particularly when I went to Nike.

9:24

That was part of why I went there was to lead their cloud transformation.

9:27

When I look back at all that we accomplished,

9:30

there was just things we were not going to be

9:32

able to do. There was a whole batch of applications.

9:35

I'm reminded of when we build the Sneakers app

9:37

and the scale that has to go into that product

9:39

and how much we had to build that was just

9:42

not possible prior to us being able

9:44

to scale up, you know, to have that elasticity

9:47

of I need a hundred more servers, now do it, you

9:49

know, and and to have that muscle

9:51

to go fast. For me, that's just

9:53

been hugely transformational and

9:55

it's mostly been scale. I also feel

9:57

like, and this is an argument I made in the casino industry

10:00

early on with cloud as, I also think it's

10:02

transformati from a security perspective.

10:04

You know, one of the biggest arguments that we used to have

10:06

with regulators in the casino space was

10:09

you cannot run any compute outside the

10:11

four walls of the licensed operator. That

10:13

was a law, and the reason was because they believed

10:16

there was a security risk to have this out

10:18

there. And through years of convincing

10:20

and going back and saying, you know what, I'll tell you

10:22

what's a bigger security risk is the employees

10:25

in that casino that have access to that

10:27

server room and know those passwords. And

10:30

there was a point in time I remember we were talking about

10:32

Amazon and with a regulator that was like, well, I

10:34

want to go and inspect the data center and see all their

10:36

controls and security. And I was like, you

10:38

will never get into an AWS data center

10:40

and that's by design, like those are designed

10:43

that there is no public assets. Even a

10:45

w S themselves is not able to go

10:48

in and log into the computers and stuff

10:50

there. And really understanding that

10:52

there was such a shift in centralized

10:54

management, control and access, I

10:57

really think, you know, one of my early arguments was just security,

11:00

which just it really allowed me to create network

11:02

layers. It really allowed me to create different vpcs

11:05

and connect things in a different way so that I could

11:07

really control with scripting,

11:09

what could talk to what right. So

11:11

the elevation for me initially with security and

11:13

then it became about scale. But

11:15

you know, I've had the chance to also kind of mentor

11:18

and work with a lot of startups. I always go

11:20

back to the early days of AWS

11:22

and what it meant to the mobile industry

11:25

more particularly what it meant to startups.

11:28

If you're doing to study looking back and I think about

11:30

what really was one of the biggest changes

11:33

there. It was when you used to start a company,

11:36

right, you had to think about my first investment

11:38

round is gonna have to go buy some servers. I'm gonna have to go

11:40

with stand up iraq. I'm gonna have to go hire

11:42

I T folks and get something up and running,

11:44

just to get an app or a website running. When

11:47

that change from No, my first hire

11:49

is going to be a designer and we're gonna start building the front

11:51

end user experience and we're gonna get this thing up

11:54

and run, and I'll hire some infrastructure

11:56

guy to build my server network in a day on

11:58

AWS. That was a real game changer.

12:00

I think you just saw how quickly technology

12:02

companies could be stood up. You saw how quickly

12:04

innovation can start to happen because you didn't

12:07

have to have that sunk cost

12:09

up front of going out and building

12:11

a data center. Danny, you're making me

12:13

think back to those early days of the web

12:15

where you knew that something was

12:18

a success when it crashed because

12:20

the server couldn't handle the load. And

12:22

the first problem was how do we get this tool to

12:24

work? And then the second problem was, oh the toolworks

12:27

and people like it, but we don't have enough server

12:30

support to actually meet the demand.

12:32

And it became just a constant race

12:34

to stay ahead of the bottleneck. And

12:36

cloud computing has really removed

12:39

that obstacle entirely. It really has sped

12:41

up development and innovation in that in

12:43

that regard. Yea, you know, there would be no hyper

12:45

scaling without cloud right as these companies

12:47

that have been able to just scale really fast. The

12:50

nightmare is if you're running your own server farms

12:52

today and you need to scale, I really feel bad for

12:54

you because the supply change is wrecked.

12:56

Right, we can't get devices we can't get switches

12:58

and have like just for our basic

13:01

retail, you've got ninety days

13:03

to six month lead times on that stuff, and

13:05

I don't think that's something that's just acceptable anymore.

