 Welcome to the CUBE's special program series, Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome my next guest. Courtney Kistler joins me, the SVP of Tech and CTO at ZooBilly. Courtney, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure to have you. Talk to me a little bit about your career path in tech and about your role that you're doing right now. Yeah, so I have spent most of my career in retail. So I spent 14 years at Nordstrom, which is where I learned a lot about what it takes to be a technology leader. And really that's where I started kind of my cloud transformation journey. And then after 14 years at Nordstrom, I ended up going to Starbucks as the VP of retail technology there and really enjoyed working at a global scale. Very different, learned a lot there as well. And also had cloud transformation there too. And then I went Nike as the VP of digital platform engineering and learned a lot there as well. Different scale and very different retail situation. And two years ago, almost two years, it'll be two years in January, I joined ZooBilly as SVP and CTO. And what I love about ZooBilly is, I mean, we were really born digital first. And so cloud is a big part of our ecosystem. And I love that we are innovators. We are data-driven, we're about experimentation and we leverage cloud in a variety of ways. I love that. You have an amazing pedigree background of companies that you've worked for. I can imagine all the experiences that you've had and how they've shaped you into the leader that you are today. What are some for people that are either in, maybe starting a little bit farther back in their careers or early in tech, what are some of the recommendations that you have for those that really want to grow their career and fast? What do you tell them? Yeah. So I would say the biggest piece of advice I can give is be a lifelong learner. The thing about technology is the technology is gonna change and evolve and the way you respond and react to that is what's critical. And so figuring out how to be somebody who could be a problem solver and learning all the time. I try really hard to surround myself with people who I can learn from and really grow and how might I continue to engage in the technology landscape but really make sure that I have a way to continuously learn. That's so important to be able to have the confidence to raise your hand and say, I wanna try something new or I don't understand something. I was reading some stats recently, I went women in tech and I saw that women won't apply for a job, Sam LinkedIn, unless they meet 100% of the job requirements whereas men will apply if they don't be 40%. I think more women need to know and others that you don't have to meet all those job requirements. There's so much on the job learning. You have to have the appetite, you have to have good mentors, good sponsors, but raise your hand, right? Lean into the conversation, there's amazing things that can happen as a result. Absolutely, and I love that you touched on the leaning in and also, this is an industry term, it's not mine, but I love it called have a personal board of directors, have people who can help you navigate and network. I would say that's one of the biggest learnings that I had throughout my career was build a community and lean on that community. And often the encouragement that you get from that will also put you in a position to be okay with not having all of the boxes checked before you pursue your next opportunity. Right, I love that you talked about having a personal board of directors. I wish that's advice you probably did too, that we had 20 years ago when we started in our careers, but it's such important advice. Technology makes it so easy for us to connect these days whether you're on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Twitter, leverage that network but really create that personal board of directors I think is sage advice for anybody at any stage in their career. I don't think you have to be a newbie to be able to see the value in that. I think there can be value in it along the way. I'd love to hear some of your successes where you've solved problems related to cloud in your career, tell me about one of those. Yeah, so one just brief set of context. So I started my career in security infrastructure and operations. So I was learning how to support data centers. I mean, that was part of the landscape when I started my career. And then this thing called the cloud came into the environment and all of us I think who started as infrastructure whether you were a sys admin or those types of traditional roles thought what is this gonna do to me? Like as someone who's been in infrastructure for a long time. And what I really appreciated about the leadership at Nordstrom is we said let's embrace it. Let's figure out how to learn and let's figure out what this might look like for us. And at the time we weren't in the cloud but we said we are going to be, and a lot of companies say this, cloud first. Now it's easy to say, right? What does it look like internally? And I think there's multiple dimensions. One is are you really designing and architecting your applications and capabilities to take advantage of the cloud? I will share that there was a lot of debate internally and I think a lot of organizations do this where they say avoid vendor lock-in. Make sure you have flexibility. And it's important to be intentional about the use of cloud. Also super important to leverage the capabilities because one of the things that I believe in is that cloud can create a way for you to free up your technologist's mind share to focus on things that are more strategic. And over time cloud has become commodity. It's something that you can adopt and leverage to avoid spending time on provisioning servers and doing things that are now automated and part of the cloud offering. Right, yeah. Go ahead, sorry. Oh, I was gonna say and also I think skill set. So it does take a different skill set. So I do think it's important for organizations to invest and also lean on your cloud partner. So one thing I really appreciate about AWS is that there's a lot of learning and lots of ways to get certified and understand how to be successful in a cloud environment. So I think it's important to also know that there is another skill set that needs to be developed in order to be successful. What are some of the innovations that excite you that are coming down the pipe with respect to cloud that you may adopt at Zubli? Yeah, that's