Melting the Retail IT Ice-Tray at Dick’s Sporting Goods with Jay Piskorik

Episode 122 · 16:34 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Hey listeners, thanks for tuning in to another episode of Pivotal Conversations. This week, we sit down with Jay Piskarik, Director of Platform Engineering at Dick's Sporting Goods, where he takes us through a high-speed journey to owning their own destiny at Dick's. Now, along the way, we get to learn a lot about some of the things that are unique to the retail sector, everything from merchandise searching to buy in-store, pickup in-store, and how Dick's is breaking down the silos, both in IT and in retail. Okay, so we're here at CF Summit with Jay Piskarik from Dick's Sporting Goods. Welcome, Jay. Hey, thanks for having me. So, Jay, I had the pleasure of hearing you speak on an analyst panel earlier today, which I know was not kind of broadcast, so there was a lot of great tidbits in there. There was one question that was really interesting that was sort of around, you know, like, just the cultural changes required and, you know, what that means at different levels of the organization. And so, curious kind of what, and Dick's been on a very rapid journey with Cloud Foundry. What have you guys seen across sort of different levels of the organization? Sure. First of all, thanks for saying it was a pleasure to listen to me speak because I felt like I was droning on a little bit there, but from my perspective, the Dick's Sporting Goods journey has been pretty aggressive. We started probably around 11 months ago with four teams and trying to figure out, you know, how are we going to attack this new way of working from a product perspective. Pivotal, of course, was very helpful with that because we were allowed to go out and kind of see the offices in the way that you guys were working and doing those types of things. But the biggest thing is for any of these types of transformations to be successful, you need that buy-in from your C-suite. And that's been one of the most encouraging pieces. Ed has been awesome talking about some of the things that we did over a holiday. Lauren and Paul have been completely supportive of everything that we've done, especially because

it's a pretty large shift with what DSG is going through right now. And there's always going to be a little bit of, you know, fear with change. But they've really helped us kind of make people more comfortable with our direction. So tell me a little bit more about that. You know, like, yes, when you're asking people to work differently, totally understandable that there's fear. Do you have any sort of specific examples? And also, you know, what does that meant at the developer ranks versus, say, you know, what sometimes folks refer to as, like, the frozen middle? Okay. So at Dick's Portings, everyone had their own, like, space. So they had their own queue. They were very much away from each other. And the only way you would meet with somebody is if you would go off into a conference room and have a conversation. We really didn't have that open floor playing conversation. They were all high pods as well. I mean, you couldn't see anyone unless you stood up. So that was, I would call that frozen because, I mean, you're just away from everywhere. You're literally in those little ice cube, like, trays. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're there by yourself and hoping that somebody's so around you at the end of the day, like, that everybody got home yet. Yeah, or really when you work late and the lights go out and then you have to pop up like a little, like, prairie dog and kind of wave your arms. Yeah, yeah. Like, oh, the lights come back on. You look like a weirdo, yeah. Yeah, I've done that. Yeah, but now, I mean, moving away from having your own personal space and, you know, some people were worried about, like, oh, am I going to be able to think in this? Is it going to be too loud? How am I going to be able to get my day-to-day job done? What they found was that their days actually go quicker. When you're sitting in the open forum, the open table situation, you're able to talk a lot more. There's a lot more conversation that goes on to the table than work, too. So you're not always 100% heads down where you can maybe make a mistake because you're trying to overthink things. You're having these side conversations about movies or other technologies that you're not working on. And then even the cross-pollination between the tables has been pretty cool to see.