13:08

There was still a lot of battles with cloud I think obviously

13:11

an operational change mind shift change

13:13

to your point about when debops became

13:15

a thing and what is it, infrastructure engineering

13:18

and s R re became a thing like availability

13:20

just monitoring really understanding, Hey,

13:23

you gotta watch this thing. It can sprawl out

13:25

of control and you can have a cost problem and

13:27

you can end up in a bad spot. The

13:29

other struggle was really you had to get really good

13:32

at forecasting because for most

13:34

people and most companies, you were moving your

13:36

CAPEX investments, which were CAPEX

13:38

investments and idea one time we're pretty easy to get.

13:40

You know, I need a few million dollars, build a rack and do whatever.

13:43

You shifted all that to op X, right, and you're

13:45

paying for that on a monthly basis, and you've got

13:47

to be much better at how you plan that

13:50

usage and know what's coming. And so it definitely

13:52

calls some I would say operational shifts,

13:54

not only for the technology team, but how

13:56

you engage with your business and your finance

13:58

team. I can tell you definitely when I

14:00

was at Nike, you know, really

14:03

there was a big concern over and

14:05

I was remembers kind of batting with the CEO

14:07

at one point about, oh, we're we don't like a

14:10

w S. We don't want to host our workload there.

14:12

The c SO the security officer had a lot

14:14

of concerns like your developers are going to have this access

14:17

to that and well, by the way, they're

14:19

a competitor, aren't they Amazon dot Com? So

14:21

we went through all of those kind of battles early

14:23

on. But I'll tell you retailers

14:25

did not want to do business for data, yes, and

14:28

you know there's all the oh, I'm just funding their work chest

14:30

to compete with me, or are they going to steal my

14:32

customer data because it's in their data centers. So

14:34

I really had to work through the legal

14:37

side of it. One of the hardest things to

14:39

do is getting the enterprise agreement with a WS

14:41

and Nike gart It took me like six months

14:43

of legal finance, the

14:45

c SO, the c i O really

14:48

getting everybody to kind of believe not only

14:50

that cloud WHI was right but that

14:52

the way we were going to do it. Who are we going to choose

14:55

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15:35

One of the things you touched on earlier was

15:37

this mission to help

15:40

athletes be their

15:42

best, whether it's when they're

15:44

actually competing or performing or when

15:46

they're recovering. Can you talk

15:49

a little bit about technology

15:51

that goes into that. What's

15:53

the process of analyzing

15:56

performance? Do you incorporate AI

15:59

and machine learning in to your approach

16:01

when you're designing these solutions

16:04

for athletes? We do. I think

16:06

measurement and tracking is kind of a lane that

16:08

we think about a lot, and that is really

16:10

comes down to currently, we have a device,

16:12

we have a chip in the shoe that actually can record

16:14

what you're doing and connects to our our

16:16

map, my suite of apps, and that gives us quite

16:18

a bit of telemetry on what's happening

16:21

during a run. We think there's a future evolution

16:23

of how we can start to learn more about,

16:26

you know, kind of tracking a workout or a fitness

16:29

routine. And so we're exploring lots of options

16:31

thinking about what we can do not

16:33

only with machine learning, but really just what we can

16:35

do now with cameras right and what we can do with

16:38

machine vision and some of the things. There is a

16:40

wide open lane that we're exploring. But

16:42

I also think there's other things that matter

16:44

so much more, and we always have conversations

16:47

about things like heart rate. The challenging

16:49

part to me is to go beyond measurement

16:52

and to really work with our sports

16:54

science teams to figure out, but what are the experiences

16:57

that we want to be able to create. To me, that's the harder

16:59

working. That's the area I'm excited about

17:01

that. I don't think that we've done enough, and we

17:03

can achieve a certain level of measurement and data

17:05

collection, but I'm much more excited about

17:07

figuring out what are the ways that we can

17:09

kind of interrupt your experience,

17:11

either before you're gonna go on a

17:14

run or after from a recovery

17:16

perspective, things that you might need to do that you may

17:18

not know you need to do. That's where I think all

17:20

of the content and really using the data

17:23

to drive a behavioral change that would

17:25

improve an athletes performance is the open

17:27

kind of lane for us that we're thinking about. To

17:30

