← The Digital Executive
The Digital Executive
Josh Hicks on Building Resilient Retail Tech and the Journey from Developer to Customer Success Leader | Ep 1073
00:12:48
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Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Josh Hicks. Josh Hicks is a senior technical sales engineer at JumpMind, a leading retail technology company in Columbus, Ohio. JumpMind's cloud native mobile point of sale platform empowers retailers like American Eagle Outfitters, Build a Bear Workshop and Petco to streamline operations, enhance customer experience and achieve sustainable growth. As one of the first senior level developers to join jumpmind, he has played a significant role in the company's growth since 2014. He quickly found himself involved in Symmetrics DS Jumpmind's open source database replication software. Today he still writes software and also works in a customer success capacity, helping customers in their first six months of their deployments. Before jumpmind, Josh held developer roles at Abercrombie and Fitch and Blue Cross Blue Shield, Michigan. He has a BA in Systems Analysis from the University of Miami. Outside of work, he loves spending time with his three kids, especially watching them play sports. Well, good afternoon Josh. Welcome to the show.
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Hello. Thanks for having me.
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Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. And we talked about that time zone just before we hit record. You're in Columbus, Ohio, I'm in Kansas City. So not too much traversing of the globe today. But I do appreciate your time and, and Josh, jumping into your first question, you've been with Junkline since its early days. How has the company evolved since you joined in 2014 and what role have you personally played in that growth?
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So when I started we were a pretty small company just getting off the ground. I was one of the first kind of senior hires to the organization beyond the owners. And when we started it was we all kind of had a retail background. So there's a retail mindset to the company. But the first product Symmetric that we built was very data oriented. So we, we kind of evolved over the next couple years into really understanding data, data movement integrations, transformations, how people were using and working with their data. So we kind of shifted to more of a wide sweeping market to about anybody that used data, which is everywhere. And then over the next maybe five, ten years we started getting more into that retail space again, evolving into the commerce product built on top of those data products of Symmetric and Metal. So we kind of went from a retail focus to a wide sweeping data and understanding how data really moved and then into the retail space again. And then as far as my roles, it's been many hats early on, everything from developing to architecture, worked with the support on the, the product, customer base. We had when we got off the ground and then had to jump into some of the marketing and sales right off the get go. So it was a very busy time and and even got into a lot of recruiting, going to career fairs, trying to expand the business. So it was really cool. Got to see a lot of the aspects of what would happen in a large organization. But to get in early and really touch a lot of those areas that normally have people dedicated to them as you evolve into a larger group. So got to see a lot of it early on and have dropped some of those hats along the way. That's kind of where I've been and how we've progressed through.
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Awesome. Thank you for the story. I appreciate that and it's great to hear someone, a lot of enthusiasm even with the company, gosh, at least 11 years now. But being one of the first employees to see everything from the ground up is pretty cool. And I know you have a retail background, but as you saw, the business probably tried to diversify or did diversify, do different things obviously to be competitive, but you're strong in the retail space. But I love hearing that you've worn all those hats, right? We've all done that. But at a startup you gotta learn a lot. And I know you had a lot of roles and I was surprised that you had that many roles from sales to recruiting to developer, that's just amazing. So I appreciate that. Josh, you have a strong background in development, but now work closely with customers during their deployment journey. How has your transition from code to customer success shaped your understanding of what clients truly need?
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It's an interesting shift in thought because with a developer background, developer kind of by trade, you're really focused on the code itself and organizing, architecting and making sure you're delivering quality code that not only you can read, but others can read. That really is your focus. You get really into the weeds on what the architecture of the application is going to look like and shifting into more of the tech pre sales and tech sales and trying to find out if the customer that we're prospects we're looking at are a good fit for the product and where there's gaps and where there's full understanding of their use case. It's a total shift in thought because you really need to understand their problems, the what they're trying to do, are they asking the right questions? What questions do you need to ask of them? And you kind of have to lose that thought of how I'm organizing the product, but what is the product going to do for Them where is it going to fulfill their needs and gaps and is it usable? That's a big shift. Is changing your architecture and your solution to be a usable, maintainable, turnkey kind of product where the customers can have success using it without having their hand held the whole way. So it's an interesting transition from a developer standpoint standpoint to go into that usability and understanding and really getting focused on what the customer needs. It's been great though. That's really been the big shift.
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Thank you, I appreciate that. And it's truly hard. Like you, Josh, I was in my career, started out as a developer, you know, making that transition. Right. You're truly a technical developer transitioning to the business side of this equation, which is a complete mind shift for sure. But understanding the business side, and I've learned this as well, like you explained, and being empathetic with the customer and understanding their requirements, a big shift. But once you get that, you can put basically the puzzle together, those touch points, the business side, the requirements and the development and how do you bring them a solution that actually works and they're satisfied with. So appreciate that. And Josh, JumpMind's mobile point of sale platform is used by major retailers like American Eagle and Petco. What are some of the biggest challenges that these retailers face today and how does your platform help solve them?
