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Join WillowTree’s Billie Loewen for a deep dive into growth marketing. In each episode, Billie discusses the latest news and topics in lifecycle marketing, chatting with a wide array of guests, including WillowTree colleagues, client-partners, and industry thought leaders. Let's grow!
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode
of Room For Growth.
Today you are in for a treat.
I am not going to ramble on.
You're going to get right to our guest because he
has so much wisdom to share.
Today we have the joy of talking to Kevin
McAuliffe. He is the Chief Technology and Digital
Innovation Officer at Brightline Trains.
But his career is storied.
It spans everywhere from Disney to Highlights
magazine. He's worked in shopping
mall chains called Justice that are sort
of tween clothing.
He's worked with some of the same mentors and
advisors that I have, which is how we sort of
sparked up a friendship.
And then through the WillowTree partnership, we
were lucky enough to work with Kevin as he
implemented his first MVP for
the Adobe enterprise platform
technology stack that he's using, which involves
CDP. And then, of course, some of their channel
messaging technology and analytics as well.
And we were lucky to get to bring some of that
technology to market in less than three months,
which in the Adobe space is a record
speed. And then through that process, through
that project and getting to know him, I've just
had so much fun learning from him and learning
sort of his tenets of customer loyalty,
learning about how he thinks about leadership of
people and how he sets processes and teams and
technologies all on these great strategic
paths together.
So I think he has a
ton of just nuggets of wisdom
that are really brilliant about how to be
innovative, and how to lead, and how to be
a master of technology.
While not sort of losing sight of the bigger
picture while remaining human, while continuing
to have a mission that you can really rally
people behind. So I'm excited to talk to him
today. I'm excited for you all to get to hear
from him. So without further ado, let's
introduce Kevin McAuliffe.
Hello everybody. Welcome to the
best portion of the Room For Growth podcast.
I have Kevin McAuliffe with me today, and we will
be talking about all things leadership,
how to drive an engaged fan base, how to build
true loyalty, and what it means to
be in charge of innovation today.
So, Kevin, welcome to the show.
I'm glad you're here.
Thanks for having me. It's been quite the
challenge to get me, and I apologize for that.
I'm so happy to finally make it for you.
Good things are worth the wait, you know?
That's the best.
Well, Kevin, good to have you here.
We have been friends for a while in a
professional capacity, for sure.
Particularly partnering together for some work
with Brightline Trains.
But before we dive too far into
exactly what you're doing today,
your title is Chief Technology
and Digital Innovation Officer.
But from your time at Justice, which
is a tween brand in primarily shopping
malls around America to Travel + Leisure, you
have spent sort of the better part of two decades
mastering what I think is an incredible feat,
which is how do you leverage technology,
marketing, brand, innovation
to build a loyal fan base?
I'm curious if you could just start by
introducing yourself to us, tell
us who you are, how you got to where you are
today, and leading Brightline Trains.
Yeah. So I'm Kevin McAuliffe.
I'm the Chief Technology and Digital Innovation
Officer with Brightline Trains in Florida.
How I evolved was
kind of a story in and of itself.
I started as a guy
who wanted to go play Major League Baseball and
lost his baseball career and found
a journalism career which found
the internet, which found technology and process
and product management and all sorts of things
along this crazy path that you probably,
most people want to have a predictable outcome
for.
And I had none of that.
I just kind of winged it on many occasions.
But, how I landed here is,
I think I joke with, a lot of people
about it, but I'm a complete failure.
I think by embracing suck,
embracing the idea of failing forward
and making mistakes and learning from it.
Listening, right, having your ears open,
having your eyes wide open to
not being right all the time and not being the
smartest person in the room.
I think it helps you surround yourself with great
minds, great ideas, great people
who know how to leverage the power
of different things to activate
different experiences for people.
And it truly all goes back to,
you know, my roots of playing as a team member
on a diamond as a kid
and learning the importance of being
able to not be the only
person on the field
who knows how to play baseball.
Right? Everybody knew how to play baseball.
We all played together. We all put it together.
And, even when you lose, you learn, right?
And I think those are the the fundamentals that
I've kind of built my base
off of. And loyalty is really, I think personally
as a consumer and personally as a,
person who uses technology, like, I
like to, to, to understand
what's in front of me. I want it to be simple.
I want to, you know, understand that the people
that are providing it to me are listening and
learning from my behavior.
I want to know that when I complain, they hear
it and they fix it.
All of those things matter. And so I think it's a
matter of who you work with, the people
that you hire, it's about all the data that you
collect. It's a matter of the technology you
choose. It's a matter of
the processes that you put in place.
And it's all about building trust in all of that
to have outcomes that feel
trustworthy, consistent, and loyal
to the guest. And I think that's that's as simple
as you can make it. Like it doesn't have to be a
platform or program or some SaaS
solution. It has to be plain and simple.
Provide your guests what they are asking for,
when they want it, where they want it, how they
want it, and it becomes
a powerful tool of commerce.
Right. So that's where I'm at
building powerful tools of commerce.
Before we go too wild talking in particular about
Brightline, will you give folks
who are not in the Florida area or maybe aren't
on the West Coast where ground is breaking, just
a little bit of an overview of who Brightline
Trains is and the mission y'all are on.
Yeah. So we are the provider of the
transportation where a flight is too
short and a drive is too long.
Where we are not
Amtrak. We are trying to be green, and we're
trying to be fast, and we're trying to be a lot
of things to a lot of people.
And, you know, Florida is the test bed of
of this really amazing product of
privatized rail that gets people where
they need to go quickly, efficiently, safely.
It's a collection of people who are passionate
about train development, train usage,
transportation evolution.
