Technology, in my mind, should always be speeding up, and we should keep pace with that and never get complacent. Everybody wants that page so a second, especially on a mobile device, that's where the traffic lives. That's where people are connected all day, and I think in a fitness realm, that's what you're really looking to do. People aren't carrying their laptop or their desktop to the gym, and so whether you're on a tract, the opportunity to leverage that mobile device is still extremely important. It's got to be performant, it's gotta be reliable, it's gotta work every single time, and it's gotta work wherever you are. Welcome to the restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. As you may know, I've spent the last fifteen years covering technology and learning how it works, demystifying everything from massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and everything in between. Yet it's the conversations with some of the most forward thinking leaders, those at the intersection of technology and business that fascinate me the most. The average person, when shopping for workout clothes or athletic gear, might not give much consideration to how large a role tech plays at under Armour, but in fact, the scope and depth of under Armour's technology strategy is astounding. Clearly, there's some traditional tech involved. You need the equipment to design and make the clothing and other equipment. You need the computer systems to run operations and provide services to employees, and under Armour has those. But the company also relies on tech in innovative and surprising ways. Whether it's analyzing how a design for a shoe performs as an athlete sprints down a track and under Armour tracks every metric you can imagine, or an entirely new way for store operators to visualize their shops in a virtual environment. Under Armour is putting tech to work. Then there's the athletic gear that's equipped with Bluetooth modules and accelerometers and gyroscopes or apps that play a part in digital fitness and the quantifying of the self. It's almost shocking the kind of technological innovation going on at the company that started in the ninety nineties with the entire business packed in the trunk of a car. I learned a lot about under Armour's use of tech when I spoke with Danny Miles, the CTO of the company. We dove into challenges under Armour faces as the company strives to meet ever expanding customer expectations in a world where even our clothing can be part of the Internet of Things, and I learned how under Armour is taking the initiative to transform what it means to be a company centered on athletic equipment and apparel. But I also learned about Danny himself, his thoughts as he transitioned from being on the tech side of operations in business to becoming a leader in them, his values when it comes to his approach to work, and what it takes to be successful when executing a company's tech strategy. But before we dive into all that, I wanted to get some background on Danny himself. Danny, I want to welcome you to the Restless Ones. Welcome to our podcast. Thanks for having me. It's excited to be a part of the conversation. Oh, we're excited to have you here, and we're gonna be talking about your job and your responsibilities and we're going to get to all the exciting things going on and under Armour. But before we do that, I always like to get to know my guest a little better. So I'm curious, when did you first start getting interested in technology? Yeah? You know, so for me, I grew up in New Orleans and I was pursuing music and that was my thing. I was studying music for a long time, and you know, really I got into digital music and that really was kind of the beginning of me connecting devices and understanding how does all these different hardware need to communicate, from digital effects to synthesizers to recording equipment. And that kind of just got me into a space that I felt really comfortable with, and that evolved into being the guy that everybody had computer questions for it. I think the difference maker for me was when I realized, probably that I have this passion for how things work. I have to understand them completely. And when it came to the I T side of the house, I realized at some point that I wanted to go much deeper into how things worked, which meant programming, which meant taking the operating system apart. I remember the days I used to tell people for the first four or five years of my career, I got used to rebuilding my computer every week because I would destroy it. I would replace operating system files. I would mess with the Windows registry, I would tweet drivers and really had to have a deeper understanding. I wasn't satisfied with just installing something and it working. I had to know why it worked and what it was talking to and what made it take And so that just kind of progressed, and that really drove me deeper in too, eventually going back to school for computer science studying obdiculate your programming and design, and from there, I guess, you know, until she wrote, gosh, you know, and just just to think, Danny, we could be sitting here talking about middies and moves and all sorts of stuff that I'm really passionate about too. But can you talk a little bit about your early days as a software engineer. Yeah, you know, in my day it was about going down to Barnes and Noble, sitting there on the computer aisle reading these three inch thick books on C plus plus and databases. It was interesting for me. I would know what I was wanting to solve for usually during the day on my job and fighting for stuff, but I always, you know, it was a double edged sword, and that I would go home at night and be like, I've got to figure out a better way to do this. I've got to understand something. And in those times there wasn't formal education. I looked at what a lot of the colleges were doing, and they were teaching how to build an ATARI if you basically went in and study computer theory and CP processors and how all the hardware and access layers work. But there wasn't a structure design domain driven design object on your programming. You had to really go get that from the network, from people that you can talk to, from books, from people you could follow and meet. It was a very, uh kind of like club that you just started to get into, know who to reach out to to ask questions, and so yeah, that was what it was like for me in the early days. It was almost a black art I remember first, you know, and this is dating myself, but definitely in the nineties we were trying to figure out how to charge credit cards and process credit cards in a time when that was black box. The banks didn't have open a pi is. There was no protocols for doing that stuff, and everybody did it different and you really had to get in and look at the data and the messages on the wire, figure out how to decrypt them and figure out which packets of data have to be where for me to get this thing to go through and come back with a valid response. I appreciate those times because it fed my need to understand how things worked at its core. But I tease a lot of the developers today that they have a lot of training wheels that I didn't have. I I crashed a lot. There are a lot more programming languages now too. How would you describe your role at under Armour if you're talking to a casual acquaintance, you know, a casual acquaimance. I usually tell people, and it's hard when you have so much going on at the top level, but you just I'm just responsible for all the technology, everything from our data platforms to our e commerce platforms, retail supply chain, finance infrastructure. I basically lead a team of other technical leaders that help us run all of the technical platforms for the business. And usually that gets boiled down to something much simpler. But I do get friends, especially in the investment community startup community, They want to know deeper, like, well, what are you actually doing, what are you