me it comes down to content, comes down

17:32

to coaching, comes down to really leveraging

17:34

what we know about athletes, what we know about

17:36

sports science, what we can measure. There's what

17:38

we can think about measuring for a consumer. Obviously,

17:41

in our product creation and design teams, the

17:43

things we're able to measure on a track, on the field

17:45

in a gym are exhaustive and extensive. That's

17:48

where I think a lot of our learning

17:50

comes from about how to create the products

17:52

we're creating. The next step is to figure out how can

17:54

we intersect with that consumer and their

17:57

journey and their workout to really provide

18:00

and added value it's going to help them

18:02

perform better. I mean, obviously,

18:04

the entire digital fitness trend

18:07

has really been about the quantifiable self

18:09

I'm curious, are you also looking

18:12

at ways now that we have rollouts

18:14

of five G technology where we have these

18:17

high throughput and low latency

18:20

wireless networks that are maturing.

18:23

Are you looking into ways to leverage

18:25

that as well with tech in order to

18:28

augment this mission of creating

18:31

the best products to help athletes

18:34

perform at their best. Yeah. Absolutely,

18:36

I mean I think you have to take advantage of everything

18:38

that's out there from that perspective, especially

18:41

as we're talking about some of the experiential

18:44

things. An area that's really interesting to everyone

18:46

right now is a r v R. Right, what does the

18:48

meta universe look like for a fitness brand.

18:50

I think that's the lane where you still really start

18:52

to become dependent on that network and you have

18:55

to really have the ability to deliver

18:57

a technical performance. And I think that that's

18:59

something that's across the board that again,

19:02

just one of the things that makes me tick is

19:04

I'm a performance chunky. You know, I want everything

19:07

delivered faster, rendered faster. I

19:09

want every model run faster and every

19:11

report produced faster. That's something that's just always

19:14

a KPI across every team that I have

19:16

to some degree is how can we make sure

19:18

that it's always moving faster because technology,

19:21

in my mind, should always be speeding

19:23

up and we should keep pace with that and never get complacent.

19:26

You know, we used to be happy with eight

19:28

second page load speeds, and then we got content

19:30

with five is the benchmark, and then we said, you're not

19:32

in business if you don't do three. But now it's

19:34

sub second. Everybody wants that page so second,

19:37

Especially on a mobile device, that's where the traffic

19:39

lives. That's where people are connected, and really

19:41

that's where people are connected all day, and I

19:43

think in a fitness realm, that's

19:45

what you're really looking to do. People aren't carrying their laptop

19:48

or their desktop to the gym, and so

19:50

whether you're on a track, the opportunity to leverage

19:52

that mobile device is still extremely

19:55

important. It's got to be performance, it's gotta be reliable,

19:57

it's got to work every single time, and it's

19:59

gotta work wherever you are right and the

20:01

v R a R example is perfect

20:04

because obviously you

20:06

need as little latency as possible for that

20:08

to become an effective tool for VR. You need

20:10

it so that you don't yack all over the place if

20:13

you turn your head and your point of view changes

20:15

a second later. That's no good. But

20:17

even for a R obviously it's only useful

20:19

if it's very responsive. I

20:22

get really excited when I start thinking about

20:24

potential use cases for a

20:26

are leveraging things like a very

20:28

high speed network, whereas you

20:30

know a few years ago, you wouldn't be able to manage

20:32

that unless you had a tethered connection,

20:35

which obviously limits whatever implementation

20:38

you're thinking about. You're not going to be connecting

20:40

your phone to a massive

20:42

computer that's like three ft away from

20:44

your treadmill or whatever. We're right now

20:47

kind of in the blue sky

20:49

hypothesis phase of whatever

20:52

the metaverse maybe, and it's

20:54

really exciting to talk to different leaders who

20:56

are ideating around that and

20:59

trying to think of ways that add

21:01

value not just to the business

21:03

but to the user experience. Because

21:05

it's undefined, it's hard to do. And

21:08

the other whole lane there that I'm truly passionate

21:10

about is it isn't just you know, from

21:12

my role, it isn't just our athletes. It's our

21:14

teammates. That's our word for our employees as teammates.

21:17

And I think that that's a transformation

21:20

that hasn't happened the way it should.

