How Data Management Lessons from the Air Force Helped Grow a Telecom

[00:00:00] Mike: As a business leader, you don’t have your fingertips on the data. You’re basically looking at the history. You’re looking at a snapshot of the history that’s conformed to the way the business used to be. And so when I was brought in, it was like, how can we modernize this so that instead of having data pushed to us, we can pull it, but we not only pull it, but we can pull it in different perspectives.

[00:00:21] Exacaster: Welcome to CVM stories, the podcast on customer value management. Together, we explore how companies can be more successful and their customers happier through the use of the latest customer value management techniques. Learn key commercial and analytical insights from telecoms, retail, finance and other industries that drive CVM forward.

[00:00:40] Egidijus: Hi, I’m your host, Egidijus. Today we are talking with Mike Burkes, senior VP of Enterprise Information Management at Ultra mobile. Mike will share his experience on how data management contributes to business growth and can even save lives. The lessons that he will share will come from serving in US Air Force and working in companies such as Toyota. Join us to learn simple steps to data transformation, from building the right tech to improving data processes to growing strong data teams. So let’s dive in. So thank you, Mike, for joining us today. I know it’s super. I know that it’s a super early morning for you. Uh, it’s I think we have, I don’t know, 11 hours difference here. So, usually when we start the podcast, I love, uh, crunching some numbers and calculating, you know, what is our guest experience? Um, but this, in this time, I will only say that I think you have more experience in data field than I do in my life. So I will try to learn from you today as much as I can. Um, so, Mike, could you share a bit of your career story, uh, with our audience?

[00:02:08] Mike: Sure, sure. Thank you. Yeah. If you count washing dishes and counting the dishes. When I was 12 and started in a family restaurant. Yes, I probably do have that. But. No. I think my career really started when I joined the Air Force. I it’s an interesting background. My father had been a rodeo rider in Oklahoma and had gotten hurt and couldn’t join the armed services during the Korean War. So he kind of ordained that I would make that a part of my life. So I joined right after, right out of high school and, uh, had a fascinating career. I joined as a maintenance person, was later selected to be on the crew of Air Force One or on the support crew for Air Force One, and moved to Washington, DC and, uh, really had a great career doing that. During that time, I got a degree and took another special duty assignment, flying for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a plane called Project Speckled Trout as a Superintendent of Flight Test and Engineering. Just a fascinating unit. We would fly flight test all day and then our real job was flying. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff around on his endeavors, be them going to a wartime area to support the morale of the troop, or going overseas to negotiate with a company that we might be a country that we might be wanting to work with. So I think, you know, it was just an amazing career in teaching me kind of the life and death of data and how important data was in, you know, the performance of my duties, because certainly the flight tests that we were doing changed the world.

[00:03:43] Mike: Uh, after that, I retired from the Air Force at the ripe old age of 38 because I joined right out of high school, and I came back to work for the Air Force for a little while, um, and then got, uh, recruited by a company that I’d heard of before Toyota, and joined Toyota as a business intelligence person, really trying to help them get through the Y2K phenomenon that everybody was a little bit worried about. Um, so I came in right before that. I worked for them as a consultant for about ten months and then was hired and then had a great career at Toyota, supporting them, kind of growing data management and the thought of what data was to the organization. Um, I remember, you know, joining in early 2000. You know, and sitting down with one of the analysts and just showing them how they could, you know, use the data to kind of understand their operational efficiencies. And we found an issue that was causing them to overpay their rail carriers. And so within that first week, I was able to show that analyst how they could save the company millions of dollars annually in doing that. And it really was exciting to me because it was really putting data to work for them. Toyota, decided to kind of relocate their, operating facilities from the West Coast and from the middle of the United States is where their plants were to Dallas, Texas. And because I had had my family chase me around and my Air Force career, I decided to stay in Southern California. Uh, that led to me applying for and getting accepted at a small company called UVNV, which was really Ultra mobile at that time, and it was a small MVNO that, was, you know, under, one of the major networks that really kind of focused their energy toward giving phone service to folks that were expatriates that come to the United States to work here and wanted to call overseas.

[00:05:44] Mike: Our leadership was really, really skilled and understanding kind of the challenges and had worked to provide a low cost service. Very shortly after I joined here, Mint Mobile was launched and Mint Mobile was really the very first online um service where people could go online, order a SIM, and actually put it in their phones. Unlike the rest of the world, the United States had always kind of catered to folks going into a brick and mortar store and handing, you know, a kid their phone where they would do the SIM swap and make this magical, you know, uh, change. And then they would hand you back a phone that worked with a different carrier. Um, we did a lot of videos. We did a lot of marketing to kind of help people understand how simple it was. And, you know, Mint Mobile was launched, of course, shortly after Mint Mobile was launched, we went into this worldwide kind of drawdown with Covid 19, and here we were as a marketing company that was exclusively online. And so our business focus and that takes me to today, where I lead the enterprise information management team at Mint Mobile, Ultra Mobile. And it’s just a great group of folks. We provide business intelligence, data science, data services, data engineering, data architecture, quality and governance to the organization.

[00:07:05] Egidijus: So, as it promised in the beginning, your career is extremely rich with very, very, very different. I don’t know, assignments and different challenges. Uh, one totally random question is like, for example, what did you take from military, let’s say, to telco, you know, what did you learn about the data there that you can use in your existing job? You know?

[00:07:34] Mike: Yeah, it was interesting. I think the military, you know, you take the flight test engineering part of it, which was really something that, um, you know, like I said, was really taking life or death situations, understanding how important it was to be accurate how important it was to take your time and go slow and make sure everything would work, um, exquisitely so that you didn’t put people in danger unnecessarily. I flew on a platform that was a large, you know, commercial, like a 707, uh, airliner. And, you know, that platform was safe for me to fly test, but I was actually writing programs that would then be transferred over to a fighter. And we were asking pilots to turn upside down, crashing toward the ground and trust that our data was going to let them recover when a warning went off. And so when you’re doing things like that, you have to be precise, you have to have many eyes on it. You have to have folks that look over your shoulder all the time. So you go from that very, um, I don’t know that I could have made the transition directly from the military to, uh, to UVNV had I not gone to Toyota, because Toyota brought a very, very conservative nature to how we looked at things. Toyota is a company that I absolutely love. They really taught me that, you know, take your time, get it right, and make sure that you’re putting the best possible product out there in front of the consumer.