transforming? What are you there to do, and when I look at an opportunity, I'm always looking for the difference that I believe I can make, and so particularly with under Armour, it really is about the transformation of their business that's underway to really become a direct to consumer player in a strong way to really serve athletes and really help make them better. The lanes that I've chosen, I've always felt like there's always something behind it behaviorally that drives me to kind of improve someone's life through not just selling them products, but through providing content and really being able to connect to, you know, an audience from a brand perspective that attracts me to it. So I think we have a lot of things we talked about in that lane of how does our brand really make athletes better? How do we really understand their needs and to end not just from what they need to wear and not just what they need to wear in the gym or on the field, but what do they need throughout their day to prepare for that to recover from that? Right, So we think holistically about how we can kind of make people better, and that's one of the things that gets me excited because I believe technology can really serve the brand well there and helping achieve that vision with under armor in mind. You mentioned cloud computing obviously has been an enormous transformative force in all businesses, across all industries. Can you talk a bit about how cloud computing has transformed the industry of retail? Well, I think obviously it's a transformative thing for all technology. It's just such a huge transformation. For me, I think that was just one of the most particularly when I went to Nike. That was part of why I went there was to lead their cloud transformation. When I look back at all that we accomplished, there was just things we were not going to be able to do. There was a whole batch of applications. I'm reminded of when we build the Sneakers app and the scale that has to go into that product and how much we had to build that was just not possible prior to us being able to scale up, you know, to have that elasticity of I need a hundred more servers, now do it, you know, and and to have that muscle to go fast. For me, that's just been hugely transformational and it's mostly been scale. I also feel like, and this is an argument I made in the casino industry early on with cloud as, I also think it's transformati from a security perspective. You know, one of the biggest arguments that we used to have with regulators in the casino space was you cannot run any compute outside the four walls of the licensed operator. That was a law, and the reason was because they believed there was a security risk to have this out there. And through years of convincing and going back and saying, you know what, I'll tell you what's a bigger security risk is the employees in that casino that have access to that server room and know those passwords. And there was a point in time I remember we were talking about Amazon and with a regulator that was like, well, I want to go and inspect the data center and see all their controls and security. And I was like, you will never get into an AWS data center and that's by design, like those are designed that there is no public assets. Even a w S themselves is not able to go in and log into the computers and stuff there. And really understanding that there was such a shift in centralized management, control and access, I really think, you know, one of my early arguments was just security, which just it really allowed me to create network layers. It really allowed me to create different vpcs and connect things in a different way so that I could really control with scripting, what could talk to what right. So the elevation for me initially with security and then it became about scale. But you know, I've had the chance to also kind of mentor and work with a lot of startups. I always go back to the early days of AWS and what it meant to the mobile industry more particularly what it meant to startups. If you're doing to study looking back and I think about what really was one of the biggest changes there. It was when you used to start a company, right, you had to think about my first investment round is gonna have to go buy some servers. I'm gonna have to go with stand up iraq. I'm gonna have to go hire I T folks and get something up and running, just to get an app or a website running. When that change from No, my first hire is going to be a designer and we're gonna start building the front end user experience and we're gonna get this thing up and run, and I'll hire some infrastructure guy to build my server network in a day on AWS. That was a real game changer. I think you just saw how quickly technology companies could be stood up. You saw how quickly innovation can start to happen because you didn't have to have that sunk cost up front of going out and building a data center. Danny, you're making me think back to those early days of the web where you knew that something was a success when it crashed because the server couldn't handle the load. And the first problem was how do we get this tool to work? And then the second problem was, oh the toolworks and people like it, but we don't have enough server support to actually meet the demand. And it became just a constant race to stay ahead of the bottleneck. And cloud computing has really removed that obstacle entirely. It really has sped up development and innovation in that in that regard. Yea, you know, there would be no hyper scaling without cloud right as these companies that have been able to just scale really fast. The nightmare is if you're running your own server farms today and you need to scale, I really feel bad for you because the supply change is wrecked. Right, we can't get devices we can't get switches and have like just for our basic retail, you've got ninety days to six month lead times on that stuff, and I don't think that's something that's just acceptable anymore. There was still a lot of battles with cloud I think obviously an operational change mind shift change to your point about when debops became a thing and what is it, infrastructure engineering and s R re became a thing like availability just monitoring really understanding, Hey, you gotta watch this thing. It can sprawl out of control and you can have a cost problem and you can end up in a bad spot. The other struggle was really you had to get really good at forecasting because for most people and most companies, you were moving your CAPEX investments, which were CAPEX investments and idea one time we're pretty easy to get. You know, I need a few million dollars, build a rack and do whatever. You shifted all that to op X, right, and you're paying for that on a monthly basis, and you've got to be much better at how you plan that usage and know what's coming. And so it definitely calls some I would say operational shifts, not only for the technology team, but how you engage with your business and your finance team. I can tell you definitely when I was at Nike, you know, really there was a big concern over and I was remembers kind of batting with the CEO at one point about, oh, we're we don't like a w S. We don't want to host our workload there. The c SO the security officer had a lot of concerns like your developers are going to have this access to that and well, by the way, they're a competitor, aren't they Amazon dot Com? So we went through all of those kind of battles early on. But I'll tell you retailers did not want to do business for data, yes, and you know there's all the oh, I'm just funding their work chest to compete with me, or are they going to steal my customer data because it's in their data centers. So I really had to work through the legal side of it. One of the hardest things to do is getting the enterprise agreement with a WS and Nike gart It took me like six months of legal finance, the c SO, the c i O really getting everybody to kind of believe not only that cloud WHI was right but