Host Intro (Gene Kim)

One of the first speakers of the conference is a very familiar face. Courtney Kissler was part of the DevOps Enterprise Summit from the very beginning, back when she was head of technology for the biggest part of Nordstrom. She is now VP, Digital Platforms Engineering at Nike.

Nike has been amazing sharing how they are adapting to digital disruption and their focus on direct-to-consumer. They shared the story last year in San Francisco, as well as in London earlier this year.

Courtney Kissler will be presenting with Anne Bradley, the Chief Privacy Officer and Global Counsel for Nike Direct. They will be talking about building a bigger team: turning legal and compliance into fuel instead of drag. They are going to talk about a unique partnership that I think you will be genuinely envious about, and I challenge you to see if you can create a similar partnership in your own organization.

Just as a side note, I had the privilege last December of being at Nike world headquarters at 7:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning for the Air Jordan 11 shoe launch, what they call a high-heat shoe launch, using digital channel as one of the primary channels to launch. I got to shadow Courtney Kissler and her colleague, Glenn Forrester, and it was an experience I will never forget.

So with that, Courtney and Anne.

Anne Bradley and Courtney Kissler

Courtney Kissler: Thank you. I think Anne is going to do it. Anne is in charge.

Anne Bradley: All right. Good morning. It is wonderful to be here. We are super excited to share a story.

At Nike, we win as a team. We are going to talk about a collaboration between our two teams that really helped us overcome prioritization paralysis, kill legacy systems, and leverage compliance for competitive advantage.

Courtney Kissler: I am Courtney Kissler. Gene mentioned a little bit about what I do now. My teams are accountable for building the platforms that power our Nike consumer experiences. That includes core commerce, in-store technology, our customization platform, which is where I made these really cool shoes, and our consumer data platform and personalization.

Anne Bradley: And I am Anne Bradley, Chief Privacy Officer at Nike. My teams are responsible for ensuring that we show consumers love and respect, and that we do the right thing with their data.

01Courtney's Journey

Courtney Kissler: I am going to share a little bit about my journey. Gene mentioned earlier in the kickoff that we all follow each other and where our journeys have taken us.

I had the opportunity to be part of the very first DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014. At the time I was working at Nordstrom, and we had really made a shift in our thinking away from optimizing for cost to optimizing for speed. The story I shared then was how we were leveraging value stream mapping and DevOps techniques and really transforming the organization. It was a unique journey because I had started as an engineer, moved through operations into delivery, and ended in a pretty senior leadership role at Nordstrom.

Then I decided to take an opportunity at Starbucks. It was a little bit different because I came in at an executive leadership role, which carries some good with it because you get to come in and listen and observe. I was able to leverage some of the techniques I had learned at Nordstrom to focus on speed to value and how we were delivering our global POS solution for Starbucks.

Now today, I am thrilled to be part of the Nike team. We are super focused on our consumer direct strategy, which is really: how are we going to connect in a meaningful way with our consumers one-to-one? That is a super exciting challenge, part of why we are here, and we are driving the growth for Nike.

02Anne's Journey

Anne Bradley: I am going to tell you a little bit about myself, too.

As background, about 20 years ago I graduated with a degree in computer science, left college, and started working at a B2B software company that made software for the newspaper industry. I spent quite a lot of time in Vegas doing that job for the first couple of years, so I am happy to be back and a little nostalgic.

I was in my 20s. I did not really know what I cared about. I was just starting out as a software developer with a few feelings about things. A couple of things mattered to me. I am from Boston, and outrage is our birthright in Boston. As my husband says, it is angry soil that built the revolution. I was outraged about all manner of things in my 20s. When I graduated from college, I remember driving out with a bumper sticker on the back of my car that said, "If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention." That tells you a little bit about me.

Among the many things I was upset about, I was really upset because I had loved using Napster and LimeWire in college. I had discovered tons of great music that way, and I was super pissed off at the judicial system, which was coming through as I left college and punishing software developers for building the tools that folks were using to share songs.

I thought it was totally unfair. The gun industry was immunized from the conduct of their users, and here were software developers building tools that others were using to violate copyright law. It did not feel fair that the platforms building that stuff were being held responsible.

So I started reading Slashdot every day. I started to follow Lawrence Lessig. He founded Free Culture. That was a big deal for me. I joined the EFF, and eventually I went to law school and became a lawyer. I really wanted to change the world, and I still do.

After law school, I started working at a couple of law firms. You have to earn your spurs in the legal profession, so you work at big law for a little while to learn how you do it. It is not really a trade school.

Then I found my way to Hulu, which was kind of ironic because Hulu was founded by a bunch of big studios to provide an ad-supported alternative to online file sharing. So I came full circle. Now I was working for the man. And the man believed in the ad-supported internet.

