EVP of Miami Heat explains how to choose a platform and modernize rapidly

(watch the full episode here)

Brad Anderson: I'm joined today by Matthew Jafarian, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy for the Miami Heat. Matthew, the Heat are one of the premier teams in the NBA, with three championships and five conference titles. But the franchise also has a reputation as one of the most tech-savvy operations in the league.

Matthew Jafarian: I think I have the best job in the world working for the Miami Heat and American Airlines Arena. Our division's job is to go into every other department, and they're our customer. We make their lives easier however we can, and the goal is to go from being the small business we were a decade ago to acting like the multi-billion-dollar organization we are today.

Brad: How do you as a leader set a tone that says, "Hey, we're going to be modern. We're going to think modern. We're going to work modern."

Matthew: I don't know If our goal is to be modern as much as it is to be the best. But you can't just walk into a room and flip a light switch. You have to really come up with a good solution. If you're going to stick your neck out and say, "We're going to do this," you have to make sure you've got the right idea.

But you're never going to convince 100% of the audience, so we follow the rule of thirds: A third of people will be for it, and a third will be against it. They're always going to be against it, right? So, we focus on the neutral third in the middle. If we convince them that this is the right thing, we've got consensus. Then, we can execute. We under-promise and over-deliver, and if we do that three, four, five times, we build up a lot of credibility and innovation gets faster and faster.

Brad: I recently read an interview where you talked about how you inherited some older architecture and some old contracts when you started in your role. How did you make decisions about what to keep and what to throw out in order to modernize?

Matthew: There were two main themes, and one of them has reached critical mass already, and that's the transition from on-premises to cloud. There are lot of benefits there, but it was a little challenging in the beginning. When you tell folks, "Hey, we're going to go into somebody else's servers," they're going to say, "Well, we own this server. We manage this server." But I would challenge that and say, "Is that really a good thing? Is this our core business? We're a basketball team. Why don't we give it over to Microsoft? I mean, if they can do it for the Department of Defense, they can do it for the Miami Heat."

The cybersecurity benefits are just the beginning. It’s also about the well-integrated ecosystem we can tap into and all the resources that are available, both for non-technical people like our sales staff, and really technical people like our developers.

The second theme for us was something that's less talked about, but it was a transition away from custom development to relying on baked platforms. So, for our mobile app, that means moving away from custom code and going to a mobile app development platform. For our e-commerce presence, that means going away from a patched together website to an e-commerce platform. And for our business apps, that means getting away from spaghetti code that's really difficult to maintain, and moving over to Microsoft's framework so that 80% of what we need is already available out of the box, and then we can focus on the last 20%, making it customized for our needs.

Brad: Spoken like a true software engineer. One of the biggest inhibitors I’ve seen for organizations getting onto what I call the “cloud cadence” is all the custom spaghetti code that just kills agility.

Matthew: It doesn't just kill agility. You end up having all of the non-technical folks in the organization asking, "What are those guys doing in the corner over there? What are they doing all day?" It's because they're spending all this time on maintenance. By getting out of that world, then they start to see all the feature releases and they see the impact of the technology. They're not spending all their time making things run.

Brad: You have a deep background in software development. With this type of expertise, how do you go about evaluating and testing the software you use in your organization? And when you were evaluating Microsoft 365, what stood out to you?

Matthew: I developed, helped build, and helped sell software back in the startup days. I wore a lot of different hats, and I was actually on the other side of the table, so it gives me a unique perspective now when I'm on the buy side. When you’re judging a potential vendor, not only do you judge their technology, you really need to understand the people you're going to potentially partner with long-term.

I don't just look at the technology where it is today. I mean, we’re in a SaaS world where software is constantly changing. I don't just want to see what your product does now. I want to know your vision. I want to know your roadmap. Show me where you're going to be, and that's what I'll buy into. That's exactly why we bought into Microsoft 365. You have a fully integrated ecosystem where the right hand talks to the left. A lot of employees at the Miami Heat don't even realize how well integrated it is because it just works, and that's what we really appreciate.

Brad: Well, thank you for hanging out, Matthew. Before we go, if people want to find out more about you or the work you're doing, where would they go?

Matthew: Look me up on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect.