AMB Sports and Entertainment CTO on digitally engaging Atlanta Falcons fans

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Maryfran Johnson 0:03
Hi, good afternoon and welcome to CIO Leadership Live. I'm your host Maryfran Johnson, the CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media. This video show and podcast is produced with the support of CIO.com and the digital media division of Foundry, an IDG company. We're streaming live to you right now on LinkedIn and on our CIO channel on YouTube. And we cordially invite our viewers to send in and respond with your own questions to our guests today. We have editors watching the feed, and they will make sure to pass your questions along so we can ask them in real time to my guests. And this is an unusual show for CIO Leadership live because I have not just one guest but two. I'm joined today by Karl Pierburg, who is the Senior VP and CTO of Strategy and Innovation at AMB Sports and Entertainment. Headquartered in Atlanta, AMB Sports and Entertainment includes the National Football League's Atlanta Falcons, the Major League Soccer's Atlanta united and the Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta last year, the franchise value of the Falcons was estimated at $4.7 billion. Karl brings a great depth of software engineering expertise in it, and data analytics. He started out in consulting before joining the Chicago Bears as their IT manager of football systems in 2002. Three years later, in 2005, he moved to the Atlanta Falcons holding various positions there as director and then later senior director of football systems. Since 2018, and 2005 He moved to the Atlanta Falcons, I said that already since 2018. He has worked for the Falcons parent organization AMB sports as their Vice President of Technology data and analytics, and then Chief Technology Officer and then in March of last year added the position of Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation to his roster of CTO responsibilities. Joining and I today also is Jeremy Duvall. He is the CEO of Atlanta-based 7Factor Software and a longtime software engineering pal who hangs around with Karl, we're going to you're going to hear a lot about the things they talk about over beers. Jeremy founded 7Factor Software in 2017 as a cloud native software engineering as a service company. His team works with tech forward enterprises such as the Atlanta Falcons, as well as other ambitious startups. He has more than a decade of software engineering experience building and advising others. And he's also a contributor to InfoWorld, which is one of CIOs sister publications, where he's written very candidly about developer issues and concerns. Most recently, he's been a regular guest host on foundries today in tech podcast, joining my longtime editorial colleague and show host, Keith Shaw. Gentlemen, welcome to you both. It's really nice to have you here.
Jeremy Duvall 3:23
Thanks for having me.
Karl Pierburg 3:24
Yeah, I'm excited to be here.
Maryfran Johnson 3:26
Okay, now two of the biggest topics we're going to dive into today are the fan experience, the which other CIOs it might be the customer experience, but the fan experience here, and that'll be a lot from Karl side of the roster. And then with Jeremy, we're also going to get into the developer experience and various ways that CIOs and senior IT leaders could be paying more attention and doing a better job of making sure developers are staying with their organizations. But before we get into that, let's start with the story of what brought you to into each other's professional orbits.
Karl Pierburg 4:06
Jeremy, you want to start on this one?
Jeremy Duvall 4:08
Yeah, for sure. So Karl, and I have a mutual friend, that I got an introduction through a friend of a friend, because I was looking for basically a coach back when I started my business, it was all just me figuring things out. And anyone who's done that, you kind of want to find smart folks to advise you as quickly as possible. Especially if you know you're not the smartest seat in the house. So I found a friend of a friend and we got an introduction to Karl and the thing that I noticed most about Karl is that he was struggling with some of the same things that I was at that time we were both sort of building our businesses at the same time. And we hung out and spent time together and really started just basically complaining to one another about the types of issues and it's like man, this sucks. How did you know I want to fire that person who have maybe I shouldn't say that but that's kinds of conversations, where it's like you can't have candid chats with with, you know, people in your orbit, especially when you're a leader in a company. And I needed that. And I got that through through Karl.
Maryfran Johnson 5:12
Karl, you you said you grow grew up in a sports front office, essentially. Because before you were a football director of systems, you were actually a football player. So you understood a lot of the issues. But it can end up feeling like a very lonely experience, I take it becoming the boss of all the, the IT folks around you. Yeah,
Karl Pierburg 5:37
I mean, you know, and that's, it's funny, you use the word it it, folks, when you're a developer, and you're an analyst, a database architect, wherever you are, you're almost even a little bit isolated within the IT folks, you know, you're okay, you're having to do a lot of, you know, it's funny, I say, my job is CTO, it's half HR, half PR, you're having to go out and like sell what you're doing, explain what you're doing, and do a ton of listening, which is really an important skill set to have as a CTO, and then bring that back together, and actually develop any term and actually build something out of it. And so, you know, I think that's where I think Jeremy and I really kind of gravitated towards each other was, you know, we had to play both hats, right? We had to play the listening hat and the Okay, what is it? What did my, my clients, in this case coaches or scouts really need? And then turn and be like, Okay, how do I actually do this? How do we actually pull this off? And a lot of times, you're a development team of one, maybe two. And, you know, I think that's where we kind of locked down to each other is, you know, we're both kind of in that Doer mindset, where I think when when I think about what I've romanticized, in my head anyway, about what large scale corporate development is, is its product owners, and it's maps. And it's, you know, really, really super clean backlogs. And, you know, wrote Milgram stories and all that, and others were like, hey, you know, I'm pushing code in between rounds of the draft, sometimes, you know, and it's, this is kind of our ability to kind of just share in that pain of you having to be agile and responsive. At the same token, you got to build sustainability and or else you end up just, you know, beating yourself down.
