Drew Pinto | Time to Think About Architecture

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1:39CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former chief marketing officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Drew Pinto. Today's topic, time to think about architecture. Now, Drew is the EVP and chief revenue and technology officer of Marriott International. He probably has a super long business card, a place he has worked most of his career. We invited him here to talk about something that doesn't get much airtime, but probably should, architecture.

2:26Today, we explore why underlying tech and data architecture may be one of the biggest drivers of customer experience, speed, and growth. Now, full disclosure, we've known each other for a number of years as our paths crossed when I was at Best Buy, and he was just starting his career at Accenture. Welcome, Drew. Thank you very much, Mike. It's so great to see you and to be here and to reconnect with you after all this time, so thank you for having me. It's a lot of fun to reconnect, and when we say architecture, we're not talking about the building design. We're talking about the data architecture, so let's start at that highest level, when you say architecture, what do you mean?

3:07And then secondly, why should a marketer care about it? Yeah, great question to get started with. I will say, first of all, we're going to make sure that this podcast is interesting and relevant to you. And then I'm not going to take you into the depths of architecture and bore you, but it is important for everyone to know. When we talk about this, what I'm really referring to is what happens below the surface that gets marketers and other business leaders and executives the capabilities that they need. So if you're going to run a campaign, you want to target certain customer groups, you want to bring content forward, you want to distribute it to the right channels.

3:46All those things have a tech backbone and a data backbone. And so what I'm going to talk a little bit about today is just what are the strategies that happen down in that layer? And really how we go about that and how we think about it. because I think knowing that really makes every marketer a better leader. And again, I have a technology role that I've been doing for the past few years. I've worked with technology my whole career, but I also have a whole commercial side of my job. And so I feel like I've learned a lot about tech and how to use it and how not to use it in that commercial role about how to really make it effective.

4:20So that's when we talk today, that's really what I'm talking about. We'll use architecture in a little bit broader terms of kind of the underlying capabilities that make things happen. And do I think of this as infrastructure and piping to give you the answer and the data you want? Or do I think about it some other way if I'm a marketer? It's all the way down to the infrastructure. Yeah. And it's also the data. I mean, data is such a key component of this. Not only where we store it and how it's formatted, but then how it's used. But then all the way up, you know, You always hear people talk about tech stacks because there's layers to it.

4:59And that goes all the way up to the actual tools that are in your hands on your day-to-day basis that you use to do your job. Those are all part of the same strategy. If you want to go all the way down to data storage, all the way up to something on your desktop. It's all part of the picture. Right. And this is becoming more and more important than ever, which is why I asked you to be on the show. So let's start, you know, we'll talk about systems in general, but one of the things, a whole bunch of people, especially if you're in a big brand, you inherit a legacy system. A lot of times it was decades old.

5:35Tell us an overview of what is officially a legacy system. Like when do you become a legacy and when are you not a legacy? And how do you evaluate your legacy system? I mean, yeah, I'm sure you're used to all the marketers and salespeople going, oh, the legacy system is killing us. It's no good. IT is awful. Yeah. Tell us your view on legacy systems and then how do you evaluate it and then what do you do about it? Sure. I would say in general, it's one of those ones like it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Yeah. That's how I feel about it is, you know, typically obviously old, right?

6:12Been around a long time. Is that like more than 10 years or more than 15 years? I mean, it really depends. I mean, actually, in some places, you can have a system that's 20, 30 years old. And it may be legacy, but it may be fine, right? Like deep down in the core, you have like a transaction system, right? So like a lot of the financial services firms, they still run a version of mainframe software that we have and to run like billions of transactions, you know, in a short period of time, it's very stable. It does what it needs to do. But I think a legacy system is one that I'm going to say it's inflexible, right?

6:52It just can't adapt to what the business needs are. And so that could be something that's five years old, but was built the wrong way. It could be something like in our case, we have some systems that are 40 years old that we're replacing right now. They've served us well, but you just get to the point where the rapidly changing business needs just can't be met by the underlying systems. Obviously, anything in the tech world, if you've got enough money, you've got enough time, you can make it happen. But to be feasible and to really respond at the speed of business, you've got to have systems that are adaptable.

7:28So that's what I would call legacy is, and when you ask how we evaluate them. Yeah, because you want to know, okay, because it's really easy to say I have a legacy system. It's really easy to say, oh, true, Pinto and IT is messing up everything I wanted to do. They were faster. How do I really evaluate my situation and know how much the architecture is holding me back? Yeah, just to remember, I always remind everybody, and again, this is what I've learned over my career. I'm not a computer science major, kind of learned this as I've gone. But the number one thing is just to make sure that you keep in mind technology and data in that case is just a means to an end.

