How to Best Manage Your Tech Debt with Fredrik Carlegren and Yeshai Bouskila from Toshiba

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Fredrik and Yeshai from Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions about how you can best manage your tech debt and increase your agility. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) I am excited. We're gonna be talking about tech debt, all sorts of good things here today. But before we get started and really get into it, I think we should just introduce you guys. So we got Fredrik here. Fredrik, could you tell me a little bit about your background at Toshiba and what you do?

(Fredrik at 00:00:31) Yeah, sure. I've been with Toshiba and previous to that IBM in the retail side for over twenty years in various roles. I've been project management, sales, marketing, communications. So a nice balance between business, technical, and marketing backgrounds here at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) And then, Yeshai, could you please introduce yourself?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:00:58) Sure. Yeshai Bouskila. I'm the executive director of innovation here at Toshiba. I've been with Toshiba for two years, but twenty years in the software for the retail industry with companies like Retalix, NCR, GK Software, Fluid, and I spent three years upstream at Shell Oil as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:15) Let's talk about tech debt a little bit. Do you have a lot of experience there?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:01:20) So from my perspective, I think that tech debt is something that no company can get rid of. It's just something that evolves through the years. It's how do you manage it and how do you balance what is consistent with it and what's intentional with it. If you think about Toshiba, we do a lot of work around the modularity and scalability of our solution and architecture, as well as a lot of components that we develop to run at the edge. There are things that people don't think about much in terms of tech debt, but the difference between an edge-based device or servers within the store have a lot of impact in general.

(Fredrik at 00:01:57) I was just gonna add, nobody listening to this conversation is alone in this tech debt discussion. We all have it. There's natural reasons for how and where it develops. I'm sure we'll get into more of that. And we've been in the tech industry focused on retail for fifty-plus years. So we have seen and engaged with customers, obviously, along the way who are in various stages of how they're managing it, how they're getting out of it, how they're trying to move forward. So, yeah, it's definitely a very valid conversation to be having.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:30) I also think that everybody has a slightly different understanding of tech debt. What's the way that you use this phrase at Toshiba?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:02:39) So it really breaks down to two main aspects, I think, from my point of view. One of them is the hardware aspect of it, and the other one is the software. They are combined because at a certain point, you have hardware that's old and antiquated that can't run your latest and greatest software, and it's this, how do we get the ability to move quicker? A lot of companies try to use the hardware as much as possible, which is the right thing to do. And a lot of companies like Toshiba, especially with some of the things that we're doing from a technology standpoint on software, we enable the retailers to do that. But there's this whole, how do we keep things moving around? How do we make sure that you use as much as possible from the hardware as well as how do we enable our software and evolve with it?

(Fredrik at 00:03:25) Yeah. And with Yeshai and team focused on innovation, ultimately, that's the conversation. Right? It's not necessarily how do we manage tech debt. It's how do we do more to support our business, become more agile, respond to customer needs, respond to business and competitive needs, industry challenges, right? It's the where do we wanna go conversation. And we did a research study with our partners at CSCMP earlier this year, and kind of three stats that popped up in terms of what's holding people back from that rapid experimentation innovation. And 49% is high cost and risk. 47% is that difficulty of integrating with new technology. Right? So it's in that context of propelling a business forward that we really have to tackle this conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:14) Where can people find that report that you just mentioned? Do we have a link for that?

(Fredrik at 00:04:18) We will provide it. Yeah. Commerce.toshiba.com on our website. You could find it there, but we'd be happy to make that link available to y'all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:26) And then where does the tech debt sneak in? Is there shadow tech debt that we don't know about? Did we just make up a new term? I think so.

