Speaker 0 | 00:09.603
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’re talking with Amit Gar, Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, CIO and CTO. We have a debate a lot of times on the show on what actually is the difference between those two. But anyways, CIO, CTO at On Campus Marketing. Welcome to the show. Why don’t you just give me a brief background, maybe what you guys do, and tell me what is the difference between CIO and CTO?
Speaker 1 | 00:44.936
Yeah, thank you for having me, Phil. So at On Campus Marketing, we support over 900 plus colleges around the US. We have association with the residence hall association. We manage contracts with them and we support students making a transition from their high school life to college. So anything what they require in this case, student requires when they’re coming on campus housing, whether it’s linen, carpets, other kind of products which they are requiring in their dorm room, we provide them. Now, because we have these relationships with the colleges, we get to know what are the requirements for the dorm rooms. Because you have different carpet sizes, you have different bedding. So we can personalize and cater to those universities’requirements. So we are a one-stop shop for a university. We provide them with a white label e-comm front. We do their marketing. We do their… uh order fulfillment customer service um so uh we are one stop shop for them sounds like it might get a little complicated yeah yeah uh you bet with all the supply chain issues it’s not so easy right yeah yeah so how did that um well it’s a good question actually how did that um with
Speaker 0 | 02:14.342
colleges and going back to college or not going back to college over the last two years how did how did covet affect you guys and how do you deal with it
Speaker 1 | 02:25.204
Yeah, great question. Our industry definitely got impacted because we depend on students going to campus. And so we had to think creatively how to handle it. We need to pivot our strategy rather than sending the linens or sending the gift care packages directly to the school. We needed to change the marketing to say, hey, you students are still studying, they were studying virtually. So how we can cater them at home, how we can create that same experience at home. We tackled financially because we knew people were struggling with the money for the last two years. So we ventured into a partnership with a company called Split It. I don’t know whether you guys are aware of that, but they allow you to split payments without any interest. So if you have a higher ticketed item and you are talking about linens, you are buying everything for a room. So it could cost you more, you can split your payments. So we did a lot of these strategies to save our business, obviously, and navigate through this difficult time as everybody else was doing.
Speaker 0 | 03:38.385
Right, right. Now, one of the topics that comes up a lot on the show for IT leaders growing up in the space or people that might aspire to get to a level that you’re at is an ability to speak the language of business, which really is understanding the business and an ability to look at the business and analyze it and understand the various different terms, whether it be things on the profit and loss statement, whether it be operating costs, controllable costs, flow through profit, gross margin, all that type of stuff. Where did you learn that or how did you learn that? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 04:19.022
great question. I guess I’ve been fortunate to be part of one of the companies earlier in my career called Fanatics. When I started my career, I started with them. And one of the main things they had there, which they ingrained in all the people who were coming and working there, is to really understand what’s going on and the concept of customer being first. So it was not about IT just getting some tasks and doing that, which most of the… people I see in IT, they get a requirement and they just do it. So when you are in a small setting, as I was in my early career, you are sitting with owners and they are actually explaining you the problem. They are not asking you how to solve the problem because they know that they trust you that you will solve the problem. So they wanted you to understand what exactly you are going to solve and how does it impact not only the external customer, which may be the person who is the end consumer getting something in this case, because it was retail, but… there could be internal customers, right? You could be working on an internal project and a finance department is your client, right? So is it really you are making a form on an application or is it really you are making sure that they can do an AP or meaning they can do the payments or they can receive a payment, account receivable and things like that. So unless you understand those concepts at a high level, it was really hard to design a solution in a smaller setting, right? And again, as I said, being close to the owners who were really thinking and actually venturing into the things which nobody has done really helped me understand and put the value on my work. That was also another thing, right? They want you to realize that you are bringing a value, which a lot of IT people don’t really think about. At least that’s what I think.