It's a passion project for a lot of people,
for a lot of different reasons.
And the reason West Coast becomes something
is because Florida proved that
it could. It's a little train that spent a long
time fighting for its ability
to get on the rails and up the track, and
into Orlando. And we've done it.
And I think there are a lot of people who said,
you can't, you won't, it'll never happen.
And it did. Anfd now everybody wants a station,
right? So I think that that bread and butter of
Miami up to Orlando really
enables our leadership team out
west to be able to prove to people that train
travel is a viable solution.
And when you get Pete Buttigieg heading out west
to talk about how infrastructure dollars
are being spent in this day and age and
that transportation can evolve and change,
you get products like Brightline West, where you
have privatized rail that will become
bullet train like Europe that's
running on electric, no biodiesel at that
point. And it's super amazing to connect cities
like Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga
in California.
And then you have places that need it, like Texas
— Dallas, Houston.
And, you know, all of the different
areas around the nation that can utilize,
high speed rail to get people to and from places
that they may never have flown to or they may
not want to drive.
And really connecting cities differently in a way
that's meaningful. So it's super exciting to be
part of this project. It's an evolution
of where I know train to be
growing up in New York, on Amtrak
and New Jersey Transit.
But it's also like a level above
on a product level, like it's such a cool product
to work on.
Yeah. You just outlined a whole bunch of
challenges that come when you are literally
laying train tracks for high speed rail trains,
and which is just something that, in terms of
technological advancement in the US, is a major
feat. But on top of that, you are also
responsible for all of the MarTech, all of
the digital experience that complements
ultimately why your customers
choose to book with Brightline.
Tell me about some of the challenges that you're
working on today around that side of the
technology for Brightline.
Yeah. It's interesting. When I got here,
Brightline was trying to do a lot.
They were trying to become not only a great
train, but they were trying to connect people to
the train, and they were trying to do everything
autonomously and have markets where you can
shop yourself and, you know, what
we had to find was a balance between how much
tech and digital
runs your life versus what are you comfortable
utilizing to make your your transportation
seamless? Right.
And the first thing I noticed when I got to
Brightline when I took the train was
the product is amazing, but the product
to get on the product was disjointed
and disconnected, right?
So trying to figure out all the places where
all that disparate technology sat and all the
different connections and all the different code
and all the things that made up all that
noise. That was the thing that people saw before
they got on this beautiful train.
Right? Was our first, understanding
of we have to dissect this and figure out
how to simplify it.
And so I think sometimes we go and get too
complicated because there's so many systems that
can do so many things, and you activate all these
tools, but then your marketing team doesn't know
what to do with it. Or you activate all these
tools in your front line team doesn't know what
to do with it. And so we put ourselves
in a really cool position to lay out,
while we ran a business — after
Covid, we we came back in November of 2021
and we're running a business — we came in and we
built a better customer journey.
We mapped out what are those places and moments
that are going to matter for our guest.
We talked about what are the steps and the stages
by which we're going to activate technology,
people and processes, and data
to go inform
and to arm the future of where
we're going to encourage the choices
in the decision makers, to really put ourselves
in a great space so that we can
build trust along the journey to go do more.
And we unlocked doors and closed other doors
that were breaking the system.
And as we evolved, we opened up
tools and ideas and capabilities
that our marketing teams couldn't do before or
our business partners didn't have access to.
And we've changed the way we do
business where it used to be, the finger pointing
of it's broken, it's broken, it's broken to how
can I, where can I, when can I?
And we were there all along the way to fix those
moments that matter to our teammates, not just
our guests. And we listen.
We have listening posts where we listen to the
data and we listen to the the feedback, and we
listen to the NPS scores, and it all feeds into
the machine. And so we've had to peel
back a very complex onion,
cry a whole bunch, and replace
a lot of pieces to get ourselves to serverless,
to all API-driven, all
scalable platforms that enable
us to take our enterprise solutions
to the West Coast when they're ready for us.
So it's been an exciting journey to
re-envision and redevelop,
but starting it with the guest experience first,
thinking about what the guest wants, what the
teammates need. That's where we started.
Speaking of just guest experience and how to
get guest experience right.
You have been
on a mission to build customer loyalty across
different industries, different types of
experiences for a very long time.
Everything from, as mentioned, tween
clothing stores in malls for sort
of premium clothing products,
targeting that demographic to
being a source of trust and truth for
where you should travel and what leisure looks
like and the future of it.
What are some of the tenets that you have
picked up about customer loyalty?
What are the things that you really believe are
critical to drive customer loyalty?
And how can brands get better at building
loyalty from their customers?
Yeah, I think like,
I think customers really just they
have needs, right.
And you got to meet them where their needs are.
And I think sometimes we all think that we have
to put this incredible
amount of technology in front of them to solve
problems. And sometimes it really does
matter to listen.
I think the interesting thing for me at JPMorgan,
which is fintech and Walt Disney World, which is
tourism, and everything in between:
I learned a lot about what it means to listen
to what's going on out in the field as you're
evolving your technology stack and
as you're launching your digital entities and
your websites and all that stuff.
I think if you're if you're blind to what's
going on in the customer's experience, you
start to get further and further away.
The other thing is agility.
Like, we don't launch 18-month
projects anymore. We launch two week sprints of
feature function and we learn from them as
we go. We're looking at data every single time.
Everything we launch comes with data.
So, I think you fail
when you try to do too much,
too fast.
When you try to bite off big bundles of
things in, in such a long period of time, because
by the time you meet the customer where they
were, they've already moved to a different
location to where you are not.