Maryfran Johnson 7:15
you both pointed out that Jeremy, of course, started with a smaller group, your company is now over 50 people. But Karl, you still have it's a small but mighty team that's doing things for the better, you've
Karl Pierburg 7:28
grown, it's been. And we've, you know, again, I think that's been a testament to our organization, and our owner, Bo basically saying, hey, we need to get better, and we need to expand and grow and there is no finish line, you look at our, our values really drive that and things like innovate continuously. You know, I think that that's really important. And we've hired leaders that, you know, thankfully, we can talk with, and we can explain, you know, hey, here's what we're doing. I mean, some of the things we've talked about doing, it's hard to draw those direct line between, hey, if you give me this, I guarantee we're gonna get x times to a lot of times it is aspirational. And to have the supportive leadership like that is, is really important to get on the on the football side or the business side. So well, let's
Maryfran Johnson 8:14
let's talk through some of the technology and the driving forces with the Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta, which if I've been told correctly, is the lot one of the the largest in the busiest stadium in the world, we like
Karl Pierburg 8:30
to think so it's we kind of refer to it. I don't know if there's an official metric on this as the largest event stadium in the world. And, you know, I mean, we pride ourselves on that we think it's first of all the most unique and iconic looking at what's like you don't you don't mistake Mercedes Benz for anything else. And when you're at Mercedes Benz, you don't mistake it for anything other than what it is, it is the most amazing stadium you'll ever go to. And it's our job and our mandate to keep it that way. You know, we've recently thrown out kind of this vision of, we're going to create the most impactful value added fan experience in the world, not just bells and whistles, but actually do stuff that matters. But you know, I mean, Mercedes Benz, we do consider it, you know, again, the busiest days in the world on an average year, we've got 50 Plus major events, and those events are, you know, 45 to 50,000 or more tickets distributed a year, we end up distributing over 3 million tickets over the course of a year, we get over half a million unique individuals and honestly more than that, because we really don't have insight into the like, actual specific individuals that come in, which is one of our kind of pain points. And of those half million people that come through in a given year only about 35,000 are for our core, you know, kind of anchor teams, the Falcons and Atlanta united. So we just got diversity that comes through in terms of the events, you know, it's you know, obviously we've got things like college football and concerts Taylor was amazing to have here. You know what we have the Super Bowl 10 national championship games, we've had the SEC championship game every year MLS Cup, Elton John. We also have, you know, over new since the team opened over six over 600 private events, which are major sources for us. We've had three motion pictures filmed here, two weddings and 10 prompts. So we get the diversity here. And from the technical part of that, you know, it don't really on my teammate, Danny branch, who is our CIO, built an amazing technical foundation, when we talk about that that enabling layer that our CIOs are responsible for, of just communication and connectivity, you know, be it from you know, we've got to again, I can probably go a little bit deeper on this group with a full fibre to the desktop CON network where we're pushing stuff around, we've got over 45,000 miles of fiber in the building, we've got Wi Fi six, we got dads, we got our you know, all this stuff is in there murder, we need connectivity in there, we've got it, we've got data centers, we've got, you know, the ability that when when when I get to come around which, you know, my job is just to come in and break stuff and in do new things and things that are different. I have this amazing foundation to push off of where I'm not having to worry about that. It's pretty amazing. What we have here at Mercedes Benz,
Maryfran Johnson 11:26
well, what because one of the things you said to me when we were getting ready for this interview today was that you had no interest in being a CIO, you really enjoy being the CTO is it because you intend to stay hands on with the technology. And just you don't want to get dragged off into that, that top leadership circle. Yeah,
Karl Pierburg 11:46
we're supposed to keep that private between me and even that wasn't just getting CTO for me, she's one of those things where we're really looking for new ways of using technology to solve new business problems. And that's kind of my definition. And it requires you to be a little riskier and a little more tolerant to pain in your own life. And, you know, I think that's, that's cool. But, you know, the ability to build and create and just explore is what I really liked about the role that I at least have here at NBC.
Maryfran Johnson 12:19
Okay. And Jeremy, what do you hear? What do you work with the CIOs and other CTOs, under senior IT leaders that are part of your business work as the the software company? What do you hear that is similar to what Karl was just talking about?
Jeremy Duvall 12:38
So with respect to some of the technologies at play, I think that a lot of companies are starting to embrace riskier technologies, artificial intelligence. I mean, we're gonna talk about that more later, obviously. But they're starting to look at technology as being a core piece of their business, which I mean, 15 years ago, when I was becoming an engineer, you know, it wasn't quite as, as prominent of a piece of your business, right, you're focusing more on how we're selling to customers, and how we're kind of driving our revenue streams, through marketing and things like that. And now, because we've had this explosion of technology in the past 10 to 15 years, everybody is all in on software, right? You've heard the quote, that Software is eating the world, I would argue it's kind of corrupting the world in ways because bad, there's a lot of bad software out there, which is kind of our mission in life is to try and solve for the bad software that exists and all the legacy systems that are kind of sitting around and not really adding value to your top line. But I'm excited about the types of technologies that people are beginning to embrace and even going back to artificial intelligence, and a lot of engineers were scared of it when it came out. Honestly, it's just math, I know I'm very, that's a reductionist view. It's a very awesome and cool technology. But embracing these sort of newer ways of working things like Wi Fi six that Karl was talking about, putting fiber in the entire building is amazing, because latency is going to be next to nothing. And you can do amazing real time things with high, high, highly efficient technologies that are across that building. I agree. I think Karl has you have like the coolest Stadium on the planet, it is one of the most technologically advanced stadiums, even back to some of the projects that we're going to talk about that we've done with you all would not be possible, if you did not have that found that sort of foundry of here's all of the amazing work that we've put into creating one of the most technologically advanced stadiums in the world. So my CIOs, the people I'm talking to are looking for ways, how do we look to the future of the technology that's coming down the pipe. And again, my background is in academics and research and I did some work on some of the first multi touch drivers before the iPhone existed. So it's cool to see kind of the things that I did. You know, in academic research and all the conversations about these amazing technologies that people are starting to embrace. It's cool to see people turn those into products and to do ploy those out to make people's lives better, right? Again, going back to fan experience, Karl's, I'm sure you're going to talk about all the awesome stuff that's in the stadium that make it seamless and make it a cool experience to walk in and go to a game or go to a concert and to kind of reduce the friction of what your customer is doing. So pivot that away from fan experience. CIOs and CTOs. Your job is to reduce the friction from a technology perspective, right. And Ken Beck actually calls he those of you know, Ken Beck, he's like a god among men and developer speak. But he, I was talking to him and LinkedIn, and he describes technical debt as a form of friction. And so we need to be thinking, as we embrace more technologies, and we look at what we're trying to achieve for our CEOs, how do we align our business strategy from a technology perspective, to reduce that friction, and to make everyone's lives better from a developer experience, perspective, fan experience, customer experience, you know, whatever.