[00:08:59] Mike: Because, again, Toyota is in the business of making sure that they were protecting forces life. And so you go from a very, very rigid, strategic, you know, strategic looking at data, um, you know, for future programs to Toyota, which was very conservative. They looked at the data, they made sure a lot of what we did at Toyota was going back and understanding, you know, where things could have been made differently. So it was really an innovation, you know, trying to push and and drive innovation. And then you dump into, uh, the telco industry and especially in the, you know, industry, we are moving at a thousand miles a minute. We do more projects than, you know, the Air Force or the Toyota will do, because we’re just always constantly changing, trying to get the best product out there. We’re reacting to the competitors. So I think if I hadn’t had that background in experience and that background and kind of getting a hunch as to when things were going right, and even the process building that I learned in both of his experience, being able to take that process and put it into UVNV or Ultra allowed me then to scale quickly because because of the process I had learned, because of the recognition of the importance of data, you are always following processes to scale. You’re not having to add people. You’re adding, you know, better processes and finding those.

[00:10:23] Egidijus: Mhm. And talking about Ultra I know that when you joined it was a pretty small company compared to where you are right now. And it has a really unique growth as a telco nowadays. Could you share a bit of your perspective. What is the role of, let’s say, enterprise data management in that type of organization where everything is, you know, growing like crazy. The needs are like crazy. So.

[00:11:01] Mike: Sure. Well, I think, you know, when I joined and I think the reason they were looking to hire someone that had come in with a lot of experience. But when I joined, we were still pushing reports out to folks, not not, you know, saying anything against the tool. But we use Microsoft Reporting Services. And so every morning our executives would walk in to their offices, they would open up emails, and they would be literally tens to hundreds of reports that we had generated overnight to tell them where the business is. Um, you know, as a, as a business leader, I guess it’s fine. But you don’t have your fingertips on the data. You’re basically looking at the history. You’re looking at a snapshot of the history that’s conformed to the way the business used to be. And so when I was brought in, it was like, how can we modernize this so that instead of having data pushed to us, we can pull it? But we not only pull it, but we can pull it in different perspectives. So being able to quickly chin up, you know, a reporting environment where a business owner could come in, a commercial owner could come in and they could look at the state of their business. They could drill into what they were seeing in their business. They could pick up the phone and say, hey, I’m seeing this. What do you think? And then a team of analysts could go and dig into it to give them the insights. I think that’s really what helped to allow us to be nimble. And I’m taking no credit for their growth, because that was really the thought and leadership of our leaders that, you know, really kind of set a path forward and executed on that plan.

[00:12:29] Mike: But I do know that data really helped them in that decision, you know, being truly a data driven decision. Um, you know, when you’re looking at it, you can , as an example, if you’re going to offer services and discount pricing for international, being able to show them what the risk was, what the value was of that, you know, what the potential market was for that. That was great churn in the end, you know, is always something that we have to deal with. Being able to segment the users and being able to help understand, you know, and we had some work from some of our great partners to go out and even look and look at our partners in the retailer space and segment the retailers to say, hey, this person is always going to bring in a high quality. This person is always going to bring in somebody that will probably churn quickly. They’re probably somebody that’s visiting from the United, you know, from outside the United States that come in for a couple of weeks and they’re going to be gone. Expect high churn, expect revenue from this group. Where is this team is really, really focused on building a good brand and a good business for you. And in the middle you have folks that were playing the spiff or the incentive markets, right? So I think just helping to recognize those patterns and put them into data and then again, being able to do it quickly is really what kind of helped the success. And, you know, to your point, at the start of Covid, we were a team of 140 as a business and now we’re over 700. So certainly grew, you know, as our business grew during that time.

[00:13:55] Egidijus: Mhm.

[00:13:55] Egidijus: And so it seems like you know um the data guys in this situation are the most um, kind of wanted guys in the room because as you said, you serve from strategic decisions where you want to kind of make sure that the management has data necessary to kind of pull the triggers for the next growth. And you have kind of all the CVM, ammunition, customer value management initiatives, you have all the fraud, uh, perspectives, etc.. So, how do you manage to serve all those, you know, stakeholders at the same time? And from the situation when you are getting Excel files as emails to the situation where they have, let’s say, capability to self-serve for a huge portion of of their work.

[00:14:52] Mike: Yeah. I think, you know, I think we certainly leaned a little bit on technology. We we leveraged highly data virtualization because not only is your business changing, the background of your business is changing. When I joined Altra, we were on prem data center using, you know, uh, very old methods to, to do things. Now we’re completely in the cloud using Node.js, you know, and so we’ve kind of evolved over time. And it was really important that we add first. The first thing I saw was we had to add a semantic layer that really kind of protected the business from the churn of what was going on in the background as we moved from, you know, kind of the monolith type architecture to a distributed services architecture, where the services are very, very light by nature to and they’re, you know, they’re being developed by different development pods, by nature for the speed expedient of delivering them. It was really important that we kept that semantic layer in place, so that the data would always bubble up to the business in something that they could look at and trust. Um, as we kind of matured around this and matured around our data governance and data quality monitoring, it became very important for us to come out and say, okay, here is a platinum set of data so you can get gross adds from many, many different places.

[00:16:06] Mike: But if you pick this gross add number, then we are monitoring it from end to end. We understand the lineage of how that came, and we understand if there’s a failure within that lineage because there’s so many things that can go bump in the night. You can have a failure in your process, and you can have a failure in your credit card process, and you get a failure in the middle of processing a lot of things that could maybe impact that number. So we open it up and you see what my net adds are negative today. Well, that’s because we’re missing these components of it. So it’s something we, you know, we don’t need to to worry about or know not everything’s golden. And yes, you have a negative net adds. So we need to kind of drill in and give you the capability to look and see where that came from.

[00:16:47] Egidijus: Mhm. Yeah. Could we dig a bit deeper into the data governance and data quality aspect. Kind of if uh um, the functions that does not understand how the data is produced and extracted, let’s say from the source system etc., and you typically don’t understand what does, why do we need the data governance and why do we need the data quality is because when you move from, let’s say, a very fast report that you get in Excel on the early in the morning to the situation, when you say, okay, to produce this report, we’ll need to make extra steps. We’ll need to make extra data tests on those reports, making sure that they are correct, etc.. So could you dive deeper why it is so important to have the data governance and that data quality part.

[00:17:42] Mike: Sure. I think I mean, I think you as you explained it, you know, data originates at the source in many different ways, and especially when you move into a microservices where you’ve got, you know, a lot of little discrete services that are trying to maybe and maybe those discrete services will have a key so that they operate with the other piece of information that they’re being tied to. Um, when you look at those and you, you know, make your own decision about where you pick the information coming from, you are putting the potential out there that you’re going to pick at the wrong place before that curation is completely happened. As an example, if you just take an order that comes through E-com and says, oh, that’s a sale, you’re ignoring the fact that that has to go through a credit card processing, that has to approve the sale. It has to go through a process where potentially the customer doesn’t receive the SIM. So there’s a shipping issue there where they might come back to us. You go through a process where maybe they do receive the SIM and for some reason it doesn’t work in the area, so they request a refund. So when you look at all that and your understanding how to basically come out and say this is a successful sale to a successful channel of our business that got us a successful product, it really is important that you understand all the nuances of how that happens. I thought it was important to use tools to be able to put in front of the business, you know, what was going on.