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:04:34) I do like that. I'm gonna use that a lot. I think that everything comes down to companies or retailers that don't have a clear plan of upgrading in a certain time frame. That's where it sneaks up on you. It's usually something like one portion of the business wants to enable—if let's call it loss prevention or marketing or different aspects want to move forward quickly—but then the other technologies within the company are too old or slow to integrate. Again, if you have an old platform that suddenly you wanna bring in this latest and greatest loyalty solution and the integration is gonna take you a year because the technology is so outdated, that's where your ghost debt comes from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:17) Are you seeing a lot of that?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:05:19) Unfortunately, I am. Yeah. So it's mainly on the consumer mobile aspects of it, how to enable the end customer. It's less on your front end checkout systems or your point of sale or self-checkout. But how do we enable loyalty? How do we enable customer interaction? How do we have some sort of discreet promotions or interactions with the consumer within the store space? And how does that all tie into the transactional data? So that's where the challenges really are.

(Fredrik at 00:05:51) Yeah. And it evolved. Right? Nobody sits around and decides that we're gonna take on more tech debt this year, but you have—if it's budgetary challenges or something else going on in the organization—you make decisions that are in the best interest of a certain point in time. You're balancing risk with budget and everything else, until you reach that moment when there's something you need to do, being asked to do, have to do to drive your business forward, and it just becomes significantly harder and probably more expensive. Right? And so, yeah, it can sneak up on you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:28) What should be my next move to make sure tech debt does not creep back in and to maintain a level of innovation?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:06:36) I think it's all about having some discipline and the ability to have control in your own destiny with self-enablement throughout this journey. If it's software, how do you constantly evolve? How do you evaluate new tools and SDKs? How do you evolve with the tech stack that you're working on? Again, if you think about going from operating system to operating system, I'm just going down to the basics here, and you wait a couple of years, the big steps are very hard to clean up. That's my perception on that. It's much easier to take incremental updates than going for a full transformation. Because just if you think about when you think about a full platform, if you're doing an upgrade every two years or every three years, it's almost like deploying a full new ecosystem, and the amount of changes and enhancements that you have in them are massive. So I think keeping that smaller, taking on frequent updates, trying to automate processes in order to get to that point will help you a lot on that journey of trying to delete tech debt or basically remove it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:50) And before we get much farther, I want—a lot of people know Toshiba because of the TV brand. And when I met your team, I found out that you did so much more. Can you just describe from a high level what division, what part of Toshiba you're in, and what their primary objective is?

(Fredrik at 00:08:06) Yeah. Yeah. Sure. We are really here for making sure the retail industry thrives and prospers. We serve some of the best retailers in the world with hardware, software, services. We're an end-to-end global solutions provider for retail solutions and technologies, driving innovation in the industry forward. And so that's what we do. So we've been in the retail industry for over fifty years, as I mentioned, and really driven by that voice of customer, and we're fortunate to have a lot of amazing retailers as our clients that guide that investment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:49) Do you have any examples of like the types of solutions that you make?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:08:54) So in terms of the retail technology, we do everything within the store space and outside of it. So our key solutions from a hardware standpoint is any touchpoint that you have. Your point of sale, your self-checkout, your mobile devices, printers, devices, IOT devices. So everything that you can think of in the store space with the exception of refrigerators, we will probably do from a hardware standpoint. From a software standpoint, we do a lot more. So we focus on your front-end lens, your point of sale, your mobile point of sales, your self-checkouts. We're one of the biggest providers in that space. Then we expand to consumer mobile application as well, to solution payments, payments devices. And then we have one of the things that my team does is mainly around the camera vision. So product recognition, progress recognition, behavioral analytics, consumer movement. So basically anything in the retail space, we do in one shape or form.

(Fredrik at 00:09:50) You mentioned refrigerators. Yeah. We don't do those, but our service technicians probably can service them. We—over 80% of what we service for our clients is not Toshiba equipment. So, yeah, we really take care of the entire retail stores when it comes to the service side. So, yeah, and global operation. So, yeah, it's a fun business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:09) That is. You guys getting into AI at all?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:10:12) That is a topic by itself, but, yes, we are. We're both heavily investing in AI internally for our development teams, for our services teams, for proactive monitoring, for innovation. My innovation team has done AI for quite some time now, but we are focusing a lot right now and investing into enabling customers with agentic AI. So basically turning things from a UI-based operation to conversational. And the goal is to drive basically anything from AI-assisted decisions to AI-driven decisions in the next five years. Today, the majority of the things that we do with loss prevention or any decisions that happen are assisting a human to make a decision there. So if it's loss prevention, we show it to a store manager, to the consumer. Our goal is within a couple years to have AI drive all those decisions and basically drive those decisions within the store space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:11) Yeah. Keeping those humans in the loop while it's training is super important.

