Michael Concannon - VP of Technology at American Express

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Michael Concannon, the Vice President of Technology at American Express, and we discuss the benefits of connecting your team to the customer, understanding that time management doesn't just happen, and ways to get your team to ask better questions that lead to better results. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Michael Concannon at 00:00:38) Hey, hey. How are you doing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) Fantastic. Audio sounds great, Michael.

(Michael Concannon at 00:00:43) Oh good. Just an Apple headphone, but seems to work fine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) These Apple headphones amaze me. They're so small and they sound just as good as these, as long as they don't rub against people's shirts.

(Michael Concannon at 00:00:54) Yeah, your helper there told me, and so I tucked the wire underneath the laptop so that should keep it suspended.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:03) Nice. Isn't it amazing though how technology works so well?

(Michael Concannon at 00:01:06) Oh, I love it. This is just, you know, the opportunities we have as technologists to do all kinds of stuff is so amazing. And I sent you over a few videos because I just play with it at home all the time, from electronics to programming to everything, and it just makes the world so much more fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) No, I love it. I was actually watching those videos. I like the musical tree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) So what did you do there?

(Michael Concannon at 00:01:33) That was just an Arduino hooked into a MIDI port where I just bought a cheap MIDI wire, cut it open, and hooked it into the Arduino. And then that was running a strip of LED lights that we have on our Christmas tree. So the fun part was figuring out what lighting patterns we wanted to use for each of the different octaves and the different notes on the keyboard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) Because it wasn't just straight linear, it wasn't just up and down. It was actually pretty creative how it was going.

(Michael Concannon at 00:02:03) Yeah, we did a different color for each octave and a different height for each note so that you could kind of play a set of scales that would go up and change color as it rotated through the height on the tree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) Yeah, I love the bass is red and the high notes are blue. I was like, this is really cool.

(Michael Concannon at 00:02:19) Yeah, my son was the one who drove it. He's like, "Oh no, we need to follow the spectrum so that the low is the lower end of the spectrum and we go up to violet on the other side."

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:28) No, it was really, really cool though. And it was on Vimeo, which we actually use Vimeo to power our business. So I'm a big fan. And then I saw in your history that you used to actually be the CTO at Vimeo.

(Michael Concannon at 00:02:41) That's correct. I had a great time there. A huge fan of everyone there and only moved on last year. So, you know, wish them the best, and they're still growing crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:53) I had heard a story. I watched a lot of interviews. And, oh, by the way, this is the podcast. There's no intro. It's just you and I hanging out talking.

(Michael Concannon at 00:03:02) I was wondering that, but I figured that we were in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:07) So, but I was watching your Vimeo, but one of the things that I thought was interesting is I had heard one of the competitors of Vimeo—I watch a lot of interviews—and one of the competitors of Vimeo had been talking about, you know, their startup. It was an entrepreneurial type interview. Right? And he said at the beginning they were too profitable. Right? Because it was such an emerging space. And I thought that was really interesting because it's such an important value, but there really are only two companies that do it really, really well, and Vimeo is one of them.

(Michael Concannon at 00:03:42) Yeah, and there's a bunch at the high end. So it was about finding that right spot in between. Right? You know, there's sort of these high-touch competitors that do everything for you and they come and set up things and there's a lot of hand-holding. But those companies are having trouble scaling because you can't serve a lot of customers if you're that high-touch and you have a lot of human needs to scale. Whereas Vimeo was, you know, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of customers, all just using the platform and not needing sort of the hand-holding that these other services were offering. So it's an interesting space because the prices of these other, the high-end competitors, were outrageous for a service that wasn't hard to build.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:28) Now did Vimeo ever take the Elon Musk approach where you build something that's high-end and then distribute it down, or did they always just go right to consumer?

(Michael Concannon at 00:04:39) It was always right to consumer because it was really founded originally by a group of guys kind of filling their own needs of, like, "Oh, it'd be great if we shared our videos and we could do this," and then it grew into a business a little bit more organically. That's why the company's been around a while. But it didn't really start to care about monetizing and growing the business until IAC bought them and kind of instructed them to have a little bit more of a business focus than they might have had when they were more of some guys in a garage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:10) Yeah, I like that they started—and I didn't mean to talk a whole lot about Vimeo. I like them and I use them and I pay them—but I like that they started to get some of those business tools in there because I was already using them. We have a video leadership program, so we're already using them to host videos. Right? But then we wanted to use some lead gen on the video. And so when I saw those tools start to come out recently, I was really grateful for that.

(Michael Concannon at 00:05:35) Yeah, and that's part of their direction, is closing the gap. Right? So from being the tool that video creators who are kind of doing their own thing and the real, like, "I'm making some music videos" into the business side is the big opportunity. So because that gap between the high-end, high-touch providers existed, it's about going into that space a bit and filling some of that need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:59) Yeah, and the business is going there because it's like you're doing it so well. I know you from my personal life. I know you from uploading these videos here. You need to be my tool for both parts of my life.

(Michael Concannon at 00:06:09) Yeah, and the team there really cared about quality of video rather than making money for a long time. So it was always about, "Okay, is the codec—does it look good? Can we get it in front of enough people to get a sense of, is it doing what our customers really want? Is the video high-quality?" and not, "Can we serve this at this cost?" You know, I think I was probably the old man there going, "Let's talk about costs and trade-offs" from a business standpoint. But everyone there really cared about video quality so much that I didn't have to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:43) That's great. Yeah, and the first time that I had to start figuring out how to deal with P&Ls, right, that's always a level in your career, a new sort of maturity. It's like, if you want to get this amazing quality thing out into as many hands as possible, you cannot ignore the business side of things.