Speaker 0 | 06:23.133
So what can we do to force feed IT people to think about value? Just tell them to ask, what’s the problem? What’s the impact? What’s the impact to the customers? What’s the impact to the… I mean, we don’t need to know. Just like the CEO, he’s going to eventually need to know what the solution is, but he doesn’t need to know all of your thinking around the solution. He trusts you to do that. He trusts you to come up with the solution. Just like he… He doesn’t need to ask you if you know how to do it. He just, he needs to tell you what the problem is, which I think is. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 | 06:55.602
exactly. Right. So, uh, as you said, right, we need to just take a step back as a technology. Right. We, we have as, as much skin in the game as any other department. Right. And the company does not run just on technology or marketing or finance or other departments. Right. Collectively, you figure out, uh, what you are working through. Right. So you need to understand this. story before you can provide your part in the solution. And it takes a lot of effort to step back because you just, we are nerds, right? We want to do stuff, right? We want to get into details. We don’t want anybody to disturb us and don’t stand over us, right? Give us two days or three days or three hours. We just want to go and do the thing. So it takes an effort to take a step back and say, hey, okay, I really want to do this and this is the problem I’m going to solve. So I would just say that just take a step back before designing something.
Speaker 0 | 08:00.942
As far as your internal customers and affecting the internal customers, when you think about how is it going to affect the end users, i.e. internal customers, what kind of questions are you typically asking yourself?
Speaker 1 | 08:18.781
Yeah, so if it is an internal project, right, the first question, the first question, at least in my thought process is to understand what are the impacts. So as if I understood the problem, then the next piece is maybe there is one customer, but the impact is far reaching. It may be that you are talking to finance, but the impact may be in operations, which is happening. So you need to understand. okay, we are going to solve this problem, but where does it impact? Not only from the process point of view, but from the technology point of view. Sometime you think about the process in one area, it impacts the other. Same thing with technology. You might be changing something in one of the areas of your technology stack, which might impact the other. So you need to understand the impact, right? So you need to ask the right question. Do we have the right people? The next piece. to that is to understand the change management. I know it’s one of the most critical things and I think is given the least time sometimes in a smaller setting. It’s easy to say, hey, I want to produce a solution, I want to do this and I’ll implement this. People usually don’t pay a lot of attention. What happens once the solution is there? The end user, in this case, the internal audience, how they are going to use. Are they comfortable? I’ll give you an example. Like five, six years back, I was tasked to do something where there was an internal group working in that company for maybe 20 plus years. They were used, they were so used to using their keyboard. like all the keys, right? Shortcuts, as you know. And they were doing a lot of functions on the screen which were controlled by the keyboard. So when we went with the solution, it was all web-based. So a lot of things, when the engineers are designing solutions, they think, oh, web is easy. We can deploy it. It’s so easy. You can see it. But it was, yeah, it was like nobody wanted to use that solution. There was no adoption. So… I think as you want to build a solution, the main thing you should be thinking, will people use my solution? A lot of time as engineers, we only want to build a solution, but we don’t think whether somebody will use it or not. So you need to see it from their eyes, right? So that’s the change management. That’s the other thing, like how will it change?
Speaker 0 | 10:53.333
So how did we miss that on the keyboard thing? So was that just a lack of communication? Was that a lack of… Walking around and sitting down next to an end user and seeing how they do their job for the day? Was that a lack of sitting in and roundtabling and, I don’t know, doing a lunch and learn with different teams? Like, what was it?
Speaker 1 | 11:13.472
Yeah, so I think the main thing, my learning from that experience was that we didn’t sit exactly with the end user.
Speaker 0 | 11:22.036
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 11:22.817
sit there. We sat with the people who were managing those group of people. and the requirements were coming, things were discussed, but exactly how it impacted the life of that end user, we didn’t really go through it. And that became very evident. Now, being an agile shop, it was caught a little bit earlier in the game than like waiting for like six months or something. But still, that was a learning to say, hey, you know what? If you’re going to impact like these hundred people, let’s… spend a day in their life, right? And so I cannot stress enough that change management is such a key. You can build anything. If it doesn’t get adopted, it’s of no use.
Speaker 0 | 12:13.968
It’s the same thing with, and I think a lot of vendors get away with almost murder because they spend a lot of time presenting and talking about bells and whistles and ROI and this and that. But none of that, that’s all smoke and mirrors. It doesn’t mean anything until you get to implementation. And then someone makes a sale and an order gets handed over to a butt-in-the-seat project manager who’s an hourly worker that clocks in and clocks out and is way overloaded. And then an IT guy somewhere got stuck with a new CRM or something. You know, any… number of nightmares that go sideways. We call them like one-legged dogs, but you know, like three-legged dog. Anyways, the, but yes, that’s, that’s very insightful. Change management being given the least amount of time, I would say is absolutely, absolutely one of the biggest mistakes that IT leadership can make. So a huge, huge insight there. The, How big is your team of people underneath you that like report to you?