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:11:15) Well, I think that what AI is doing is it, one, it enables most people within the store space to do other things. I think the majority of the retailers—they're fighting challenges of hiring people, are trying to maximize what we do with the resources. And if we can have one resource manage multiple stations or multiple areas and walk out of their specific zones to do other things, we're just providing a better experience for the shopper at the end of the day. And, again, if we simplify things for store manager instead of starting to click buttons throughout the day in order to create the reports and just have a conversation with the system, everything is gonna be much simpler, smoother, and guided.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:00) Yeah. I was talking—I just moved this past week, and I was talking with the HVAC repair people, and they now have software on their tablets that do like 90% of the process and essentially walk them through everything now as the techs. And it's just becoming unbelievable watching how fast—you've both been around for twenty-plus years in the industry. Technology so slow to roll out. Now it seems to be rolling out so fast.

(Fredrik at 00:12:29) Yeah. Yeah. And our field technicians have the same technology. Right? And we can help retailers arm their store associates with technology. You don't have to be a technician to solve every problem. Some problems, yes. But other things, they are relatively easy. You just need to know where to start, get that guidance. Hey, I can go a long way. At the end of the day, as Yeshai mentioned, it's really about making things simpler, but also how do you move faster, right, to respond, bring out new technology, new capabilities, resolve an issue. And AI can certainly help tremendously in that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:04) So if I'm a big company and I've got legacy systems and I feel like they're holding me back, can I call you guys and you can help us with that?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:13:12) Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So what we do is we take, regardless if it's our legacy solutions or third-party legacy solutions, our Elera commerce platform basically has been designed from the ground up, and we can take small components within that and enable you to do specific use cases that are a challenge for you right now. We have one large retailer that has a legacy solution that just took our returns engine, for example. And we simplified the process for them to do returns. It was a very big thing for them. We have different types of retailers that use our loss prevention solutions. Again, we're just taking bits and pieces. Different types of basket services, self-checkout by itself. So we can integrate new technology with old technology and enable you through that.

(Fredrik at 00:14:01) This is one of the most important things, really. Right? Because it can be daunting. Obviously in different customers, retailers, any business, really. Right? You have different levels of tech debt. You have different levels of business priority, budgets, how you get started. And we have all the above. We have clients that we do very specific use cases within their existing infrastructure just to deploy certain capabilities to help their business, to full-scale transformation. There's no right or wrong. It's what is the business need and the driver, and those are the conversations that we'd love to have, is what is the right path forward, and how do we leverage technology as that enabler?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:14:44) Yeah. Nice. I'll add. I think one of the things is we basically take people on journeys. Three years ago, we basically developed our own frictionless store experience. So using our camera vision, shelf sensors, entry exit gates. So all of our technology to build a frictionless store. We're not trying to sell it at this point because we believe that the cost of having a full frictionless store is too high, especially where the majority of our customers are full-size grocery stores. But we believe that you can take journeys or steps in order to get to that end goal within a couple of years. Again, if you start adding different types of cameras in different areas of the store, if you start taking loss prevention journeys, if you enable your front-end checkouts. So the same process can happen here. You don't have to do a full rip and replace. You could if you wanted to, but we can take you on a journey with small bits and pieces to improve the challenges that you're having today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:38) Is that what most people do?

(Yashai Buskila at 00:15:40) Some do, some don't. I think usually there's this phase where retailers know that they need to replace everything, and they will just do a rip and replace and do the whole system because they're on that fifteen-year transformation journey that they were at with their old solution. Some of them say, "Oh, I'm only halfway of using my current system or solutions, but I want to enable loyalty or I want to enable these different journeys," so they will take incremental steps.