(Michael Concannon at 00:07:03) Yeah, the great thing is that a lot of the problems that Vimeo had to solve over time have gotten easier too, because video distribution on the web was a hard problem and is now not so hard a problem. And it makes the focus more on, "Okay, what are the feature sets that the customers want?" rather than, "Can we get the video to play on everyone's machine?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:25) Right, with the correct ratios and quality. So now you went from Vimeo and now you're at American Express. Was that a direct—was that your last move?

(Michael Concannon at 00:07:35) Yes, and that was kind of a pretty big departure for me if you look at the path. And maybe I'll take a step back and give you a little more history because I've kind of always loved technology and worked mostly—my career has been focused on digital media and ecommerce. So I intentionally avoided financial services because I felt that the financial service—I lived in New York, I grew up in Brooklyn, and so I always had opportunities within financial services, and the jobs always seemed like we were an order-taker in technology of there's a product group that decides what it is and here's your spec and you go build it. And there was no—they removed the creative freedom that developers have in a digital media or an ecommerce company where we're moving faster and much closer to the product definition that I liked. So I avoided financial services my whole career, and that's why I kind of went down that path. Probably wouldn't have even considered American Express if I didn't have some connections here that convinced me to talk to the people and found this new love for technology here and sort of a transformation that started about four years ago to try to compare the technology here to the technology players rather than the other financial services.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) Oh, that's a broader perspective.

(Michael Concannon at 00:08:55) Yeah, so, and you know, it's harder to judge against that. Right? It's easier to judge against, "Okay, are we as nimble as the other credit card companies or something along financial services, other banks?" It's much harder to compare yourself to the Googles, Facebooks of the world. But, you know, that leads to a lot of the thinking of, "Okay, how do we change the environment and how do we attract good developers? How do we go away from the old financial services model of 'let's hire a consulting company to solve our problems' and really own the technology?" which I think is important to the success of the business. For most businesses now have to look at themselves as a technology company as well as a company that does X.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:38) So what are you doing there? What are you interested in there?

(Michael Concannon at 00:09:41) So I'm focused in an area called Disruptive Technologies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:45) Are you serious? That sounds so cool.

(Michael Concannon at 00:09:48) It does. I love the name of that group too. But the two things that I'm responsible for are blockchain technology and robotic process automation. So on the blockchain side, obviously a very popular topic, became popular with the cryptocurrencies, and it's almost to a fault associated with cryptocurrencies. Whereas it's really about using the distributed ledger technology to represent digital assets and do things with distributed ledger technology. So we're members of the Hyperledger project under the Linux Foundation, and we do a lot of things with them. And we've launched a few real use cases. The most popular one that we talked about publicly is one called Flexible Rewards, where we enable our merchant partners to distribute points on their own. So you go into a merchant and they decide that they want to give you 100 American Express reward points for any behavior. You know, in the past it's always been, "Okay, this merchant, maybe they'll do two times points because they want to be a premier member and they'll reward American Express card members." But now we can say, "Okay, you can give five times reward points on product X or product Y so that they can do deals with the companies and the products they sell." Or they can reward on, "Do a review of a product," or, "Come into the store and we'll give you 100 points" and just do behavior-based rewards. So we really give them the freedom to do whatever they want with their point structure. And all of the reconciliation happens on a distributed ledger. So they own their own nodes on the chain, and then we just participate in that chain and essentially sweep the points that they have awarded off the blockchain and onto our back-end systems so they appear just as normal Membership Reward points.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:43) That's amazing. And that exists today, that's out there?

(Michael Concannon at 00:11:46) Mhmm, and it's a growing program. And it really gives the merchants all kinds of freedom that they never had before under a program that was—the other programs that are somewhat limited to what information we already have about the purchases. So we have that limited transaction information, but this gives a lot more freedom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:06) So how did—I mean, you guys are pretty big, American Express is a pretty big company. You guys are really big. And blockchain is fairly new, so you guys managed to get out there in front of it pretty quick.

(Michael Concannon at 00:12:18) Yes, and I think, you know, it's important for us to have awareness of blockchain technology and distributed ledger in general. It's a disruptive technology that has potential to really disrupt even this industry as we serve as an intermediary enabling commerce, and a lot of the cryptocurrencies are kind of in that same space. So I think it was important for us to understand that and then get out in front and really be part of the movement to embrace this technology and use it where it's appropriate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:48) I never thought of it like that. You just popped the idea of American Express acting as a platform into my head. Right? Normally you think you're a bank, you're a credit card company, but acting as this platform, providing these services so that people can be flexible and do what they want—that just is going to keep you so relevant.

(Michael Concannon at 00:13:05) We're unique in this space in that we have relationships with both the merchants and the card members. And the other card providers generally are either a card network or they're a bank and not everyone has this closed-loop relationship.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:22) Now were they asking for this, or how did this idea come up?