Speaker 1 | 13:28.310
Like direct reports.
Speaker 0 | 13:28.990
Or that you work together. Here’s the question I want to ask you. I want to ask you about how to effectively coach or what’s your philosophy around coaching an IT team and setting expectations?
Speaker 1 | 13:45.204
Yeah, great question. Right. It starts with you. Right. Are you disciplined enough? Are you motivated enough to do things before it reflects on others? It’s easy to think that you are in a position to do something. It’s very hard to reflect that on yourself and then pass it on to others. So my philosophy is very simple. There are four things which I deeply value. The first thing is people, which is cliche to say, but I value, even though as the finance teaches us, people are considered a liability versus a computer is considered asset on our balance sheets. But the challenge is computer is going to go bad in like six months. The people are there. And these are not everyone, whether it’s working customer service warehouse or IT, help desk, anywhere, right? These are the critical pieces which we understand, right? Yeah. So we need to understand that we need to invest in our people, right? I go again and again in organization. I see people working there for 15 years and you ask them what transition you have made or what do you think you have learned over 15 years? And you will get an answer that they are still doing the same thing which they started 15 years back. Yeah. Right. So it’s an utmost duty for every company to invest in their people.
Speaker 0 | 15:22.925
So that’s something that everyone says. Yeah, correct. But how? So how do you invest in your people?
Speaker 1 | 15:29.287
Great, great, great, great question. So again… from my point of view, right? I don’t know how others do. You need to understand that how you are bringing those people and giving them challenges which they like, right? So you may be passionate about certain things. I may be passionate about other things. What triggers you may be different than what triggers me. Maybe it’s learning something, taking a course which triggers me. Maybe it is challenging, tackling a problem which nobody has tackled in the business. Maybe I have done enough in my team and now I want to explore other teams. Maybe I want to manage people now, or maybe I want to facilitate a process. I want to project. So we don’t pinhole people in one role. This is all what you want to do. Because I feel as people grow and evolve in their career, they need to see what is available for them to be excited about it. Right. So that is one piece. Right. How to. And the other thing is like, sometimes you’re limited and bounded in a company. You can only give so much, right? If I’m in a retail business and an e-com business, I have so much innovation, which we can do. Eventually business has to make money. There is budgets and there is constraint, but within those constraints, can you be flexible enough to move your team around? Can you be flexible enough to give them, whether if they want to go deep technically versus they want to go towards more resource management, what… opportunities you can create for them. That’s how at least I try to help them on that piece. The next portion is really managing their work-life balance. So the example which I have been trying to preach in our team is about health, right? So we have about 30 minutes every day, everybody has to invest. There is no tracking for anyone, but you have to invest. We talk about it in every team meeting. whether it’s a whole IT team meeting or it’s just people who are in my team direct reports, we always talk about what you have done, how you are doing it. You may not succeed this week, maybe you are bad, like you did three out of seven days out of your goal. What about the next? So health, then what is you doing for your professional growth? So people say companies have to do a lot. You know what? you need to be motivated to do something about yourself. And that starts by asking, right? So my job is to make sure I’m initiating all those things, right? I’m here to provide the tools. But at the end of the day, the motivation is intrinsic. You need to be motivated and you need to find, is this something which you… I’m passionate about technology. Many people are not. It’s okay. It’s okay. If this is not what you want to do, you can do something else. That’s great. But let’s figure it out together.
Speaker 0 | 18:33.561
Is this the right path? I think that’s an ocean’s worth of value there. So thank you. I don’t think there’s anything else that needs to be said there. I mean, even just taking 30 minutes to invest in your people and ask them, what have you done for yourself or helping initiate? Helping initiate that for them and providing an environment where that is welcomed is great. On the business side of it, how do you get people more involved in the end user experience so that you don’t give them a software-based platform with no keyboard?