(Frederick at 00:16:07) Yeah. I mean, let's call it what it is. It's a return on investment calculation ultimately. Right? And it's the financial case that we like to work with our clients on to figure out what is your need and what is the appropriate investment return you're going to get on that so we can have that conversation. Right? So the ROI and focusing on the business needs—that's where it all starts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:31) Do you know how long until all checkout is self checkout? I feel like we're getting there.

(Yashai Buskila at 00:16:38) So I think it really depends on the type of retail store that you're in today. There are different rules and regulations that will not allow us to have full self checkout. So, for example, if you think about buying age-restricted items, different types of venues that people have to adhere to certain rules and regulations—I think we'll get there, but not as quick as we believe, just because of different types of rules and regulations. We're probably about a good five years from being, let's say, 95% self checkout, but that's my personal opinion at this point.

(Frederick at 00:17:14) Yeah. Yeah. But now we're getting into a whole discussion about consumer psychology and all kinds of things when it comes to that. Right? Certain parts of the country, certain geographic considerations, other considerations too. Right? So are we going to see more and more of it in different ways? Absolutely, no question. Right? I think, and it's not just a retail statement, it's a general consumer statement: we're used to doing things more on our own, on our iPhones, or when we go to the airports, you name it. Right? So that—I think we continue to see that.

(Yashai Buskila at 00:17:46) Again, we're not trying to sell a full frictionless experience yet. We have the technology. We showcase it every year at NRF, at one of the biggest trade shows for the industry. But it's a very weird experience for a lot of people, and it's something that I think really depends on the demographics of people who access them. There are certain people that will feel so comfortable, you know, tapping their card, tapping their app, walking in, taking whatever they want, and leaving the store, compared to different generations that will either try to trick the system or—"Am I getting the exact items? Am I billed correctly?" Especially with some of the frictionless experiences, you don't get that receipt immediately when you walk out. So there's some doubt there. "Am I being charged the right amount? Am I being charged for the right items? Did I mess up?" You know, what happens if you walk to a store and there's something on a top shelf and you just ask another shopper, "Hey, can you give me that item?" and they hand you that item. Who gets billed for that item? Does it transfer from their basket to yours? There are a lot of open questions that we're trying to resolve there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) You bring up a lot of good points, because if I was doing a full Saturday grocery shop session for me and my family of five, that's going to bring up a lot more questions. But when I'm at the airport and I'm grabbing a bottle of water and some trail mix, I'm less concerned there. Also, I do think that when the full grocery shop experience becomes that way, it'll make it easier to have less baggers. Because right now, when I go to the grocery store by myself to grab a sub or something, I just do self checkout or a few quick items. But when I'm with the whole family, we're going to the person that can scan it and check it out because we're trying to watch the kids while they're doing that. And then we get help out to the car and all of that good stuff. So I would say we wouldn't need all of that if we could just bring our own bags and it was smart enough—we could just put the stuff in the bags and then directly into the cart. Then there's no need to have the help checking out. So that's interesting.

(Yashai Buskila at 00:19:54) So we've tried—and there are different retailers in the industry that do smart carts. We did ours as well, and then you can do different, basically, self-scanning journeys with mobile applications. Just think: if you were walking down the aisle and as you're putting the items in your baskets, you're already bagging them, your journey became totally different. So the question is, how do you do security on the checkout or as they leave the store because all the items have already been bagged? Again, it's just the technology is evolving very quickly there. The question is, what's the cost of it? Because if you think about the cost of a smart cart today, and the fact that theft in carts is quite expensive—there's some challenges with ROI there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:38) I was talking about stealing carts. Yeah. Yeah.

(Frederick at 00:20:43) Well, it's also, you know, having been in the industry for decades, right, we understand that technology ultimately has to be operationalized, and there's a whole set of humans and experiences—both associate as well as consumers—that actually interact around that technology and how it's used. And, you know, that makes the store a pretty unique, special environment. And, you know, the shiniest, newest technology isn't always going to work if it's not put in practice with a strong operational understanding. So, yeah, that's critically important.