8:10It's a tool there for you to help you achieve what you're trying to achieve. So what I always start with is I go back to the commercial side and to the business side. And I say, tell me what customer experience we are trying to deliver. Or in some cases, right, it might be for your employees, you know, associate experience. And then what are the drivers of value around that? So you start with very basic questions that you and everyone as a business leader start with, right? Like, what are you trying to achieve? What's it worth? How far is the gap between what we want the customer to experience and what we have today?

8:45And you start there and then you flow it down. And once you start flowing that down, that's when all the gaps are going to come out. Is it truly like an architecture thing or an underlying legacy system thing? Is it that we have the data, we just don't have it connected, right? Like that's the case sometimes we find out. We say, oh, you know, I wish I knew this about our customer. And it's because of our legacy systems, we don't have that. Lo and behold, we go investigate to try to solve the business problem of, hey, we want to be able to personalize your stay in one of our hotels like this. We go find it and say, oh, actually, we have that data.

9:22It's just sitting over here and it's not piped together. So it can be used and pulled to the surface for the front desk associate when they're checking you in, for example. So sometimes that's where it's like, it may not be your legacy system problem. It's something else. And then in some cases, it might be a process problem or a change management problem. But to know what you're trying to achieve, it sounds so simple, but it's critical. So I have to run real use cases through this, right? To see where the holes are, not just ask it one question and then go, oh, it's the legacy system. Yeah, that's exactly right.

9:57And you get a variety of people in the room. some of which will be your technologists, but you'll also get your customer experience person, your user design, and you get them together and you say, this is what I'm trying to do. Like for us, obviously, Marriott Bonvoy members are critical for us. Well, you guys had to smash so much data together to make Bonvoy. You got it. And we have more than we use. So we should be using even more to make things even more personalized. But what we used to do is then say, okay, someone has one idea. Hey, wouldn't it be great to, you know, acknowledge your birthday, right, as a Bonvoy member.

10:38And then it was like the team would go solve for how do we acknowledge your birthday, right? And now we're saying we want to be your lifelong travel partner. So that means here's like seven or eight things along your journey that we might be able to do. If you bring that all together, then the teams that I have in my department sit down and say, oh, well, these are all pretty similar needs. We want to make sure we have one place where all your preferences sit and that any system that needs to access that for any kind of use case you're going to have, it all pipes that way. So it works. And so what that allows us to do is then when someone comes in and says, well, I don't really care about birthday, but like if you, if you get a new dog and you, lots of pet friendly hotels, maybe we should send you a note, congratulations.

11:29And, you know, here's some great hotels to go to instead of rebuilding all that and doing another project. We just say, Oh yeah, well, we already have that data because we thought about the fact of what you were trying to do for a member experience in this case. But you're basically saying this thinking upfront, a lot of which should come from the customer interface people should not be a one use case. It should be a concept when they can give it to you. You got it. Yep. And if I come and I say, I want birthdays. And then two months later, say I want dog ownership. And then three months later, say I want kids and everyone builds three little things.

12:04It's kind of crazy instead of everybody getting together and say, how many possible things could we ask for that we might use? Yeah, yeah, that's right. And just the bringing the tech people into your strategy, right? Even if and not at the end when you're like, okay, here's what I want to do, like throw it over the wall, go build this. It's right from the start. You know, again, very simple management principles, but they really work. and I'll tell you you know like the people who work on my team they thirst for that they're yes they love technology they love data yes that's their what they've chosen for their career but they want to have an impact just like anybody else I always had them come to all my staff meetings I wanted to direct people assigned to the department yeah and expected them to go to everything so they could argue it yeah yeah and and then they get tapped into what you're trying to achieve because lo and behold, when they get in there, they know the products better than anybody else.

13:04They may innovate and come up with a different way to do it, but they understand what you're trying to achieve at the end. That's when the power really gets unlocked. We are taking a short break from this show for a word from our sponsor, Typeface.

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14:17now back to our discussion hey drew when we were talking earlier uh one of the things you said is it's not built to last, it's built to change. And what does that mean and how do you do it? So I think it connects really back to what we're talking about with legacy systems. I would use flexibility or inflexibility is the big determining factor there. And so the way we build technology now is that you almost realize or admit right up front that you're never going to be able to predict what the business users or the customers are going to want. And even if you get it right at first, it's going to change pretty quickly.