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Yeah, it's an excellent question. And we've been in this space for quite a while now. I started working even earlier than when I came on full time with jumpmind, working with some retailers as a freelancer and to see the. The scaling issues to being able to scale products that are able to reach out to these large retailers that have stores, not only in the number of locations and the number of stores that they have, but like geographically, they're spread across potentially the US Potentially against the globe. So reaching out and being able to set up software and an architecture in a platform that's going to scale and allow them to grow, not only adding new stores, but there's times where you have to close stores. You need to be able to absorb that stuff and make sure the software is resilient enough to handle that scaling. And I always tell people one of the real aspects that's been key to our product development and really taking us to the next level is we deal with a lot more than the happy path we're really good at. Kind of when the problems start to arise, the software's with the longevity that we've had in building the tool and the number of customers that we've expanded out to. It's very resilient and dealing with unexpected behaviors when you have outages, when you have failures and inconsistencies in the network, when you have different things in the environment that might control the behavior of the actual application. So we've had it to be resilient in dealing with a lot of those kinds of unexpected type behaviors that make the software real, tried and true and stand up against a lot of different things. And that's a real big deal when you're dealing with stores and taking on inventory and sales and needing to be reliable on the data and the transmission and movement of it. And then, I mean, this is a little outside of the software indirectly, but I mean, we've done a really good job of hiring great people. We've gotten people in the retail space that have had lots of experience and in the tech space. So we're very critical about who we bring in. And a lot of people are come from backgrounds, they've seen it, done it, they have real life experiences with the problem potentially on the other side. So when we bring them into our side, they're already familiar with the shortcomings and the pitfalls that a lot of these retailers run into. So we're able to leverage a lot of what their knowledge and background and then apply it to our software and our products. So with that and that kind of all that molding together, that's really evolved into a great solution that's worked for a lot of these vendors, as you can see from the brand list we have.
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That's awesome. Appreciate that. You know, trying to find that right, you know, through trial and error, of course, you've learned to build resiliency into your platform through learning, through challenges. But having to scale something at that size with retailers like American Eagle, for example, is no small feat. But you did highlight a key point that I always take to heart as the people. Right. And the culture and hiring that great talent with that experience, building that great culture of teamwork and success is something that I really just am attracted to and I love to talk about that side of the business. So I appreciate that. And Josh, last question of the day. As someone who's worked in the field for over a decade, how have customer expectations evolved when it comes to technology solutions in retail, and how do you keep ahead of that curve?
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Yeah, yeah. As you know, in any IT platform and technology, no matter what field you're in, that is the game changer. So I really think what we're seeing now in these retailers is instead of just pushing a product years ago and trying to sell goods, you're seeing them rely heavily on actual data. I mean it's critical to not only move the data and get it to platforms that are able to deliver the feedback that you need. I mean there's all kinds of analytics and AI now going into the situations and so having these retailers expand into their technology platform and really understanding what data they have available to them, how fast it's available to them, how reliable is it. And they're actually enabled to make smarter, more intelligent decisions around the business based on the data they have in front of them. And so being able to store more data now at a cheaper rate, being able to use cloud platforms, be able to use better on prem devices, you just have more flexibility everywhere. But you need to be able to move that data, move it reliably, scale it, secure it. Security is ever increasingly never thought of it as much maybe in a retail we do a lot with banks and financials and government and such. So we've been able to kind of leverage the security we gain out of those kinds of platforms with our tools to move that into retail and provide them that secure transport. So with all that being said, they're able to access a lot more technologies that are out there. I mean it's no longer just relational databases. There's all kinds of platforms for storing, moving, transforming data both on the cloud and on prem. And that just empowers them to make smarter decisions, decisions and really grow their retail business. So and we've really been able to absorb a lot of that technology under one product. So the, you know, the commerce product and the symmetric product and our, our integration tool and our promote engine and everything's kind of rolled into one. So we're able to, there's never ever one product that can kind of do everything. But it, it does encompass a lot of the use case in the business case for them in one solution with a lot of integration points. So they have the flexibility but they also have a lot under the hood with the full JumpMind product suite.
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Thank you, appreciate that. And today it is, you know we talked about on the podcast recently, you know, this omnichannel marketing and retail where you just gotta be adaptable and flexible to the different ways that you can bring in sales from consumers. And retailers are demanding, they need that data. They're leveraging real time insights using AI and predictive modeling, leveraging hybrid platforms that fit your customer needs, but their customer needs, whether it's cloud, on prem storage solutions, obviously it's a fit their need. But what I've heard throughout this conversation today, Josh, is not only are you resilient in your platform, but you're really able to be agile and provide kind of a one stop shop for your customers. And I think that's amazing. So I appreciate that. And Josh, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
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Yeah, great. I really appreciate you bringing me on podcast today. It was nice to meet you.
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Bye for now.