Maryfran Johnson 15:57
Go and Karl, talk about some of the things you've done that have made that fan experience frictionless at the stadium,
Karl Pierburg 16:06
there's some really, there's some real obvious and upfront ones. And there's other things that we're we're still working on and trying to figure out. But basically, we look at friction as anything that keeps you from getting what you want, and enjoying the event that you came here to see. And sometimes, you know, we fans want a little bit of friction, instead, they want to walk around, they believe it or not, they want to wait in line and look at some things other times they don't. And so areas that we've kind of hit on are things like replacing the traditional old school magnetometers, where you'd walk through and everyone would be when you get winded and everything else, we work with an awesome company called evolve. That featured more of a an open lane kind of way to walk through and it reduced our touch point to about 10%. Under that really about 8% of fans now kind of need to get checked and moved and we can move through, you know, by four times the volume than we could through a normal one. But we had a tremendous cost savings by doing that, and a huge fan experience gain, but it's letting people you know, go there. The challenge with that was we had a bottleneck or a friction point there and as soon as we removed it, we created another one at the turnstile. And so we then kind of moved to adjust to that to start looking at using things like biometric authentication on you know, doing things where we really saw what slow people down was when they had especially multiple tickets and getting their phone out and having that phone ready. And in there wasn't a way for the prepared fan to get your nakki clock behind for unprepared fans. And so we worked with our partners at Delta who have done some similar work in this space and we created Delta fly through lanes where fans can for free just before they come in they snap a selfie real quick and they walk up the screen recognize them It says you know again welcome Jeremy you've got four tickets Yep. And you walk in and you're all set to go and it really again it's kind of a 4x multiplier for us on getting fans through and you know it's gonna opt in only you know, we don't mandate anyone do anything that way but we developed a pretty loyal following on that if people that do it also found that fans are more than willing to do it even one time about a quarter of our fans that use it or only went to one event at Mercedes Benz last year are one Falcons game I should say and you know, they read their Know Before You Go they say Hey, this is gonna save me time. No problem. I'm doing it. I'm ready to go. Once we're in the stadium, we've then began again trend over you know, how can we get rid of lions? How can we get rid of of bottlenecks, especially when you know what you want? And so we've got two kinds of technologies we've experienced with their experiment with their One is we've installed installed. Three, we've got a fourth one coming frictionless stores, where you basically tap a credit card right now and you walk in you grab what you want, you just walk out and there's no checkout, there's nothing else you get charged for what you grab. Our partners at ifI were awesome with that, and we continue to expand out with that. And what we found it was it was kind of a slow ramp up. But once especially our fans that have been there once like they knew exactly what to do and they knew exactly Hey, it's it's a timeout. I know I can make it to ifI and back before that we get back from a timeout and you know, that definitely, you know, drove an uptick in sales without cannibalizing nearby. And the other area we've really experimented with is expense, extending that biometric entry experience to the ordering standard we've worked on with one of our partners, some biometric cocktails, called spirited and that's again kind of a beta a closed beta we have right now. We'll be experiment we'll be expanding again for United season a little bit. But with this one, you can walk up basically can authenticate with your face, do age verification, do payment, and just have the machine unlock. You can self serve yourself a cocktail and get out of there. And that's again kind of a combination between reducing the friction doing some research in to fans wanting more, you know, mixture ink access, and our ability to kind of connect those systems together really allows us we're Jeremy's team kind of came in to help us create that that experience. Okay.
Maryfran Johnson 20:13
And I'm thinking of to how you had explained to me earlier that there is so much technology in the stadium that you operationally you have to you can't just run in and break stuff and apply it you also everything has to play well together. Is there a particular way that you approach that with your small but mighty team?
Karl Pierburg 20:39
You know, it's funny, because that small but mighty team extends to not just our dev team, it expands to everyone at the stadium. And so here's a good example. Two years ago, or a year and a half ago, we had the the 2022 Peach Bowl on New Year's Eve at Mercedes Benz stadium. And in that game, the final kick was final field goal templates kicked right before the stroke of midnight, hit the ground right after the stroke of Midnight's the game was over at that point, and we had a Falcons game ready to go by 11 o'clock the next morning, right. So we had a transition from one game to the next, you know, 11 hours. We had for that first one, we had 71,000 orders go through our food and beverage system. The next one, we had 50,000 Or sorry, 36,000. Go go back to back like that, right. So it was we're talking about introducing new technologies like hifi, like, like, like spirit, we've got to make sure that works with the whole stadium and they can close out, they can reconcile, they can do their performance analysis, and then get reset so that we can measure and go the next day. So when we're going through a pilot, okay, we got a little bit of grace. But if we're hoping to expand, it's got to fit in with the flow of how everyone does business. Because our food and bed partners are gonna tell me to pound sand if I'm making go through five different procedures to close out of a stadium.
Maryfran Johnson 22:00
And the role that that you and your team are playing in enabling that Jeremy talk a little bit about that.
Jeremy Duvall 22:09
So I think what's awesome, there's a duality between what Karl's talking about what the fan experience and what we're talking about, for developer experience, small but mighty is is is a very important approach to innovation. There's a lot of psychology around, the larger your teams are, the less effective they are is a thing called Dunbar's number, which is applied specifically to social situations, but it actually maps to professional. There's some studies that have been done that show that it also maps to some professional situations as well. smaller teams are more communicative, they can have chats off the cuff to solve problems more quickly. You avoid design by committee, because there's typically a captain that just stands up and starts, you know, being the quarterback of the team. Anyone who's been in a team sort of sees this right. And these are the types of things that our company has embraced as a as a culture and as a way of life. And you know, these are the chats that Karl and I had early on is how do you achieve more with less? How do you build a team that is excited to come in and work every day and execute and avoid the friction of the things that get in their way? Right. So again, going back to what Karl said, his obsession is reducing friction in the stadium, my obsession is reducing friction on the development production floor, so that we can embrace ideas like developer experience, we can do CI CD correctly, without 15 tollgates. And, you know, 10 calves, which I'm sure some of your listeners have experienced, or maybe even implemented, systems like this, and there's nothing wrong with it. But it certainly slows you down. And one of the things that I've I've enjoyed watching Karl do is challenge that status quo of hey, we can go faster, where we can do more with less, yes, we need the right bodies on the floor to do it. But we can get a lot more done by focusing on reducing friction inside our engineering teams, and getting a smaller team to do more by empowering them.
