Latest / Talk Commerce / Live From Ecomm Forum Frank Verdeja on Bridging the Gap Between Technology and Business Teams
Transcript
- Speaker 2 (00:01.206) Alright, welcome to Talk Commerce Live from E-commerce Forum in Minneapolis. Today I have Frank Verdea. Alright, Frank, tell us what you do, who you're with. All right. Yep. Speaker 1 (00:14.126) you're here. Yeah I have 13 years in e-commerce and data management background. I'm local to the Twin Cities and I currently work for a data management company but I'm always wanting to keep my finger on the pulse of who's who and who's making magic in the Twin Cities with e-commerce. Yeah, we met way back at ShopJimmy and I had forgotten about ShopJimmy but you've been with all kinds of stuff. Old school Magento based e-commerce platform. That was quite the experience. Yeah, you know, I learned a ton about e-commerce while I was there, just as a business person interfacing with the developers and your development team. it actually taught me some very strong skills around making sure that I'm always the bridge between technology and business. being a part of a startup where the developers were in-house, it was just such an opportunity. Speaker 1 (01:15.92) to learn so much and I credit all of the work that I've been able to do to that original job. Yeah, we talked a little bit earlier about that bridge and how it is sometimes it's hard to for it for For a technical person to talk to a customer and for a customer to talk to a technical person you need that middle person right kind of Interpret for the two people tell us about some of the challenges you have in that Yeah. Speaker 1 (01:40.814) Well, so I think the biggest thing that I've always learned is... To overcome the challenges, the best first approach is to give context. So whether you are talking to the technical team, you need to give them the context about what are they building and why are they building it. What's the value in it? Because I find that that not only gives some clarity to PMs, project managers, and directors to be able to guide the overall roadmap of a build out of a product. but also giving them context, it shows that what they're doing is valuable and it helps them personally prioritize their work. And then on the flip side, when you talk to the business side, giving context from a technical standpoint, it allows business people to understand why there's roadblocks in the queue and in the timeline. It helps them understand that there's... deep value in certain things like introducing core application, explaining that to a business person that this is core, we should be able to roll this out. This is custom, it's gonna take more time. It helps guide the expectations of the business. And I've found that by having the communication, it kind of rubs off on everybody and everybody just has mutual respect for both sides of the picture and they act more as one team. That's great. And I think that as a developer, it's so easy to get sidetracked and it's so easy to go off on your own. you know, at ShopJimmy, I, know, one of the things that, one of the things that bothered me was that I couldn't do some of my own tasks. as a seasoned developer, you really need to be focused on doing that. It's such an important role. Yeah. Tell us a bit about precisely, precisely what is it? Speaker 1 (03:36.558) Sure, so precisely as a data integrity company focused on global data integrity for any type of business. So that could mean focusing on solutions around data governance, data observability, data integration from mainframe to cloud, data quality engines, and then master data management. And they also play in the location intelligence space. They have a data set that can apply to things. like customer and supplier onboarding, as well as once you have identified and verified a correct address, supplementing that inside of an MDM with very complex point of interest and demographic data. So from an e-commerce perspective, it's great. The data sets are very valuable because they can help train or teach machine learning programs to spit out better content in a more geo specific language or locale. It can help with tax jurisdiction and price models and things like that. So it's all good stuff. It's fun. It's adjacent to e-commerce. We don't directly make e-commerce products and solutions. But we're usually up the stream empowering the larger organizations for e-commerce success. Again, I think now with AI and the ability to collect data and now the ability to use that data and even having these right systems that are out there that allow you to just store so much raw data, having that management system is even more important. Speaker 1 (05:22.762) Yeah, and what we're learning too is that from a usability perspective, a lot of our customers are choosing to own that data in their own clouds. And so you need to be able to come to them with some platforms and tools that can sit on top of their cloud infrastructure and apply those business rules, apply that data governance and everything, and not become another set of tools. that have to get embedded into the enterprise at a local level like on-prem, but to meet them at the cloud and provide supplementary services. That's great. So Frank, what are you hoping to get out of e-commerce? today? I'm hoping to learn about new e-commerce companies that I haven't heard of yet around the Twin Cities. So I'm always curious to see who's up and coming, you know, being a part of a small business that acted as a startup, as an e-com startup. It's in my blood, it's in my heart, and so I love like rooting for the new players that come on board. That's awesome. Thanks, Frank. It's been such a great conversation. Great to see you again. Yeah, you too. And see each other in future again. Speaker 1 (06:36.492) Awesome.