(Michael Concannon at 00:13:26) So this idea already existed when I came on board here, and I've just helped manage the group forward with that and kind of solidify the platform team to speed. And some of the other things I've done is in roles of CTO. So that's been moving along. And I'm equally excited about the other half of my job, which is the stuff that we're doing on robotic process automation. There's a whole field called RPA that's become really popular in the last, say, four years, and these vendors are seeing crazy growth. But that RPA industry is focused on replacing humans with software robots. So essentially giving these robots a Windows desktop and having them click away with keystrokes and mouse clicks, which is great in general, especially for a company like American Express where we've focused on customer service so much that we've thrown people at a lot of process. And we have people doing jobs that are redundant and really, you know, could easily be done by machines. The big pivot and the thing that excites me the most though is that the advances in computer vision, natural language processing, optical character recognition has made it possible for us to understand unstructured data in all kinds of new ways. So all of the documents that get uploaded, all of the IDs for verifying customer information that get uploaded, we can understand those in new ways. And then we can decision on them in new ways because we can adopt machine learning in a different way. And instead of just doing the removal of redundant tasks, we can create all kinds of new process by combining these three things: sort of the robotic process automation that allows us to access systems that may not have an API or some legacy systems and mainframe kind of things. They no longer become a blocker. And then we combine them with these other two technologies and we can come up with new ways to serve the customers that are much faster or more segmented than ever before because we have so much more information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:31) That's—I love it. It's like we're living in the future, you know, coming—

(Michael Concannon at 00:15:37) Well, the thing is that as we started the conversation, you know, all this electronics that's available to play with on the side and all of these technologies are here, and they just take time to gain adoption. And my job here is to make it easy to adopt those technologies. And that's what's fun about it, and that's why I took a departure from this digital media path over to financial services, because of the excitement behind the opportunity here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:04) Everything is growing so fast, but then at the same time, it's also slow. So I was in Publix last night. It's a grocery store chain down here in Florida. And I was walking through and I saw this giant stand-up flyer thing, and it said, "Order from the deli and pick up." Like, you can order while you're shopping and pick up from the deli when you leave. Well, in 2009, we built a prototype with Boar's Head, you know, the meat company. Their headquarters happens to be in my city, and so I worked with them and we built an iOS app prototype that did exactly this. And it took ten years for it to go from what we built to actually being something in the store. I was like, it's going to take three months, right? But for that technology to get adopted—

(Michael Concannon at 00:16:49) Yeah, yeah. I love the expression: the future is here, but it's just not widely adopted yet. And that holds true. So it's great that we can play with these things. And, you know, I was at Sony Music when we started adopting cloud technology early, and it was so easy to use. And now everyone has this power at their disposal, and you don't need a big team to do anything anymore. You can order cheap electronics. You can get access to cloud computing. And I look at all the random things I have in my personal life, and I have my own cloud infrastructure running all the time for that, all fits below the free tier at AWS. You know, it's so easy to do things that it makes a lot of fun things possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:35) So let's take it back a little bit before the Arduinos and the AWS free tiers. What were you hacking around on in the '80s and things like that?

(Michael Concannon at 00:17:44) Yeah, so I'm in my forties, which makes me a Commodore 64 BASIC programmer when things started. Obviously, I was super interested in technology, and as it evolved, I adopted it where I could in my personal life. And when I spent the hours ripping my CDs into MP3s, I had a tablet on my coffee table with all metadata ripped from WindowsMedia.com so that you could see the album covers, click through, and play out on my stereo. You know, all things like that have been fun. And I got into Arduinos somewhere around the time when I realized it was the easiest way to connect it with everyday life. So control outlets and plugs, and I have had a connected garage door for twelve, thirteen years now. Basically, as soon as we moved into the house, I was like, "Oh, network-connect my garage door" by just soldering some wires into the switch. And then we went on from there. And that's when I started trying to foster that love of technology into my kids too, and we started with the Halloween projects every year, which just had been a ton of fun and an inspiration for my kids to know that everything's possible from a technology standpoint.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:58) Tell me—I saw the candy dispenser. Tell me about that.

(Michael Concannon at 00:19:01) Mhmm. Yeah, so we were trying different things each year and usually hooked up to the garage door, but we had built an eight-foot Matchbox car racetrack a couple of years ago with a little sensor at the end to say who won. And we decided that that would be a good slide for Kit Kats to head down. So we put a couple of motors on the top that would release one candy at a time. And then we needed something to protect it, so we ordered some cheap lasers from online, got them delivered, and then hooked up a smoke machine below a table. So it would look like the laser was cutting into the table, and you had to reach through the laser to get out the candy that was dispensed by the machine. It was a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:49) I love it. I actually learned about refraction with lasers because I saw one day—this is probably 2005. I was driving and I saw a crossing guard, you know, crossing section—I don't know why I'm failing to describe this easily—the white stripes in the road where people walk across. And I thought to myself, I saw the yellow lights on the side. I was like, "Why don't they just put lasers in the ground and shoot them up, so it looks like this wall or this barrier?" And then I realized—and then I called my dad, who's, you know, an engineer. He's like, "Well, you would need some sort of smoke machine, or you need something for it to actually look like a solid line, because that's how lasers work." And so I was like, "Ah." Because before that, you go through life and you see some lasers and they're solid lines, right? You're just like, "Oh, you just need a solid line laser. That's all you need." And it's like—

(Michael Concannon at 00:20:33) The movies have taught us—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:33) Right.

(Michael Concannon at 00:20:33) Yeah. And that's why I needed the smoke machine to be able to see the lasers for the whole thing. It's funny you bring up refraction, you know. Going back to my professional career, I started at IBM Watson Research Lab, and we had a fingerprint lock there. And those all work on refraction too. They shine the light into that glass, and when you put your finger down on it, it stops the refraction. So it makes it easy for a laser to take a picture of your finger. We use that as the entry into the doorways there, and I eventually put it on my apartment in Hoboken as well. So that in the early nineties, I was keyless and just using my fingerprints to get into my apartment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:13) Well, of course.

(Michael Concannon at 00:21:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:15) Of course.

(Michael Concannon at 00:21:15) It was a ton of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16) I wouldn't expect anything less.