[00:19:02] Mike: And actually, I probably in my decision making of how we went forward, probably delayed the business a bit because we kind of struggled with some of the tools. It was very important to me as an example, that we had lineages, um, not all the tools, unless you’re on a single stack, which I would assume that probably many Indians aren’t on single stack architectures because they’re probably using, you know, the the most viable but probably cheapest tools out there. So they’re not investing in the end to end SAP type type environments. Um, when you’re doing that, you run the risk that maybe connectors don’t work as well as they should. So maybe it’s hard to pull lineages from certain pieces. Maybe you’re using technology that is a little bit advanced, or maybe it’s a little bit old. And so the support for that technology is not there. But I think it was really important that we, you know, be able to get a group of folks into the room, sit down and show the lineages, show them the importance, show them how we were thinking of organizing the data and then getting their feedback. It’s also important when something comes up and says, okay, we can’t get a piece of information in in this timely of manner. What does it mean? Is it something we should prioritize doing, or is it something that we can push off in a priority and get it, you know, later in the cycle? So having those business owners that are engaged, they become self teachers to their, you know, to their own.

[00:20:24] Mike: So there’s somebody that the business can go up to because they understand the data. Um, so I think it’s, you know, I think it’s been really important to kind of bring the business along, create ownership for the data so that when a new project comes in, you can sit down with that group and say, okay, this is going to touch customer data. You own customer data. What are this new project? Do you want to see? Let’s use for an example. Um, you know, potentially we run out like a white glove program for helping some of our customers. A service that we could sell to add a little bit of revenue. But, you know, how important is it to understand, you know, how often do they use it? What’s the cost of them using it? How many times are they calling care? Are we getting the value that we expected from this? And so tying that all together to kind of help the business to understand if it’s a successful program or not, you know, not successful. I think that’s really kind of the business value that we’ve brought. Um, and getting the governance and getting the stewardship because otherwise you’re just, you know, folks looking at data. Um, you love data, and, you know, anybody that’s a data guy or gal loves data. So anything they see, they might want to just throw out there. But it sometimes becomes noise if it’s not curated in the right way. And it doesn’t support a business purpose.

[00:21:35] Egidijus: And I assume that there is some adoption process, uh, which happens in an organization, because if you used to get, I don’t know, a report and now you say, okay, you are a citizen of all this data ecosystem, here are some tools for you to consume the data there are your inputs necessary, etc.. How did that process work? Like what are the challenges to adopt kind of to onboard, let’s say the rest of the organization’s functions to uh, to this.

[00:22:10] Mike: You know, I think I think one of the biggest challenges and kind of getting to a roundabout answer to your question, but one of the biggest challenges when you do allow curation of data and you do allow self-service and you’re trying to make data ubiquitous, then you have a lot of folks that will go out and they’ll kind of download that golden standard of data, and they’ll make some changes of it to kind of suit their needs, and they become important and listened to and successful. And suddenly those reports might be as trusted as some of the things that are being pulled from here. But as an example, if your area doesn’t need one sales channel engaged in that report, you might have limited out that sales channel a long time ago, right? So now your reports are looking at a fraction of the business. So I think what is really important, as I said, is to kind of publish that gold standard. Here’s the numbers. You know what you might be hearing from Mike over here, you know, might be different when you’re hearing from John over here. But this is the standard of of reporting. And this is what, you know, we validate these numbers. We know they’re great. And we so it’s kind of a it’s kind of, you know, you want to encourage self-service. You want to encourage, you know, having that ability to go into data and pull it. But at the same time, you’ve got to manage and make sure that the business understands what is the true source.

[00:23:37] Egidijus: Mhm. Um, well, I bet this is a challenge because every time I get a report , you know, I want to do some kind of I have the way how I calculate my report.

[00:23:51] Mike: And I think a lot of that’s transparency right. So a lot of the reports that we’re putting out now is we kind of kind of understand. And so as an example, if we’re looking at our ECOM, we’ll show here’s the orders. Here’s the orders after credit card processing. Here’s the orders, you know, of refunds that were requested. Maybe somebody had buyer’s remorse. Maybe they were up at two in the morning and decide. Saw Ryan Reynolds commercial and decided to buy. Um, you know, a SIM card. And then when they woke up at six in the morning, they were. What did they do? So, you know, here’s the refunds that were processed. Here’s the shipping, you know, here’s what was shipped and successfully. Here’s your shipping orders that were returned, because maybe so when you look at that and you have a lineage. You can say, we started with X, we ended with Y. And here’s the journey between. And that really helps by delineating those journey, it really helps the business to come in and say, wow, we have a problem here. You know, we’re not seeing we’re not seeing the data flow through as it should. So we have a problem here. Maybe our shipping to activation is slow. Let’s understand, is this a shipping issue. Is it, you know, people get their SIM and we haven’t really prepped them on what to do with it, you know, is it an education issue? Is it a compatibility issue. So I think by breaking it down and just being completely transparent about every step of the way, it really helps, you know, it helps the the business to get confidence in what you’re reporting, but it helps them then narrow down on the focus on what is actually good or bad.

[00:25:17] Egidijus: So it seems like there’s quite a lot of alignment and educational work down the road happening. It’s not enough to throw the best tools to your stakeholders. And and then you kind of start the next journey. Yeah.

[00:25:34] Mike: Yeah. I think education in every organization that I’ve been a part of education around the data is extremely important. Right. Whether you’re whether you’re putting it there on the report and showing everything that’s limited, whether you’re building out confluence pages or, you know, whether you’re building an information portal that people can go to, or you’re leveraging tools that they can go to and understand, you know, kind of the the lineages and the definitions of the data. Education is extremely important.

[00:26:01] Egidijus: Mhm. And you also have been in an extremely unique position because over those years you did quite a lot of infrastructure changes, like from uh, taking the data from, source systems to building a data warehouse to pushing the data warehouse to the cloud and doing everything at the same time. When the organization grows like crazy. How did you manage that?

[00:26:31] Mike: Well it’s interesting. Yeah, because I think it’s a business first organization, right? I could not maybe at Toyota, I had the luxury of, you know, Toyota would create like a data warehousing project. Everybody understood that it was going to be this huge endeavor. Understood. Everybody understood there was going to be times of outages, times when we were going to have to convert. And we went through a couple of, you know, product conversions. At that time, I think we went from RedHat to Oracle. You know, one of the big things for our major data warehouses was probably the biggest one we did. And I remember during that project, you know, it was it was all very well planned out. It was executed, but there were downtimes, you know, we were downtimes as you were doing data when you shift forward to Ultra. And we wanted to move from Hadoop to Snowflake. Yeah. You can do it. We’re not going to stop any of the other projects. We’re not going to pause any of the other projects. And you can’t import you can’t impact our ability to report any given day. So it was kind of like, you can’t cause any downtime. If it’s something that you want to do, you know, then yes, you can spend the budget to do it, but you can’t impact us by having any downtime. So certainly added a lot of complexity to what we did. Um, certainly probably made us make some decisions to potentially do kind of the lift and shift before modifying. Um, but, you know, all in all, I think it was something that you just learned to kind of work around the parameters that the business will let you support. And you go from there.