14:58So when we say from built to last to built to change, built to last was these big monolith legacy systems that we're now pivoting away from. Because the advantage was to make sure they were stable and had scale and they were efficient and cheap and all that type of thing. And they did that really well. But now those are table stakes. I mean, you, every system has to be affordable and has to be stable and reliable. What we now look at is say, how adaptable can we be? And so, for example, let's use our Bonvoy program again. We may want to change the rules of that program or the benefits that you get, or how do we recognize different tiers of members?

15:41and we realized that as the experience develops and as people get their, I guess, the expectations change in the loyalty space and in the loyalty space, we don't know exactly what we're going to need. So we built it in a way now where the underlying kind of core systems do the same thing over and over again and they don't change that much and you won't have to touch them that much. But then there's a layer above that, that's where it's all configurable. So if you want to make a change and say, oh, you know, let's recognize people, you know, with different benefits. Now it's just what we call a configuration change.

16:19You change the rules in one little place and now it works versus the old way was you'd have to go down. You'd have to go down and reprogram the whole thing. Yes. And that's the difference. That's the built to change component of this. But what you're also saying is the more the people building the configuration layer, especially the marketers out there or salespeople out there, the more they can say what is they want to be configurable, the better this will be. Because if you get it stuck down under the configuration layer, it costs a lot of money and time, right? Yeah, that's right. And this is where I think it was.

16:54I loved your idea to do this podcast because this is why I say, hey, marketers, you don't need to know all this tech, but get to know a little bit of it and also get to know your partners in these areas, because then you can really work with them and almost admit right up front. I actually don't know where this is going to go, you know, because the market changes on me, even if I did know the market changes on me. But here's the types of things I'm going to want to do. And then here are the types of things that may change in the future. And I really can't lock into a commitment here. Then then rely and kind of expect your good tech and data teams to go from there and say, OK, well, I'm going to build this in a way that gives us some optionality.

17:35And that's really important. Hey, let's talk about, you guys are obviously a big company. You got it right. I've been at a lot of big companies that really work to get it right. If I'm not in quite as big of a company or I don't have the infrastructure I might want, a lot of people will go to outsourcing a lot of this stuff. one of our guests was on the show and said the most important skill in the next 10 years particularly given ai will be vendor management picking the right tech picking the right people how should our listeners think about the difference between build versus buy and and you know if if they are very frustrated they want to build something or they want to buy something outside of your remit, how do they go about that?

18:27Yeah, yeah. I have been on the in-source, outsource, offshore, onshore journey and several different jobs here at Marriott. So I could tell you my personal experience, but also I'll just put a lens on it of if you're a smaller company and what you can do. Our basic premise here is we're going to buy commodity, right? We don't want to be in the business for something that is a pretty standard service that you can get out on the marketplace. Like what's an example of a standard commodity? When we did this was actually a pretty big pivot for us just a few years ago is actually our central reservation system.

19:04Go ahead and book a reservation with us. That was our own homegrown system, 40 years old, and we needed to rebuild it. And we actually went to a company called Amadeus, who's a partner of ours. So we said, okay, for the core reservation system, we're not necessarily going to differentiate that much on that. And they have a very good product. They have other hotel companies on that. And so we've now joined like a community, which means any enhancement we provide or one of our competitors provides, they're going to build that into the product. So where the differentiation comes from for us is then you, it's how you assemble all the different capabilities across these commodity products into a customer experience we were just talking about.

19:49And that goes to your built to change thing, because Amadeus will change reservations as fast as anybody changes them versus one brand. Exactly right. Yeah, it's I view that assembly is like the analogy I guess I'd use is you can buy all the ingredients and the appliances in the kitchen. The chef is where the magic happens. Right. And one chef is better than another one because of the product they produce and the experience that they create. and that's how we've we pivoted um the other thing i'll say is again the advice the advice is not for everybody because they're everyone's different situations but what i would say is um we've learned on the in-source outsource pendulum that you can go too far in either way and somewhere in the middle usually works well what the place where it goes too far to outsource is um you lose one, some really key skill that you're going to need because again, things keep changing.

20:48So you're, if you're totally outsourced, you're going to atrophy in some of those key skills and you're not going to be able to adapt as quickly. I think that's probably been our biggest thing. And then two is like, you want to keep control over that differentiating factor, which to me, again, is that assembly kind of layer. So, so for us, we found the balance between if you're smaller and you don't have a really big ability to have big tech department everything certainly outsourcing makes a lot of sense but I think I think you always want to retain that kind of middle part before it reaches the customer or your employees and that you have some you can have a pretty small department but have some very skilled people there so what you're saying is some assembly required.

