Tom Rice

Better subject lines can boost your holiday results. Check out these valuable insights based on an analysis of subject lines and campaign performance from retailers using Oracle Responsys during the 2023 holiday season. https://lnkd.in/gQssWqaE

1

"The core art of Operations Management is observing the messy, human chaos of business and applying order to it." The Operator's handbook is a great guide to the various operations disciplines like #businessoperations or #bizops, #revenueoperations or #revops, #financialops or #finops,#legalops, #marketingops, #peopleops and #productoperations / #productops that have emerged as a result of shift from hardware to software-based value creation (see my previous post too --> https://lnkd.in/gwNWwkNh?). Great introduction, though I find it lacking as it did not include factory operations, supply chain, store operations that rely far more on offline-online interfaces. For any operator out there, process, analytics, metrics, cadence, solutioning and execution are the key concepts to apply.

1

2 Comments

Ever had a promising account slip away? ZoomInfo Copilot helps you win them back. 🏆 Marissa Varney, Account Executive at ZoomInfo, demonstrates how Copilot can help you turn "dead" accounts into active opportunities. By leveraging AI, Copilot surfaces important buying signals — like intent spikes and key personnel changes — so you know the perfect moment to reconnect. Watch below and learn how to bring lost deals back to life. 👇 #ZoomInfoCopilot

2

Can you take a few minutes to share where you are on your #GitOps journey? We've got the best GitOps #ContinousDelivery product with Codefresh; we are adding functionality to Octopus Deploy to use GitOps principles in how you deploy, and getting you started with learning tracks and certifications. Share your challenges with us, and we'll share what we hear across the industry.

3

User (highest mileage segment) feed-back at its finest :-)

2

/*********Mentorship**************/ I was watching today Andy Jassy's video (https://lnkd.in/gRV2mGPr) on career advice. He shared one of the very important thing on Mentor's. Mentor's overall objective is too help you grow. They let you do things which you even think you can not do and then give support if needed. They give honest feedback on areas of growth.

1

Spotlight on Professional Integrity: Navigating Job Title Inflation and Role Misrepresentation on LinkedIn We've all seen it—profiles on LinkedIn that seem to inflate duties or job titles beyond their true scope. This trend raises several critical questions for both professionals and employers: 1. Why Does It Happen? - Is it driven by competition, a desire for recognition, or pressure to appear more accomplished? 2. The Impact - How does this affect team dynamics, company culture, and the credibility of professionals within and outside the organization? 3. Company Policies - Should companies monitor LinkedIn profiles and hold employees accountable for misrepresentations? What are the ethical considerations involved in such monitoring? Here are some thought-provoking questions for the community: • Have you encountered instances of role inflation on LinkedIn? How did it impact your perception of the individual? • Should there be clear guidelines and consequences for misrepresenting one’s role online? If so, what should these look like? • How can companies support employees in showcasing their true achievements without feeling the need to exaggerate? Let's discuss! Your insights on maintaining professional integrity in our digital age are invaluable. #ProfessionalIntegrity #LinkedInEthics #WorkplaceCulture #CareerGrowth #Leadership #mentorship #accountability #askTheToughQuestions

37

3 Comments

Some great tips for your next interview 👇 #amazoninterviewing #amazon #jobs #interviewtips

5

DIY Van Build vs Microservices vs Chief Slowdown Officer Building a DIY van is a lot like building a house at first. But one day, once you're on the road, you realize it’s nearly impossible to hire a contractor to fix mistakes on a weekend in the middle of nowhere. The choices you make during the build can have significant consequences, especially when dealing with features involving fuel, water, electrical systems, and safety. In van builds, as in software development, breaking down your needs into smaller, manageable decisions (similar to microservices) allows for simplicity and flexibility. In the video below, I mounted the diesel heater in the engine bay. The decision not to permanently install the diesel heater inside the van and drill holes through the floor had several benefits: diesel fumes out of the van; easy replacement and cleaning; improved safety without running fuel lines inside the van. The onboard air compressor is mounted next to the diesel heater but can be removed for use elsewhere, adding to its versatility. This version of the van is a prototype (1/N). The common belief is that during prototyping or creating a proof of concept (POC), you need to make quick decisions to Get Stuff Done (GSD). While the value of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is clear, it's not always the best approach. The alternative? Maximum Viable Options (MVO). MVO doesn’t mean getting bogged down in analysis paralysis or moving too slowly—it means being deliberate. Think of yourself as the Chief Slowdown Officer (https://lnkd.in/gN42uwfN, @ 1 min mark). One of the hardest aspects of a van build is the electrical system. By taking time and delaying this part of the build as long as possible, I was able to visualize the wiring diagram repeatedly and virtually test the wiring and electrical flow. When I finally started building, it went so quickly over a single weekend that I thought I had made a mistake. But, channeling the Chief Slowdown Officer mindset, I didn’t turn the system on immediately. Instead, it went through a review and certification process. This careful, deliberate approach made supporting the system easy. Being a Chief Slowdown Officer is similar to how athletes—like pro basketball players or golfers—slow down and visualize the shot before committing to it. This is a powerful technique for architects and engineers. If you can slow down and visualize the architecture and dependency graph of everything you build, then OpenAI has no chance. At least, not yet. More on that later. Van facts: 400W solar panels, 5kWh battery bank, bi-directional charging with the van’s battery/alternator, 20-gallon fresh water tank, 16-gallon remotely dischargeable grey water tank, a power-assisted bed lift, 8,000 BTU air conditioner, onboard air compressor, heated floor, walk through shower, bio waste disposal...