[00:27:59] Egidijus: Mhm, I bet it’s quite a lot of pressure on the team as well, because kind of from the engineering perspective, as a team, you always want to make sure that you work in a good environment, like technically capable. The processes are running smooth and you are at the same time you need to serve the business. And now the transition is always kind of, I don’t know, um, uh, a huge overhead for the team. So, uh, how did you manage the balance? You know, in the team? How do you keep the team motivated, you know, to push, uh, for the result there?

[00:28:36] Mike: Well, I think especially now that I’m a leader, nobody turns to me for my technical advice anymore. And the folks that I’ve hired are so much smarter than I am, which is great. I mean, it’s fine, you know, to have the humbleness to recognize what they bring to the table. But I think it’s really all about hiring the right individuals and being honest with them as a leader. You know, I remember distinctly when, you know, working in the Air Force and this is, you know, kind of going back to a piece in time. But we would get our duties done at night. And I always worked the swing shift. So I worked 3:30 to 3:30 in the next morning if needed. We’d always get our duties done and, you know, we’d make sure the shop was clean and make sure everything was ready to go. And if it’s 10:00 at night and stuff is done, let people go, because you always know that there’s going to be that time that you’re going to need them to stay, you know, to the long hours of the morning to work on a problem. And so I think you build up that by showing the respect for your team and showing that you understand the struggles that they’re going through. To do that, I think you really have to kind of instill that when I hire folks, I’m the last person in the hiring process, and I try to scare them out of the job. I kind of, you know, bring him in and say, look, it’s going to be fantastically rewarding. This is a great group of people that we’re doing. We’re actually moving the needle in a smaller company, helping it to grow larger.

[00:29:51] Mike: But, you know, there’s times that this is going to be rigorous. There’s times that you’re going to be waiting for a project to change and a project to deliver the night before we launch. And so as a data person, you’re going to get something thrown over the wall that’s completely different than what you had planned for, because something at the last minute in QA testing has shown that we have to make a change. We’re in Toyota. We were very rigorous. And, you know, we protect ourselves against them. And we had preliminary design reviews and final design reviews in the week. We had architecture pieces that everybody signed off here. I’ve got developers that are developing up to the very last minute and, you know, and we also have basically a propensity to say, okay, we know we have a couple of errors. Let’s go ahead and go forward and fix those errors. Where Toyota it was, you know, you can’t have an EP one. You can’t have any p2’s, you know, to launch a big, big initiative. So I think it’s really the team, you know, making the team feel flexible, making sure that, you know, we compensate them well, making sure they understand what we’re trying to do. I think that’s all a part of really making this work. Um, and I have a great team I’m so proud of, you know, the men and women on my team and what they deliver. Um, every single day, I try to let them know that I think they understand that, um, you know, they understand and hear my pride and speak of them.

[00:31:15] Mike: Um, I’ve always thought that it was best as a leader, you know, to protect your team when needed, but when they’re doing a great job, get out of their way and let them shine. So I’ve always been a leader that says, hey, you did a great job on that. Go tell someone, right? I don’t want to take that story to them. Let them take that story. Let them take that self pride. Um, and, you know, it’s in it’s interesting. I think this kind of goes back to my background as a parent as well. I think you have to kind of stand back, let your team perform, watch them closely. You know, use the KPIs that you need to kind of understand where maybe morale is going a little bit, or maybe the work is getting a little bit too long, but, you know, kind of help them really stumble a little bit. If they if they need to know that they have the protection of a team behind them. Right. Um, I’m so proud of how we can have very important people in the organization, you know, go on vacation for a week and we don’t miss a beat, you know, because the team just steps right up and fills the void. Um, and so it’s just it’s really, you know, I think it’s really about the team and having processes in place that they can follow. They can always go back and say, well, this is what I should be doing. Or here’s what Mike would do in, you know, in his absence. So I think that’s all a part of being successful.

[00:32:30] Egidijus: So it seems that the team is not very small at this moment of time.

[00:32:36] Mike: We’ve certainly grown, we’ve certainly grown a lot. Um, we when I joined, I think we were eight folks, and we did all the fraud and revenue assurance as well as the information management, which is always one of the joys, you know, when you join a small company and they come in and you were hired to be a vice president of data, and they said, well, you know, we’re going to also have you run the fraud revenue management team, which I didn’t have a lot of experience in. But now we’ve hired, you know, somebody that’s very as we’ve grown, we’ve hired a team that’s very, very skilled in that. And oh, by the way, I think we also took on retention at one time. And now we have a whole retention team that we’re working to support. You know, as we’ve kind of grown into our skin, if you will, as a company. Um, but yes, I’ve grown from eight people, you know, doing a lot of different things to now almost 40 individuals, very focused on data. Um, and, you know, we do as I said, you know, we have data architecture, engineering and customer, the customer data supporting our messaging. So I what’s exciting to me is I think right now we have 35 and we call them business priority list projects. So these are things that our business says is really important. They rank them 1 to 35. Um, so that we know what we should be working on. But right now my team has deliverables in 23 of those 35. So and those projects will all be gone in the next three months, and they’ll be replaced by a slate of new projects. So there’s this continuous work that you’re doing. People understand that data is there. People understand that data is important to be at the table. And, you know, so there’s no, um, there’s no pushback when we say, hey, you know, we need more resources to do this, or we can do this better with this, this piece. Um, so, yeah, it’s just a great team.

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[00:34:35] Egidijus: Mike, you mentioned a lot about, you know, this kind of positive leadership and the values of the team that you bring people together to do the tough job. What are the, let’s say, technical competencies necessary in this modern and very, very fast paced, uh, data management area. So kind of what kind of different departments do you have for data management?

[00:35:05] Mike: You know, one of the things and it was funny, I resisted this for a very long time. And it’s it’s interesting. And I think thankfully I’ve got, you know, leaders underneath me that really push me to kind of acquiesce to it. But even as basic as understanding agile development and understanding your processes and how we should go through and, you know, create these scrums and create these these teams, these working teams and working groups that are working on a section of the business. I was I was always kind of I guess, you know, when you look at my career, I always kind of focused on the Tiger team effort, where I would assemble a team and put them on a project and might disassemble them and put them on something else. And I think, you know, when you’re working on singular projects that are pretty large, that probably works pretty well. Um, but when you’re trying to support 35 different initiatives, you know, or 23 different initiatives and always shuffling, I think really understanding the processes and the agile methodology has been incredibly important, just as a framework so that people don’t get lost, you know, and and hiring project managers that can do that. I am so proud of my project management team. I have a person that’s just focused on basically herding the cats of all the data folks and then being the voice of that back to the business. And she’s probably my most important person. You know, she’s not a data specialist, but she’s probably my most important person because she can speak the technical language to all of my team.