21:36Yeah. It should be required for all companies. You use the word experience. Let's talk about customer experience and how that is affected by architecture. Yeah. I think probably the biggest thing is both the good and the bad. If you have the architecture right, then the experiences you can deliver to the customer are much more enriched, but also you'd be a lot more flexible. So I'm sure a lot of your marketers that come on are talking about hyper-personalization and being very tailored to people. Everyone has those same ideas we do as well. Your architecture or your data is going to be one of either the holdups or the unlocks there.

22:25Yeah. Can you get to that information? How do you use it? There's all the security and privacy around it, right? If you're not built correctly, then some data you may have that you could use if you had it set up right, you're not going to be able to use. So that's where I think it shows up. And Drew, how do I assess this? Because what I want to say is, all right, because we're talking about architecture and data, do I just pound it with a gazillion use cases? Or how do I, if I'm sitting out there, think, all right, I got to be ready for the next wave of AI personalization, all this stuff. I got a loyalty program for this.

23:03How do I assess what I have now in conjunction with you? Give us a tip. I would ask the most fundamental questions that you think probably are kind of basic questions. Ask those questions about your data, right? What data do I have about a customer? So if I was on the Bonvoy app and I wanted to be painful, I'd say, do I have coffee preferences for the room? Do I have this? Do I have that? I could just make up everything like that. yeah then you would tell me you know do i have do i have birthday dates do i have pet status and then you could tell me what i have and don't have yeah and then when i say drew i want to go get that data we don't have it yeah some of it is not easily gettable right yeah yeah but at the very first thing i would do though is even ask just an open-ended question go to your data team your tech team say what data do we have like pick a customer have them mask it so you know you don't even see who the customer is just say tell me what we know about our customer show me everything and where does it sit and how is it accessible just ask them those basic questions and see what answers you get either it's going to be well we can't tell you that because it's in like a variety of places or we have it all here but it only gets gets delivered to these channels or you know if if you're in a really data forward company, they're going to say, we have it all.

24:33Here it is. Here's how we update it on a, on a periodic basis. Here's how we send it to the different places. Again, it's not highly technical. They can, they might drag you down into the weeds. You just drag it public up and say, no, no, no. I don't need to know the solutions or what cloud providers you're providing or you're using. Like, you don't need to know that. You just need to know the basics. Like draw me a schematic of what customer data do you have? Where does it flow? right? And what channels can access it? And you'll be enlightened by the answers, especially by the reaction. I did this recently here.

25:13We've been trying to really improve our data on a variety of fronts. About a year ago, we hired a new head of data analytics and AI, fantastic guy, hired him from outside the hotel industry. And these are our first conversations as he got in his name's colin and i asked colin okay and he had great answers but not only yeah here's where it is but he's like but here's what's missing right and i love this term i don't know if he's the one who coined it but uh you know there's a lot of talk about data lakes right and everyone putting it so he called it data puddles and he's like there's like there's pieces of data that are really good but it's not all interconnected and so for someone like me right who again comes from more like the sales marketing background.

25:58That was a really easy concept for me to get. I'm like, oh, okay. Then he took me deeper. I was like, okay, when I say that, I mean, here's what we have and here's the places and here's what we have to do to interconnect them. But it made a lot of sense. And now it helps me with the strategy, the investment plan, how we deliver then data to stakeholders. Cause I get it because he showed it. Cause I asked some very basic questions and he showed it in a way. The data puddles. All right, Colin, we'll call it the Colin rule. You must have been a cuddle. I know when we did the loyalty program at Best Buy, the CIO at the time, Mark Gordon, and he smashed 14 data sites into one.

26:40Yeah, yeah. To get that right. It's actually pretty fascinating these days with AI. You might not have to have a data lake anymore. So it's really turning things on its head because everything's so discoverable. But you need to know where it is and what you have and you need to govern it all. And so that there's a whole piece on that. But it's really, again, it just goes back to fundamentals though, that for a marketer, a sales leader, if you just are clear, like here's what I'm trying to do. Like our sales team, it's like, when our customer, like a big group customer goes from one hotel to the other, other hotels just wants to know, how was the last event?

27:20What were they looking for? Did it go well or not? Did they have any special requests? We do all this manipulation today to try to get that information to the next hotel so they can provide better service. Like we know that now. So we're going to work on data to make it really easy for our sales team at the next hotel to be prepared. They don't need to get into the details of how that works, but they need to be clear about the business problem they're trying to solve and why it's going to benefit the customer. So if you are advising all the marketers out there, what are the biggest mistakes they are making in this space now?