a great question. We're constantly looking at what can we take advantage of and I think what I get excited about is really the ongoing innovation when it comes to data-driven insights and how do you incorporate the knowledge of your customers and the broader kind of, I'll call it retail landscape into continuing to put relevant experiences in front of your customer. And I think doing that at scale is, I mean, you can achieve it in other ways. I think a great way to achieve it is leveraging cloud and the scale and performance and speed to, I'll call it like speed to data insights. Like you can get so much out of that and learn. And so for me, I think it's really anything that has to do with data. Every company has to be a data company these days, whether you're in retail or automotive or manufacturing, you have to become a data-driven company. You have to be able to derive those insights. You talked about in the retail space, I always think, oh, I'm such a demanding consumer because I've been trained, thanks to the cloud, that I can get whatever I want, whatever I'm looking for and these companies will start to learn me in a non-scary way, hopefully, and serve up relevant personalized content that, oh yeah, that's right, I need one of those. We have that expectation in our personal lives and I think we bring it into our professional lives as well. And so every company needs to be able to be that data company to deliver what the end user is more and more these days expecting that the demands are gonna be met. Absolutely, and I really appreciated what you said too about there's that innovation and expectation of your customer. There's also some really amazing innovation that can happen for your internal developer community leveraging the cloud. There's tooling, there's data-driven insights as well, like how long is it taking us to deploy software? Well, that's a learning moment and often cloud can help you solve for speed to delivery, having high confidence in your ability to deliver because many of the cloud tools allow you to do a canary deployment. I'm only gonna expose this to a percentage of my customers and then I'll bring it live to everybody else. There's ways to leverage cloud technology that also makes it innovative for the internal developer and you might even say internal customers. That's a great point. I always think the internal customer experience and the external customer experience are linked strongly hand in hand. And one of the things that we're seeing more and more, I think a lot this year is how influential the developer role is becoming in the decisions and the technologies and what to deliver to the end user customer. So that internal experience and external experience need to be hand in hand for them both to be successful. Agree. And you hear a lot of movement in the industry around like platforms and developer experience and DevOps is an area that I'm super passionate about. And really ultimately what it is is how are we all delivering value as fast as possible to our customers with high quality? Because if you're doing speed right, you're not compromising quality. And I think this again is a recognition of where the industry has evolved to you can use cloud as a platform to accelerate those capabilities. Yes, it needs to be that accelerant really for things to be successful. I'd love to get your thoughts on over the last few years what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen in the workforce and innovation that come to mind? Wow, so I think what I've seen is really the shift in you mentioned data, every company is data driven. So the expectation of technology is to also be data driven. And I often think sometimes that many technologists think of technologies too complicated it's too hard to be data driven. And in reality, we're kind of wired for being data driven. And so infusing that into how we think about everything we do and making sure that that's part of kind of the DNA of the organization. I'm also a big believer in observability. So like really having good knowledge of how are the things that you're building really performing? And that's another area where cloud can help where you can really instrument the end to end journey and have transparency to that so that your teams are set up for success. They can understand the health, they can see it quickly and they can respond quickly. You know, I always think the horizon for technology is infinite, the innovation, the capabilities, we need to have good strong teams diverse teams, teams that bring in different thoughts different perspectives, different backgrounds. My last question for you is on diversity in terms of the tech workforce, what are some of the things that you're seeing and maybe some advice you would give for organizations to be able to really embody diversity, equity and inclusion? Yeah, so I'm a big believer in inclusion. Like I think that it often doesn't get as much focus as it should. So it's very similar to a customer funnel. If you attract a bunch of diverse talent but you can't retain them, then you're gonna continue to have a challenge. So my focus is often on am I creating an environment where diverse talent can thrive? Now, Zulily and our broader company Q-rate like we believe passionately in diversity, equity and inclusion and it shows up in everything we do. So I also think actions matter. So it's one thing to say it's important but it's like leaders need to demonstrate the commitment. So we've done some pretty, I consider to be investments in how do we continue to develop our internal talent and grow diverse leaders and leaders from any position. It doesn't mean that you move into management. We have leaders that are in engineering rules and product management rules. It's like, how do we continue to invest and also create inclusive leadership opportunities where our leaders are learning. What does it look like to operate as an inclusive leader? So important, but to your point, action is so important. Sounds like you guys are doing an amazing job at Zulily, not only in terms of embracing cloud first being born in the cloud but also from a DEI perspective, I love that Courtney. Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us, your recommendations and thoughts. I know the audience found a lot of value in it as Dubai. Thanks again for having me. My pleasure. For Courtney Kisler, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE special program series, Women of the Cloud brought to you by AWS. Thanks for watching.