[00:36:29] Mike: And then she can speak the program language to the program folks. But then when you look at the technology, you know, and the things where I grew up and, you know, I learned how to code in Fortran and then JavaScript as part of it. And I can certainly write SQL. You know, my team now is programming in Glue. They’re Python. You know, everything is Python. And I think, you know, they’re using some tools like KBT, which is a tool that helps them basically author and extract the lineages in. But I really think it’s just a modern architecture, just trying to understand, you know, all the AWS pieces that come in. Certainly a group that focuses on machine learning and the concepts. And now even looking into large language model and how we’re going to leverage AI in some of these things, you just see those technologies continuous, continually evolving, you know, feel a little bit remiss. I probably should have learned Python at some, at some point in my whole. I think every one of my folks, you know, probably writes at least some Python code, and most of them live in Python. I’m no help to them. They’re not going to pick up the phone and say, Mike, what’s the problem? What do I do? And I’m like, well, you need to call Bob, or you need to call Mary because they can help you. I can’t, but, you know, I think it just, you know, one of the things that I always strive for, um, because when you’re in part of an organization that really, you know, and I’ve got to say that being part of this organization, my leadership is incredibly empathetic.

[00:37:53] Mike: And so I think when you’re leading an organization, you always are helping these folks grow. You know, you’re always trying to say, let’s grow as a team, and I hope you stay here forever. But then you’re also saying, look, you know, develop yourself, get get some skill sets here, get some initials by your name so that you market yourself to the next potential, you know, take the experiences you’re learning here, grow yourself and you know, and that that’ll help you be successful. So I’ve always been proud of my ability to help people soar with their strengths. And that’s certainly something I learned from Toyota. That was, you know, one of our one of our banners. But basically to help people understand, um, you know, when you look at it, you know, what you’ve done over your career, probably my biggest contribution right now is, you know, in hiring folks that have gone on to be amazing people. And the current CTO of Toyota motors, North America and Toyota Connected is a gentleman that I looked at and I said, man, this guy is just brilliant and let me help him kind of grow some of the things that will help put that brilliance into focus. And he would have been successful without Mike Burkes in his life. But I’ve always been proud that, you know, I gave him his first opportunity to kind of grow and, you know, just expand beyond everyone’s, you know, Imagination.

[00:39:11] Egidijus: I think that magic ability to build the team and to grow people is really often underlooked, especially in kind of leadership positions. As you are. You are Mike. Um, I have one super tough question for you because, that question is how do you imagine, let’s say, the perfect execution of a, um, enterprise data management? What would be the outcomes in the organization when you would say, I’m done?

[00:39:49] Mike: Well.

[00:39:51] Mike: If I’m done, then that means I probably don’t have a job. So, you know, it was really interesting. I got a lot of stuff automated when I was in the Air Force. I got a lot of stuff automated where I was kind of coming in and babysitting because I was working within a defined budget. I had created a database, my very first attempt at creating a database, and I titled it Argus, which was another rough, another rough guess. Under stress was kind of the acronym for that. And, you know, I put this database out there and it was really meant to help because my particular focus was to manage the budget. And so, you know, you have a lot of flight test engineers that were really, really hungry to go out and fly. They love to fly. You know, you give them a plane and a toy and they go fly every day. But then you have, you know, the Air Force is saying, here’s a, here’s a budget we have for training. Um, and so my job was to kind of keep them out of the cockpit when they were trying to fly, when they had actually achieved, what, like if they had if they had done a test sortie on an F-16 or an F-22 and had landed five times during that sortie, then my job was kind of to put the data together and say, you know what, you don’t need to go out and fly today to get another sortie because you’ve already got those in your flight test.

[00:41:01] Mike: And so I had a lot of pilots that were not very happy with me, but I think, you know, putting that together so that we were controlling the budget and helping to show the Air Force that we had accountability. I was at a really special time in life because I had been a flight test engineer, and toward the end of my career with the Air Force, I was put into a program. America went through this kind of total quality management where it was really let’s set KPIs at the top and let’s push those KPIs down to the organizational units. So I was brought on to kind of do that. It was especially with the focus of, you know, a several million dollars that we were doing for budget management, for fuel costs. And, you know, we had historically not been very well. We had historically had to go back at the end of the year to get more money from the Air Force, which caused other programs to suffer as we were getting money to keep our pilots trained. So you do that, you you establish, you know, kind of something that is working very, very well.

[00:41:56] Mike: But then you look at the data and say, well, how can I improve upon this? And so then you start looking around at the other processes. And one of the things that I was most proud of is, you know, unfortunately in the area of flight test where, you know, men and women are putting themselves in great danger doing things that are really advancing, you know, advancing what was out there. You would run into mishaps, you would run into a plane that, you know, had an issue, or you’d run into something that would cause something to go wrong. So we would stand up these alerts. And there was just such a struggle with everyone when we knew that there was something happening and we were trying to get the information out. And I was looking at my another rough guess under stress database and I’m like, wow, I have all that information right here, you know? And so I would monitor, we set up, you know, kind of real time alerts to monitor when we were being alerted that somebody was having an in-flight emergency, and we could go out and we could look at the crew, we could understand the specific training needs of the crew. We would notify the base commander. We would notify the squadron commanders.

[00:42:58] Mike: We would notify the hospital all through automated means just to say, look, this is you know, what is happening in your space. This is the real time and happening. And here’s the training and the things that you know you can bring to the table. If I just sat at my job and said, look, my job was to get the budget within 1% or 0.01% and just sat back and was was, you know, satisfied with that, then, you know, yeah, I was doing a great job at that. By pushing that envelope, you’re actually changing things. So that’s why I don’t think it ever is going to be something that’s done. I think now that new data is out there and new ways to use data will always be there. I think if you, you know, if you wake up in the morning and the lights are all green on, you know, your data quality, your data quality has come through and everything’s loaded fine, then you know that you’ve prepared the business the best they can for what’s going to happen that day. But you never know what’s going to happen that day. So you never know when a new system, a new challenge, a new opportunity is going to arise. And you’ve just got to be ready to react to it.

[00:44:02] Egidijus: So it seems that, Mike, you have some inner passion for that data that drives you. You know, I solve one problem and then, you know, another ten projects are coming in. It’s, uh.