(Yashai Buskila at 00:21:25) Yeah. Coming back, Joel, to your point about the full frictionless store, I will add one thing. When you think about a full frictionless store, there still is an associate there within the store space. So the question is, is the amount that we're investing in order to create that full frictionless store worth it compared to just doing, for example, a vision-based self checkout, which is still cool and accurate? And we still have the associate there to do age-restricted items or validation as needed or stock the shelves. It's just a different approach there. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:58) I'm curious about this next part because I think you'll have different perspectives. But budgeting for tech that doesn't yet exist—how do you do that?

(Yashai Buskila at 00:22:11) So I think, for our perspective, it really depends on the retailer itself and where they're going to put their money at. It's very hard to identify, you know, for technologies that don't exist yet. That's a good question. I think the majority of the vendors that we meet with, they put a few percent of their P&L towards those new evolving technologies just to test them out. Again, if you're talking about mobility or frictionless experiences or camera vision—I'm not talking specifically on things that have ROI like loss prevention or product-in-progress recognition—mainly new evolving technologies. If it's smart carts or robots, or—you know, Frederick and I met with a group of industry leaders a couple weeks back, and it was very interesting around how they look at that investment phase.

(Frederick at 00:23:10) You know, putting a team, budget, having some priority around new innovation—and that's, you know, not necessarily that common. Not every organization is aligned to really drive innovation or have the—you know, versus being maybe a little bit more risk-averse. But it's also, I think, partnering with vendors who can engage in those conversations, who are open to that co-development, co-creation, or have technology stacks that make that a little bit easier. You know, we famously had a CIO come in about a year ago talking about experimentation, right, and that mindset that they were trying to create within their organization to truly bring a little bit more of that innovative culture, try new things. But, you know, speaking of tech debt, that's also easier if you have those kind of environments or partners or vendors that help you do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:07) Now, just to help me completely wrap my mind around this: So you're building with companies. You're helping them spend their innovation funds. Is that correct?

(Yashai Buskila at 00:24:19) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:20) Okay. Do you yourself have an innovation fund, or is it just you're innovating all day for these people—that's just what you do?

(Yashai Buskila at 00:24:28) So we have an innovation team. We have two areas of innovation. We have innovation that's on our core platform, which is part of our standard R&D budget. That's one aspect of it. And then we have the innovation team, which today—we have about 120 people globally in our innovation team. We focus on basically everything in the retail aspect. We do focus right now mainly on camera vision, camera- and edge-based devices, as well as AI. There's what we focus on as what we call GA solutions, or generally available solutions, that we basically build, design, develop as we go through. And then we basically have a proficiency of our ML Ops and camera vision developers that we enable retailers that come to us with challenges and say, "Hey, here's a use case that we have. Can you install some cameras, look at some footage, and tell us if your camera vision services and AI can assist us in any way, shape, or form?" So, for example, we have a large retailer that came to us and said, "Hey, one in a hundred scans is an error. Not even a theft. It's an error." And the error could be an associate just scanning one item multiple times or not scanning the items correctly. "Can you help us with that?" So we're in a POC right now with them with our camera vision solutions. We have different types of retailers and totally different industries as well that look for us to do movement of inventory, inventory levels, different types of interactions with produce and product. So, for example, what's your touch-to-take ratio on produce, which is an interesting concept. Meaning, is my produce good enough? If it took me four times to pick up an apple, are my apples good? Are they bad? Should I reduce the price? Should I try to clean them up? There's a lot of analytics that we do in that space. But these are things that retailers come to us with—with their challenges—and we facilitate that.