As a lawyer, I was the first IP, technology, and privacy lawyer at Hulu. I spent a lot of time defending the ad-supported internet. I loved the job. I did not love defending the ad-supported internet and all of the tracking that comes along with that. You know my roots; the EFF also does not like all the tracking that comes along with that.

When the opportunity came up to go to Nike, where we are trying to make people better, inspired, and active instead of sitting and binge-watching television, I could imagine my daughter going for a run. That was super compelling. Even more compelling was the fact that this was a company that loved consumers. I wanted to be part of that and not have to monetize eyeballs, instead getting to deliver services to consumers. It was a wonderful choice, and I have loved it every day, even the hardest days we have had together, and there have been many.

Courtney Kissler: There have, yes.

Anne Bradley: Nike likes to dream big and go after it. As they say, "Just do it." We are going to show you one of our favorites.

03Crazy Dreams

Courtney Kissler: I feel like I could watch that video a million times. I love it.

Anne Bradley: Gets me every time.

Courtney Kissler: All the feels.

Anne Bradley: All the feels.

Courtney Kissler: That is what I work for.

Anne Bradley: All the feels. Okay. What are our crazy dreams?

Courtney Kissler: I joined Nike to be part of a world-class organization, working at a scale I had never experienced in my entire career. One of the crazy dreams of my entire time in technology has been to actually kill a legacy system. I think we all know they just drag us down. They are just like, "Not this year. Maybe next year." That has been a crazy dream of mine, and I will judge by laughter that others maybe have had that crazy dream as well.

Anne Bradley: I joined Nike to work for a company that inspires consumer love, and to help Nike show that love back to our consumers by respecting them and their data. So my crazy dream: figure out what data we actually need and delete the rest.

Courtney Kissler: Today we are going to share a story about how we brought these dreams to life.

Before we go there, though, I am going to share a nightmare story, one of my worst nightmares. I started in the security industry. That was my first startup, and my very first role at Nordstrom was as a security engineer. I knew how it felt to be the one who needed to be talking about compliance and security mandates, and I also knew how it felt to be on the receiving end of a mandate where the date had been picked on my behalf, already committed to the board of directors, and basically it was, "You just need to get it done." Typically that showed up as a compliance checklist, and we all know where that story goes. It is not really truly protecting the consumer.

We decided that we were going to approach that very differently. We were going to use our dreams to tee this up in a different way. Rather than having a legal mandate come our way, we collaborated and came up with: what is the right thing to do? We engaged our teams, and then we pitched back to the board and committed.

We took the approach of leveraging our board as something we could use in day-to-day conversations. I would bring out that board commitment anytime somebody was trying to derail the prioritization of the activities that we had committed to and our teams had committed to. Amar was one of the key leaders who helped us make this happen.

We would have armies of stakeholders coming to us wanting us to pivot and work on different priorities, whether it was a shiny object or something revenue-driving. If I could not keep the priority with just the board commitment, then I would call Anne in for reinforcements. Sometimes I could just mention Anne's name and everybody would be like, "Okay, okay, we got it."

Anne Bradley: Yeah. That is a feature.

Courtney Kissler: Other times, I would pick up the phone and call Anne, and she would do some math.

Anne Bradley: What? Lawyers can do math? Yes, we can.

04Negative ROI Is Real

Anne Bradley: On the screen, 4%. Anyone know what that is? That is the fine under the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe: 4% of global annual revenue. That is big numbers for every company.

For Nike, with $34.3 billion in revenue, that gets you to a really big number, and that number gets attention. But I know you are saying, "That is just an abstract number. That is just the maximum fine you could ever get. What if we just did not do data deletion? What if we just did not enable export?"

Okay, let us talk about the risk there. What happens if we just do not enable deletion? I put that at: do not enable deletion, 80% chance we get investigated.

That is $1.09 billion. Then if we get investigated, what are the chances we get caught? We did not build deletion; it is kind of table stakes, the basic stuff you are supposed to do. That is 100% chance we are going to get caught.

But you are like, "Anne, sometimes they do not fine you the maximum amount, right?" All right. Let us say 50/50 we get the maximum amount. That is the present negative value of not doing data deletion: $550 million for Nike.

I will put that up against any $10 million revenue driver or $40 million shiny object that you put in front of me. Guess what? I usually win, and we get it done. Negative ROI is real. I explain this hundreds of times a year. From every Scrum Master to our CIO, I explain this math when they try to deprioritize this critical work so that we can participate fully in the same prioritization planning as everyone else. I know engineers understand negative numbers.

05Minimum Viable Compliance

Courtney and I have been working together, and one concept we use to help our teams collaborate is MVC. MVC means minimum viable compliance.

Courtney Kissler: Yeah. Feel free to hashtag it.

Anne Bradley: Our teams work together, and they come up with what is the minimum viable compliance, and then how do we commit to that? In exchange for being such a totally awesome legal partner, Courtney has prohibited her team from engaging in my absolute favorite behavior: sending me a link to a legal definition of PII from Wikipedia.