[00:44:18] Mike: I think context switching is probably my greatest skill set, but that probably comes from being a parent to, you know, a lot of kids. I always told everybody it was really cheap to have kids in the Air Force, you know, because our medical care was great. And, you know, I would come home from a mission and the next, you know, nine months later, we’d be having another child. So. But then but then when you have six kids in the fold and you’re now trying to manage kids that you know are ten years apart. Um, it gets kind of challenging. So I think that’s where all the ability to context switch came in.

[00:44:52] Egidijus: Uh, so so this is where your skill set, you know, to manage those 35 projects priorities. And it’s. Like.

[00:45:00] Mike: You know, it’s it’s important. I think prioritization is really important, and I think any organization has to align themselves with the leadership to understand what is the most important. There’s too much work for my team to do, right? And you think of that person that’s trying to get that 35th priority project out. That’s that’s really important to them, right? And so you have to treat them with the respect that we understand. That’s important. We have this number one project. And so sometimes you have to use that priority to say look we’re going to be a little bit delayed in getting this out because we simply have to do that. And I think that, you know, as a leader that again, is something that you have to be really, you know, willing to do is to go to fight for your team and say, look, you know, you asked us to prioritize this. We’re doing this. This is going to suffer a little bit. But, you know, rest assured, we understand that this is what you need and we understand and we’re going to get this delivered. But, you know, it’s it’s we’re following the priorities that you have set.

[00:45:56] Egidijus: Mike, I know that you are as a company now really advanced in data management part. But they are like thousands of companies who are just starting their journey. They now have those Excel reports which the organization is sharing and they want to move further. So what would be your I know, top 3 or 5, uh, ideas where to start with and what are the most important aspects that they should start from?

[00:46:33] Mike: I think, you know, the first thing is you kind of have to learn what the business outcomes that are expected or what, you know, those reports are generating as far as business outcomes and what’s what’s most important to them. Right. Are you are you trying to gather enough data to make a directional change, or are you trying to gather very specific, concrete data so that you’re meeting some kind of a regulatory demand and it has to be perfect? Or are you simply, you know, just doing something to kind of understand. Are you headed in the right direction? So I think you need to understand the business for that data. And then you put the right amount of rigor to it. Um, you know, when I came in here, um, we have an individual in this organization that, you know, is just very dear to me. He had become the guru of all of our data. And, you know, I kind of upset. And he was so well respected by the other seven members on the team, uh, because he was a guru of the data. And the very first presentation I put together, I had him kind of singled out and said, well, this is, you know, kind of the risk we have in this organization because everything flows through him. So what we have to do is we have to set the data up so that everybody in the organization understands. And, you know, an eight years later, I’m not sure that we’re as far as long as we can because there’s so much that’s being created. And sometimes, um, you know, you’re not taking the time to document as thoroughly as you should. But I think, I think that, you know, if I was saying that, you know, somebody’s got a lot of spreadsheets, look for commonalities against the spreadsheets. Look for the business outcomes. You know, always track to make sure that you’re looking for those business outcomes, and then look for the right place and the right technology to apply to get those business outcomes. And by the way, in our resignation, it’s Google Sheets. It’s not Excel sheets.

[00:48:17] Egidijus: Yeah. Well, um, kind of I still love, uh, both Google Sheets and Excel sheets. They are still amazing. But maybe not. Not for everything.

[00:48:29] Mike: I, you know, Toyota was was completely Excel. And we do have a lot of the finance folks use Excel. And I love the formulas and stuff. But I just think you know, the cost you. Every organization is different, every organization is different. And the amount of money that they can put toward things. And Google was a cheaper alternative at that time. So that’s why, you know, a lot of our folks use that. And and what, you know, what you find with innovation is a lot of the team members will leverage tools to make their lives great. And and, you know, I mean, we processed refunds on Google Sheets for a long, long time. And it was a great way for us to do it. But it sure didn’t make getting that data out and getting it, you know, out to the business. So we can understand when somebody was likely to give us a refund. It made it harder. Right. So that’s where you look at you let a process run for a long time until you kind of understand that the business has grown big enough that you really need to have better eyes on it. So now you go through and you understand how to ingest that data into the business and you know, and how to make reporting on it so that it can go out to, you know, kind of serve a larger purpose.

[00:49:36] Egidijus: And how is how important is, let’s say, top management support in the journey of, you know, going from, let’s say, less governed data to like the the future state is it can you achieve it something without the support there.

[00:49:56] Mike: I’ve been I’ve been, you know, very blessed in my career here at Ultra by having leadership, you know, at the very, very top, super empathetic leadership, super empathetic leadership that, you know, that treated us with respect. And so, you know, keeping people motivated because they, you know, they people people keeping people motivated when they knew they had a company that cared about them is so much easier than trying to motivate someone where it’s not clear if the management cares. Everybody here knows that our management cares. Everybody here knows that our management is sincere about wanting us to get the most out of life, you know? So it’s a great organization to work for, and it’s been recognized as one of the best places to work for. And it’s been recognized as fastest growing, you know, and so just a lot of great things that our leadership did. So you take it down a notch, having leaders that understood the importance of data and you know, that really had a passion for understanding just how close margins are. So really trying to eke out every perspective, wanting to go to the parent company with ideas and being able to prove those ideas in data. Yes, you might give us a better pricing on this. And yes, it may seem like we’re going to be running risk of revenue, but this is what we think it’s going to grow. And here’s the data to support that. We think this is going to grow this way. I think I think, you know, really having that leadership that just understands the value. And, you know, and it wasn’t always that way. I mean, there were you know, there were times when, um, on our engineering side, you know, there was kind of this those are the analytics guys, you know, stay out of our business.

[00:51:39] Mike: I think over time, we’ve kind of matured as an organization and we have regular meetings. Probably one of my closest allies in this is the team leader of our IT and organization. And it’s very interesting to me because I’m I report to the CFO of our company. So I report up in the business side where at Toyota. I reported to the CTO of Toyota. Um, so I think you know where you are in the organization and the relationships you make, but there’s trust that has built up between the engineering team and our team. And so when I pick up the phone and say, hey, I really need your help. You know, we’ve got some issues that are that are happening because, you know, we’ve got a process that may be creating bad data. I get somebody that listens to me instead of somebody that becomes defensive. And I think, you know, once you get over that barrier. And I think part of it is being humble in your mistakes, right? I think one of the the nits about me or one of the things that, you know, there’s been some frustration in the past is that I am quick to escalate things when I see things. And, you know, it’s not not necessarily a sky is falling, but I’m very quick to escalate and, you know, very quick to say, here’s a potential outcome. And sometimes those outcomes don’t get realized. But I think as long as you’re calling the alert and you’re calling it with sincerity, and you’re calling it with really a passion for making the business better. Eventually people will say, okay, yeah, that’s just my going off on. It’s probably not that big a deal, but it’s something we should, you know, we should turn our attention to.