that the way we were going to do it. Who are we going to choose was kind of the right partner there. Conventional thinking says you have to pay more to get more. I want the world, but T Mobile for Business uses unconventional thinking to deliver premium benefits for better r o I from customized five G solutions to three sixties support. We help you reach your business goals right now, I want it now, innovating to improve business today and tomorrow. That's unconventional thinking from T Mobile for Business. Capable device required covers not available in some areas some US require certain planter features c T mobile dot Com. One of the things you touched on earlier was this mission to help athletes be their best, whether it's when they're actually competing or performing or when they're recovering. Can you talk a little bit about technology that goes into that. What's the process of analyzing performance? Do you incorporate AI and machine learning in to your approach when you're designing these solutions for athletes? We do. I think measurement and tracking is kind of a lane that we think about a lot, and that is really comes down to currently, we have a device, we have a chip in the shoe that actually can record what you're doing and connects to our our map, my suite of apps, and that gives us quite a bit of telemetry on what's happening during a run. We think there's a future evolution of how we can start to learn more about, you know, kind of tracking a workout or a fitness routine. And so we're exploring lots of options thinking about what we can do not only with machine learning, but really just what we can do now with cameras right and what we can do with machine vision and some of the things. There is a wide open lane that we're exploring. But I also think there's other things that matter so much more, and we always have conversations about things like heart rate. The challenging part to me is to go beyond measurement and to really work with our sports science teams to figure out, but what are the experiences that we want to be able to create. To me, that's the harder working. That's the area I'm excited about that. I don't think that we've done enough, and we can achieve a certain level of measurement and data collection, but I'm much more excited about figuring out what are the ways that we can kind of interrupt your experience, either before you're gonna go on a run or after from a recovery perspective, things that you might need to do that you may not know you need to do. That's where I think all of the content and really using the data to drive a behavioral change that would improve an athletes performance is the open kind of lane for us that we're thinking about. To me it comes down to content, comes down to coaching, comes down to really leveraging what we know about athletes, what we know about sports science, what we can measure. There's what we can think about measuring for a consumer. Obviously, in our product creation and design teams, the things we're able to measure on a track, on the field in a gym are exhaustive and extensive. That's where I think a lot of our learning comes from about how to create the products we're creating. The next step is to figure out how can we intersect with that consumer and their journey and their workout to really provide and added value it's going to help them perform better. I mean, obviously, the entire digital fitness trend has really been about the quantifiable self I'm curious, are you also looking at ways now that we have rollouts of five G technology where we have these high throughput and low latency wireless networks that are maturing. Are you looking into ways to leverage that as well with tech in order to augment this mission of creating the best products to help athletes perform at their best. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I think you have to take advantage of everything that's out there from that perspective, especially as we're talking about some of the experiential things. An area that's really interesting to everyone right now is a r v R. Right, what does the meta universe look like for a fitness brand. I think that's the lane where you still really start to become dependent on that network and you have to really have the ability to deliver a technical performance. And I think that that's something that's across the board that again, just one of the things that makes me tick is I'm a performance chunky. You know, I want everything delivered faster, rendered faster. I want every model run faster and every report produced faster. That's something that's just always a KPI across every team that I have to some degree is how can we make sure that it's always moving faster because technology, in my mind, should always be speeding up and we should keep pace with that and never get complacent. You know, we used to be happy with eight second page load speeds, and then we got content with five is the benchmark, and then we said, you're not in business if you don't do three. But now it's sub second. Everybody wants that page so second, Especially on a mobile device, that's where the traffic lives. That's where people are connected, and really that's where people are connected all day, and I think in a fitness realm, that's what you're really looking to do. People aren't carrying their laptop or their desktop to the gym, and so whether you're on a track, the opportunity to leverage that mobile device is still extremely important. It's got to be performance, it's gotta be reliable, it's got to work every single time, and it's gotta work wherever you are right and the v R a R example is perfect because obviously you need as little latency as possible for that to become an effective tool for VR. You need it so that you don't yack all over the place if you turn your head and your point of view changes a second later. That's no good. But even for a R obviously it's only useful if it's very responsive. I get really excited when I start thinking about potential use cases for a are leveraging things like a very high speed network, whereas you know a few years ago, you wouldn't be able to manage that unless you had a tethered connection, which obviously limits whatever implementation you're thinking about. You're not going to be connecting your phone to a massive computer that's like three ft away from your treadmill or whatever. We're right now kind of in the blue sky hypothesis phase of whatever the metaverse maybe, and it's really exciting to talk to different leaders who are ideating around that and trying to think of ways that add value not just to the business but to the user experience. Because it's undefined, it's hard to do. And the other whole lane there that I'm truly passionate about is it isn't just you know, from my role, it isn't just our athletes. It's our teammates. That's our word for our employees as teammates. And I think that that's a transformation that hasn't happened the way it should. Has video conference really changed that much in twenty years? It really has it? It had gotten that much better, right, And I really feel like that the way people work is changing. I mean, obviously coming out of the pandemic from us all being at home. In my world, we're a highly distributed workforce, a lot of remote full time employees, and to me, that's a huge lane to think about how these types of technologies again keep people connected all the time. I think about it just as much as they do the athletes is I want my teammates to feel like they're having experience with our brand and they're able to connect and create culture, a sense of belonging with the brand, even though you know they're all working across the globe and around the country in a virtual environment. I think that's a wide open area for innovation. We talked about a R and VR and one of the things I think that I'm most proud of what the team did through the pandemic was early on in the pandemic and credit this is right before I started, but there was a decision made to