Maryfran Johnson 24:00
And I want to actually pivot over for a minute or two to talk about when you say the developer experience. It sounds like it's frictionless, but it's also more empowered. I want you to explain that a little bit more. It was, it's one of our favorite buzzwords for this conversation today. But it's something that I don't think I've ever talked with a CIO in a couple of decades now, where talent acquisition and retention was an incredibly high on their list, usually in the top three. And in the last few years, a real focus on building up that internal engineering expertise, you know, all the things that got outsourced 10 years ago. They're all in source now. And everybody wants more of these incredibly talented developers who can make this kind of thing happen. So what is different now about the developer experience and what CIOs need to be paying attention to? versus just a few years ago? Yeah,
Jeremy Duvall 24:59
that's a good Great question. And it's a very complicated question. Because we're dealing, we're dealing with the psychology of human beings here, right? I think one of the big changes that I've seen, and you pointed it out is in sort of the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a rush to offshore and there was a rush to commoditize software engineering, because for good reasons, we thought that, well, this is about cost savings. And all I have to do is ship the right spec to the right people. And I can get output that produces some form of widget that I can plug into my systems and it goes and makes me money. We know that that is in fact, not true now, right through the scrum renaissance of the 2010s. On into what we're seeing today, which is people are beginning to even question Scrum and say, Wait a minute, is this even the right process? We're not sure. So the developer experience is an outgrowth of the DevOps movement, if y'all remember, that was another buzzword about five years ago, where we applied Agile to operations. And now all of a sudden, we are pushing to production every day. Whereas companies like Microsoft, which I worked for, were doing that before this, right. So we're seeing people focus more on productivity as as an obsession in the engineering team, right. And productivity is a function of many things. It's a function of proper inputs, which produce good outputs. It's a function of psychological safety in your team. So you understand that people can raise their hands when they feel like they're doing something sideways, or they're not certain about a particular decision, they can raise their hands and challenge that. And it's also a function of all of our what I like to call our software pipeline, which is product to to UX to development to DevOps, or your platform team, which is the new hotness, there's another buzzword, right platform teams. All of this produces an outcome, right? So the the product, people produce the business problem and the challenge we're trying to solve, and then that flows through my pipeline and comes out the other side as a piece of software. Right? Pretty simple, right? The picture is clear. Where developer experience really shines is when we're talking about how efficiently and effectively an engineering team can push that code out to prove a hypothesis, that product has bet the farmer right? If Karl says, I think I can increase fan experience, I think I can get 100,000 people more people through our lines every day, if we tested this one little tweak to this system over here, he needs to be able to do that. Right? He needs to be empowered to run that experiment to test it and see if it is, in fact, something that produces value for the company developer experience is is I as an engineer, I'm sitting in my dev team. And when I hear that from Karl one, I know why two, I understand the business outcomes of that. Three, I'm empowered to go out and do those experiments and build code in a way that's not so locked down, except in regulated, so totally different. Well, we'll put the regulation, the regulated industries aside for a minute, because this doesn't apply to my banks and my health care people out there, kind of and to for those engineers to enjoy what they're doing and to be able to feed back into the engineering lifecycle. So I'm not just a cog in a wheel, sitting here taking a ticket, reading my five requirements, writing my code pushing to production. And that's all I do. Right. Our engineering teams need to be able to question product, question UX and have conversations about is this In fact, adding business value, because my context is, I've written 10 systems that kind of do this too. Or maybe in another job, I wrote a piece of software that did exactly what you're looking for, and it didn't work. So maybe we need to talk about that, and me feed my information back into the broader team. So it's more about developer experiences about not treating teams as cogs and wheels and as actual business value because as we said, Software is eating the world, we need to lean into the experts that have created assets that our biggest companies rely on and get their input back into what we're building.
Maryfran Johnson 28:43
Yes. Okay. You've been nodding quite a bit there, Karl, I want you to weigh in to
Karl Pierburg 28:49
I mean, I mean, Jeremy, put it best mean developers are happiest when they're building and creating and being productive, and they understand what they're doing contributes to the bottom line. That's that's. And when we are doing things like being stuck in monolithic old, Dev stacks, when we can't put a push to production, we can check in code when troubleshooting takes, you know, three days because of poor documentation or poor standards. Those are things that are inside of our control that we can help to standardize mitigate and get rid of, then you know, it does become that external relationship and that ability to partner with the business to do the other areas, the UI UX, the product, understanding the product management, have had having the right up in the right pipeline there depending on how big your team is, to be able to voice those concerns. We had an issue this morning where we had a very eager client who had a product idea they were guaranteed they came to us and told us the entire way they wanted it built and we're like, look, I love the enthusiasm help us understand the outcome because we've done this before, like help us. We can smooth this out and get to a better spot with you. But that takes a little bit of them. Also understand that hey, we're not just a bunch of nerds here like you We, we can think about business problems. And that's where I think the that level of communication and that's what makes a really good. I'll call him a technical teammate, because it could be any number of roles, but your ability to have normal, you know, those kinds of outcome based conversations that don't necessarily get locked into the tech with members of the business really, is what brings value to you as a person. Is why I'm where I'm at is because I can talk to football coaches, I can talk to, you know, whatever. Otherwise, I would just, I would be doing the same thing I was doing 20 years ago.
Maryfran Johnson 30:38
So you can talk to football coaches, you can talk to technical people, you can also talk to business people, and help them. Jeremy, the piece you wrote for InfoWorld. On this last year, the headline was managed morale, not metrics are a more effective engineering team. Do you both think this is something that kind of everybody gets now or is this going to be? Is this going to be news to anybody?