And the expense of getting to that platform for
it to fail is a huge mistake for every
company. So what we found is this nice balance
of let's pick moments that matters.
We call them MVP. Some people don't like that
terminology. For us it's launching something,
getting a reaction and then having a
way to react to that reaction
in a positive or negative way.
It doesn't matter to us. We now know how to
evolve using data and using
feedback and using all of the tools that are in
front of us to enable change in a
controllable fashion.
And it says a lot about
the people you surround yourself with.
Like, I have people who have done more than I
have ever expected of them, even though I told
them I'm like, I want this from you, right?
They're doing more because we gave
them the right attitude, the right empowerment,
the right tool sets, and the right
collaboration environment to go
listen and learn and change in such
a way that it's not reactive anymore.
It's very proactive, even though it is constant
and it's continuous development.
Right. So it's been exciting to
know where the customer is all the time
because we're listening to them and we hear them
and we want to evolve with them.
We don't want to be ahead of them.
We don't want to be behind them.
We want to be with them, and we want them to be
with us. And I think that builds a lot of
trust and relationship that you lose
when you try to just anticipate where
it's going or try to be something that you're not
or like, perfect example, we tried to do
mobility.
We tried to take people onto
a trip to the station
so that they get to the station and they
get on the train and they leave and they get on
in another Uber and they leave.
But we had somebody in the middle of that that we
didn't control, but we took the blame for it.
And when we took that out
and we just gave them a connection to Uber, which
they already have on their phone, it
tampers down the complaints and the concerns
because now it's an Uber conversation.
It's not a Brightline conversation.
We gave them a connection to Uber.
We built the relationship with Uber for them so
that they don't have to think about it.
But we run a train, really damn well, and
that train is where our focus is
having somebody figure out how to get to and from
us? That is something that we're going to,
you know, kind of give you the tools to help you
with. But we shouldn't solve that problem.
We should solve making sure that everything about
that train ride is fantastic and that it lives
up to your expectations.
And that means partnering with the right partners
to get you to and from, but letting them do that
job because they do it best, right?
I don't drive Uber cars, right?
I don't run Uber.
So building that relationship and having that
connection tissue is part of the world people
live in. But it's not the part that I want to
manage. So that's an example of that.
I think that's a great example, and I love how
pragmatic you are around technology.
You know, we spend so much time exploring
the challenges of building this like repeat
fan base, this loyal fan base.
I'm curious where you think so many brands
get this wrong, and particularly where
CTOs get this wrong, where they under leverage
or overindex on various
types of technology to get these jobs done, that
you lay it out like pretty simple when you
explain it. It sounds so easy.
But yeah, I think I think CTOs
inherit a lot of things, right?
I think depending on where you are in time,
you're dealing with different systems, mainframes
and different types of installations of
SaaS software and different types of
environments where things are disparate.
Like at T+L there's a whole
ecosphere of different things that still have to
be reconnected.
And it's not an easy job to be able
to reconstruct and do.
It's expensive. It's time consuming.
And there is bureaucracy in a publicly held
company. I think the benefit that I've had, and
the luck that I've lived in the last couple of
years, is I worked for a privately held company
where I've been given the opportunity to go make
a difference and make a change and make a
transformation.
I've been given the toolset and the power with
the empowerment for my boss and my peers
to go, represent them in terms of
listening to what their requirements are, what
their questions are, what their business needs
are, and also pairing that to the guest
experience and then building it from scratch.
And I think, you know, everybody's situation is
different, but not everybody-- You don't have to
come in and and shake everything up.
There are instances like we did at T+L
where we built a little bit of a digital agency
that evolves certain parts of the business that
were meaningful to the business, that showed
how we could run Agile, how we could run projects
differently, how we could install software as
a service like Adobe in a way that was
meaningful to the company, meaningful to the
guest, and meaningful to the marketing, and
drove the business forward without really
having to reinvent the entire wheel.
Now, where you get into trouble is you still have
disparate systems that aren't connected.
I'm lucky in that we have a 360-degree
view of the customer, because we built everything
from the base up, from data up, and
we got all the noise out of the way.
So because I have all that data now, I can make
decisions and learn really quickly about what's
going on because all my systems are in one space.
That's just something that people have to
overcome. And I think it's again, it's
surrounding yourself with the right people,
having the right wins, convincing your leadership
that those wins are meaningful enough to go after
more wins.
And I think it's sometimes it has to be the long
game. Sometimes for us it was a shorter game,
which is fantastic.
Now we get to go move on to loyalty platforms
and gift card platforms and things that are
going to take us up to the next level
besides just booking paths, you know.
Totally. Yeah. And I think that iterative,
that ability to have an iterative roadmap where
you say what's critical, what's next, what's
next, what's next is sometimes the challenge in
itself. But.
Interestingly, you have innovation
in your title.
I'm curious how you feel about sort of the state
of innovation today, but if I had a hunch
it's that you might feel like you are on
a bit of an island, because at least in my
perception, we are just not in a great
moment for innovation.
The economy is pretty terrible.
The white collar job market is poor,
so people are either experiencing layoffs or
having trouble kind of moving.
And the talent pool at the moment is in a strange
place. The investment in startups
is down, and then AI is sort of
dominating every conversation as this proxy
for innovation, where often what we're talking
about with AI and machine learning are,
automation tactics or personalization tactics
that have really been around for quite a long
time. They're just being re masked with a much
more expensive, and shiny
cover.
But I'm curious how you feel about innovation
today and how you build a culture of
innovation when innovation is low.
Yeah, innovation is a really
loaded term.
It's like, I always joke, like,
we used to build websites,
and now we build, like, these digital
experiences, right?