5

1 Comment

Triage, Localize, Mitigate, Root Cause, Fix. When in doubt, mitigate first (but not always). I am privileged to get to work with the Checkout and Cart teams that own the major "purchase bits" of the physical goods shopping experience at Amazon. When our software stops working and shoppers can't buy, we call it an order drop, a Sev-1, an outage, an incident, or my favorite understatement "an event." We take "the purchase bits" pretty seriously at Amazon because our customers expect convenience in their shopping - we constantly work to earn their trust to make their lives easier - from helping quickly deliver the "almost an oops" birthday gift the next day for my niece, to enabling a grocery delivery to get dinner on the table for the family without a trip to a store, and even buying cost-effective, delivered-to-your-door medicine to manage a condition. Sure, order drops cost Amazon money, but preventing a shopper from completing their order loses their trust, and trust is *much*, *much* harder to earn back than money. Normally in an order drop, our first goal is to *mitigate impact*. What changed (what was the *trigger*)? How do we get back to a known good or better state? We have levers that reduce impact and help, analytics and tools to detect anomalies and assist with roll-backs, and event streams to help find quick "dial downs" of config changes or experiments. So "Mitigate first" is usually better than "first understand, then mitigate" because understanding takes time and every minute of an outage is another large set of customers whose trust is lost - maybe forever. Mitigation gives the luxury of time to understand *root cause* and identify fixes to *durably prevent recurrence.* However. Some events are complex, multi-layered, hard to localize, and even require new code to be written and deployed to provide an effective mitigation. These incidents flip the script back to "first understand." A recent major incident showcased this in a big way, and the minutes of trust loss ticked into hours before we had a full mitigation that made customers whole again. I regret that I failed to reassess the situation and available data sooner - losing valuable time leading mitigations that just weren't helping enough. We've already learned a lot from this event, and I look forward to the talented and engaged owners across areas in Amazon improving our software and processes to prevent a similar issue from happening again. If you were unable to shop recently at Amazon and saw one of our cute "dogs of Amazon" pages while trying to check out, please accept my personal apology for the trouble and inconvenience this caused.

102

3 Comments

Santana Row shopping center in San Jose has implemented a ticketless parking system that eliminates the need for drivers to take a ticket upon entry and pay at a pay station upon exit. Instead, drivers can simply scan a QR code (see photo) posted throughout the garage using their phones, enter their license plate number and credit card information on the website that pops up, and a camera will read their license plate and open the gate as they exit. While this system may seem convenient and efficient, I think there is a significant security concern! There is a risk that perpetrators could replace the posted QR code with their own, which would redirect drivers to a fake website where they would unknowingly enter their credit card information. This could lead to unauthorized charges and potential identity theft. It is crucial for the shopping center to address this security concern by taking appropriate measures to protect drivers' personal and financial information. They must ensure that the QR codes posted are authentic and that there are no vulnerabilities that could allow perpetrators to manipulate the system. As an alternative solution, pay stations could be installed for shoppers to use instead of relying on their own phones.