Jeremy Duvall 31:07
I think I'll go first. I'll then I'll put my name out there for the flame wars. In the comments. I don't think I think this is a thing we all know about. Yet. But you look at Dora and some of these other metric frameworks, check out an AVI Noda on LinkedIn, I'm gonna plug him. He's a friend of mine. And he has an entire company that's designed to talk about developer experience. And he has a lot of studies that he's done with Google and podcasts that he's had with Spotify VPS, where we discuss these things like Dora metrics, and what are they what value are they providing, right? When I said manage morale, not metrics, I'm not saying that we shouldn't measure what we're doing. Telemetry is incredibly important. But when you start measuring, when you start pushing metrics, right, there's good hearts law, right? When a measure ceases, when a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure, right? It's more about having conversations with your engineering team and using metrics as telemetry to pivot the organization towards a more effective way of solving outcomes. What Karl, you said it best right? Get bring me outcomes as a as a product organization, as a business, bring me outcomes, right? If I'm your VP of Engineering, and you come to me with a prescriptive way of solving a problem, I'm just going to say no, because I want an outcome, what are we trying to do? Because my team are experts, right? There are software engineers, that I have hired and spent all my time and effort creating a culture where they can maintain productivity and execute against your problems, as as a business, bring me the outcomes you're trying to you're trying to solve for. And I will in turn, make sure that they're happy, well fed, cared for excited, psychologically safe, focusing on root causes, as opposed to blaming people for issues, which is a big issue with infighting, right, that we have in our organization. Like, as a CIO, I have too many problems to worry about. Because you're managing like a group of people and people are very hard to deal with. Like I need, I need people to cut me some slack and, and make my job easier, right is what I'm telling others is make my life please don't make my life hard, where I have to manage you and also manage all these people that are just fighting. And it's it's fun. Yeah.
Karl Pierburg 33:13
So well said.
Maryfran Johnson 33:16
Well, we have a question from our alert and watching audience. And it actually goes back to something we touched on earlier for an organization of AMB sports, his size and kind, how are the responsibility split between the CTO and the CIO? Yeah, that's, that's an that seems to be a very important way that you're making it all work. So talk about that in a little more detail.
Karl Pierburg 33:39
For us, the way we split that up is, it's probably a little too generic but but I'll put it this way as primary a CIO is primarily run the business CTO is a little bit more broad the business in their focus. I don't focus a ton on things that I don't support things. Generally speaking, I'm buying Strategic Initiatives expore, can we execute on them, you know, make sure that we connect up into our business into sustainable, integrated ways that use our existing systems, philosophies, security requirements, all that kind of stuff. And then we turn them over and operationalize them. And we start on the next thing, we also handle things like data analytics, will be probably driving AI for the most part, things like that. Our CIO handles, you know, infrastructure, making sure that we're like, you know, the things that the lights have to stay on to do like that as his job. And frankly, it's awesome because I've got great partners and both Danny branch and Kevin Pope are kind of reforming our current CIO like we have d spend so like I have, I have drinks with him after we don't drink as much as it's portrayed on this podcast, but we're going out right after this just because we catch up like Hey, what are you working on? What are you thinking about? We just we're constantly pushing on each other on Hey, how can we get better here? But Kevin jobs to make sure that hey, we can sell you know, we can sell hot dogs. As on Sunday, we have tickets up on Sunday, you guys in mind is like, Hey, here's a new way we can sell hotdogs, here's a new way, and it's gonna eventually fit in and really make a difference for us. business wise. So that's kind of where I would split that up. It's probably not the gardener answer, but thank you do it.
Maryfran Johnson 35:19
I know. And the second question we have, and this one is even more fun. It's another question for Karl, do you foresee integrating fantasy games for the fans, giving them rich hybrid experience of fans attending games at the stadium? And also playing games? Talk about multitasking, right? You're
Karl Pierburg 35:39
getting a couple of answers from me on this, right. I'm 47 years old, I grew up working for a football team. And so because of that, like I absolutely hate fantasy, because you should be rooting for a team, not a player. And like, that's just old man yells at Cloud, you know, kind of, right. So I just wanted to state that. So you guys have like a where I'm coming from. When it comes to integrating it. We know that fans when they come to the stadium, like they do a myriad of things. And I was looking for the numbers right before and I couldn't find it. But we do terabytes of data over our networks, major events. And so we know things like, you know, fantasy and social and video uploads and all that stuff, we have to facilitate that. Because they want to do that. As far as integrating some of that stuff in I think that's where we got to look at where's the value add for us. I'm a big fan of let's find the things that people do well, and then if it's if it adds, let's bring it in and do it, but like, you know, for example, I don't know what value you get by going to the Falcons to manage your, your fantasy app, or your fantasy team and see what's going on there. Right, just give it to a better we I'd rather partner with them, you know, advertise with them, gain them as a sponsor, support them that way and let them kind of drive and do things that way, then make for frankly, would be a subpar product that other people do really, really well. To know that we need to support them from the base kind of activity, how they use our stadium perspective, they can't get online, if they can't check their stats, if they can't send that video to, you know, it's over. Okay.
Maryfran Johnson 37:17
Now, actually, that segues really nicely into something I wanted to ask about as well. And it has to do with behaviors, fan behaviors, the industry, your industry is very much back to business as usual. You know, sports events, and concerts are sold out and in person and all that. But the fan behaviors have changed in the post pandemic era. We talked about this a little get into that a bit about what has changed? And what does that what kind of ripple effect does that have on what you need to do? Yeah,
Karl Pierburg 37:47
you know, I think one of the things that we've seen is I think fans expect a little more, which is great. I think fans expect us to know a little bit more about them, I think that is becoming more and more table stakes is they don't want to be treated like fan 107320, which is my you know, my ticket master ID number. They don't want to be treated more as hey, this is Karl at the very least, and introduce some things that way. And frankly, that's where I think, you know, when we start talking about you know, frictionless and biometrics and fan experience, there's really kind of two levers we really know that we need to pull as we're hitting on those use cases. One is personalization. Just making people feel special in big or little ways right can be as little as your name on the screen. One of my favorite moments when we're implementing Delta fly through registering as a pilot is a woman walked up she she had her first thing she did she had her face come up and said her name and she goes shit knows me and was like, those are the moments when they when when they see their name there for TIG isn't the guy high fives is three friends that are with him like those are the cool moments that just you don't get from you know business as usual. And then the event will go all the way up into I'm gonna be careful here but like getting respected purpose valued value proved me generative AI on making sure that we're communicating with our fans, we're sending the right messages to them, especially when it involves the event day experience. You know, there's there's we got stats all over the place, but But 75% of the people that park at Mercedes Benz on game day, by their parking that day and don't realize how far out they need to park. A lot of those fans that don't have this number of majority, those fans get their tickets transferred to them or buy them within 48 hours of the event. We've got to be responsive and agile to message those fans and say, Look, if you're parking don't come all the way downtown because you're just gonna have to turn around and go back out to one of these slots. Use one of these six lots. Here's a coupon for that code. But if Jeremy is coming in, he's a season ticket member I can't send him that message. Because I will lose all credibility instead of Jeremy. I gotta Say, Hey, we just implemented a new license plate scanner at our gates, let me know your license plate number and you'll be able to pull right in. And you'll do that right, I need to be able to say, hey, welcome Jeremy to the event, here's an extra five bucks, because you're here early, get a beer on us or get a soda on us probably.