Like, I mean, it's the same thing. We're building
websites, right? But at the end of the day,
innovation to me is
you know, really keeping a pulse on where
your guest and your customer is going to be and
where they want to be and how they're evolving
their life in technology.
I think keeping people around
you that are eager to learn and constantly
trying to consume information around them
that makes them better, that makes them want for
more. Having partnerships that are encouraging
you to tap into beta programs and
be on their board so that they can talk to you
about opportunities that may not be ready,
but may be something you want to tap
into to see if your team can get their heads
wrapped around it and break it, and do a couple
of things there, that that you wouldn't have
access to if you didn't have good partners like
that. So I think innovation to me
is embracing
the idea that you're never done learning,
right? You're never done evolving.
You're never done changing, and you're always
in motion and being comfortable that you're never
done for the customer.
The customer's always going to want for more.
And so, we we have teammates
who are, maybe
they've never, ever worked in digital before.
But we saw something in them that made them
really think about something differently.
And we love that idea.
And so we encouraged that idea.
And so I think things like hack days and, getting
your teammates involved in projects that they're
not comfortable with or that they've never worked
on before, or pushing people into,
parts of the business that they may not have,
they may not have experienced.
Like my leadership team, they should all know
P&Ls pretty well.
They should all know how to negotiate pretty
well. But not all of them have had access to
major contract negotiations and things like that.
Having them along the way helps them get better
about understanding the technology you choose,
understanding the questions to ask, understanding
how to push your partners for more,
for less, for more out of
them, not to pay more for it.
And I think, I joke, but my favorite
price in every conversation with negotiations is:
free. That's my favorite price.
Like I want like I want my partners to be as
invested in innovation as I am
because I want to be on the cusp of where
they're going, not behind the eight ball.
And a lot of times you get caught behind the
eight ball. So innovation is a weird place for
me. I think, you know, it's in the title.
It's a weird title. It's like this really long
title that means nothing other than
I have a lot of responsibility to the
guest to keep their experience where
they are on their devices, their iPads, their
phones, their desktops,
their laptops, and ensuring
that our teammates are equipped to handle any
and all situations that may arise.
The innovation is really about how far
you want to push it, how hard you want to push
it, how fast you want to push it, and how much I
want to go fight for
the budgets to go continue to extend.
Like our strategy this year
had ten things on it from last
year that we completed last year because we got
everything else done.
And now we have 20 new things on it this year.
And next year, we have a bunch of things that we
want to go do, and that's going to change ten
times to Sunday by the time we get to the end
of the year. Because we're looking at what we're
doing, we're learning from what we deployed.
We're making decisions on that.
That's not that important anymore.
This is where, you know, where our guest is.
So let's go to that.
That's how we work our system.
It just enables us to to be proactive
in the conversation versus reactive,
which I think being proactive is being
innovative, right?
Yeah. I love this idea that so much of what
innovation is just sits at the core
belief in the embrace that customers are going to
constantly change. And in that change, there's an
opportunity to continuously meet their needs.
And by simultaneously taking the teams that are
working on meeting those
needs and putting them a little bit through the
wringer of learning and change and understanding
the business and frankly, reconnecting with
customers in unique and interesting
ways on a continuous basis.
And then, of course--.
One more note on that, right?
So our team started very small with a lot
of vendors. We now have a bigger team,
because we have different disciplines now.
And we have an offshore entity for our
development house.
Our product teams have evolved from like
blobs of work, in one
big lump of let's deploy every two weeks to.
We now have vertical structures that are towers
where there's disciplines around specific
function.
And now those teams all have iOS, Android,
AEM [Adobe Experience Manager], and QA and other
representation along with product, program
management, project management, and all of that
stuff means we're getting more for the bang
on the buck, right?
Whereas before we had one big lump sum, now we
know how to work together and merge code.
And as we keep evolving that we can now take
feature functions into categories.
And focus on back end or focus on commerce
and focus on front end.
And now you're getting more out the door
every two weeks because you've built the
confidence in the team and the structure, and
they're knocking more things off the list.
So you're getting further and further ahead,
right on your punch list.
And you're closer and closer to always having
your pulse on where the next thing is versus
always being 20 releases behind the
thing that you want to get out the door.
Yeah, but if I weren't careful, Kevin, hearing
you, you are good at saying, let's put this in
smaller bites, smaller slices, smaller sprints.
Let's break everything down to just like, what's
the critical priority, what's critical, what's
critical.
But I think the risk of that and perhaps this
is, you know, partially a privilege of working
in a private company versus a public one.
But my perception is that we
generally live in a time where finding
long term strategy is really hard.
And generally when I look at company roadmaps
and what their strategic plan is for the next
year or two, three, five, sometimes
it makes sense and sometimes it's just a lot of
shiny objects or a lot of reactionary
pivots to things that
don't necessarily need the time and attention
that they're getting. I'm curious for you, how
do you make sure that you balance kind
of plan and execute for the
long term and create alignment
and vision and strategy over that long
term versus sort of this like short-term
reactionary change?
Yeah, I think there's--
I'm working for a company where there's a lot of
different groups that are evolving at different
paces, right? Because they've come up and they're
growing in different stages.
At some point we'll probably all be at the same
stage. But, we're in year two
of a 3- to 5-year plan,
of where we're going to go launch things.
Now that's changing because we launched AEP
[Adobe Experience Platform] and we're a year into
AEP, but our teams are still learning how to use
email, to deploy emails.
We're not at SMS, we're not at notifications.
We're not at a few different things that I think
we could be at.