begin creating three D assets of all of our products, so before they were made, we were going to actually make sure that we had a three D asset of every single skew that we were going to use. And the purpose for that was because we knew that our sell in our go to market cycle, especially with our wholesale partners, was going to go completely virtual. We weren't gonna be able to meet them in person. So we ended up partnering with an innovation partner who was building a virtual retail product that allows us to bring our customers into a virtual room and look at all of the products for the next season in a three D model, and that's continued to evolve to where now we're actually able to say, hey, you know, to one of our partners, we can render your store and your shelves and your layout, and we can show you what the fall product assortment's gonna look like on your shelves in a virtual environment. And we were able to bring them into these rooms where we have just wall to wall screens and we can show them that virtual environment there we're playing. You know, we do have some headsets that we've been able to integrate, but even just in a browser for people to be able to go into a three D environment and see the products, see what it might look like on their shelves. I don't know that that's something we ever would have got to without the pandemic. But what that's done is it set us up for the future. We now have those assets we're looking at, how do I bring all those assets to my e commerce experience, you know, and start to render three D models there. If I end up in a virtual world, guess what, I have all of these assets and they're in They're high quality renderings three D of all of our products. So I'm really excited about all of those lanes, especially for kind of what I call experiential tech a r v R. Yeah. What I find remarkable is the rate of success I've seen in those changes. I mean, obviously it's succeed or you might become irrelevant. So the existential thread was there, but the innovation and the agility, the quick adoption of new technologies and new approaches in order to have as minimum a disruption as possible, knowing there was going to be one but trying to minimize it. I love those stories. But it also creates a new foundation to build upon in the future. It does. The thing I'm most excited about is the operational model that it changes that it really is a disruption if you think about and again, I've been around long enough to to see different I T models. I think in the early world where a large portion of your I T budget, your spend your support with I T support making sure people had computers and printers and the network worked and they had a camera. That gets instituted, right. But what I love is how much we're not walking around taking people's computers, like you know what everyone's at home. You should know how to set up your own computer. You should know how to set up a network in your home, get on a WiFi. You should know how to get a camera and a microphone to work. Like I feel like that's something that's really shifted, and that to me means we have a more technically advanced workforce than we had, not necessarily just before the pandemic, but definitely ten years ago. Because I feel like that ownership of in order for me to work and do my job, I have to be kind of managing my own tech to a degree. My I T company is responsible for making sure I have a device, making sure that my account is provisioned. But we're not having to go down and replace keyboards. They got coffee spilt in them, and it was a cost. It was a significant kind of ongoing operational effort, and we still have I T support. I don't want to say it's gone away, but I do think this idea of a more across enterprises, brands that haven't always been viewed as you know, technically strong companies, like everyone's having to be a technologist to some degree in this day and age. Before I could let him go, I had to ask Danny one more thing. We talked about metrics in this episode, but how do you measure success? Well, I do look at a principle of approach. So there's our business objectives and goals, which we say we're aligned with a business that we have to achieve certain goals throughout the year. But on the technology side, there's a list of things that we really care about that are what I call our principles that don't change year over year and associated with those principles as a set of metrics. Right, just to give an example, some of those principles to me are secure architecture, user experience, data completeness, strategic partnership. All of these principles that we've called out, we've knowed it down to six. I try to keep it small. I could always have ten on my mind. But I've always worked with a team to say, let's pick some things that we stand for outside of achieving our business goals as a technology organization. What are the things that we stand for, and how do we measure success against those things. We track all the things with the business, obviously revenue, everything from conversion to article activation times to how quickly we can process transactions and collect payments and ship and deliver. All those things matter, and we align with our business on those. But if we do those and we don't pay attention to what I like to call the important technology principles, and we slip on something like cyber security, all we slip on making sure that data is complete and whole on quality. I think those are things we have to measure ourselves against you over year, and so when I look at success, I'll look at a combination of the alignment that we have on the business objective goals and how we're contributing to those, as well as how are we measuring ourselves against the principles that we've decided as a technology leadership PAM are important to be a world class technology organization. Thank you Danny so much for joining the show. Thank you Jonathan for having me really enjoy the conversation. Thanks again to Danny Miles of under Armour for joining the show. I admired Danny's proactive approach to tackling problems, finding solutions, and then implementing them. I also like his philosophy that while you should be proud of the work you have done, you should always strive to do better. And it's exciting to think about the tech that is transforming under Armor right now. I'm very curious to see what the next generation of technological innovation brings to the comp and its products. It's fascinating because I've seen over and over how the combination of athletic skill and technological innovation leads to breaking world records and setting new standards for athletic performance. And yet I keep finding myself thinking, well, that's it, that's the best we can be, only to be proven wrong. The limit does not exist, it would seem. I expect we'll see more mundane items become high tech over time. Some of those will likely be specialty equipment for high performing athletes, some of it might be more for you know folks like me who aren't. But beyond all that, the elements that make that innovation possible in the first place are already there. With compute power, wireless networks and the right team in place, a company can innovate in ways that will make operations more efficient, it will be able to respond to dynamic situations in an agile way, and of course they can find new ways to delight their customers. Thanks for listening to the restless ones. Be sure to check back for future episodes. We're all talk with more restless leaders in the tech space. I'll see you then. T Mobile for Business knows companies want more than a one size fits all approach to support. I want the world, so we provide three sixty support customized to your business. From discovery through post deployment. You'll get a dedicated account team and expertise from solutions engineers and industry advisors already right now. I want it now, three six support that's customized for your success. That's unconventional thinking from T Mobile for Business