(Michael Concannon at 00:21:17) And you can never forget your keys that way. But, you know, career-wise, that put me on the path at Bell Labs and Watson Research Labs. And I grew up a lot at Sony Music and learned to be a manager there. I was put in charge of giving some of these new artists websites and quickly getting them up to speed. But after we built a little bit of a platform, the bigger artists came back and were like, "Wait, why did these young artists have more features than I do?" So as a young manager, I wound up in charge of michaeljackson.com and brucespringsteen.com and all these big names. And it made for a very fun job and an easy recruiting. Obviously, recruiting in New York is always a challenge. Recruiting everywhere is always a challenge. But having a fun project to work on like that made it easier to attract developers. And we just had a ton of fun responding to crazy artist requests on a regular basis as we're managing 540 different artist websites. There was always a crazy request on the table.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:20) Only yellow M&Ms on the website?

(Michael Concannon at 00:22:24) No. We had some of the older artists asking for games on their websites that would never be played. You know, some of them didn't make sense, and some artists didn't care at all and said, "Do what you want with our website." And then we had artists like Pearl Jam who cared about, it seemed like, every pixel on their website. They were really in touch with what was going on, cared about their fan experience so much that they were on top of every detail. But it made for a very fun job for quite a while there. And that's where ecommerce started, because once we had this massive amount of traffic, we decided to monetize it. And I became more than just a media guy. I became an ecommerce guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:05) And a revenue-generating person.

(Michael Concannon at 00:23:07) Yeah. Interestingly enough, that actually caused a problem. When we were a cost center, it was very easy. And then when we started generating revenue, they were like, "Well, here's your profit goals this year." And I was like, "Wait, no. Before, it was easier when we were just the cost center." So it was kind of more fun when we didn't have to have a profit. But it was still a great experience, and I learned a lot. And then my career progressed at that point onto Barnes & Noble, where I thought I'd get even closer to the media because we could do analytics on the text there. And most of my time was spent just fixing the ecommerce systems because when I got there, things were not in a position to handle the flood of traffic that the Nook brought. And the Nook was a great product, and it was kind of expanding at that point. So we had to just fix systems and get things ready from that standpoint. And I learned a lot about scale there—scale of ecommerce, scale of the metadata systems, and then scaling up people as I had larger and larger teams very quickly there during the growth phase.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:14) So with these teams, and obviously as you've made progressions throughout your career of leading these teams of people and doing these great things, what have you noticed as far as some trends between moving in your career between the people and the teams?

(Michael Concannon at 00:24:31) You know, I'm kind of fortunate that I've moved around a bunch because I could take some of the behaviors and some of the things I learned about the management style from one place to another, and that experience is super valuable. The thing that I always come back to in terms of what makes teams happy and developers is one, the connection to why you're coming to work, the connection to the business. And if you give that to developers, they could be proud of what they've done. So teach them. I've done Finance 101 many times with, "Here's how the business works, and this is why we do our job." And I think it leads to a pride in people's work. And the second thing I think that makes teams, especially tech teams happy, is that they're learning all the time. So putting things in place—at Sony Music, we had a weekly lunch where we shared different tech information, and I've incorporated different flavors of that everywhere. But those two things, I think, are the things that have made developers happy. You know, the connection to the business, it gives you the pride and the, "I'm learning something new all the time as we adopt different technologies or try them out." And the best way of learning is usually from peers. You know, here at American Express, I'm actually impressed with how well we have training programs to teach the basics and fundamentals. But I still prefer the peer-to-peer learning because you get a deeper knowledge. You get a knowledge of the newer technologies and how to do things rather than sort of this coursework kind of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:04) Yeah. I've learned—well, you're a hacker, right? You put stuff together. You're an innovator, and so you have to have this ability to teach yourself and to learn. And what you find is that—or at least what I found to be true—is that when I could sit down with someone else and hear their story, there's all these intangibles that come along with it, and it helps accelerate that learning curve.

(Michael Concannon at 00:26:26) Mhmm. Yeah. And I've always preferred the team to be collocated so we can do those whiteboard sessions. We're somewhat remote, but we get together regularly. I practice design sessions with the team all the time where we talk about, "Okay, what's the next problem we need to solve, and let's get everyone's opinion on the board." Let's get that because I think you generate innovation by having everyone involved in the decision-making. However, everyone kind of put their design up there rather than having someone go away and come back. But I'll give everyone the problem statement ahead of time so they can all come with a preformed opinion of a way to solve a problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:07) I like that. So you give them the problem statement ahead of time. And then does that help them ask better questions, get better results?

(Michael Concannon at 00:27:15) Yeah. And I have trouble sometimes holding my opinion till the end because, well, if you're the leader and you put your opinion up first, it's unfortunate, but you'll get a lot of, "Oh, we all agree." And I've learned that it's much better to try to get the opinions all up there. And it helps me get exposed to a different point of view, something that I might not have seen otherwise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:40) You know, I learned that from Simon Sinek, and I tried it. Do you know Simon? Have you heard of him before?

(Michael Concannon at 00:27:44) Yes. Okay, I've heard of him, but I know him very little.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) He got really popular because he's got this really unique idea. It became one of the most popular TED Talks on the web, and that was ten or fifteen years ago. And since then, he's just released multiple bestseller books. His whole concept is, "How do I get ideas worth sharing and worth spreading?" and then he just puts them out there for the world. And he has a marketing branding background, but he's really sharp. But he put this book out. It's actually—this is how much I like it—it's right here. It's Leaders Eat Last. And he tells a story in there about an Indian tribal chief who would sit there and go around the circle and listen to everyone, and the leader would always speak last. And I was like, "Oh, let me go try this principle at work" versus saying, "Here's what I think. What are your ideas?"—which is what my default was and so most people I see do. And so I said, "Alright, I'm always looking at the 80, and then I go say, what's the 20?" And so I tried it out, and boom, worked way better.