People jumping in and solving problems together, creating almost, like, communities around our tool sets that are in these open areas. Yeah. And we did see that, you know, what am I going to do with my stuff? What am I going to do with this? And the group really got on board with what we were doing, but also leadership did a lot of things to help us get there. We have lockers for everyone. We're creating more open space where people can go and kind of get away from the tables if they need to just think. They're very responsive to us as a workforce. They've always done a really nice job of taking care of us at Dick's Boarding Goods. And now in this new transition that hasn't changed. Yeah. I also like that the lockers have a very, like, sports kind of feel to it. Yeah. They're green, too. Green DSG. Of course. Yeah. Everything fits. Okay. So now what about, you know, maybe at slightly different levels of the organization, the frozen middle, the folks who are managers but not senior leadership? And, you know, they're often in a tough position where they're still responsible for getting something done, and yet they're not, you know, they also have to manage a team and deal with a lot of that part of the day-to-day. Those folks are often strapped, and they're sometimes the most resistant to change just because they're overwhelmed. Have you noticed anything there? Yeah. I think all of us were overwhelmed at first. I don't think, I think that was a, we were looking at everything that we were about to do, excited about it, but then think about actually going there and how we were going to get there. But specifically to what you're talking about, I think we've had a better engagement model from that layer. I think they've really taken to the ability to make more decisions than they had in the past. We talked a little bit at the analyst dinner that, you know, it used to be you go away for three weeks, you try to plan for a whole year with everything from your budget down to what projects you're going to deliver, and now that's kind of gone out the window. I mean, we focus on what's the best thing for our athlete, or what's the best thing for the teammates that we work with.

What are we building to make each other's lives a little bit better? And having the ability to shift quickly and not be tied to a project plan every quarter, I think that's been really enjoyable. So how does planning work then? You know, like the focus on the athlete, right, which is how Dix thinks of their end customers. But, you know, how does that planning cycle work? How do things, you know, get course corrected? So, I mean, it's like anything else. Once you get moving on something and you find out there's the wrong thing, you stop. I mean, that's a lot of the course correction. But for what we want to do as a company and we want to have more ownership of our direction, I mean, Paul talked about this in the Wall Street Journal, is we're bringing everything in-house. So we're looking at our product plan and saying, you know, where are our wins at? Where can we get our feet underneath us and learn these processes and show some success with delivering things for the teammate or the athlete? Are there any wins that you can share? We have a bunch of wins for 11 months. I'm pretty proud of the team and everything we've done so far. One is obviously Merch Search. That was talked about in the Wall Street Journal as well. That's an in-store app that's on one of our devices that our teammates can look up everything about our product so they can react quicker to our athletes faster. And that has to be a morale boost for anyone if you can actually answer a question right on the spot and not have to say, well, let me go look at this somewhere else. They have it literally in their hand. They're able to do that. So that's the folks in the stores. You've got 700, if I'm remembering from that article correctly, you know, hundreds of stores out there. They've got in-store associates and now they all are walking around with iPads and they can pull up answers? We have handhelds. Oh, handhelds. Okay. We were able to deploy to the hardware. Yeah, the iPad would be a really big, kind of clunky to carry around, wouldn't it?

But we've been able to adapt the hardware that we already have in the stores and the handhelds and things like that to our new processes. Okay. So it doesn't change the way that they have been working up until this point. It just added more features on top of that. Okay. And then we did a really phenomenal job over Cyber 5 of protecting ourselves from, you know, everything's going to break. You're always going to have a problem. You just have to be prepared to fix the problem or adapt to the problem. And our teams were able to build out five or six applications that ran with e-commerce. And when we knew that one of our third parties were running a little bit hot, we were able to shift that traffic over onto our own homegrown applications. And that helped us phenomenal. That was phenomenal. Like our CRE group was able to look out and say, we're going to have a problem here in 20 minutes. And we were able to make a decision that fast. Okay. And CRE? Customer Reliability Engineering. Okay. So, yeah, we started our own RE practice a few months ago. And like I said, we've been, because of the buy-in across the company, and that's from the C-suite down and even the business levels, finance, everybody's bought into what we're doing. It's really a phenomenal thing to be a part of right now where everyone understands what we're doing and they're jumping in to help. We were able to pop up in our ER organization within a couple months. A lot of our corporate teammates that were working on other things saw that as an opportunity to do something new and cool. So they jumped over there, and they've been building out unbelievable monitoring. We're very proactive versus reactive. And they're playing around with all types of cool stuff. Like they're coding in Go just to figure it out for the rest of the community at Dick's Sport. Because they're just figuring things out and bringing their learnings back to the team. What are some of the measurements that you've seen, both in terms of technical or business, that kind of point to, okay, this is how we know things are working?