Technology, in my mind, should always be speeding up, and we should keep pace with that and never get complacent. Everybody wants that page so a second, especially on a mobile device, that's where the traffic lives. That's where people are connected all day, and I think in a fitness realm, that's what you're really looking to do. People aren't carrying their laptop or their desktop to the gym, and so whether you're on a tract, the opportunity to leverage that mobile device is still extremely important. It's got to be performant, it's gotta be reliable, it's gotta work every single time, and it's gotta work wherever you are. Welcome to the restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. As you may know, I've spent the last fifteen years covering technology and learning how it works, demystifying everything from massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and everything in between. Yet it's the conversations with some of the most forward thinking leaders, those at the intersection of technology and business that fascinate me the most. The average person, when shopping for workout clothes or athletic gear, might not give much consideration to how large a role tech plays at under Armour, but in fact, the scope and depth of under Armour's technology strategy is astounding. Clearly, there's some traditional tech involved. You need the equipment to design and make the clothing and other equipment. You need the computer systems to run operations and provide services to employees, and under Armour has those. But the company also relies on tech in innovative and surprising ways. Whether it's analyzing how a design for a shoe performs as an athlete sprints down a track and under Armour tracks every metric you can imagine, or an entirely new way for store operators to visualize their shops in a virtual environment. Under Armour is putting tech to work. Then there's the athletic gear that's equipped with Bluetooth modules and accelerometers and gyroscopes or apps that play a part in digital fitness and the quantifying of the self. It's almost shocking the kind of technological innovation going on at the company that started in the ninety nineties with the entire business packed in the trunk of a car. I learned a lot about under Armour's use of tech when I spoke with Danny Miles, the CTO of the company. We dove into challenges under Armour faces as the company strives to meet ever expanding customer expectations in a world where even our clothing can be part of the Internet of Things, and I learned how under Armour is taking the initiative to transform what it means to be a company centered on athletic equipment and apparel. But I also learned about Danny himself, his thoughts as he transitioned from being on the tech side of operations in business to becoming a leader in them, his values when it comes to his approach to work, and what it takes to be successful when executing a company's tech strategy. But before we dive into all that, I wanted to get some background on Danny himself. Danny, I want to welcome you to the Restless Ones. Welcome to our podcast. Thanks for having me. It's excited to be a part of the conversation. Oh, we're excited to have you here, and we're gonna be talking about your job and your responsibilities and we're going to get to all the exciting things going on and under Armour. But before we do that, I always like to get to know my guest a little better. So I'm curious, when did you first start getting interested in technology? Yeah? You know, so for me, I grew up in New Orleans and I was pursuing music and that was my thing. I was studying music for a long time, and you know, really I got into digital music and that really was kind of the beginning of me connecting devices and understanding how does all these different hardware need to communicate, from digital effects to synthesizers to recording equipment. And that kind of just got me into a space that I felt really comfortable with, and that evolved into being the guy that everybody had computer questions for it. I think the difference maker for me was when I realized, probably that I have this passion for how things work. I have to understand them completely. And when it came to the I T side of the house, I realized at some point that I wanted to go much deeper into how things worked, which meant programming, which meant taking the operating system apart. I remember the days I used to tell people for the first four or five years of my career, I got used to rebuilding my computer every week because I would destroy it. I would replace operating system files. I would mess with the Windows registry, I would tweet drivers and really had to have a deeper understanding. I wasn't satisfied with just installing something and it working. I had to know why it worked and what it was talking to and what made it take And so that just kind of progressed, and that really drove me deeper in too, eventually going back to school for computer science studying obdiculate your programming and design, and from there, I guess, you know, until she wrote, gosh, you know, and just just to think, Danny, we could be sitting here talking about middies and moves and all sorts of stuff that I'm really passionate about too. But can you talk a little bit about your early days as a software engineer. Yeah, you know, in my day it was about going down to Barnes and Noble, sitting there on the computer aisle reading these three inch thick books on C plus plus and databases. It was interesting for me. I would know what I was wanting to solve for usually during the day on my job and fighting for stuff, but I always, you know, it was a double edged sword, and that I would go home at night and be like, I've got to figure out a better way to do this. I've got to understand something. And in those times there wasn't formal education. I looked at what a lot of the colleges were doing, and they were teaching how to build an ATARI if you basically went in and study computer theory and CP processors and how all the hardware and access layers work. But there wasn't a structure design domain driven design object on your programming. You had to really go get that from the network, from people that you can talk to, from books, from people you could follow and meet. It was a very, uh kind of like club that you just started to get into, know who to reach out to to ask questions, and so yeah, that was what it was like for me in the early days. It was almost a black art I remember first, you know, and this is dating myself, but definitely in the nineties we were trying to figure out how to charge credit cards and process credit cards in a time when that was black box. The banks didn't have open a pi is. There was no protocols for doing that stuff, and everybody did it different and you really had to get in and look at the data and the messages on the wire, figure out how to decrypt them and figure out which packets of data have to be where for me to get this thing to go through and come back with a valid response. I appreciate those times because it fed my need to understand how things worked at its core. But I tease a lot of the developers today that they have a lot of training wheels that I didn't have. I I crashed a lot. There are a lot more programming languages now too. How would you describe your role at under Armour if you're talking to a casual acquaintance, you know, a casual acquaimance. I usually tell people, and it's hard when you have so much going on at the top level, but you just I'm just responsible for all the technology, everything from our data platforms to our e commerce platforms, retail supply chain, finance infrastructure. I basically lead a team of other technical leaders that help us run all of the technical platforms for the business. And usually that gets boiled down to something much simpler. But I do get friends, especially in the investment community startup community, They want to know deeper, like, well, what are you actually doing, what are you