(Frederick at 00:26:22) But I think, you know, another point that you make, Joel, is—yeah, we're constantly trying to build technology and solutions that help our clients innovate, but we're also bringing that in-house and our team in-house. To give Yashai and our other folks credit, right, a lot of it is, what do we need to do differently in our development shop, in our innovation process, and how we use the technology ourselves? Because it's not just our clients that need to move faster. If they need to move faster, then we need to be able to move more quickly and be more adaptive as well. Right? And how we take in requirements, build capabilities, deploy functionality, test, and bring that to market. So it's really—that's where this co-creation mentality and innovative mindset with our partners and our clients comes in, because it's got to be both. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:11) And then how do you, as a technology leader, balance jumping from shiny new object to shiny new object while also making really smart business decisions? Because there's more new, amazing things now than ever. I don't even want to say the word AI again, but there's just so much happening. How do you really figure out what's the thing to move on?

(Frederick at 00:27:33) Yeah. We clearly made a decision, you know, several years back that we wanted to look at the foundation, right, of our platform and build on that so that we weren't just layering on and adding cool functionality on top of a more monolithic application stack. So, you know, how we built and developed and—you know, it was really critical, and how we started from a much more modular, microservices-based platform that gives us greater flexibility. And so—but then on the flip side, one of the other important aspects in terms of the whole prioritization, which is kind of what you talked about, of what do we focus on—very voice-of-customer-centric. As we just said, just had a major customer advisory council. We have all kinds of different feedback mechanisms that drive what those next focus areas and technologies are so that we can stay focused on what truly matters and what truly drives that return on investment.

(Yashai Buskila at 00:28:36) I'll add one unique thing that we have within our platform and ecosystem, and this is something that the retailers pushed us to, and we call it self-enablement. The idea here is that we let the retailers control their own destiny, meaning that unlike some of our competitors, the Elara platform—any one of our retailers can go and develop on top of it, integrate to it, make modifications, add microservices to it. The idea here is, especially since we have very large retailers that have their own dev shop, they might want to focus on things that are unique to them and not have it shared within the core code of the platform, or they want to move quicker with third-party vendors that can do integration. So, for example, if you have a hospitality customer or some sort of a touchpoint that you want to integrate to, you can have a third party just integrate to the system however they see fit, develop on top of it, add a touchpoint, and not have the vendor, which is Toshiba, limit you or hinder your ability to move forward quickly. So that's another big portion of our ecosystem, that the whole self-enablement is one of the key features that we have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:45) I like that. Retailers being able to control their own destiny. All right. This is a good one. What would you say to someone who just can't let go of a legacy system? They're really attached to it.

(Yashai Buskila at 00:30:00) So I think, eventually, you know, we have a lot of retailers that are attached to their old legacy solutions in one way, shape, or form. Many times it's around the cost of this investment and the hardware that they need to do and services. The technology has evolved to a point that replacing these systems is—it's not something that's just—it's required. If it's security, if it's speed of service, if it's all your PII data that's on the system somewhere in some way, shape, or form, if it's modernization—there's so many things that simply have to happen in order to require you to move off of them. There are certain things that are more back-of-house that they're thinking of, you know: "My managers are used to something happening in the same way or in a specific order," or maybe different types of DSD receiving and shipping that are just standard things. But eventually, they're all moving off of it in one way, shape, or form. It just happens organically.

(Frederick at 00:31:10) Yeah. We get it. You know? We have these discussions every day. Ultimately, there is some compelling reason to act. You know? And then it comes back to: do you take an individual journey to see one step at a time, or do you really go all in with kind of a full transformation? And, you know, step by step is good too, but have that long-term vision so you don't get caught making five, ten separate individual decisions along the way. You end up with something that's even more complex. But, no, we understand. And there is a path forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:45) Do you guys have any cool numbers on, like, what percentage of the market that you guys have in retail? Like, is there any stores I would walk into that they're using your stuff?

(Frederick at 00:31:56) Well, what's cool is no matter where somebody is in the country that's listening to this, when they go shopping next time, whether you go to a grocery store, convenience store, you know, other kind of big box retailer, look at checkout. Whether you use a self-checkout or a manned lane, you're gonna start to see Toshiba logos a lot more than you have in the past. So you'll find Toshiba logos in the field.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:23) There we go. I am curious about, you know, agility. Let's give some tips to CTOs to help make their teams more agile. What should they be doing? What should they be thinking about?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:32:34) I think there's a lot of CTOs out there that always think about, do we develop our own solutions or do we buy? And I think that's one of the biggest challenges is that nobody stops and thinks maybe there's certain things that are not sexy. Okay? Doing taxes is not sexy. Doing basket calculations, doing all of your math.