So one of our wins last year was around search on the website. So we actually did an ABC POC. One was on our current search. One was on a third-party vendor that was coming in and bringing their proprietary software. And then the third was a product team that actually built out on the Elk Stack our own search capabilities. The business went through and did a bunch of different testing. They did a pretty cool split of traffic. And they were moving things around constantly. And they did decide on our homegrown search. And that was because of speed, reliability, and, you know, overall cost as well. I mean, a lot of people, especially at this conference, talk about the ROI of using Cloud Foundry. And what does it do to your bottom line and your sales and things like that? But they don't think about the savings that come along with some of this stuff. And just saving on licensing and hardware to run our own Elk Stack has been paid dividends already with us trying to build out our private cloud. The other thing, we look at our velocity. How fast are we able to deliver products and applications? How often are we pushing not only to non-prod but to production? That's our big thing. We want to put things in production and have that feedback loop. We want to find out if we're doing the right things and what we can change. Is there an example of where you've gotten some feedback that, you know, was illuminating? Like either, okay, that was a surprising, hey, okay, that didn't work. Or like, wow, that something changed and is working better. So I think the merch search team, again, is the star of that because they were working with better communication with our store teammates and finding out, like, hey, this is great, but can you add this feature on? We're not so tied into, you know, we have to deliver X, Y, and Z by this date.

We're actually using the metrics and the feedback that we're seeing of how fast are we looking things up? Does the teammate in the store actually enjoy using this? And what is their feedback? Another pretty cool example was some of these teams are just going out on their own and kind of people watching in the stores and seeing where we're getting some frustration from our athlete or from our teammate and then making decisions on how we can fix that with software. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So we had, one of our teams was out looking at how the Boppus situation was working. Boppus? Buy online, pick up in store. Oh, okay. Thanks. I'm not down with all the lingo of the retail sector. I sometimes forget, like, I'm talking in the third language there. But as they were watching some of the things that were going on with our teammates and how it was affecting the athlete, they just pulled out their phones and started texting the athlete and saying, hey, this changed, we don't have this product, but we can ship it to you directly. Would that be okay with you? And they got so much positive feedback off that that they were able to start working on a solution in Boppus to better communicate with our customers. That's great. And I think what's interesting is that, you know, when we think of this type, whether you want to call it, you know, air quotes, digital transformation or not, and you think about that around retail, you kind of assume it's all about, okay, how do we just make the e-commerce store better? But you've described a couple of scenarios where it's really this, you know, your omni-channel experience and how are you making this blend of both, you know, e-commerce, but also this in-store experience. So it's really cool to hear a couple examples of how that plays out. I think we've also done a really good job of kind of breaking away from that siloed experience of you either work on the stores, the brick-and-mortar store, or you work on e-commerce, or you do infrastructure. Now we're just one technology unit that's, you know, we're very balanced out at this point.

We're looking at how pricing works between the stores and the e-com site, making that all one experience. So there's no frustration for an athlete who looks it up on the app and then comes to the store and they find a different price. That could be very frustrating for anybody. So trying to make sure that we're having that omni-channel experience come to the forefront, it has been a big push for us. And breaking down that walls of you only work on stores and I only work on e-commerce has been one of the first steps in the right direction. Okay. So what's next? Where are things going to go? This has been a lot in the last 11 months. So in 11 more months, you know, what do you think we can expect? I think with the talent that we have in the building and the talent that we're actively out recruiting, we're going to own more of our destiny. I think we'll have more of the e-commerce front end under our control and it'll be all of our applications. I believe we'll do more with inventory for the stores and the e-commerce site. I think all of our product teams have shown tremendous amounts of growth and I look forward to seeing what they're doing. I'll be honest with you, I'm not even 100% sure what they're going to do because they come up with ideas every day. It's phenomenal to be in that office and just hear people talk about what we're doing. Yeah. Okay. Well, any final thoughts you want to share? Thank you for having me on and thank you for all of your help. I mean, the Pivotal and DSG relationship has been phenomenal and you guys have really helped us move the ball forward. So, I really appreciate everyone I meet. You guys are almost like all the same personality. It's kind of weird. I'm going to try to not take offense to that. I have a unique snowflake of a personality. Yeah, yeah, I do. But I also really appreciate the sports reference with moving the ball forward. That probably never gets old for you. Sometimes I don't even think about it anymore. It just comes out of my mouth. All right. Well, thank you for joining us, Jay, and looking forward to hearing you on the main stage tomorrow.

Thank you.

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