Maryfran Johnson 40:16
There's also a lot more expectation that things can be delivered in the moment, right? It's not it, that was one of the points you made that, you know, the generations of season ticket holders buying things months in advance that change during the pandemic.
Karl Pierburg 40:34
opportunist is the the, the persona that we can call that they're looking for, and can do it and how do those fans react in Go, and they're not going to be in season ticket members, but they are going to be the ones that take advantage of things and interact and pay attention. And it's funny, when you talk about, you know, the ability to reply in real time you have to stay in that moment. That's been a big capability we've had to build out is that ability to communicate and respond and even have awareness in near real time. Believe it or not, we're still a lot of our business that's on that 24 hour, you know, do you know, 2005 ETL structure where you load in a flat file at 3am? kick off a job at 4am? Right? I mean, still a lot of that here. Yeah. So okay,
Maryfran Johnson 41:24
let's and that reminds me to I often ask my CTOs and my CIO guests to talk about what the digital business model means to their particular industry or company. And when you think about the Falcons and doing digital business, what comes to mind? What is different about how you look at it now versus say, a few years ago?
Karl Pierburg 41:47
Yeah, I mean, again, I think when I think about especially our fans, it's all about, you know, learning as much as we can about our fans in ways that are respectful and privacy minded. In to facilitate meaningful conversation, to get them the information they want, and to orchestrate amazing experiences that deliver them the products they want. I would say that that's probably what digital means to us. In that spot. Probably the the other side of that is operationally, making sure that we run the most operationally efficient stadium in the world so that when we do things like flip from a Saturday or Sunday game, we get the insights we get the data we get everything we need to deliver it in the in the in the ways we need it so that we can make the right decisions. You know, we can we don't do this yet. But our ability to adjust product or offerings, based on the people coming in, that's an opportunity there. We have fan friendly pricing and retracement same, so we probably won't look at using that data to tweak pricing levels. You can come to our stadium and get a hotdog and a beer and pay you know seven bucks for combined like for everything. It's a great place to watch a game you really need to be here. So we're not going to look at Hey, you know the CIO leadership live crowds coming in, let's jack up prices, you know, 20 we're more looking at, hey, you know, Jeremy's a season ticket member has been with us for five years, let's make sure we're giving him a little something extra on the side.
Maryfran Johnson 43:24
Everybody loves a coupon, don't pay just a
Karl Pierburg 43:27
little something. Let you know that hey, we know you. We care about you. You're so fun. And then for us that helps us generate a digital touch points. We can understand what you value in what you like and some of your preferences. Well,
Maryfran Johnson 43:39
in the use of that word orchestration that I know that came up a lot when we were getting ready for this show. And then I wondered Is that becoming the Chief Technology Officers essentially becoming more and more immersed in orchestration of this sort of work with the data and all? Is that a very common problem that other CTOs and CIOs across the sports and events industry are solving these days?
Karl Pierburg 44:09
I think we're ahead of the curve a little bit on that. I think we're seeing a little bit early sports lags in general, because we because we can mean Atlanta has an interesting challenge in that we don't have 100,000 person waiting list like the Pittsburgh Steelers do. We got to work to keep our fans happy. And we do we have amazing teams here to make Arish who leads our fan experience group and I'm sorry for my well announced but they're out there but you know, they work they work their tails off to do things keep our fans interested excited. We're number two in the NFL and fan experience and we should have been number one or number one last year and over numbers went up but another stadium I'm not gonna say who they were. They went up just as well. I mean that's like the battle for the fan you know, experienced there but
Maryfran Johnson 44:58
yeah, Well, Battle of the Bands can be fun for everybody, in a way. Yeah. Well, one of the points you made Jeremy, when we were talking earlier, you said seeing both Karl and AMB and the Falcons embrace this approach to kind of doing it right from the developer perspective, that kind of incredible amounts of time and data collected and then using it in a really good way. It talk about that a little bit more, I take it that you don't see that with everybody you work with.
Jeremy Duvall 45:29
I think it's a it's a constant battle, right? ambc special in the entire sports entertainment sector is special, because it's so data driven. You need to know, as Karl mentioned about your fans to provide them a good experience to be a good host right? To give them that free hot dog on the side when they show up and they're a season ticket holder. Not every industry is that driven to be focused on that type of of activity. I will say, though, that you said that sports lags a little bit, Karl, I think for y'all, I'm gonna disagree, you all are on that cutting edge. Because a lot of the companies that I still work with have challenges dealing with multiple integration points across all the SAS products that people are buying these days, you know, gone are the days of build, where build is favored when you're talking build versus buy, the software industry is is combinatorial exploded with products that solve your problem. And corresponding salespeople that are selling you that product, then you really have to think about integration as being a key piece of your digital strategy as a CIO, right? You know, you're holding your your leads into Salesforce, and you're turning around and pushing that somewhere else. And then you want to take all this data and build some model on top of it to say, what are my customer personas? Who am I trying to go after? What's What do they care about? How do I find those right buyers for my product XYZ and ABC, so So I think you know that the challenge is still there. And I find that specifically at ABC, y'all do a really good job of that of taking all of these disparate pieces of information and folding them into something that adds value. So I would look to you as a case study on how to do it, right, because you guys have done a fantastic job.