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:32:57) Why not focus on buying some sort of a platform that gives you all of your standard integrations and applications? Again, if you think about integration to coupon vendors or tax services, additional components, buy that. But if you wanna focus on making yourself unique or your store experience unique, that's where those CTOs need to focus their time and effort. How do I create kiosks with Flash UI? How do I create custom journeys for my consumers?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:33:26) How do I create journeys where there's dynamic interaction between the shopper and store systems? I walk down the aisle, give me promotions that are relevant to that, not just, "Hey, there's, you know, $2 off dog food," which is seven aisles away from me. I come into a store based on a specific time and day that you're, again, like you talked about the store that you went to or other stores, we're creatures of habit. We go to the exact same store on mostly the same day.

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:33:54) You know that on this journey, I'm gonna buy certain things. But if I came here on a Monday or Saturday morning for some odd reason, give me different promotions. So, again, these custom journeys, custom interactions, focus on what you do, the experience that will differentiate you and less on the core platform that you're trying to develop. Just pick something, work with it, and then enable your associates and consumers.

(Frederick at 00:34:21) So we asked this question also in that survey that I referenced before, right? What are the main challenges that organizations face to ensure that agility of their store operations? And it's the same things we've talked about. 48%, the difficulty in upgrading legacy systems, 30% due to vendor lock-in, another 30% lack of in-house expertise. Right? Those are top responses as to, you know, why it's just not possible, right, to have the agility you need: skills, vendor systems. Right? You know, so it's, those are clearly the challenges that we're facing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:05) I wanna go over just a couple general leadership insights for just all the tech leaders out there regardless of, you know, the specific industry. But what's one piece of leadership advice that you have learned and you still apply every day?

(Frederick at 00:35:21) One thing that comes to mind kind of in this conversation in the context of technology, and then I'll bring it maybe back up a level, is just, you know, is a problem we're trying to solve urgent and pervasive. Right? I always like to make sure you ask yourself that question and understand what's driving your decisions. But, you know, more broadly in terms of leadership, I think a lot about curiosity and creativity and, you know, are you really fostering that in your organization and then empowering your teams to fully lean into that? Because, you know, that's, to me, where it starts. Otherwise, reckless experimentation or setting aside an innovation fund, you're not gonna get any meaningful outcome if you don't truly put that cultural backing behind it.

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:36:15) I think I'm gonna just add one thing to what Frederick said, and I'm gonna, there was a CTO that I worked with many years ago that always was one step ahead of management. He was experimenting with everything, but at a very small level. He wouldn't go and add a technology and try to deploy it. He would just experiment with it within, you know, the company's ecosystem somewhere in the corporate store. So small experimentation just to be aware of what's happening and being ahead of management.

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:36:44) We do this all the time here in our innovation group where we experiment with things just so we are aware of what's going on in the industry and playing around with new technologies, not on a large scale, but at least we have some visibility and knowledge of what's happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:59) And then while we're talking, why don't you share a moment that you learned a really tough leadership skill? Do you have any of those that you can share with us?

(Frederick at 00:37:10) I struggle with thinking about an exact moment, but, you know, for me, I think it all still comes back to culture, and transparency is another key thing that we talk about. And, you know, sometimes those are the things that do kinda come back to your point of tough leadership and learning a lesson. It's always better to be really transparent in the conversations you have. You know, you just gotta say, "Yeah, that's gonna work," or "It's not." You gotta be open and honest with your employees as well as with your customers and partners.

(Frederick at 00:37:46) And when you don't go in with that culture of transparency, you're certainly gonna run into some challenges.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:56) That's so cool. Oh, this is great. This is great. Well, guys, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Yeshai Bouskila at 00:38:02) Oh, this was awesome. Yeah, it was cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:04) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.