But if I decided to just throw another thing out
there, we would be even further behind
because they haven't embraced really how to build
segments and to automate and to do a lot of
things in that tool. So we're going to go
backwards a little bit and help them really get
their chops
built up around how to use that tool and put some
smarts behind it so that they can catch up
a little bit so that by the time of the end of
the year comes when we say, alright, now we're
going to activate an SMS program or a
notification program from marketing.
Now they know how the basics work in AEP to
trigger opportunities to
build automation and segmentation and activation
in that tool and then can then be utilized
for SMS and notifications, not
just email and on-site.
So it's a matter of keeping a pulse on
not only your customer, but also where your
business partners are and how they're utilizing
the technology that you install.
And constantly honing it
and then making adjustments to that three year
plan. My three year plan can be I can go out ten
years if I want to. It's all bells and whistles
at that point. Like it's I'm you know, I might
have a flying train by then for Christ's sake.
So I don't I don't know what that looks like.
Right. But at the end of the day, my charge is:
let's look at where we are, let's
think about where we want to be.
And if we don't get there, that's okay, we have
other things that we're going to keep doing.
But then there's also the innovation isn't just
in how we're delivering major
features. The innovation is how are we getting
better at managing our DevOps?
How better are we at making sure that we have no
live sites? How better we reacting at issues that
arise? How better we are implementing serverless
and using AWS tools and really
actively monitoring our web experiences, our app
experiences, our experiences in general to know
when things break before they break.
And I think the innovation is not just in the
idea of building these big, bold
new ideas. It's about how do you operationalize,
how do you really work hard to
think about new ways of building better tools
that drive your cost down, your efficiencies up,
and your skill set beyond belief?
I think those are all play into your
innovation, and all play into your roadmap.
And sometimes, you know, you get a
couple of things that get in the way of that and
you have to readjust. And I think that's the
important part, being able to have the ability to
say, okay, I need to take a pause.
I need to see where we are.
I need to evaluate what we want to go do and go
do some of the things that we may not want to do
right now, but we have to do in order for us to
get to that next level and then readjust that
calendar and push it out even further.
It also comes with, you might not have
the money, you might not have the ability to hire
people. You said it, like there's inflation
issues. There's financial
impacts to that. There's people laying off, not
hiring. There's a lot of things going on in this
world where you can't predict where you're
going to be and your company is, but when you hit
that space and you're predictable,
you can make better judgments to keep your people
safe, to keep your processes safe, to keep your
product safe, and your guests safe, if you're not
getting too far ahead of yourself and overhiring
and overspending and doing all those things.
So I think all those things balance out.
And it's all in the in the idea of strategy
and positioning and thinking long
term. But knowing that short term is where you
have to quarterly, weekly, monthly, however
you want to do it, keep a bead on it
so that when when the time comes to make hard
decisions, the hard decisions are just pushing
people back like contractors out a little bit, or
putting a project off, not having everything
on top of you, that then you have to make cuts.
That's the hard part, right?
Yeah. I love that idea of understanding what's
the mission we're on. And then how do we break
this into the smallest pieces possible, and even
understanding what are those milestones for
movement and action?
Perhaps at the risk of speaking a little bit
outside of both sides of my mouth, I would
be remiss if I didn't ask you a chief
technology and innovation officer about
AI and machine learning.
So let's talk about where Brightline is at in
terms of readiness to harness the
efficiency-driving, the
personalization-improving, and the operational
impacts of AI and machine learning.
So first of all, one of the things I know about
Brightline is that, Kevin, you invested a ton
of time, effort and money into building a
really good foundation for data
and for technology, and I'd love to understand
more how you did that and how you did it as fast
as you did, so that you kind of have these good
building blocks in place.
But then second, where are you seeing
opportunities to leverage AI and machine
learning, and what advice would you give to other
businesses just kind of grappling with this
today?
Yeah.
The starting point for us was,
bad code, bad partners,
bad data.
Right. Those three things came to a head and
everything broke.
And the report that every executive was getting
every day, that was broken anyway,
that they didn't realize, it was just data.
That gave me the ability to go put a team
together to go focus on fixing data.
And so we started by looking at the tools that
existed, the ones that we had.
So we had Fivetran where we brought data in,
Databricks where we cleansed it, and then Power
BI where we visualized it.
Those tools were kept.
We hired the right people.
So I brought in people that I know who are very
good at architecting and engineering data.
And then we set out and we fixed the
data that was broken, and we started to
showcase how different it was than the data
that used to be in the reporting and how
reporting isn't really the problem,
because anybody could throw something in a
report. It's about consistency and
clarity and cleanliness and,
you know, really understanding what the data
is and how important the data is to activation.
And so we started building.
Data was a product.
Data is now a service. We have a whole series of
access points for our business partners to go get
data to do their own reporting, to do their own
analysis, to understand what that
data is for, why it's there, how it impacts
day to day, business decisions and how
it activates in other ways.
And so once we got the data right,
we started looking at like, AI has been out
there, everybody's talking about it.
Everyone wants to use ChatGPT.
Everybody wants to have their emails written for
them. Everybody wants to dump data into something
and put it in the cloud and hope it spits
something out.
And you know, my first fear
in using AI and ML is
the security and the data breach
aspects of things. So when people are taking data
outside of the company and using tools
like ChatGPT, what they don't realize even on
Google and others, it gets consumed into the
larger brain.
And that asset
is now not your asset anymore.
It's others' assets. So we've locked
down external use of ChatGPT
internally from a security perspective.
Now we're testing Copilot because we're a
Microsoft shop. So we're using Copilot to test
with certain people in the business.
And we'll roll that out so people can write their
emails and build their strategies and do all
sorts of things. But now it's contained.