Speaker 1 | 19:20.458
Yeah, I think this is an excellent question. Again, it starts with you are considering that person and that person is considering that it’s their problem. So when I discuss with business units, right, and my experience is evolving. In the last 20 years, it has evolved a lot. It’s not about IT or one person. It’s about what business problem we are solving. If you make it, if you involve people. right, you need them to speak on your behalf. That’s what I have learned in my life, right? If you want end users to be involved, you need to start with them very early and they need to be excited about solving a problem. And a lot of people only are excited if it impacts them, by the way. If I tell you something which you are not interested in, I can beat the drums, you will not be interested in doing that, right? So you need to find, you are solving a problem for someone, right? It could be an IT audience, by the way. We are talking about internal audience. We solve the problem. We have performance issues. We have monitoring issues, like how to monitor in real time so that we are not all the time looking at those dashboards. It’s a very simple example in monitoring. So how to automate those things so that we can make life easier? Or how do we do continuous deployment and integration to make life easier? How do we do unit testing? How do we fire integration tests at the end of the build? Right? commenting, standardization. I can go and go, but on and on. But the thing is…
Speaker 0 | 21:00.043
We should have a top 10. I mean, we should have a top 10 of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 21:04.004
yeah. I agree. As you have top 10 OWASP, right? Security. So that also has to be ingrained. When you’re writing code, are you thinking about security? The world is like scary place right now, right? With so much going on.
Speaker 0 | 21:16.628
Come on. Software dev guys thinking about security. We’re usually asking to turn the security off. Come on. I just inserted this code into the system, by the way.
Speaker 1 | 21:31.052
I agree. The thing is that you need to be genuinely interested in solving a problem for somebody else. If you are, then they will be genuinely interested in testing that because they really want it to be successful. It will make their life easier. So you need to find what problem you are solving. Hmm.
Speaker 0 | 21:58.019
The, so what does that conversation look like? I guess with the, if you’re encouraging your team to do that, if you’re encouraging your team to get more involved with the end users, right? Because it might just be a handful of people. It might just be like, well, you know, and, uh, if you listen to that last show, then the reason why it was so funny is because, because he was like, no, don’t ever put me in front of people. Which I found oddly stereotypical of IT people. But how do you, I guess if there’s the problem, we flush out the problem, we have the problem, we go to the people, we tell them, hey, I’m trying to solve this problem. I guess it’s just going to happen naturally, I guess. But do you encourage people to go around and speak with end users? And I mean, how do you foster that environment is, I guess, the question.
Speaker 1 | 22:52.658
Yeah, so it varies, right? Depending on the project. Is it something which is, we are an agile shop, right? Is it coming through our product owners and what they are trying to think through in the team? Or is it a project which we are thinking we are in the brainstorming phase? If it’s a brainstorming phase, we want them to sit with a cross-functional team. Just a very… Like one of the examples recently happened, we were supposed to, the request came in that we are supposed to develop a dashboard. Just, right, details are not important, but we’re supposed to develop dashboards. So when the request came in, the first thing we did was not discuss like, okay, how the dashboard will look. What are the data points? We were trying to understand why do you need a dashboard? So as we have trained our team, they went in, like we had one architect and one team lead along with me. We went in with the business folks, created a cross-functional meeting for half an hour. It was just half an hour just to explain to us what problem they are trying to solve. What we found out was that they were trying to figure out how many orders are late within a day, which hasn’t been shipped through our distribution centers. So… Okay, they wanted to understand that and they wanted these dashboards in real time so that they can expose that information across the distribution centers and fulfillment centers so that we can keep up with the demand. So that made sense. Okay, you need that. From there, then it went, okay, what should be the data points? Okay, are you really looking at the shipment data? Are you really looking? Do you need future orders? So then the discussion went in because now we understood the problem. And now the team was engaged. people from operation, they were engaged more because they want this data to make their work easy. So it naturally happens, right? When people are interested about a topic, forget about technology, think about politics, religion, sports. You pick any topic. If somebody is interested in that and you start talking to them, you will get wealth of information. Whereas if somebody does not like sports and you start talking to them, guess what is happening? You’re hitting a wall. You’re never going to get across that person. So you need to find a common ground, what you are working towards.
Speaker 0 | 25:20.817
When you say you’re an agile shop, would you say that that permeates throughout? Obviously it does. The answer is yes. It permeates throughout the entire business. But- does it permeate from the sense that people are aware of what agile is? Would you say that large business owners, CEOs, CFOs understand? When you say you’re an agile shop, would they understand what that means? And does it matter? And does it matter? Or do CEOs and CFOs kind of do this stuff naturally? Or are they just crazy idea people and then you help put a process to it?