transforming? What are you there to do, and when I look at an opportunity, I'm always looking for the difference that I believe I can make, and so particularly with under Armour, it really is about the transformation of their business that's underway to really become a direct to consumer player in a strong way to really serve athletes and really help make them better. The lanes that I've chosen, I've always felt like there's always something behind it behaviorally that drives me to kind of improve someone's life through not just selling them products, but through providing content and really being able to connect to, you know, an audience from a brand perspective that attracts me to it. So I think we have a lot of things we talked about in that lane of how does our brand really make athletes better? How do we really understand their needs and to end not just from what they need to wear and not just what they need to wear in the gym or on the field, but what do they need throughout their day to prepare for that to recover from that? Right, So we think holistically about how we can kind of make people better, and that's one of the things that gets me excited because I believe technology can really serve the brand well there and helping achieve that vision with under armor in mind. You mentioned cloud computing obviously has been an enormous transformative force in all businesses, across all industries. Can you talk a bit about how cloud computing has transformed the industry of retail? Well, I think obviously it's a transformative thing for all technology. It's just such a huge transformation. For me, I think that was just one of the most particularly when I went to Nike. That was part of why I went there was to lead their cloud transformation. When I look back at all that we accomplished, there was just things we were not going to be able to do. There was a whole batch of applications. I'm reminded of when we build the Sneakers app and the scale that has to go into that product and how much we had to build that was just not possible prior to us being able to scale up, you know, to have that elasticity of I need a hundred more servers, now do it, you know, and and to have that muscle to go fast. For me, that's just been hugely transformational and it's mostly been scale. I also feel like, and this is an argument I made in the casino industry early on with cloud as, I also think it's transformati from a security perspective. You know, one of the biggest arguments that we used to have with regulators in the casino space was you cannot run any compute outside the four walls of the licensed operator. That was a law, and the reason was because they believed there was a security risk to have this out there. And through years of convincing and going back and saying, you know what, I'll tell you what's a bigger security risk is the employees in that casino that have access to that server room and know those passwords. And there was a point in time I remember we were talking about Amazon and with a regulator that was like, well, I want to go and inspect the data center and see all their controls and security. And I was like, you will never get into an AWS data center and that's by design, like those are designed that there is no public assets. Even a w S themselves is not able to go in and log into the computers and stuff there. And really understanding that there was such a shift in centralized management, control and access, I really think, you know, one of my early arguments was just security, which just it really allowed me to create network layers. It really allowed me to create different vpcs and connect things in a different way so that I could really control with scripting, what could talk to what right. So the elevation for me initially with security and then it became about scale. But you know, I've had the chance to also kind of mentor and work with a lot of startups. I always go back to the early days of AWS and what it meant to the mobile industry more particularly what it meant to startups. If you're doing to study looking back and I think about what really was one of the biggest changes there. It was when you used to start a company, right, you had to think about my first investment round is gonna have to go buy some servers. I'm gonna have to go with stand up iraq. I'm gonna have to go hire I T folks and get something up and running, just to get an app or a website running. When that change from No, my first hire is going to be a designer and we're gonna start building the front end user experience and we're gonna get this thing up and run, and I'll hire some infrastructure guy to build my server network in a day on AWS. That was a real game changer. I think you just saw how quickly technology companies could be stood up. You saw how quickly innovation can start to happen because you didn't have to have that sunk cost up front of going out and building a data center. Danny, you're making me think back to those early days of the web where you knew that something was a success when it crashed because the server couldn't handle the load. And the first problem was how do we get this tool to work? And then the second problem was, oh the toolworks and people like it, but we don't have enough server support to actually meet the demand. And it became just a constant race to stay ahead of the bottleneck. And cloud computing has really removed that obstacle entirely. It really has sped up development and innovation in that in that regard. Yea, you know, there would be no hyper scaling without cloud right as these companies that have been able to just scale really fast. The nightmare is if you're running your own server farms today and you need to scale, I really feel bad for you because the supply change is wrecked. Right, we can't get devices we can't get switches and have like just for our basic retail, you've got ninety days to six month lead times on that stuff, and I don't think that's something that's just acceptable anymore. There was still a lot of battles with cloud I think obviously an operational change mind shift change to your point about when debops became a thing and what is it, infrastructure engineering and s R re became a thing like availability just monitoring really understanding, Hey, you gotta watch this thing. It can sprawl out of control and you can have a cost problem and you can end up in a bad spot. The other struggle was really you had to get really good at forecasting because for most people and most companies, you were moving your CAPEX investments, which were CAPEX investments and idea one time we're pretty easy to get. You know, I need a few million dollars, build a rack and do whatever. You shifted all that to op X, right, and you're paying for that on a monthly basis, and you've got to be much better at how you plan that usage and know what's coming. And so it definitely calls some I would say operational shifts, not only for the technology team, but how you engage with your business and your finance team. I can tell you definitely when I was at Nike, you know, really there was a big concern over and I was remembers kind of batting with the CEO at one point about, oh, we're we don't like a w S. We don't want to host our workload there. The c SO the security officer had a lot of concerns like your developers are going to have this access to that and well, by the way, they're a competitor, aren't they Amazon dot Com? So we went through all of those kind of battles early on. But I'll tell you retailers did not want to do business for data, yes, and you know there's all the oh, I'm just funding their work chest to compete with me, or are they going to steal my customer data because it's in their data centers. So I really had to work through the legal side of it. One of the hardest things to do is getting the enterprise agreement with a WS and Nike gart It took me like six months of legal finance, the c SO, the c i O really getting everybody to kind of believe not only that cloud WHI was right