(Michael Concannon at 00:28:38) Yeah. And it's something you have to do over and over again because the first few times you do it, people don't get it and they're timid about things. And even in the design sessions in general, getting people to speak up is a training exercise that has to go on. So you can't do one design session and expect it to yield the results. You do it again and again, and you find that the comfort level comes up and you get more diversity in the opinions that are presented. And even, you know, the benefits of having the diverse teams where more opinions come only comes out when you draw out those opinions and you create an environment where it's safe to talk about those things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:20) So the repetition and the culture on this team—on your teams—is you help foster that through these design sessions. So when people know that they're going into this session, it's a place where they can pull out their creative ideas, work through problems, and then that just creates a team. That's an interesting way to create culture.

(Michael Concannon at 00:29:40) It's not just the sessions. I think you have to do multiple things. Just like hiring is a long list of things you have to do, creating a culture that fosters ownership and then team input also requires a lot of things. And, you know, as the teams got bigger at Barnes & Noble, we had a separate issue queue in Jira, the issue management system, that was just about new ideas. And I promised that I would empty that queue with feedback every week so that anyone could submit there, and then I would give feedback. And having it even centrally located prevented people from coming up with the same idea multiple times and coming to me, you know, "Oh, did you ever think about this?" I'm like, "Yes."

(Michael Concannon at 00:30:22) And here's the answer why. And we could filter that eventually over to the wiki of things that were on our backlog or where it was prioritized. But giving everyone, once the team is big enough that you need process around things, put process around the innovation and the new idea generation so that you could foster that culture of we value this, and then we're willing to even commit to a process and commit to time spent against that process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:51) I like that. So people don't feel shut down when they have new ideas or dismissed. They can just go to this queue, and they can see if it's already been suggested and what the outcome was. And then if it's unique, they can submit their own concept.

(Michael Concannon at 00:31:04) And you want people to have, anytime they have an idea, day or night, have a place to throw it down and know that someone else is going to look at it and give them some feedback.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:14) That's important and valuable. Actually, as I was saying this morning, I like to listen to motivational stuff in the morning. I was listening to an interview with Larry Ellison from Oracle. And he actually got the idea for relational databases from IBM research that they didn't really care much about. They weren't going to really pursue the idea. And he was reading an IBM research paper, and he's like, oh, this sounds like a really cool concept. IBM doesn't even really believe in it. I'll take it. And he ended up creating Oracle.

(Michael Concannon at 00:31:43) Yeah. And it's amazing how many ideas that changed the world were not adopted quickly at first. And then later it becomes obvious, but at the time, it's like, wait, why do we have to structure the data that much? But I guess that has proven wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:59) Okay. So we've got—I'm really interested in—we're kind of getting into the good, like, we're—I like this right now, Mike. I'm having fun.

(Michael Concannon at 00:32:05) Yeah. We're jumping around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:07) Yeah. No, it's all in the same area, though, because we're talking about leadership. Right? We're talking about culture with teams, and you have some actually pretty unique things that I don't hear very often. I like your idea queuing system. I love the your experience in finding that speaking last is really useful and the information that you've given about how you run your creative sessions, your problem-solving sessions, giving the problem first. You like to be co-located. I like to be co-located or remote. Either is fine. You just kind of have to make it work with whatever. But what other sort of insights, things—just what else do you do? Tell me more. I can write a book with this.

(Michael Concannon at 00:32:49) I don't know. I guess jumping around, obviously, I care about metrics a lot too. And metrics can be a challenge across the board in terms of what you're using them for and do they truly represent what you think they do. There's the business metrics part of things—where are we providing value and are we measuring that the right way? I think there's development metrics of how fast are we going, and I've seen various mechanisms to do that. Tracking pride is really what you're looking for. I find that if the team is very proud of their work and if you could measure that in some way, I usually feel good about the velocity of the team. The story points is sort of our best proxy, and we use that on a regular basis. And that gives us sort of the, okay, let's come up with story points, put milestones on a calendar, and see we're hitting those milestones. And then you have to still apply a little bit of human intelligence on top of it. And then the people metrics, which I think are the hardest of, okay, how are you evaluating the professional development and the contributions of the various team members? And that becomes even harder. I found that having good values defined makes it easiest to do that because then you could go through the values and say, okay, here's our ten values, and is this person demonstrating those values across the board? This way we can say, you know, they're producing a lot of code, but maybe they're culturally not doing this or they're doing other things. And that use of values is something I learned from the Amazon way. Right? A lot of our reviews were based on the guiding principles within Amazon, and I found that very useful. And I've used that technique then in other places as we go through sort of the metrics and say, okay, are you acting on the values? And here's the ten values that we see as important in terms of contributing to different things and mentoring and leading folks. You're respecting others. Are you able to disagree and commit, which is one of the Amazon principles of can you change your opinion and listen to others? And that gives you metrics to evaluate people by.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:17) So how does that actually, like, how does that look? Like, when do we—like, let's say I'm on your team. Right? Are we meeting monthly and going over the—like, how does it actually play out?

(Michael Concannon at 00:35:30) Yeah. So I believe in one-on-ones on a regular basis. Everyone should have that with their manager. And the one-on-ones, the whole point of the one-on-ones is for the subordinate to get their feedback during that and then voice what they need from their manager at that point. So I usually have the folks on my team report the agenda into that as well as I bring an agenda into my one-on-one with my manager. I think that's what the purpose of blocking that time is. If I need something from a team member, I'll send them an email or I'll interrupt them, and I can go over and do that. The one-on-ones give them a block of time to work on that. And then you need periodic reviews where you're making sure you're spending the time on professional development within the one-on-one. It really comes down to providing feedback during those sessions and providing critical feedback as well as the positive feedback so that people understand what they need to work on, how they can change, and then recapping that in an email of some form so that when you go back a quarter later, you could say, okay, did we address any of these things? Are we getting better?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:42) And I like the mix of the culture items into it because that gives you some sort of baseline. So when you're—and correct me if I'm wrong, please—like, when you're having these conversations and you want to maybe soften the feedback or deliver it in a more palatable way, you can reference it against your culture items.