Speaker 1 | 25:55.466
Yeah, so it’s true. in both cases, right? In the cases where the business stakeholders might not understand what agile is. So I feel it is a responsibility of the leadership in this case technology. They want the process, right? To educate everyone because there has to be a buy-in. When you say you are an agile shop, you need to understand what does that mean, right? you are going to create an incremental product which may not be complete. A lot of people think agile means that you just run away with no testing, no design, no code reviews, meaning we still have to follow all the tenants, right? We still have to produce a minimal viable product, but that does not mean that product may be finished because the requirements is changing, right? There is an acceptance criteria as they talk. So that information, right? has to be understood by everyone who’s involved in that stream. Now, with that said, does that mean agile shop means that you solve every problem with that process? Not necessarily, right? There are things which need to be planned in a better way, right? We had a warehouse to move. Physical warehouse, physical inventory has to be done. We cannot just keep doing like every two weeks that process or something. Maybe it is a… a finish deadline, a contractor has to come, right? So you have to use common sense. When I say we are Agile Shop, I meant more on engineering side or application development side, not like everything else. There are things, upgrades are planned, right? You can still think about it, how to put pre-work before getting into the streams for the team, right? So there’s a lot of pre-work needs to be done. There has to be, if there is a fixed deadline, then we need to understand how would we do certain. things and increments so that we will we can have a more predictable uh release so again um it depends so just back to the the the coaching the it team really
Speaker 0 | 28:11.355
quick and and taking them through these processes how do you involve if someone wants to grow in it and They’re getting involved. Well, obviously, if they work with you, they’ve got it made because you’re going to give them challenges that they like, you know, find out whatever triggers them and maybe, you know, give them problems that they want to tackle. But what if they’re not in an organization like that, but they want to grow? I guess my question would be is how do you get in the right place? You’ve been through different companies. You’ve had the benefit, I guess, of having a really good start, whether it was at Fanatics. But have you ever, whether it be in a job interview or what questions to ask in a job interview, how do you make sure you don’t get stuck in kind of the… And I love how you put the cost center. How do you make sure you don’t get caught in a cost center? But more, I like how you put it, flexible with constraints.
Speaker 1 | 29:25.913
Yeah. Yeah. Life is about how you see it. So from my point of view, it starts with you, right? If you are motivated enough to be better in your life, to be more skilled in whatever field you may be, there is enough time in the day. during the work, after the work, that you can be. Now, to your point, how you choose a right place. Sometime it’s not in our hands. right? The culture, getting an interview for four hours or even for two weeks, you might not be able to figure out until you go there. Can you influence? I always like to say that I always challenge my people to say, hey, my peers that, hey, can we influence? Can you bring to the table? What would you like to do? Can you open up? Because one of the things I find time and time again. A lot of IT people don’t want to talk. They would rather not talk to anyone. Guess what? If you don’t ask, nothing happens. If you don’t tell, nothing happens. Nobody knows how you feel. And nobody has time to be very honest, right? If you think you are busy, guess what? Everybody is busy with 100 million things. It’s the nature of the world, right? You may have personal issues. Everybody has personal issues. You might have work backlog. Everybody has work backlog. So… The thing is, you need to bring it to the table. What do you want? Speak. And that’s what the main thing every leader has to do. A lot of people might not speak, but you need to encourage them. You need to create something I call a safe environment. They should be able to call you out when you’re wrong. It has happened with me so many times. They said, hey, Amit, you said you will do this and you haven’t done it. Okay, that’s fine. Things happen. We get busy. Then we have to get back to it, right? Just because you have one day bad does not mean the next day has to be bad. Right. So you need to encourage everyone and you need to create a safe environment so they can bring those things in. And I know it’s a cliche to say, right, like everybody should be better and doing things. But even if you start alone, people will turn around. People will turn around and do those things with you. Right. So start with you. I would say it doesn’t matter where you are. Just start, learn something today and be better than zero. Be one is always better than zero.
Speaker 0 | 32:05.970
Point zero one is yeah. Point zero one is better than zero.
Speaker 1 | 32:10.192
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 32:12.372
Yeah. Talk to me a little bit. So any ideas on, on how to influence when you say, can we influence, can you think of a time or an example where you guys had great influence?
Speaker 1 | 32:24.075
Yeah. I, I get influenced all the time.
Speaker 0 | 32:28.339
You’re either influencing or getting influenced.