[00:53:05] Egidijus: But yeah, why is it so important to escalate early? Because usually people tend to escalate as far in the process as possible, you know.

[00:53:16] Mike: You know, because again, you’re running on margins that are very, very you know, you’re not you’re not selling, um, you know, you’re not selling expensive things. I mean, you’re selling you’re selling products that are, you know, 15 to $20 each. And if you run into an issue where maybe you keep a promotion that was intended to, you know, hit a subset of the users, it might not it might not show up. You know, we will often run a promotion that if you come in from one of our competitors, you know, we’ll give you a break. But what happens when, you know, code changes and all of a sudden you’re giving that break to everybody. Right? So, you know, the business is still seeing sales come in, but suddenly the revenue is is being impacted. So when you see that and you don’t have margins to make tons of, you know, tons of changes, I think that’s where it becomes, you know, something you want to do. We’ve set up an internal process that really, you know, kind of looks at our own mistakes as a company. And, you know, when we do things that impact our ability to, um, you know, to get revenue in or ability in that’s been put under me to kind of every month coalesce a report that says, look, here’s what our operational inefficiencies or here’s what the things, the mistakes that we made might even be mistakes on my team, you know, and trying to apply, uh, data in some pieces. Here’s the mistakes that we made and here’s the material impact to the business. And I think just being able to talk about those mistakes. And again, I credit our leadership for, you know, wanting us to be transparent. Um, I don’t think people here are punished for failure. I think, you know, obviously repeated failure would be something that would be frowned upon, but I think everyone sees it as a growing opportunity to say, let’s not do this again. So that’s that’s what makes this organization interesting.

[00:55:07] Egidijus: So, Mike, time flies really, really fast. And we are approaching our wrap up part. We would like to ask you a couple of, uh, you know, questions that we ask every guest. So the question number one is, you know, over those years, I bet you had many proud moments of your career. Could you share a 1 or 2 of them here?

[00:55:34] Mike: Um, yeah. I think that the moment that I’m proudest of is not a moment, but it’s kind of a point in time. Um, as I said, I work for Toyota, and I worked for Toyota during a big time in our history of the unintended acceleration, where there are a lot of folks that had purported that, you know, Toyotas were causing people to get in accidents because they were on accelerate. They were accelerating. We had data to show, you know, a lot of behaviors within the car or behaviors of the operator of the car. That was kind of contradictory to what was being purported to us. But I think the ability to rally and I’ve never been prouder of the system we built. We basically took 14 different systems, which included our warranty systems. It included, you know, voice manipulation of our our people that are calling our customer care, the service people coming in, the NIST, the National Highway Standards, basically data coming in, and it tied it all together using a technology that was, you know, kind of a key value pair. It was so expensive to run it at that time. And this is where, you know, I hired that guy that came in and made it work. It’s just a magic. But you know, imagine going into a BI tool and typing in sushi as a key search word and it coming up and saying, you know, something from a database. I got sick because I was using the refrigerated, you know, glove compartment, and I put my sushi in there and the sushi spoiled, and I got sick. Think of the ability to do that in terms and being able to that.

[00:57:09] Mike: And that’s that’s a microsecond. And I remembered when I showed this to the president of Toyota, and I came in and he, in his mind was thinking of something that was happening along the border between Canada and the United States, where there were some dealers that were selling cars and basically swapping out, you know, cars are a little bit cheaper on one side of the border than the other. And so they were swapping out speedometers so that because the Canadians were in kilometers, the United States were in miles per hour. And so they were swapping him out. And he just typed in that keyword and instantly saw all that data on what was happening in his supply chain and what was going. And the dealers that were impacted. And he could really, you know, just you just saw the light go on in his eyes. And the joy of knowing he had that what we were able to show out of that. And that’s where I think, you know, the analysis, once you have the data come, is what we were able to show is a little bit of a bias against Toyota. And that really helped us. Um, you know, as we were we were talking to, uh, the government and being able to show them where potentially they were looking at Toyota and a little bit muted light, because here’s one of the competitors that would have, you know, pretty catastrophic things happen to drive shaft fell off and they would get one claim, here’s a Prius that, you know, came in for a battery failure. And all of a sudden there’s seven claims because the guy said that one time his window didn’t go up or down.

[00:58:29] Mike: And one thing. And so they were kind of overinflating the claims against Toyota’s. And being able to show that in that context was really, really happy. Um, and it’s funny how life is. I when I was flying for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of our customers on our plane was the secretary of the Air Force, Sheila Widnall, and I just I had so much respect for her. She was an MIT professor. Her husband was an MIT professor. And I would talk to them on these long flights, and we would just strategize and just talk cool stuff. Toyota. The government actually hired Doctor Widnall to run the team that was, you know, looking to find issues with Toyotas, you know, because Toyota opened and, you know, opened the doors and said, come look at all of our code. Bring your best scientists. Help us find it if there’s something wrong. And Doctor Widnall actually led that team. And just the surprise and delight of seeing her and her seeing eye myself and just, you know, knowing that she could trust me, that was really, really cool. So I think that’s the greatest success in helping that team through that, um, Ultra has been great just because I think we’ve helped push the business along. But again, I can’t take the credit for that. I think we’ve got some brilliant leaders that have just really done the right marketing strategies, really got the right people behind us. Certainly you know, just the way that that team has grown. I can’t take credit for it, but I don’t think I was an adherence for that.

[00:59:53] Egidijus: Uh, Michael Humble Burkes. Yeah. It’s like, uh, but, I think you also had some failure stories that could, you could share with us as well to make sure that, you know, it’s not everything beautiful in life.

[01:00:13] Mike: Well, I think failures are really opportunities to learn, right? So I think that’s really and hopefully, you know, it’s not something that causes something catastrophic. I remember something that that helped me to learn very early, you know, in my career. And it was a flight test, um, in Wichita, Kansas, with, you know, pilot, co-pilot, uh, Boeing engineer and myself. And we were out testing a couple of things. We were testing a voice automated autopilot, um, in our special research bed, but we were also testing a new landing system that was really, really quite unique in the way it was pushing data in. And so you’ve taken the 707 and you’ve probably done 25 touch and goes and doing 25 touch and goes in a 3 or 4 hour sortie is exhausting. It’s exhausting for the pilots that are doing that. It’s exhausting for the folks that are capturing the data. We had started because we wanted to get away. We wanted to actually do this around Kansas City, because there’s weather that comes into Kansas City and makes it very hard to land. And so we were doing this kind of, you know, through fog and which is eyestrain and everything. But we were writing notes furiously. The Boeing engineer and myself, the pilots were flying. We were writing the notes, and we were recording the data in a system that was state of the art at that time, 30 years ago, that had probably 30 gigs of data in it. Maybe. Probably not even that, probably 30 megs. But we all assembled after the flight in this room, you know, pretty late at night, like 9:00 at night in Boeing’s headquarters there in Wichita.