(Michael Concannon at 00:37:02) That's right. It definitely helps. And I think that's why those values come into play a lot. You have something to point to and say, when I've looked at these principles and, you know, we have a pretty good progression matrix here at American Express that I like, and I've seen other places too where you look at and say, you know, an engineer at this level should exhibit these twelve behaviors, and do we see those?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:25) Oh, nice. Do you post those publicly, by the way?

(Michael Concannon at 00:37:28) No. I don't think we do. But I think, you know, the Amazon matrix, although not public, is available online. I'm pretty sure our AmEx ones are within the CTO organization, which is where I report up to. And I don't think that that's public anywhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:48) Okay. Yeah. I'm always interested because I randomly started asking this question of if their culture items are public, and I get an 80% no. Like, 80%. But I was thinking to myself, like, the way—you attract—your vibe attracts your tribe. Right? And so if you put those online, people could see them and you could attract developers that already know that they're a culture match because that's how they roll. Right? And then, I don't know. I'm just throwing that out there.

(Michael Concannon at 00:38:18) I'm in agreement. I think the history in financial services was to hold information tight, and I think we're getting much better at that. We're open-sourcing a lot of code. We're doing—we're making a lot of progress. Open-sourcing our guiding principles is probably further down on my list of things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:39) You mean that's not a priority?

(Michael Concannon at 00:38:41) Well, open-sourcing it isn't quite as big a priority. You know? Obviously, I think you're right, though. I think it would attract additional developers, and hiring is always tough. And I think here at American Express, we haven't gotten the word out well that we are now a technology organization, and we care about technology. We have a lot of technology. You know, even speaking to you was part of my agenda is to get that word out. I want people to know that that's what we're doing here and mostly for the hiring so that we can attract the right talent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:15) That's been a huge byproduct of this, and I had no intention and didn't mean to at all. I just found out after a few months, people would—I would connect with past guests, say, hey, how are things going? And one time, the first guy was in North Carolina, and he said, you won't believe it. After this show aired, someone reached out to me, sent me an email, and said, oh, I really liked your story on this. Your culture is the style and value. It really aligned with mine. The individual ended up flying across the country, taking a job, becoming one of their best engineers. And they got to know the person through the interview and they got to know the culture through the interview. And then it kept—people kept telling me that it's happening, and I'm like, this is an awesome value add.

(Michael Concannon at 00:39:54) Yeah. So I'll let you know ahead of time that I have that in mind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:57) Oh, of course.

(Michael Concannon at 00:39:58) One of the byproducts of this—well, because as I mentioned, hiring is one of the biggest challenges a technical leader faces. And as I alluded to earlier, you have to do a lot of things to be good at hiring. In fact, you just can't make mistakes in many areas. You know, you want a good candidate experience. So we spend a lot of time making sure that we're treating them well. And I always start with a pretty long intro to what's the position about, what's my culture, what are my values that I bring into the group, and then acting fast so that we could turn around this decision, you know, pushing hard on your employees to refer and doing that often, building the tech cred among the community and talking about what we're doing, publishing, doing the open-source pieces, casting that wide net of things, you know, selling the opportunity when they come here of what they're going to learn and where they're going to go on from. You know, all of those things—you have to do all of them to build a great team. And then keep them—spend time on retention, make sure that their experience is right. Sort of the best offense being a good defense there. Don't lose people, and you'll gain momentum on building the team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:10) You mentioned one there about recruiting, which I found to be incredibly interesting, specifically from Asana. Have you come across Asana yet?

(Michael Concannon at 00:41:28) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:28) They're like a task management system. They're pretty cool culture and popular in that world of task management. But they had this concept—they have hashtag ABR, always be recruiting. And they make it—they made it like a part of their culture. Like, it's not a negative word over there. People will recruit Uber drivers and you're at the grocery store, like, you run into someone or you got a meetup. And so this recruiting has become this amazing part of their culture, and that's always fascinating. When you see someone doing something really well, it's like, how did you do that? And, you know, what exactly are they doing? And the end result that I took away is that they've embedded it into their culture to where it's just something that's cool. You just bring your friends in, show them the cool projects we're working on, and that helps recruit you.

(Michael Concannon at 00:42:10) Yeah. And team quality. Like, the team just keeps getting better and better the more you have a pipeline of people waiting or people wanting to come on board. Google attracted a ton of good engineers just by getting the reputation of being a cool place to work. And that goes into that always be recruiting aspect of it so deeply.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:33) So tell me the type of person you're looking for. Like, what are some of the qualities and the people that you're looking for?

(Michael Concannon at 00:42:39) I mean, we mostly hire on intelligence. You know, obviously, we're focused so much on the robotics space in the hiring that I have a good proposition because I'll be able to teach about optical character and computer vision, all of the machine learning integrations we're doing. So it gives me a good selling point of you'll learn a lot of these technologies, but I'm not looking for someone who's already done it. I don't need the deep expertise in one area. I need really good coders, and I hire on intelligence. You know, the interview process is about solving, problem-solving, and talking through experiences where I want to hear of obstacles that were overcome more so than I want to hear about, do you know this technology or that technology? The ability to learn is what we're trying to test for, and then we want to hire based on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:35) So you're referring to intelligence as the ability to learn?