Speaker 1 | 32:32.082
Yeah, people have some tremendous ideas. I was talking about this health thing to you, right? Which we started in our technology team and now it’s company-wide. We have company-wide thing now. But in technology, when we were hearing about like what people were doing. So some people as their health goal, they think that they want to reduce. their soda intake. So they were drinking three or four times soda in a day. And they said, we don’t want to drink that. Somebody wanted to do walks with their dog two times a day. Somebody wanted to do a keto diet. The reason I’m telling this is that when you say you have a health goal, people might have, I had different ideas, right? Or you have to exercise or you have to go 30 minutes this. Health goal is something for you. for your own health, not for your family, not for your kids, not for your work. It’s just you, you. So whatever you pick, whatever you choose is good for you. So what has happened since then, because we share in this big IT town hall, we share, I ask everyone, we go through many, how many people we go through like a very quick, what was your health goal and how are you, how did you do last week? Right? So you get to hear such fantastic ideas and then you will see in next two weeks or three weeks, some other people will picking up on other people’s ideas, right? So it’s great to see that evolution, right? And influencing. So that was just a very specific example on health. But it could happen when you see, it could be a code review, right? Somebody said, hey, I wrote a unit test on this and I found this and this is the way I used it. We had other days, somebody used some in Google Cloud. platform they were trying to use create a pipeline and they used a very specific way to do it and they mentioned in the team because of that other engineers heard it and then meaning we do this in the town halls as well we we actually ask people to come and show what they have done if they they want to show right and people feel proud like i want them to feel proud of their work meaning you did it when we are the creators think about you are taking an idea from someone a line, sometimes like a word, forget about a line, people don’t even write these dossiers, right? They just give you a line. I would like to have this happen. From there, engineers take that and actually give it a life. And some people, millions of people use that. So creation is not easy. You need to be proud of your creation. And if you cannot be, you are in the wrong business. So be passionate about what you do.
Speaker 0 | 35:19.356
The 30-minute town halls that you guys do, is there a structure to that? I mean, you said you had health goals, but sometimes someone’s showing a lot. a code, a line of code. So is there a structure to these? And I can’t remember how often do you do them?
Speaker 1 | 35:34.505
Yeah. So first of all, it’s not 30 minutes. At 30 minutes, we have our different meetings, like team lead meetings. But we have town halls. Usually we have like just the IT town halls we have for one hour. Every two weeks, I conduct them across all IT teams. And it depends on what topic we are picking. There is not a… finite structure. The main thing is it’s a conversation, right? Sometime we talk about like, uh, what’s your favorite band or like, what are you doing for a weekend? Right. That’s a convict. So there’s such a big team, right? People get to participate. Um, the main thing is if I have something to share at a corporate level, which, uh, a lot of the time they might not hear, right. So we just do that quick thing, but at the end it’s about them. Right. I really feel. it’s that time which I see a lot of people coming up and I get to hear them I talk a lot but that is one of the times I get to hear a lot of people it’s one of my favorite meetings just listening to so much things happen I was like man I miss so much sitting in the meetings where was I this is a good place I need to be with these guys yeah
Speaker 0 | 36:54.397
that’s uh That’s awesome. So the town halls, it’s just a good thing that other people could implement. I’m sure there’s plenty of people not doing that.
Speaker 1 | 37:06.183
Yeah, many people might be doing it. It’s just your meetings. I call them IT town halls, but you can call them anything. It’s just getting everyone together for one day.
Speaker 0 | 37:17.329
How do you communicate the company growth or company issues, problems? How do you include your team? in the growth of the business, you know, how do you, how do you do the opposite, I guess? So the town halls you’re being on the here from everybody else, but how do you disseminate to the rest of the team?
Speaker 1 | 37:39.417
Great question. Very important. Communication is very important, whether it’s going in both directions, it doesn’t really matter which direction you pick, but you need to do it. And I’m being fortunate to be working with our CEO. Fantastic. So we have every week, we have since the COVID started, we have this meeting, which we call a line of business meeting. So every department is represented there. And not everyone is there from every team, but a lot of leaders are there. And every business or every department has to report what is going on. And last week and how the business did. So we get to hear. as the listener on the other side of the department, what other departments may be facing or what they are doing and how the business is doing. Then it’s up to us in the IT. We have team leaders and things like that who take that information and discipline. Now, every organization may have different rules. We choose to involve a lot of people because the more you know, like we went through a very harsh COVID time. It wasn’t easy. I’m telling you, meaning you think about a lot of students not going to colleges, right? So your business has to get impacted severely, but we came up with some very creative ideas how to manage. And those ideas came through a wider team, not just like few leaders sitting. The reason they came because the problem was explained to them, right? Why the business is not just staying. One of the other things I will quickly underline, a lot of people just ask you to do the things and they will not tell you the reason. And what I mean by that, you will, and I have evolved in this process in the last 20 years because I was one of them, right? I will go to someone or somebody will come to me and say, hey, I need this report. Give it to me by today at 3 p.m., right?