[01:01:46] Mike: And I remember I had all these sheets of information and we were talking about it. And always being the person who wants to innovate, I said, let me go make copies of it. So I took these sheets of paper to a copier, and there was a person, you know, using that copier at that time and running mimeographs for, you know, an organizational thing that came and I said, hey, can I make copies of this real quick? And he said, sure. So I stacked my papers up on it. I pushed go to make four copies, and the pages started coming out blank. And I’m looking at it thinking, there’s a problem with the copier. And what I realized or didn’t realize is that all of the notes that we’ve been taking had been taken on thermal paper. And so when you put thermal paper through a copier that’s just ran 100 copies as they went through, they instantly turned black. And so I had to walk back into that room of exhausted people. And I had destroyed their data. You know, I had destroyed a data point that we were all depending on. And it really kind of helped me understand. And, you know, I again, everybody I’ve always been accommodated, you know, I guess in my career where people say, hey, it’s a mistake. It was an honest mistake. We understand it, you know, don’t make it again.

[01:02:56] Mike: You know, but walking in and understanding how important it is, you know, that taught me that data protection, you know, we’ve got to really, really be careful about information because I just I kind of looked at the sadness and all of those eyes, you know, understanding. We still had the data on disk and we still got, you know, success out of it. But we missed a piece of it because I had not I had been careless with the data. So even though that only impacted the lives of the three people besides myself that had been there, it really taught me a poignant story about, you know, protect data at all costs. Make sure that, you know, you’re you’re careful with it because it’s something that sometimes can’t be replicated. So I’ve carried that through. I, you know, larger term failures. I think it’s just in, you know, probably some technologies that we, you know, you work hard to ask a company to invest in a technology and maybe you don’t do your homework enough, or maybe you kind of understand or get swayed by the salesmanship of the company, you know, the selling company, and things just don’t work.

[01:03:58] Mike: And, you know, I was really successful at Toyota because I did not have any failures. I tend to pick technologies that would go on to greater and bigger things. Um, I’ve had some stumbles at Ultra, you know, smaller company going in smaller expenditures where we try something and it just doesn’t work. And, you know, you’ve dedicated resources to it, you’ve dedicated time, you’ve dedicated dollars that are really important. And it just doesn’t, you know, it just doesn’t come to fruition. So I think those are the things that, you know, I would look back and say, dang, I wish, you know, I had a little bit more homework or I’d been a little bit more sure, because I kind of led some, you know, folks that are working really hard down a path that that didn’t come to fruition. And that’s that’s the hardest thing to come, you know, a year later and say, look, you know, I know I asked you to spend $75,000 on this, and I wasted your money because we just didn’t get, you know, we learned some lessons, but we just didn’t get it done. So.

[01:04:53] Egidijus: Uh, these are very inspiring examples. I just can try to imagine, you know, the face of your team when you’re coming with those blank sheets of paper.

[01:05:08] Mike: You know, it’s hard. It’s hard. I don’t I’m not a very good storyteller. So it’s hard to, you know, to put the exhaustion that’s on. If you can imagine trying to land, you know, you know, tons of aircraft in fog on a runway in Kansas City and just a strain for those poor pilots and trying to do that and the trust they’re having. And, you know, here’s this guy that comes in and all of the notes that we were taking all of their comments. And of course, today, 30 years later, all of that would have been digitally recorded.

[01:05:36] Mike: Wouldn’t have had the issues, but we were riding on pieces of paper and it was going so well. I just kept ripping off pieces of paper from a fax machine and handing it over, and we were just taking pages of notes, and that was that was quite the experience.

[01:05:49] Egidijus: Yeah.

[01:05:49] Egidijus: So I can’t imagine, you know, and the last question, Mike, it’s like for people who would like to grow um, in data career, what learning resource would you recommend for them?

[01:06:04] Mike: Well, it’s interesting, I think that, you know, you learn from experience. So get yourself experience in as many places as you can. I um, I always, you know, ask people when they’re to talk amongst themselves because data there’s so many pieces of data. Right. There’s the folks that are, that are managing the storage of it, managing the efficiency of how a database is operating, kind of the the physical database engineers. Right. You have the folks that are transforming the data and, you know, kind of making it useful. You have the the folks that are doing the analytics around it. So I always encourage to talk up and down the stack. I think every data person should understand some of the business context at the very least. I mean, I think certainly as you get closer to the consumer endpoint, where you’ve got your business intelligence and your data science team, they have to understand the data. Exactly. They have to understand the business context. But if you go back to the person that’s just being asked to, you know, copy data from here to here, I even think it’s important for them to understand the big picture of it. That’s why I’ve always loved data is to go in and say, yeah, you may look at it that you’re taking this piece of information and copying it from this or database over to snowflake so it can be curated out, but understanding how that’s going to be used. So I think, you know, getting folks to talk about those, I think, you know, a lot of the teams have taken courses, you know, some of the courses that are out there to grab, you know, certifications around, you know, some of the technical components, like some of the AWS components and the AWS his tools.

[01:07:34] Mike: I think also, you know, putting folks into, uh, you know, courses that are around us, you know, like maybe, you know, getting them to get a certification in data science or data analytics or maybe now in AI, I think there’s just, you know, a lot of lot of resources that are out there. And I do one of the things, again, that I love about this organization is we follow something called the entrepreneurial operating system, where it’s based on the process of, you know, you if you only focus on the small day to day things, you never grow. So you’ve got to have some of these big rocks. I really encourage my team to look for things that they can use as a rocket to self develop something that will help them develop themselves. And it might be in, you know, I always try to make sure it’s within the data space, but maybe you have a data engineer and you’re trying to talk to them about, well, think about how you would do data quality. So get some training on data quality so you can understand what’s right in your ETL scripts or your transformation scripts. Now in DBT that we can extract and say these are business rules. So I don’t. There’s no one answer, one simple answer. I think it’s just always keeping your eye open and understand the chain of data from beginning to end and kind of the value points of each of that.

[01:08:44] Egidijus: I think there are so many brilliant data engineers who grow further into, you know, becoming business leaders as well.

[01:08:53] Mike: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[01:08:56] Egidijus: So thank you, Mike. It was really exciting to have you today.

[01:09:01] Mike: Well, thank you for inviting us. And, you know, letting me share a little bit of my story. And I you know, as you know, I’ve always had a great partnership, um, you know, with teams that you’ve been associated with. So I think we, uh, we’ve got a great working relationship. And it’s it’s an honor to be able to speak with you.

[01:09:17] Exacaster: CVM Stories is produced by Exacaster. We help companies take their customer value management to the next level. To stay updated on our latest episodes, subscribe to the podcast or sign up for an email newsletter at exacaster.com/cvmstories.