Do you not know anyone can edit that? Plus, if it were that easy, would it have taken this long and massive student loans to become a chief privacy officer? Come on.

Courtney Kissler: Here is what we did. Last year, we mapped all of Nike's consumer data. We built capabilities to control access and do deletion at scale. We deleted a half a petabyte of data that, if we had not done that activity, we would have ended up needing to protect it. That was a massive win.

Back to my crazy dream, we deprecated two massive legacy systems. Genuinely, I do not hear a lot of people telling those stories, and personally I have not experienced it in my career. This paved the way for our consumer direct offense, which is already seeing a ton of return.

06Killing Legacy Platforms

Courtney Kissler: You know why I hate legacy systems, but it turns out, so does Anne. Anne, why do you hate legacy systems?

Anne Bradley: Well, they suck.

Courtney Kissler: Yep.

Anne Bradley: They hold us back. Consumer expectations are racing forward, and delivering the experiences of the future is impossible on a geriatric stack. We are not doing it. It is so difficult.

If any of you have ever had to negotiate with your lawyer about what kind of on-screen disclaimer you are going to build to explain to consumers why you cannot do something the right way because of the legacy stack, you feel my pain. When you feel it enough, you learn its name. Our pain was called CAM and MSP, and I have PTSD when I hear those names.

Courtney Kissler: CAM was our classic account management system. It was essentially the original consumer data store. MSP was our multi-sport platform.

CAM tended to be the number one routine issue whenever we had a high-impacting event. Gene talked about our high-heat launches. MSP was a platform that supported products that were not even in the market anymore, but it was still this anchor in our environment. They were both severely keeping us from meeting our growth goals.

So we had an Irish wake, as one does when you are from Boston.

Anne Bradley: Full-on celebration.

Courtney Kissler: Our teams were encouraged to write poems, which was what was scrolling in the background, so that we could say goodbye to CAM. This cake was to say goodbye to MSP. It was super fun to see the creativity, because one thing Anne and I try to do with our teams is: this can be fun. It does not have to be boring work. We should actually enjoy it.

I am going to read this: "As it sits on bed of death, for CAM, we have come here to mourn for its journey."

Anne Bradley: Sojourn.

Courtney Kissler: Sojourn.

07What's Next: Multi-Region Strategy

Courtney Kissler: What is next for us? Some people's dream is to go to Disney World. Some people's dream is to get their personal best in the Berlin Marathon. My crazy dream is a multi-region strategy. It is a pretty nerdy dream.

Anne Bradley: Right?

Courtney Kissler: Why would that not be my crazy dream? Let me say why it is my crazy dream.

We are consumer obsessed, and we are global. It is super important for us to have a strategy that enables our geographies to connect in a meaningful way with their local consumer. The way we do that is through the multi-region strategy. We would not do it just to do it. We would not do it for compliance reasons. We will get compliance by doing it, but our real driver is to be relevant in that one-to-one connection with our consumer, and to empower our geographies to manage that.

Anne Bradley: How does this match up with my dream? Some of you may have read in the news that there are nations all over the planet passing data localization laws, which require us to hold consumer data in their territory.

Many of my peers, much to my disappointment and somewhat revulsion, are building multimillion-dollar data centers where they are just streaming dead copies of data and putting them there. Then we pay for the data center, put the data there, pay for the data center. No consumer benefit.

The thing that makes me wake up in the morning is the idea that we could be both compliant and useful. The multi-region strategy is a huge deal to me. It is not the theater of compliance. It is real. We are going to move the data to where the consumers are. We will check that compliance box, but at the same time, we will deliver performant experiences for consumers that make them love Nike even more.

As we look to the future, that is what Courtney and I are going to keep doing. We will just keep racking up the trophies, the nerd trophies.

Courtney Kissler: Nerd trophies.

Anne Bradley: But they are trophies nonetheless.

08Build Your Bigger Team

Courtney Kissler: One discovery that we have made throughout this journey is that we are truly building a bigger team. We do not focus on our organizational structure or any boundaries. We get out of our lane. We lead by example, and we really partner to deliver the best of Nike to our consumers. In doing so, we win as a team.

Anne Bradley: I understand this is the classic slide at this conference: what help we need, what do we need from you? A lot of times people ask for tactical stuff: how you can help us one way or another, hit us up on the Slack channel. Sure, we want all that.

But what do we really want? We want this community to have courage and resilience and step out of your comfort zones. Lawyers are not scary or mean. Find surprise collaborators.

Courtney Kissler: Sometimes we can be.

Anne Bradley: Sometimes you can be. Mean when that is what we are trying to do. But find your surprise collaborators. Build your bigger team. Ask yourself: are your dreams crazy enough?

We are not Nike if we do not close on another badass video. This is one of our favorites. It features chicks, and the tagline is in Spanish, so I will translate it for you: "Stronger together."

Courtney Kissler: Thank you.

Anne Bradley: Thank you.