(Michael Concannon at 00:43:39) The ability to learn, yes. And not necessarily a corpus of knowledge from the things they've experienced before. You know, obviously, the coding experience, you get better and better with time, but it doesn't even necessarily need to be in a language that we're coding in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:55) It's an interesting balance. You get someone at one end who's extremely experienced, but—it's like, I don't even know where I want to go with this, but my—before I'm even finishing the sentence, my brain's like showing me all the different possibilities. Like, you can get someone who's very intelligent who's done it before, and they can be really, really poor because they're always telling you about all the reasons why it won't work. But you can also get someone who's really experienced, right, who's done it before, and they can have that understanding and that database, that repository of knowledge, but also have the optimism. That's just a really rare person.

(Michael Concannon at 00:44:33) Yes. And you're right. It is a balance of saying, okay, you've had this experience so that you can quickly work around obstacles. You've seen this problem before. You can move very fast. And that's valuable, and that's what comes with experience. But you have to make sure that there's an open mind that comes with that, and you're not saying, no, I've already tried that. It doesn't work. And not the willingness to retry something and maybe something's different. You know, maybe this environment is different. You should look at that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:01) Yeah. I was talking to someone who said that they have a yes and culture. So rather than shooting stuff down, let's say, yes and this, and I just thought that was kind of unique.

(Michael Concannon at 00:45:11) One of the directors on my team uses that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. That's his thing. So it's funny you bring it up, and I like it too. But I think leadership is a lot balanced, though, finding balance in those things, finding balance in how much process. I've seen that over the course of my career as I've moved around. One of the questions is how much process is right? I'm like, well, what's the size of the team?

(Michael Concannon at 00:45:34) What's how are things working? Or if things are broken, sometimes you need process to straighten it. If you have the team growing to large sizes, you need to add process. If the team is functioning well, you can loosen process and speed things up. You know, those go down the line.

(Michael Concannon at 00:45:50) And then engineering versus product or sales driven organization is another balance. You go back and forth. How aggressive you push on the schedule or can you relax? You know, how self motivated is the team? All of those things, they don't have an answer. You just find the balance. I think that's what makes the job hard. Otherwise, we would all just follow the playbook.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:10) And fun.

(Michael Concannon at 00:46:11) Yes. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:13) Because it allows people, like, you know, you and me, the people that are willing to do what's necessary even though it's difficult to rise up and to have more. Like, if it was all even, that wouldn't be as much fun. But the fact that we can choose to embark on something that's incredibly difficult and to overcome those obstacles, I mean, that's what makes life worth living.

(Michael Concannon at 00:46:33) Yeah. Exactly. I couldn't agree more. And, you know, as I said, it goes back to the if everything was easy, then we would just do it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:45) So now we've gotten some idea of the type of culture that's there, the type of people you're looking for, the intelligence, the ability to learn. Let's talk about, like, how they actually reach out. Is it americanexpress.com/careers or, like, where? I could put a direct link in the show notes, but what's the best way for you?

(Michael Concannon at 00:47:04) You know, actually reaching out to me directly always works. Okay. And then we have links on that. We do have americanexpress.com/careers, and that has the widest breadth. Because we're such a large organization, finding my organization in there isn't something that you just do like that. I mean, you could search for the robotics space and the blockchain space, and that will all lead to me from the enterprise standpoint. But we also have a ton of good opportunities throughout technology, so I would recommend people just search around and find the right fit for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:36) No. They want to work for you. They want to, these people want to work for you. So they go to LinkedIn and maybe type in your name, Michael. Can you spell your last name?

(Michael Concannon at 00:47:44) C-O-N-C-A-N-N-O-N. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:49) How do you pronounce that? Concannon. Okay. I got it right in my head. Woo. Yep. That's a strong name, Concannon. Right?

(Michael Concannon at 00:47:57) Yeah. It's Irish. All four of my grandparents were born in Ireland and met in Brooklyn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:01) Really?

(Michael Concannon at 00:48:02) Yeah. Yeah. So nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:04) Nice. Yeah. I'll actually be out there in that, like, Brooklyn, Manhattan area. I first of all, I have family up there. My brother-in-law is actually a music producer and works a lot with Sony. So, yeah, I was like, oh, that's cool. Yeah. He did a lot of the, in the early 2000s, like, he was working for Universal and they did all, like, the Kidz Bop type stuff. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Like, the Aaron Carter and Brooke Hogan and, like, all those type of younger kids. Yeah.

(Michael Concannon at 00:48:34) Yeah. We at Sony Music, we had a very tight relationship with the Universal folks. I got to know a lot of them, you know, to the point where we had to sometimes watch what we were saying because we were bordering on anti-competitive because we knew everything that was going on at Universal, just because of the tight social network that was around those two companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:56) Yeah. It's amazing. It's a totally cool industry too. I was actually, so my brother-in-law's name is Aaron Aceta, and we, I was talking with him about how, like, music actually hits the radio and, like, actually becomes a hit. And he was explaining, you know, like, the political relationships and how everything works and how a song can be great, but if it doesn't have the right timing and the right slot for the right relationships, it just doesn't hit and doesn't get out there. And I was, like, blown away because I heard one song and it was, like, way better than another song. But he was, like, there's something attached or some relationship here with this song with the person who's choosing it. So this less cool song is going to be the popular one. And I was like, what? And now it's on radios. You hear it everywhere. It's crazy. Yeah.

(Michael Concannon at 00:49:34) Yeah. We've watched as, you know, as technologists, we've watched as less correct technology has won the war over time in many areas. So, you know, it's not always the best wins, even though I think as technologists, we'd like the world to be that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:53) But we are kind of talking about relationships here though. Right? Abstractly? Tell me about how relationships have helped influence, like, helped your career and your progression. Are they important?