Speaker 0 | 39:49.890
The reason why I need the report is because…
Speaker 1 | 39:53.852
Exactly. Because, right? Because getting it by 3 p.m., I got the urgency, but it didn’t motivate me to do that report because it didn’t connect me with what was so important. It may be important for you. And just because you are authority, you are giving that sometime it does not work well in IT or inventory. So if you explain that, hey, consumers are getting things or we need to send all the emails, we had this delayed shipment or we had this pre-shipment or whatever reason may be. If you start with a reason and then you say, hey, this would be really helpful if we can get, so we can help to solve this problem, then people will be intrinsically motivated to. to do that. So I guess as the COVID hit, we were very transparent, right? What is happening? How the business is doing? What are the reasons happening behind it? So people were taking it on to themselves saying, hey, we are part of this solution and we are part of this company. So we need to come up with something. And they came up with some good ideas and which we were able to do and help the company. I’m very proud of our team.
Speaker 0 | 41:05.416
Uh, that’s, yeah, it’s, well, I’m proud for you. It’s, um, cause it was, uh, yeah, I can imagine there being some stressful days. I spent the, I mean, it doesn’t get much worse because just kids just didn’t go back to college. I mean, really, there was a time where like, I just remember, I remember a whole couple of months where we were like, why do we even need colleges anymore? Like, look, this is exactly why we don’t even need colleges anymore. You know, it’s just a lot of people were saying that. Remember, like, why am I paying for whatever Harvard is per semester, 40 grand a semester, you know, or like now I’m learning online. Is it really worth it anymore is what people are saying. And then they start questioning, is it worth being on campus and all of that? But that’s that’s not what this show is about. We certainly want people back on campus. We want people ordering bedsheets. Yes,
Speaker 1 | 41:53.268
definitely. Please go.
Speaker 0 | 41:57.070
We need bedsheets, darn it. The. My kid’s never been away from home. Yeah, I worked for Starbucks for a long time. I still have a lot of the management philosophies beat into my brain. I’ll never get rid of it. We had the what, why. That was what it was. The what, why. You got to provide the why. Here’s what I need you to do. And here’s why. And then we had the coaching conversation. And that was the what, what, why. Here’s what you did. Here’s what I need you to do. and here’s why.
Speaker 1 | 42:33.570
Little things, but it makes such a difference. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 42:35.952
no,
Speaker 1 | 42:36.272
of course. So one of the things I could say to the IT leaders is that as they are growing, evolving, as I’m also evolving in my career, you need to note down certain things and take a specific count that you want…
Speaker 0 | 42:57.528
to bring those things in your values or day-to-day life and see how you can improve because life is much easier after that there’s a domino effect when you start to do all of these things and a lot a lot of the the themes that come up often on the show is how do i influence executive management how do i get a seat at the executive round table how do i again influence how do i take decision how do i take direction but if you’re doing all these things and sitting on meetings and solving problems and involving people and communicating it’s going to things are going to start to to fall um the it’s it’s not always just about again like you said before keeping the blinking lights on and some sort of you know um meaningless um you know roi calculator of uh even though that is important And, um, the, which is how does, um, does your team and get, how does your team report to finance? I guess is how, how do you measure, how do you measure quantitate quantitative? That’s not really a word. It is a word, but I’m not using it correctly. How do you, um, you know, um, qualify your. value as it from a purely financial standpoint i’m assuming you guys can say well yeah because you’re a kind of like i thought shopping cart when i saw your profile but because you’re an e-commerce business that runs on software basically i’m sure you can quantify a lot of it but how do you break down um i guess a return on investment and how you’re delivering to the bottom line from your department yeah um If I ask you, how much money did you save us this year? How did you make us money and how did you save us money? That’s what the CFO is, I’m assuming, thinking. And I’m assuming ultimately that’s the purpose of a business is to make money. So how did your department save money or make money this year?