But every single software service that we put
into play, Adobe, Databricks,
you name it, everything that we use, HAFAS,
HACON, Siemens, Sqills, everything.
Everything has a backbone by which data,
in some way, shape or form, is powered by
AI in one way, shape, or form.
Now, how do we unlock it?
How we test it, how we use it?
Adobe's a big one.
How we turn those things on again.
I'll go back to my last piece.
If I turn it on too soon, everybody's
head will fall off.
Because they want it, but they don't know how to
use it. They don't know what to do with it.
They don't know how to embrace and harness the
power. So what we're trying to do is,
experiment a little bit in different ways.
Databricks, our data engine,
we sat down with them. They've got some cool
engines that will help us take the data that we
have in the database, and instead of reporting it
in Power BI as a line,
giving our consumers, our business partners, the
ability to use AI in a chat simulator
to pull data out based on the questions that they
ask. So informative
toolsets that enable people to ask all
the wild questions that they ask because they're
all like in teams. Hey, what about this?
Oh, I forgot to ask you about this.
And now you give them a tool that they can do
that. And the data is all in a database and it
pulls itself out.
Adobe: we're looking at how to utilize betas
through Adobe to activate AI in AEP.
And we're partnering up with Adobe.
And then by by default, working
with people like Best Buy and Caesars and all
those other Adobe partners to learn
from each other and how to implement it the right
way and do it responsibly and give our
teammates the tools with knowledge of how to use
them, not just turn something on and hope it
works for the best, right?
So I think it's fantastic.
I think it's exciting. I think it's scary as
hell.
But it's our responsibility to make sure people
understand that it is scary as hell.
It can be dangerous.
And not dangerous in terms of like the robots are
taking over, but dangerous in terms of protecting
your IP, right?
Protecting your product, protecting
your guest, and protecting the information that
you spent so much time collecting
and putting in a place that's secure, that could
easily leak itself out to the market.
I mean, AT&T just had a breach.
There's a whole bunch of things out there where
people are getting hacked.
We have to be as
concerned about how to protect our guests
and our teammates and our product as we are about
how to utilize and power and harness this
AI and ML. So I'm at the beginning
stages of where I want to go, but I'm
at the right place because every tool that we
install has AI built into it.
How we use it? It's going to be up to us.
How we test it is going to be up to us.
How we roll it out is going to be up to us, and
we're going to do it in the right way, at the
right time, for the right reasons.
And my suggestion to everybody is don't just
trust it.
Test it. Try it.
Ask a lot of questions.
Hold people accountable to what it's supposed to
do. And don't just assume it's going to do
what you think it's told to
be the outcome, right?
So I think I think if we're all responsible about
how we go about using it, we can do it in a
way that makes our guests lives better, our
employees lives better, and doesn't harm
our business property and our world
at large.
Totally. I love this really clear eyed
leadership view of sort of safety first,
and then we'll figure out how to play with
something that could be fire.
Fire is a powerful force for both good and also
destruction, if you're not careful.
Listen, they told me as a contractor
when I was a kid trying to make some money
on the side that I can, you know, play with wires
and hook up stuff. And I got shocked like 6 or 7
times pretty good.
And guess what? I didn't want to be an
electrician after that. So not everybody should
be touching the wires.
So I think there's a lot of things, you got to
define roles and responsibilities in all this
too, right? And you have to define governance.
And I think what we're trying to figure out is at
that layer of governance to say, okay,
you're a certified electrician, you're not going
to — every once in a while you may, you know,
zap yourself — but you're not Kevin who got
electrocuted every time you opened the wires up.
Totally.
Yeah.
I'm just picturing, you.
Absolutely zapped.
Someone tackling me from the side of the road,
yeah.
Okay, Kevin. Last one.
Let's just talk a little bit about
leadership.
You and I come from kind of a shared philosophy.
We've had a shared
advisor in our lives who's passed down some good
wisdom to us. We can talk a little bit more about
that if we have time.
But the sort of core philosophy that
the job of a leader is to raise
up new leaders.
So I'm curious how you spot future leaders
in your teams and how do you help raise them, and
how do you hold them accountable?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I am a guy
who, you know, it's
about relationships, right?
I think for me, if I can have a good conversation
with you, and we can find
some commonality and find some ways to challenge
each other and respect each other and be
responsible to those interactions.
I think that's like an indicator to me.
So, like, when I interview people I don't like,
there's not like a big light and I'm not like
grilling you. It's a conversation.
If I can't have a conversation with you, that's a
starting point for me that won't evolve.
And maybe that's a little hasty sometimes because
you only have a minute to talk to some people,
but like people who are
eager and open and honest,
genuinely can have a good conversation.
And I think part of my Spidey sense is from
living in New York, I can read some people
sometimes. Sometimes I, you know, I've been away
from New York a long time, so I've lost a little
bit of my Spidey senses.
But, you get a gut feeling about people.
You get the idea based on who they are
representing themselves in front of you that that
they're they're eager to learn and grow and
change.
I believe in this though: I did not become
a leader until people that I
led became a leader themselves.
And you can see it. So, one
of my people at Disney, she went on to
become a leader.
And you saw it. You saw it in terms of how people
responded to her.
You saw it in terms of how people
responded to her ideas and her
ability to get stuff done, her ability to
clear the blocks, to move people around.
When she became that person, the
stuff that I instilled in her, the stuff
that we worked on, the stuff that we talked
about, it came to fruition because she
now represented — it's kind
of like passing it on.
Like I have had coaches in baseball that taught
me stuff that if I taught it today,
it would still stand true.