Karl Pierburg 47:13
Appreciate that, we got to show the outcome of that, you know, and because we are pushing that. And I think for me, in particular, like I see integrations and our ability to handle integrations as a core capability that we need to start picking up work historically, that has been a use case that you've pushed off to your vendors, right, I've got these three key products, you guys need to integrate with each other. And I'll figure it out. And you know, maybe I'm paying a big fee for that. Maybe y'all are paying a big fee for that. And we're planning on doing something else. But what we're seeing now, especially since COVID, is not covered COVID at all, it's because of the maturity in the development cycle. Here's one all of these products are investing heavily into that integration layer and capabilities. So everybody has that. And two, they want to focus on their core product and not necessarily on integrations or the integration that's becoming a whole separate business unit form, which are two different things. But by us can leaning into that in our ability to handle that it allows us to create a much more composable ecosystem here that lets us think more about how do we put a best of breed situation in place? How do we do better experimentation? Because we're not I'm not having to say hey, I want to test out autonomous bartending, hey, go partner with my biometrics company and do a full integration there. It's no it's, you know, hey, Jeremy's team, you know, here's our API endpoint for our biometric authentication. Here's our payment endpoint. Here's our connective tissue layer, how do we make this work? And that's, to me where that where that's so important, and it's, we're able to do it now. Because we're no longer dealing with like, DICOM and, you know, trying to integrate with stuff on servers that are behind 17 firewalls and in a different, you know, PCI compliant zone or dealing with API's that are sitting on a SaaS host. It's, you know, sending, you know, a SaaS based solution that it's just a matter of getting the right credentials to
Jeremy Duvall 49:12
You said, DICOM my brain just shut down. I'm sorry. No, no
Karl Pierburg 49:15
fun. No,
Maryfran Johnson 49:17
you to know exactly. You to know exactly what that means. But I'd be really hard put to tell you much about DICOM. certainly sounds like the role of data architecture is pretty key here. Talk a little bit about that.
Jeremy Duvall 49:35
Do you want to take that first girl, you got here the data guy? Come on. You're
Karl Pierburg 49:38
the nerd that says so eloquently. I'm like a state school. You're like a Princeton guy. Whatever.
Maryfran Johnson 49:45
You know, Karl, I think you've been talking pretty well so far. Take this one first. Then I grew
Jeremy Duvall 49:51
up in a trailer in north Georgia and my southern is going to come out here and I'm good.
Maryfran Johnson 49:56
You both had been saying y'all The more relaxed you get. So And
Karl Pierburg 50:00
that's for sure. By birth. So
Maryfran Johnson 50:04
my, my favorite one of those is all y'all got a whole round of people who wants to talk about data architecture, I
Jeremy Duvall 50:14
will start. So data is a glacier. Everybody knows that data is hard. So I'm a back end developer by trade, just so y'all know, I'm the guy that would talk to the database people and say, Hey, this is the schema I want to implement. And they would tell me no, and go rebuild it and hand it back to me right back in the day when I was doing my rounds at various clients. So data architecture, to me is incredibly important to get right up front, I've always been slightly more meticulous than your average software engineer when we're talking about data, because there's a lot of really cool technologies out there, like code first design, which you know, Entity Framework does that and Hibernate has a little bit of that, too. Rails is great at sort of providing active records type stuff, and again, I'm spouting off nonsense, Mary friend. But the the idea here is that data is something that has to be focused on early. And since we had the data warehousing boom, again, yet another technology boom, in our lifetimes, that produced this thought process of okay, we need to mine our data for interesting things, to then turn into business value, it's even that much more important, especially with AI sort of, again, exploding onto the scene. Now it's even 100 times more important that your data is good. With AI, you can be a little bit more sloppy, because AI is smart, and it can train on models and things and figure out based on unstructured data, what you're trying to do, but data architecture is a thing that I like to focus on when I'm talking to to CIO clients or friends or whatever. Whenever we're building a new platform or a new product data architecture is one of the things that we sit down and have a chat around. How do we make sure that this is extensible moving forward? And how do we make sure that we can mine this? That's a question you weren't asking 10 years ago, is 10 years ago, it's about how do I get it into persistence? That's all that matters, that my data is there, and my OLTP is doing the thing. And then OLAP came along, and people were talking about cubes and crazy business analytic stuff. In 2024, what we care about is how do we turn data into a monetized business proposition. And I think that we got to be careful about that. Because there's privacy implications, and as you all discussed, but it's it's a very, very important thing to focus on when you're building your product, or you're adding on to your existing product to get that right out the gate. So you can feed that into your analytics team. Yeah. So the
Karl Pierburg 52:22
other area when it comes to data architecture is becoming more and more a word that I use all the time. And I can't quite figure out how to actually implement it yet. But as data governance, that's hard. I think that's what data governance at scale is going to be the next kind of layer two data architecture about what is this data? Is it accurate? What's in it? How do we get to it, who's using et cetera. And it's going to really take off with some of the automated tools that are coming out there, you already have it with the CO Libras. And everything else in your view is going to be Microsoft's attempt that they rebrand at some point a year and a half from now. And it's something else, it actually sticks in that data architecture is really important. And then the other area, though, that I think we talked integrations is equally important is system architecture, understanding how you're moving stuff from one system to another. And that requires you to obviously have a good understanding of the data architecture of both systems, or at least the interface, you know, all those two. But how are you transferring that data? How are you making sure that you know again, that's right, that holistic view of your business is so important, and it's so hard, it hurts, right? But you got to be, you know, A, B, C, D, E, and like, alright, we needed to end up down here, but it's got a pinball through. It's like playing games or something. He's kind of kind of figure that out.
Maryfran Johnson 53:38
Okay, well, let's now I want to pivot over to AI. And I'm reminded one of the quotes I have from Karl, when we talked earlier, you said today AI is kind of dumb. And I'm gonna make you extend on that a little bit. And but Consequently, it really is going to be some very big changes in more probably than any part of the IT world, or the technology world developers are affected by this. And there's so many, there's so much care and feeding around the right or the wrong data ending up in your in your large language models. So I'm sure you didn't mean anything quite as simplistic as I threw it out there car, but Go, go ahead and tell us about where you are with AI.
Karl Pierburg 54:26
So AI city has anything you look at now has AI worked into some kind of tagline, some kind of something. And when you talk with people, it just seems like people have learned that they can use the word AI and they it's like their genie in a bottle that gets them what they want. And it means that you can avoid certain things and not having to do things like Hey, what are you actually wanting to do? And what is the data actually and I get that there's, like, it's probably not as like, I definitely think about things in rows and tables a little bit, right. I know that There's a rigidity to me that I need to soften on. But like when I have a coach come in a man, I want to use AI to tell us what plays to call them like, right? If you just don't, you don't you don't say, hey, point to this and say what place should I run? Like there's some, some work involved in that. And some of that work involves, you know, again, some of the data architecture, data governance and making sure that we've got the right things are some of that is in, make sure that the outcomes determine that we want to get to and be out there. But I think I think it's it's one of those things to where it's almost like when you have that friend that said, Hey, let's go build an app. And it's yeah, it's it's a great idea. And it's good. And we need to build an app. But like, you don't just buy there's so much that goes into it. That's do it correctly. It's almost like over simplified. Yes,
Jeremy Duvall 55:47
I record with Keith a lot on this on the TECHtalk show.