21:23

Has video conference really changed that much in twenty

21:25

years? It really has it? It had gotten that much

21:27

better, right, And I really feel like that the

21:29

way people work is changing. I

21:31

mean, obviously coming out of the pandemic from us

21:34

all being at home. In my world, we're

21:36

a highly distributed workforce, a lot of

21:38

remote full time employees, and to

21:40

me, that's a huge lane to think

21:42

about how these types of technologies

21:44

again keep people connected all the time.

21:47

I think about it just as much as they do the athletes

21:49

is I want my teammates to feel like they're having experience

21:52

with our brand and they're able to connect

21:54

and create culture, a sense

21:56

of belonging with the brand, even

21:58

though you know they're all working across the

22:00

globe and around the country in a virtual environment.

22:03

I think that's a wide open area for innovation.

22:06

We talked about a R and VR and one of the things I

22:08

think that I'm most proud of what the team did through

22:10

the pandemic was early on in the pandemic

22:12

and credit this is right before I started, but there was a

22:14

decision made to begin creating three D assets

22:16

of all of our products, so before they were made,

22:19

we were going to actually make sure that we had a three

22:21

D asset of every single skew that

22:23

we were going to use. And the purpose

22:25

for that was because we knew that our sell in our

22:28

go to market cycle, especially with our wholesale partners,

22:30

was going to go completely virtual. We weren't gonna be able

22:32

to meet them in person. So we ended up

22:34

partnering with an innovation partner who was

22:36

building a virtual retail product that allows

22:39

us to bring our customers into

22:41

a virtual room and look at all of the products

22:43

for the next season in a three D model, and

22:45

that's continued to evolve to where now

22:48

we're actually able to say, hey, you know, to one

22:50

of our partners, we can render your store and

22:52

your shelves and your layout, and we can show you

22:54

what the fall product assortment's

22:56

gonna look like on your shelves in a virtual environment.

22:59

And we were able to bring them into these rooms where we have

23:01

just wall to wall screens and we can show

23:04

them that virtual environment there we're playing.

23:06

You know, we do have some headsets that we've been able

23:08

to integrate, but even just in a browser for

23:10

people to be able to go into a three D environment

23:13

and see the products, see what it might look

23:15

like on their shelves. I don't know that that's

23:17

something we ever would have got to without the pandemic.

23:19

But what that's done is it set us up for

23:21

the future. We now have those assets

23:24

we're looking at, how do I bring all those assets to my e commerce

23:26

experience, you know, and start to render three D

23:28

models there. If I end up in a virtual world,

23:30

guess what, I have all of these assets

23:33

and they're in They're high quality renderings three

23:35

D of all of our products. So I'm really

23:37

excited about all of those lanes, especially

23:39

for kind of what I call experiential tech

23:42

a r v R. Yeah.

23:44

What I find remarkable is the

23:47

rate of success I've seen in

23:49

those changes. I mean, obviously it's succeed

23:52

or you might become irrelevant.

23:55

So the existential thread was

23:57

there, but the innovation

23:59

and the agility, the

24:01

quick adoption of new

24:03

technologies and new approaches in order to

24:06

have as minimum a disruption

24:08

as possible, knowing there was going to be one

24:10

but trying to minimize it. I

24:13

love those stories. But it also creates

24:15

a new foundation to build upon in the future.

24:17

It does. The thing I'm most excited about

24:20

is the operational model that it changes

24:22

that it really is a disruption if you think about

24:24

and again, I've been around long enough to

24:26

to see different I T models. I think in the early

24:28

world where a large portion of your I T budget,

24:31

your spend your support with I T support

24:33

making sure people had computers and printers

24:36

and the network worked and they had a camera. That

24:38

gets instituted, right. But what

24:41

I love is how much we're not walking around taking

24:43

people's computers, like you know what everyone's at

24:45

home. You should know how to set up your own

24:47

computer. You should know how to set up a network in your

24:49

home, get on a WiFi. You should know how to get a

24:51

camera and a microphone to work. Like I feel

24:53

like that's something that's really shifted, and that

24:55

to me means we have a more technically advanced

24:58

workforce than we had, not necessarily

25:00

just before the pandemic, but definitely ten years

25:02

ago. Because I feel like that ownership

25:04

of in order for me to work and do my job,

25:07

I have to be kind of managing my own tech

25:09

to a degree. My I T company is responsible

25:12

for making sure I have a device, making sure that

25:14

my account is provisioned. But we're

25:16

not having to go down and replace

25:19

keyboards. They got coffee spilt in them, and it

25:21

was a cost. It was a significant kind of ongoing

25:23

operational effort, and we still have I T support.