but that the way we were going to do it. Who are we going to choose was kind of the right partner there. Conventional thinking says you have to pay more to get more. I want the world, but T Mobile for Business uses unconventional thinking to deliver premium benefits for better r o I from customized five G solutions to three sixties support. We help you reach your business goals right now, I want it now, innovating to improve business today and tomorrow. That's unconventional thinking from T Mobile for Business. Capable device required covers not available in some areas some US require certain planter features c T mobile dot Com. One of the things you touched on earlier was this mission to help athletes be their best, whether it's when they're actually competing or performing or when they're recovering. Can you talk a little bit about technology that goes into that. What's the process of analyzing performance? Do you incorporate AI and machine learning in to your approach when you're designing these solutions for athletes? We do. I think measurement and tracking is kind of a lane that we think about a lot, and that is really comes down to currently, we have a device, we have a chip in the shoe that actually can record what you're doing and connects to our our map, my suite of apps, and that gives us quite a bit of telemetry on what's happening during a run. We think there's a future evolution of how we can start to learn more about, you know, kind of tracking a workout or a fitness routine. And so we're exploring lots of options thinking about what we can do not only with machine learning, but really just what we can do now with cameras right and what we can do with machine vision and some of the things. There is a wide open lane that we're exploring. But I also think there's other things that matter so much more, and we always have conversations about things like heart rate. The challenging part to me is to go beyond measurement and to really work with our sports science teams to figure out, but what are the experiences that we want to be able to create. To me, that's the harder working. That's the area I'm excited about that. I don't think that we've done enough, and we can achieve a certain level of measurement and data collection, but I'm much more excited about figuring out what are the ways that we can kind of interrupt your experience, either before you're gonna go on a run or after from a recovery perspective, things that you might need to do that you may not know you need to do. That's where I think all of the content and really using the data to drive a behavioral change that would improve an athletes performance is the open kind of lane for us that we're thinking about. To me it comes down to content, comes down to coaching, comes down to really leveraging what we know about athletes, what we know about sports science, what we can measure. There's what we can think about measuring for a consumer. Obviously, in our product creation and design teams, the things we're able to measure on a track, on the field in a gym are exhaustive and extensive. That's where I think a lot of our learning comes from about how to create the products we're creating. The next step is to figure out how can we intersect with that consumer and their journey and their workout to really provide and added value it's going to help them perform better. I mean, obviously, the entire digital fitness trend has really been about the quantifiable self I'm curious, are you also looking at ways now that we have rollouts of five G technology where we have these high throughput and low latency wireless networks that are maturing. Are you looking into ways to leverage that as well with tech in order to augment this mission of creating the best products to help athletes perform at their best. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I think you have to take advantage of everything that's out there from that perspective, especially as we're talking about some of the experiential things. An area that's really interesting to everyone right now is a r v R. Right, what does the meta universe look like for a fitness brand. I think that's the lane where you still really start to become dependent on that network and you have to really have the ability to deliver a technical performance. And I think that that's something that's across the board that again, just one of the things that makes me tick is I'm a performance chunky. You know, I want everything delivered faster, rendered faster. I want every model run faster and every report produced faster. That's something that's just always a KPI across every team that I have to some degree is how can we make sure that it's always moving faster because technology, in my mind, should always be speeding up and we should keep pace with that and never get complacent. You know, we used to be happy with eight second page load speeds, and then we got content with five is the benchmark, and then we said, you're not in business if you don't do three. But now it's sub second. Everybody wants that page so second, Especially on a mobile device, that's where the traffic lives. That's where people are connected, and really that's where people are connected all day, and I think in a fitness realm, that's what you're really looking to do. People aren't carrying their laptop or their desktop to the gym, and so whether you're on a track, the opportunity to leverage that mobile device is still extremely important. It's got to be performance, it's gotta be reliable, it's got to work every single time, and it's gotta work wherever you are right and the v R a R example is perfect because obviously you need as little latency as possible for that to become an effective tool for VR. You need it so that you don't yack all over the place if you turn your head and your point of view changes a second later. That's no good. But even for a R obviously it's only useful if it's very responsive. I get really excited when I start thinking about potential use cases for a are leveraging things like a very high speed network, whereas you know a few years ago, you wouldn't be able to manage that unless you had a tethered connection, which obviously limits whatever implementation you're thinking about. You're not going to be connecting your phone to a massive computer that's like three ft away from your treadmill or whatever. We're right now kind of in the blue sky hypothesis phase of whatever the metaverse maybe, and it's really exciting to talk to different leaders who are ideating around that and trying to think of ways that add value not just to the business but to the user experience. Because it's undefined, it's hard to do. And the other whole lane there that I'm truly passionate about is it isn't just you know, from my role, it isn't just our athletes. It's our teammates. That's our word for our employees as teammates. And I think that that's a transformation that hasn't happened the way it should. Has video conference really changed that much in twenty years? It really has it? It had gotten that much better, right, And I really feel like that the way people work is changing. I mean, obviously coming out of the pandemic from us all being at home. In my world, we're a highly distributed workforce, a lot of remote full time employees, and to me, that's a huge lane to think about how these types of technologies again keep people connected all the time. I think about it just as much as they do the athletes is I want my teammates to feel like they're having experience with our brand and they're able to connect and create culture, a sense of belonging with the brand, even though you know they're all working across the globe and around the country in a virtual environment. I think that's a wide open area for innovation. We talked about a R and VR and one of the things I think that I'm most proud of what the team did through the pandemic was early on in the pandemic and credit this is right before I started, but there was a decision made to