Probably, yeah, my editor, and I just sit around and I talk to them, and they just write whatever nonsense comes out of my mouth. Maybe I said it, maybe not. But he's smarter than me. Now, I think, you know, and the funny thing, Karl, I hadn't heard that before. So here's a fun thought exercise. What if two coaches are using AI to call plays? What's gonna happen? Exactly, they're probably just going to deadlock and you're just going to run the perfect place, you have a zero sum game, it's not fun. Nobody wants to watch and make so you know, yeah. AI is one of those things that you know, I studied AI in school where I have a master's degree in computer science I'm so I took AI with Charles this bell, who's amazing human being. And I implemented all those algorithms, or I wrote using a framework K Means I spent times understanding what these things do. And it's all statistics. It's all math, it's very, very cool. And it can add immense value to humanity once we figure out all of the rules and regulations around it. But I agree with Karl right now, AI is dumb. It's just a buzzword that people use to sell you their product. And we're going to figure this out, right in probably five or 10, I don't know, five or 10 months, somewhere in there will be like, alright, we're kind of heading on that adoption curve. We know that AI is good for things we know, it's great for increasing developer productivity. We know it's awesome for solving this, this base set of problems in our world. And it's going to become the next tool that everybody uses to make their lives better. The thing I love the most about AI as specifically chat GPT is it solves a lot of human computer interaction problems that people have with computers, right? I studied HCI in my undergrad, and what that basically is speaking to as, can my grandmother, jump on my computer and talk to it and say I want to learn a new recipe for cornbread. And all of a sudden, it's like, here you go, you can do that. Now, that's amazing. That's really cool. I used to do this with Wikipedia, because I'm a nerd. And I just read Wikipedia for whatever reason. So now you have a computer that you can talk to that can give you information in a real time way that you can learn it has a huge implications in education is huge implications across the entire spectrum of technology. But as of right now, be wary if anybody tax AI on the end of their product name, you should be like, Oh, do you really know what you're doing? Well, it's
Karl Pierburg 58:25
like there's a legitimate, like AI can solve a ton of problems. And like 100%, we'll be using AI to help us understand and analyze and hey, is this an effective play call against this defense, given the historical context of who we're going against what formations we come out in what defense they're playing? And you know, what 100% will be some of that out there. Yes. But it's not quite as simple as saying, hey, what's the play called to rise? Well, it. It will start there, get there,
Jeremy Duvall 58:52
but it'll get there. But yeah, that's a reductionist view. And I think it's just because people don't understand it. And as it as more information gets out there and people start understanding what it is and what this tool is good for. Just like when the iPhone came out, it's a little bit easier to understand what you do with an iPhone, it's a phone, but there's also so many implications to the platform. And, you know, I have a calculator in my pocket now, which I didn't have when I was growing up growing up, right. I grew up as a millennial. I didn't have the internet. If I wanted a calculator had to go to my car and get one now I just want my phone out. And I can do like, complex algebra on my phone if I want to.
Maryfran Johnson 59:22
Yeah, and it's more of a supercomputer in your pocket now. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I just when I think about the potential of technology and some of the obvious things we all want to get to. I always think of a story from when my son was probably three years old, and he had put a VCR tape anybody remember VCR which is your VCR tape in to watch? I think it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And he stood there looking at it for a minute and then he leaned over and he said play and he is today senior software engineer at Google. And so you know the the the way technology is advancing and the the way it remains so fascinating to talk about, I think has been very well demonstrated by you both today. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for the CIO leadership live. Episode. It's been wonderful having you here.
Karl Pierburg 1:00:18
Thanks for having me and hang out with J. I'll do it. So let's go do it.
Maryfran Johnson 1:00:21
There you go.
Jeremy Duvall 1:00:22
There he goes after this, right beers after this.
Karl Pierburg 1:00:27
Wildly Atlanta at five o'clock. So I
Maryfran Johnson 1:00:30
do think we've used the word beer more often on this episode shouldn't
Karl Pierburg 1:00:34
be with developers. Writing code is spot on sports is fun, the two together should be really fun. And it's not. So well.
Maryfran Johnson 1:00:44
And I've enjoyed learning so much more about the developer experience and how we need to focus on that. And a lot of it does seem to boil down to treating people like the be incredibly smart human beings that they are
Karl Pierburg 1:00:58
going to be creative and letting them build. I'll say one last thing about that. When we look for technical people, we look for analysts and football, analysts love coming to work force I go, I can work in sports killer, I'll do it. When we go to developers, developers could give two s--s if they come to work in sports or not. They want to build and create and have an environment where they can do that. That's all that they care about. And if it's a sports cool if it's if it's, you know, healthcare cool. They just want to be able to do cool things. And that's been true for a while.
Jeremy Duvall 1:01:30
Purpose, right? Yep. Some industries get this a little bit a better rap than others. And I do agree. It's all about the culture that you provide and good leadership and can I come in and do something fun? Yep. Okay.
Maryfran Johnson 1:01:41
All right, good. Well, this has really been fun with both of you today. So thank you. Yeah. If you joined us late today, do not despair. You can watch the full episode later here today on LinkedIn, but also on cio.com. And of course on CIOs channel on YouTube. Leadership live is also available as an audio podcast wherever you find your podcasts. And I hope that you enjoyed this double barreled conversation about developers with CTO, Karl Pierburg of AMB sports and entertainment and CEO Jeremy Duvall of 7Factor Software. We're going to be back again next month on Wednesday, March 20, at noon, Eastern with Karen Higgins Carter, who is the CIO of Gilbane Building Company. So we'll be talking a lot about the construction industry and some of the issues going on there. Please do take a moment to subscribe to CIOs YouTube channel, where you can find more than 125. Similarly fascinating episodes and conversations of CIO leadership live. And we also have expanded around the world. There's now six international editions of leadership live podcast in places like Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the Middle East. So join us we'll be watching for you and thanks for watching us today.