25:26

I don't want to say it's gone away, but I do

25:28

think this idea of a more across

25:31

enterprises, brands that haven't always

25:33

been viewed as you know, technically strong

25:35

companies, like everyone's having to be a

25:37

technologist to some degree in this day and age.

25:42

Before I could let him go, I had to ask

25:44

Danny one more thing. We

25:48

talked about metrics in this episode,

25:51

but how do you measure success?

25:54

Well, I do look at a principle of approach.

25:56

So there's our business objectives and goals, which

25:58

we say we're aligned with a business that we have

26:00

to achieve certain goals throughout the year. But

26:03

on the technology side, there's a list of

26:05

things that we really care about that are what

26:07

I call our principles that don't change year over

26:09

year and associated

26:12

with those principles as a set of metrics. Right, just

26:14

to give an example, some of those principles to me are

26:17

secure architecture, user

26:19

experience, data completeness, strategic

26:22

partnership. All of these principles that we've called

26:24

out, we've knowed it down to six. I try to

26:26

keep it small. I could always have ten on my mind. But

26:28

I've always worked with a team to say, let's pick some things

26:30

that we stand for outside of achieving

26:33

our business goals as a technology organization.

26:35

What are the things that we stand for, and how do we measure

26:37

success against those things. We track

26:39

all the things with the business, obviously revenue,

26:41

everything from conversion to article activation

26:44

times to how quickly we can process

26:46

transactions and collect payments and ship

26:48

and deliver. All those things matter, and we align

26:51

with our business on those. But if we do

26:53

those and we don't pay attention to

26:55

what I like to call the important technology

26:57

principles, and we slip on something like cyber

27:00

security, all we slip on making sure

27:02

that data is complete and whole on quality.

27:04

I think those are things we have to measure ourselves against

27:07

you over year, and so when I look at success, I'll

27:09

look at a combination of the alignment

27:11

that we have on the business objective goals and how

27:13

we're contributing to those, as well as

27:15

how are we measuring ourselves against the principles

27:17

that we've decided as a technology leadership PAM

27:20

are important to be a world class technology organization.

27:23

Thank you Danny so much for joining the

27:25

show. Thank you Jonathan for having me really

27:27

enjoy the conversation. Thanks

27:33

again to Danny Miles of under Armour for

27:36

joining the show. I admired Danny's

27:38

proactive approach to tackling problems,

27:40

finding solutions, and then implementing them.

27:43

I also like his philosophy that while you should

27:45

be proud of the work you have done, you

27:48

should always strive to do better. And

27:50

it's exciting to think about the tech that

27:52

is transforming under Armor right

27:54

now. I'm very curious to see what

27:57

the next generation of technological innovation

27:59

brings to the comp and its products.

28:01

It's fascinating because I've seen over

28:03

and over how the combination of athletic

28:06

skill and technological innovation leads

28:08

to breaking world records and setting

28:10

new standards for athletic performance. And

28:12

yet I keep finding myself thinking, well,

28:15

that's it, that's the best we can be, only

28:17

to be proven wrong. The limit does

28:20

not exist, it would seem.

28:22

I expect we'll see more mundane items

28:24

become high tech over time. Some of

28:26

those will likely be specialty equipment

28:28

for high performing athletes, some of

28:31

it might be more for you know folks

28:33

like me who aren't. But

28:36

beyond all that, the elements that

28:38

make that innovation possible in the first

28:40

place are already there. With

28:43

compute power, wireless networks

28:45

and the right team in place, a company

28:47

can innovate in ways that will make operations

28:50

more efficient, it will be able to respond

28:52

to dynamic situations in an agile

28:55

way, and of course they can

28:57

find new ways to delight their customers.

29:02

Thanks for listening to the restless ones. Be

29:04

sure to check back for future episodes. We're

29:06

all talk with more restless leaders

29:08

in the tech space. I'll see you then.

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