It doesn't matter how you sit in the box and hit
a ball. Doesn't matter if you spin the bat a lot.
There's fundamentals that I learned from
coaches over time that if I
taught that today, kids would be great
baseball players, right?
And I believe that they, all the guys
that I grew up with playing ball, they're all
coaches now for a reason, right?
Because they understood not only how to listen
and learn and grow and change and take advice
and take hard criticism.
They became better teammates.
They became better ballplayers.
And then they evolved because they love the game
so much to become leaders, coaches.
And then they teach people how to become coaches
themselves because that's a path.
Same thing with teachers, right?
I do believe, though, like you cannot
claim ownership of leadership until you've taught
somebody something that they actually enact.
And leading from the front matters to me, like
setting an example, rolling up your sleeve, doing
the shit that that is hard as much as doing the
stuff that is easy, right?
Showing your teammates that you are with them all
the time, whether you're on their
on the call at night, at 2:00 in the morning on a
release, or just sending out a really nice thank
you note the next morning to say "I appreciate
you and what you do and how you achieve
it." But clearing their blocks, getting them the
tools they need, making sure that they have the
budgets, making sure that you're protecting them
from the world around us.
Like in Covid, we didn't lose one person on our
team at T+L, because we made decisions
going into Covid that said, don't spend this
money, don't hire these roles, say
goodbye to these contractors and let's keep our
team intact so we don't have to do anything about
it, right? That's leadership.
Making sure that you're thinking ahead, making
sure that you've got their backs,
making sure that you're thinking about all
the things that could go wrong to protect them
from all that noise and not giving them any worry
about it along the journey, just letting them do
their best and empowering them to be their best.
And then they become their best selves.
And leadership is one of the most important
things for me as a leader,
because I've had bad leaders in the past, and
sometimes that really impacts you.
And I vowed not to be a bad leader.
And sometimes, like, you're not sure about
it, but the team that came with me here to
Brightline has come with me to T+L from
Disney. I've worked with them at Disney, I've
worked with people that come back to
work for more because I feed their need to
grow and learn and change, not because I'm some
great leader. It's because I'm giving them the
opportunity to become their best selves every
single day. And that floats my boat every
morning. Waking up to do a job is just a job.
Waking up and seeing their eyes wide open
because they've got the ability to go represent
us at a conference for Adobe
or AWS or something else like that is a
meaningful moment, right?
Totally. Yeah. I'm with you as somebody who
likewise started my career in sports, like grew
up doing sports, grew up as part of teams,
and then all through college I was part of that
community. I like your analogy where it's
important to understand how to be a good
teammate, how to be a good coach, how
to be a good cheerleader if you're going to be
really managing that entire development practice
because each of those roles, as a leader, you
need to know how to lean into each one.
And then I would just add, like being able to
find one of the things I love, I love that you're
good at first impressions. I think I'm not.
I think I'm terrible at first impressions, and I
often get them wrong. And people I end up
loving...
I may be wrong, I may think I'm just really good
at it, but just be terrible at it.
Yeah I think I like, trust my Spidey senses and
then people prove me wrong all the time.
People who I'm like, oh, I'm not going to, you
know, I'm not going to enjoy this person.
I end up just absolutely loving.
So I learned to check my bias.
So the thing I look for now is when do I see
somebody's magic come to life?
Early in our like working together time.
Like, how long does it take for me to see the
thing about them that's just so special,
and how to harness that and turn that into
something.
I think that's a great
call out. You can
take a moment that is
not so crazy exciting to
anybody else, but make it a moment
for that person.
We do a lot of things in configurations.
Nobody gives a shit about configurations.
I apologize for cursing on your podcast.
I'm bringing the level down.
I apologize for that. But at the end of the day,
the idea that somebody spent time thinking about
how to make something better and configuring
it differently to make it more optimal, right?
That is as important as a beautiful
image that's sitting on top of your homepage that
somebody created.
And they're different entities and different
mental spaces, but they all require
some care and feeding.
And when you care and feed, people respond to
that. I'll go back to my baseball days.
I was a pitcher. I wanted to be on the mound.
But you can't pitch every day.
You have a responsibility to your your
batterymates, right?
One day, you have to keep the book, one day you
have to count pitches, one
day you're out in the bullpen watching somebody's
back. The other day you're isolated and running
laps after you throw.
And the next day you throw.
And when you're on the mound, you're on the mound
with with your buddies on the field and your guys
on the sideline. It's never anything different.
There's not a lot of isolation, except when
you're running around the field watching the
game, and you hate your life because you have to
run 20 laps, 30 laps, 40 laps to get your legs
in shape, right?
But it's all for the betterment of the team.
If you learn from the starting point
that you're never too good to do something,
right?
You don't learn how to work with people, and
people don't see how good you can work with them,
and so you miss out on the opportunity to be
on somebody's side. I never talk about things in
terms of, "I'm in front of you,"
even though I like to lead from the front.
It's about being behind them, pushing them
forward, and showing them how, and
being at their side.
That's part of leadership.
That sports thing really does tie
back for me, because it was such a meaningful 20
years of my life — of being in dugouts
and being on fields and being with other people
in vans for four hours while you're riding to a
game, talking about strategy, talking about how
to how to get the best out of each other.
That's that's my philosophy.
Not to mention..
Let's just do a straight call out to
Scott Bracale.
He's a guy who we've both worked with.
He has a tool that he likes called
"Personalysis." It is a basic color
analysis of people.
There are many that are just like it, where it
essentially groups people into somebody who's
a high action red versus a numbers
driven, open-ended, likes to
explore blue, versus
communicative, likes-to-talk-it through yellow,
and then a very process-driven, detail-driven
green.