begin creating three D assets of all of our products, so before they were made, we were going to actually make sure that we had a three D asset of every single skew that we were going to use. And the purpose for that was because we knew that our sell in our go to market cycle, especially with our wholesale partners, was going to go completely virtual. We weren't gonna be able to meet them in person. So we ended up partnering with an innovation partner who was building a virtual retail product that allows us to bring our customers into a virtual room and look at all of the products for the next season in a three D model, and that's continued to evolve to where now we're actually able to say, hey, you know, to one of our partners, we can render your store and your shelves and your layout, and we can show you what the fall product assortment's gonna look like on your shelves in a virtual environment. And we were able to bring them into these rooms where we have just wall to wall screens and we can show them that virtual environment there we're playing. You know, we do have some headsets that we've been able to integrate, but even just in a browser for people to be able to go into a three D environment and see the products, see what it might look like on their shelves. I don't know that that's something we ever would have got to without the pandemic. But what that's done is it set us up for the future. We now have those assets we're looking at, how do I bring all those assets to my e commerce experience, you know, and start to render three D models there. If I end up in a virtual world, guess what, I have all of these assets and they're in They're high quality renderings three D of all of our products. So I'm really excited about all of those lanes, especially for kind of what I call experiential tech a r v R. Yeah. What I find remarkable is the rate of success I've seen in those changes. I mean, obviously it's succeed or you might become irrelevant. So the existential thread was there, but the innovation and the agility, the quick adoption of new technologies and new approaches in order to have as minimum a disruption as possible, knowing there was going to be one but trying to minimize it. I love those stories. But it also creates a new foundation to build upon in the future. It does. The thing I'm most excited about is the operational model that it changes that it really is a disruption if you think about and again, I've been around long enough to to see different I T models. I think in the early world where a large portion of your I T budget, your spend your support with I T support making sure people had computers and printers and the network worked and they had a camera. That gets instituted, right. But what I love is how much we're not walking around taking people's computers, like you know what everyone's at home. You should know how to set up your own computer. You should know how to set up a network in your home, get on a WiFi. You should know how to get a camera and a microphone to work. Like I feel like that's something that's really shifted, and that to me means we have a more technically advanced workforce than we had, not necessarily just before the pandemic, but definitely ten years ago. Because I feel like that ownership of in order for me to work and do my job, I have to be kind of managing my own tech to a degree. My I T company is responsible for making sure I have a device, making sure that my account is provisioned. But we're not having to go down and replace keyboards. They got coffee spilt in them, and it was a cost. It was a significant kind of ongoing operational effort, and we still have I T support. I don't want to say it's gone away, but I do think this idea of a more across enterprises, brands that haven't always been viewed as you know, technically strong companies, like everyone's having to be a technologist to some degree in this day and age. Before I could let him go, I had to ask Danny one more thing. We talked about metrics in this episode, but how do you measure success? Well, I do look at a principle of approach. So there's our business objectives and goals, which we say we're aligned with a business that we have to achieve certain goals throughout the year. But on the technology side, there's a list of things that we really care about that are what I call our principles that don't change year over year and associated with those principles as a set of metrics. Right, just to give an example, some of those principles to me are secure architecture, user experience, data completeness, strategic partnership. All of these principles that we've called out, we've knowed it down to six. I try to keep it small. I could always have ten on my mind. But I've always worked with a team to say, let's pick some things that we stand for outside of achieving our business goals as a technology organization. What are the things that we stand for, and how do we measure success against those things. We track all the things with the business, obviously revenue, everything from conversion to article activation times to how quickly we can process transactions and collect payments and ship and deliver. All those things matter, and we align with our business on those. But if we do those and we don't pay attention to what I like to call the important technology principles, and we slip on something like cyber security, all we slip on making sure that data is complete and whole on quality. I think those are things we have to measure ourselves against you over year, and so when I look at success, I'll look at a combination of the alignment that we have on the business objective goals and how we're contributing to those, as well as how are we measuring ourselves against the principles that we've decided as a technology leadership PAM are important to be a world class technology organization. Thank you Danny so much for joining the show. Thank you Jonathan for having me really enjoy the conversation. Thanks again to Danny Miles of under Armour for joining the show. I admired Danny's proactive approach to tackling problems, finding solutions, and then implementing them. I also like his philosophy that while you should be proud of the work you have done, you should always strive to do better. And it's exciting to think about the tech that is transforming under Armor right now. I'm very curious to see what the next generation of technological innovation brings to the comp and its products. It's fascinating because I've seen over and over how the combination of athletic skill and technological innovation leads to breaking world records and setting new standards for athletic performance. And yet I keep finding myself thinking, well, that's it, that's the best we can be, only to be proven wrong. The limit does not exist, it would seem. I expect we'll see more mundane items become high tech over time. Some of those will likely be specialty equipment for high performing athletes, some of it might be more for you know folks like me who aren't. But beyond all that, the elements that make that innovation possible in the first place are already there. With compute power, wireless networks and the right team in place, a company can innovate in ways that will make operations more efficient, it will be able to respond to dynamic situations in an agile way, and of course they can find new ways to delight their customers. Thanks for listening to the restless ones. Be sure to check back for future episodes. We're all talk with more restless leaders in the tech space. I'll see you then. T Mobile for Business knows companies want more than a one size fits all approach to support. I want the world, so we provide three sixty support customized to your business. From discovery through post deployment. You'll get a dedicated account team and expertise from solutions engineers and industry advisors already right now. I want it now, three six support that's customized for your success. That's unconventional thinking from T Mobile for Business