(Michael Concannon at 00:50:02) Oh, super. In both directions, you know. I obviously, I've had folks that have moved with me from place to place, and I've loved those relationships, and then I've had mentors who have taught me different things over time. You know, I landed at Sony Music, and my manager there was a gentleman, Tim Nelson, who tried new things all the time, was never afraid to fail. You know, he failed fast and, you know, teaching me the importance of trying something new was fantastic there. And he was sort of new on cloud computing, and I learned so much about cloud computing that I've carried over through my career just because he was saying, yeah, go try that. And we were able to do that. And I joined Barnes and Noble mostly following the fantastic people leader skills that John Foley, who went on to found Peloton. He was president at the time, and he hired me on there. And he was someone that you just trusted, and he trusted his people. You know, he'd come to you, ask you a question, and he'd put 100% trust in, and it built a sense of loyalty. And learning those lessons from the relationships with those people were fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:07) And that's a cool company. That Peloton company, I like it a lot.

(Michael Concannon at 00:51:11) Everyone does. It's and that's, it's a brand and a culture he built, you know. And I think it's loved because of the love that he's put into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:21) You cannot even like the whole biking thing, and you can just examine the product for face value. And you can tell it's, like, highly quality, high quality produced product by people who are just incredibly in love with what they do.

(Michael Concannon at 00:51:34) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:35) The plug for them.

(Michael Concannon at 00:51:37) Oh. Yeah. I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:38) Well, what's his name again?

(Michael Concannon at 00:51:40) John Foley.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:41) All right. Plug for John Foley. That's awesome. So as we wrap up here, I'm going to run a hypothetical situation by you. But first, I have to know, do you like SpaceX? Do you like what Elon Musk is doing?

(Michael Concannon at 00:51:54) Yes. I'm a Musk fan. I think he's one person I learned from because I sometimes have trouble exaggerating the vision, and I think he does that really well. You know, I think even he doesn't believe some of the claims he makes, but he does it to put it all the way out there. And I think that's something I could learn from because I always get too real about what's possible. But he's done a ton of amazing things, and he's got the right mindset.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:22) He lives fully. Absolutely. Right? So let's say, let's say you are at the gym. Right?

(Michael Concannon at 00:52:27) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:29) And you're on a Peloton bike. Okay. And in walks Elon Musk on the bike next to you. Right? You guys are having this great conversation, chatting it up. Afterwards, you jump in the brand new 2020 Tesla. It's not even out yet. Can't even get it, but Musk has a prototype one. You go back. He's going to show you the new booster, the new, you know, the hopper? The new hopper one that's going on right now? He's going to show you the new hopper at the space pad. You go to there, but he's also got something special for you. He shows you behind this curtain, he pulls it back, and there is a time machine. All right? You get to go into this thing and you get to go back to yourself, like your very first time programming on that Commodore 64, and whisper one piece of advice into your ear. What would that be?

(Michael Concannon at 00:53:14) And it has to be advice. I can't give myself, like, a stock tip or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:17) You can say whatever. You can't say buy Bitcoin. Yeah. No buying Bitcoin. But what would it be?

(Michael Concannon at 00:53:26) I mean, I guess it'd have to be one of two things. Either, you know, taking time, blocking time to understand goals and that time management doesn't just happen. Like, I think early I thought, well, you know, I can work on this, and I don't have to worry about blocking time to make sure that the important things happen. And then also, I think I've had to learn over time to celebrate success, especially with my teams. I've kind of, especially early on, gotten to the point where we've hit a success and I'd kind of be like, yeah, we should have done that. Like, I didn't get to the sense of, all right, we need a little bit more celebration when we hit milestones. So it's something that I have to remind myself of even to this day. So maybe if I put those in my younger head, it would have sunk in by now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:13) So don't gloss over the achievements. Sort of, like, take a moment to celebrate them.

(Michael Concannon at 00:54:18) Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I've worked with several people in my career who come back and said, you know, this was an accomplishment. I go, yeah, it was. I expected you to do that. And they feel like, yeah, but this is, you know, and even I remember one of the people I was managing, he said, why does all your feedback center around the things I didn't do right? Why isn't there more positive feedback? And, you know, that celebrating success is important. And I tend to look at the critical stuff of the growth path a bit more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:52) I like it. That's, I think that is fantastic. Your past self thanks you. Little annoyed that you interrupted him programming, but he says thank you for the advice. Yeah. Well, Michael, this has been amazing. I've had a lot of fun hanging out with you today.

(Michael Concannon at 00:55:07) So did I. This is great. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:08) Next time I'm in, next time I'm in that area, I'll shoot you an email, and maybe if we're around, give it to her, the office or something and say hello.

(Michael Concannon at 00:55:14) Yeah. Sure. You could stop by my house. I have a whole bed of technology. We have 3D printers, and I have VR headsets in my house. So we, I just love playing with the stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:24) You're doing the right thing for your kids. I've got two little ones, but they're under the age of two. But when I saw your Vimeo videos earlier, I was like, from a dad standpoint, like, this is the type of environment I want to craft for my kids. You know?

(Michael Concannon at 00:55:38) Yeah. Fostering that curiosity, I think, is a gift. So I definitely work at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:44) Well, you're doing great. I love it. And I'll put the Vimeo link in the show notes. People can go check out some of the videos too.

(Michael Concannon at 00:55:49) Okay. Sounds great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:50) Have a great day, Michael. Thanks.

(Michael Concannon at 00:55:52) You too. Bye.