I used to think that this stuff was all malarkey,
but when you put it in a team perspective
and start to think about how you actually need
every one of those roles, and if you're missing
people who have different preferences
and ways of working in ways that they sort of
shine to fill — not just the sidelines,
but who's on the field, who is leading —
your team will miss something.
I have found that as a
helpful framework for recognizing biases
and teams and recognizing gaps and thinking
as a way of rounding. I'm curious if you use
these assessments for anything still?
I haven't used them in a while.
I think every every one that I've taken,
I've come out unsurprised about what my results
are. I think the biggest thing
for me is sometimes, you can
get... It's almost typecast for
a specific outcome. And I think the thing
that I've learned — maybe it goes back to how I
got fired at Highlights Magazine.
I never expected it to happen.
I didn't. We were performing.
I didn't know why.
And, you know,
trying to kind of figure out, did I fit?
Did I push too hard?
Did I, you know... Was I not a good team player
in that space? Was I trying to shove technology
where technology didn't want to be?
I did a test there.
It gave me a specific outcome and said I would
fit in in this specific way.
I was at a moment in my career
where I wanted to accelerate things and push
things, and maybe I pushed too hard.
There's a temperament of "what's in you
is what's in you." What's going to come out on
those tests are going to come out on those tests.
I think you embrace who you are.
Be yourself, but know that
your self is always growing and changing in that
it's not just the results that matters.
It's how you fit your
piece into the puzzle of all the other pieces
that you're working with.
That's been a a growth thing for me.
I used to be, "I'm right.
I'm doing it.
This is it." As a 20 year old, 25
year old. And now I'm a 50 year old and I'm like,
"Okay, but I hear what you're saying and
I see what you're saying, and I think there's
some value in this.
Let's pull this together and let's have a
conversation about how we can take it to the next
level." I think that is the sweet spot.
I joked about it at Adobe Summit about
chocolate and peanut butter coming together.
I'm allergic to peanut butter, but I used to, as
a kid, take peanut butter and chocolate and
put it together because it tastes so good.
I would just take a allergy medicine to
cure myself because
I just wanted that taste.
But the magic of of
leadership is the magic of putting the right
people in the right room to develop the right
things and cool innovations and different
ideas. It could be the same idea, just
a result that's different than anybody expected.
But I think what Scott's
goal was with the personality stuff at Tween
was to find all these...
We used to call them purple
squirrels, right?
Find all these different, innovative,
smart people and
find a way to put them all together in a
really nice way to develop a great culture
and a great product and a great outcome.
You can't go wrong trying to figure out how to
bring the right people into your business to go
develop it.
You know, we joke about it a lot, but
all of those moments where I took those tests,
you learn something about yourself and you go,
"That's not me." But then it is
you. You just have to figure out how you want to
evolve that to
be your best self.
And surround yourself with people who are good at
things you're not and appreciate that.
Listen, I wouldn't be where I'm at right now, if
I couldn't work with the people that I work with
today... My leadership
team makes me who
I am because they are outstanding,
courageous, proud, hardworking
learners and doers.
We get shit done because they are
unafraid to to tackle problems
and tackle ideas and to do
things that I'm asking them to do that nobody
else probably would ever ask them to do.
It's who you know, who you surround yourself.
Even this relationship, Billie, with
WillowTree. WillowTree has made me a better
person because of the things that
come from each and every person that we work with
at WillowTree. I think there's a piece of us,
that's still waiting to come out, and it's just a
matter of who you get to connect with to get it
out of you, right?
You have to learn those lessons and learn those
things in your maturity.
But if you open up your mind,
you can be a lot of things to a lot of people in
and meaningful to them — not just
a passing ship in the night.
I love it, Kevin.
We have you for about 30 more seconds before
we have to release you to what I'm sure is
another meeting of the day.
But on this quest, on this podcast, we always end
with the same question, which is...
We spend so much time talking
about brand loyalty and how to build it.
So I want to know, which brand are you truly
loyal to and why?
All right. So I have a little bit of an obsession
over baseball hats.
I am very loyal to a company called
baseballism.com, and
I get my fill of monthly
hats. "Surprise and delight" moment hats.
Everything from, you know, minor league
baseball to professional baseball
to, quirky Easter
hats and Saint Patty's Day hats.
I have a hat for every holiday.
That's a baseball reference.
It's ridiculous.
But baseballism, I earn loyalty points.
Which doesn't mean it doesn't add up to a ton,
but they respect me.
They send me a thank you note every time I
purchase something.
It is a relationship that I have, and they
know me because every time I'm hankering
for another beautiful baseball lid,
they ping me on email and they're like, dude, we
got the hat for you. And so that's my
obsession. But you know, brands that I use.
I built the Chase mobile app with a team back
in the day. I still use Chase today because it's
loyal...
It's consistent, trustworthy,
and I have everything in it.
I use that all the time.
Things like AmEx and Amazon and those brands
are part of the fiber of my life.
But baseball is...
I should have worn a hat today. I have a closet
full of hats. I'll show you some of my hats one
day.
We'll have to do a closet tour.
I have to clean my closet before I take you on a
tour, but for sure, I'll show you my 800 hats.
Okay, when I'm back with "WillowTree Cribs."
Yeah, that sounds good.
"WillowTree Cribs." That's awesome.
Hey, Kevin, thank you so much for being with us
today. This was super fun.
Worth the wait, as mentioned.
And thank you for sharing so much advice.
Yeah, thanks for being patient and persistent in
getting me on here.
I really do enjoy talking about this stuff, so I
appreciate the time and energy.
It's always great to have a conversation with
Billie.