32

12 Comments

As per Brandon Suponchick, CTO of Aviture, in his session at the Kansas City Developer's Conference called "The Agile Architect: Building Product From The Trenches, Not The Tower," one of the many insights he shared was the importance of testing but even more foundational is that code needs to be testable. In order to have "architecture that evolves at the same pace as your business requirements," we need to start with code that is easy to test, and tests should be holistic and stable. If code design is poor and difficult test, our ability to change systems and deploy quickly will be limited. We need to be able to ensure our code will not break through sufficient tests. This includes unit tests. #KCDC #KCDC2024

18

Strategies are specific courses of action, not vague hopes. If your strategy or vision statement includes open-ended statements that don't paint a clear picture of your intent, then you haven't done enough to define your strategy.

5

We published an article about all the awesome product observability features of Segment we have today and upcoming in the near future. Bookmark this if you are a Segment user!

36

1 Comment

A theory of #softwareengineering effectiveness as the triad of business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience. 1. "Effective software organisations focus their investments on the right outcomes." 2. "Effective software organisations make fast and consistent progress toward their goals." 3. "Effective software organisations give engineers the support and tools they need t o feel engaged." WDYT? #technology #operatingmodel #devex #devops #valueengineering #value #engineeringmetrics #cto #cio

3

Exciting news! Our team has released a new feature that I'm thrilled to share with you all. Auto-Association is now available to help our customers connect their data to our AWS Supply Chain Data Lake. Thanks to Generative AI, powered by Amazon Bedrock, we can read a variety of source data and automatically build the SQL transformation recipes needed to convert this data into our canonical data model. I'm particularly proud of this feature and want to extend a special thanks to my manager, Jyothi Bodas, for leading the project. If you're interested in learning more about Auto-Association, check out the demo video Jyothi created. I want to thank the entire team for producing such an awesome feature for our customers! Alok Mehta, Asim Joshi, Christie Molloy, Colin Ashfield, Leonardo Murri, Michael Walsh, Parshant Chowdhary, Shalini Thinderu,Tom Nolan, Vita Grebeniuk and the host of other team members that made this happen. I also want to send out a thanks to our leaders- Ameet Vaswani, Diego Pantoja-Navajas, Dilip Kumar, Alex Dunlap, and to our Customer Success team led by Tariq Choudry. #aws #amazon #amazonbedrock #AWSSupplyChain #day1

104

8 Comments

When planning a vacation, consider the following: 1) Join one or more Facebook groups that are about travel to the city or destination you are interested in. I learned so much by doing this for a recent trip we made to Italy. A certain Facebook group was the single most helpful source for helping me plan a wonderful trip. I learned so many helpful tips and resources by reading posts and comments. 2) Read reviewer comments and look for recent reviews: When researching lodging like vacation rentals/vrbo/Airbnb or hotels, be sure to read comments. The comments can give you a more complete picture of the place. Ratings are definitely important as a first step to narrow down choices, but a reviewer may be more likely to be honest in their comments. I have seen high reviews but comments may point to areas of concern. Also, if there are no recent reviews, that may be a red flag as well. 3) For vacation rentals (I like VRBO), if the host doesn't respond quickly to your questions or show appreciation from your reservation, take that as a possible red flag for your upcoming trip. If you can't reach them before your trip, that is a good indicator of how they will respond during your trip. If the lodging has free cancellation, you could consider canceling reservations if you do not get a good first impressions from communications. If they don't show kindness or appreciation from your reservation, they may not really care about your business and you may not feel comfortable staying there. As someone who is working on being a host myself, I can't imagine not showing appreciation or offering assistance to my customers (which happened to me). 4) When choosing your vacation experience, think about what will make your dreams come true and make sure you make those happen so you truly feel like your vacation meets your needs. For example, is it relaxing on the beach in a remote area? Is it seeing places, art, museums, sampling certain foods, eating in certain restaurants, etc.? Is it a combination of planned AND unplanned exploration or do you like most of your time planned? Is it visiting a city that you have always wanted to see? Is it an urban experience you want or only outdoors/nature? 5) I suggest to not plan much on the heavy travel days except for maybe eating and exploring the area as you will be tired from traveling and possible time zone differences. You don't want to plan stuff when you will be too tired to enjoy it. Plus, travel delays can happen which can affect anything that was scheduled on the same day. 6) Make sure to give yourself some downtime and rest so you feel refreshed before returning to work. That way, you won't feel like you need a vacation from your vacation. I usually include at least one day after returning from vacation before heading back to work. 7) After all the planning, enjoy your trip and try not to stress! All the advanced planning will help make your trip enjoyable!

9

6 Comments

Stay ahead of the curve by leveraging cloud data and AI technologies to drive adaptability within your organization. Dive into this informative piece from Harvard Business Review.

2