Speaker 1 | 45:03.122
Yeah, great question. Right. And as I said, you need to understand your own value of doing things. When you are doing things, you need to really take a look how you are doing it and what does it bring to the table. So to answer your specific question, one of the examples, just for the finance, right, and picking up a project, which is more back end operational cost saving kind of project, because it’s very easy to give ROI on anything. on channel or a front facing channel, right? You can calculate the conversions, you can calculate all that. So we had to implement a fraud solution, right? We rallied for it with finance. Finance was getting a lot of these chargebacks and chargeback for the larger audiences basically when somebody puts a credit card to a vendor site and they denied that this should be, this is not the card I put. and on your site, somebody else did. So there is a fraud, right? So the credit card companies charge you money because it was your site which allowed that. So that’s just a chargeback. So, okay, so we are getting these chargebacks, right? So the problem came in, hey, we are getting these chargebacks and we need to figure out a way how to resolve this. Okay, the site is working fine. People are putting their credit card. We have all the security. So, okay, so let’s think about a fraud solution. So we implemented a fraud. fraud solution uh we took down um my chargeback rates were much higher in percentage i cannot disclose the number but it went to like uh like 0.18 percent so so the significant when the project significant it was like so much dollar value and it’s measurable it’s measurable it’s measurable right so simple maybe measured Yes, simple. We said it took us so much time to implement the project and then we took a one month period and we said, okay, how many were you getting versus how much you are getting now? That’s a decrease. Then we carried over for six months and carried over.
Speaker 0 | 47:10.105
How long did it take you? How long did it take you to fix this problem, Rod?
Speaker 1 | 47:15.870
I think six weeks from the time we decided, but it took us. I mean, the main thing was to understand really what we are going to solve. So our objective was to reduce the chargeback. Once we partnered with finance and understood, okay, this is it. Then there is a vendor selection, whether we are going to buy ourselves versus we are going to buy or build ourselves. And then what is the team? How is their availability looks like? Those things sometimes take time because these things come all of a sudden, right? This is not a planned project. So again,
Speaker 0 | 47:52.724
did someone… Did someone discover this or did someone ask you, Hey, fix this?
Speaker 1 | 48:00.038
No. So in our leadership team, we discuss, right. We discuss all the finances.
Speaker 0 | 48:04.162
There you go.
Speaker 1 | 48:06.023
Right. So they discuss, as I said, it’s an open communication. So they say, Hey guys, meaning we are having this problem. How do you, how can we help ourselves? Right. I mean, our company cannot afford being a company of the size to have so many issues. Right. and it’s not an issue. It was not really an issue. It was just, how do we control this? Are there better ways? He was seeking ideas. And then, okay, the ideas came through. It was like, okay, can we do something in customer service? Can we do something on our website? Can we do something in technology? How can we do finance? How can we measure? So all these things, meaning it’s not just technology who solved it. It was really finance, finance-driven project, right? As I said, we are here to be part of that strategy. tier, but you need to figure out what problem you’re solving with the partner.
Speaker 0 | 48:58.844
That’s a great example.
Speaker 1 | 48:59.644
It’s an IT problem.
Speaker 0 | 49:00.905
Yeah. It was a great example that IT solved. It seemed like low hanging fruit, eliminate it, and now give me a raise. Don’t you see? This has been absolutely outstanding. Very, very insightful. Thank you so much for being on the show. If you had any one piece of advice to deliver to people out there like yourself that are maybe growing up in IT, what would that be?
Speaker 1 | 49:35.982
It would be to take care of your people. Build trust. One of the most ignored things is trust. The teams who are successful are what I see in my experience. are the teams where people within the team are trusting each other. I can have your back, you can have my back. We will get through this together, right? Focus on building that trust within your team, within your peers, and then you will see things changing and things will happen. So focus on building trust within your team, within yourself.
Speaker 0 | 50:21.077
Amit, thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds.
Speaker 1 | 50:24.940
Thank you. Thank you, Phil, for having me.
Speaker 0 | 50:27.182
Appreciate it. Yeah, and for everyone out there listening, don’t forget. Go to iTunes. If you like what you heard, please give us a positive review. Well, an honest review. What we want is you to actually type in the comments and give us an honest review.
