Innovation Is Everyone’s Job: Leading Tech Change With Alex Seidita

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and today I’m excited to welcome Alex Seidita. He’s the Chief Information Officer at Aspida, and he has spent 35 years in IT leading projects, including data warehouse projects through large technological shifts.

[00:00:22] Tessa Burg: And we’re excited to learn more about his background, what this has looked like at companies like Citibank, Home Depot, even in the military. Uh, and it’s, it’s fascinating ’cause we were just talking about this before the call, that AI is no more than another technological shift. And it really is the people and the processes that we bring to the table that will help determine how successful we are in navigating this shift as well as shifts in the future.

[00:00:51] Tessa Burg: So, Alex, thanks so much. For joining us. I am really excited and looking forward to this conversation.

[00:00:57] Alex Seidita: Thanks, Tessa. I’m looking forward to the conversation as well.

[00:01:01] Tessa Burg: So let’s get into your very, uh, big and varied background. And you were saying like, you know, you started in computer science and how that really gave you the foundation to navigate these technological shifts in different industries, payments, insurance, CPG, and retail.

[00:01:19] Tessa Burg: I mean, these are wildly different industries, but all have gone through and had to navigate. When major platforms and new technologies are introduced, how that impacts everything from back of house to front of house. So tell us a little bit about where you started and what that journey looks like.

[00:01:38] Alex Seidita: Uh, thanks, Tessa.

[00:01:39] Alex Seidita: Uh, yeah, I, I, uh, have used the blessing of computer science, which was what I went to school for, across a variety of industries. I find that the problems, uh, irrespective of the specific industry a lot of times at the core are the same, and you just gotta bring people together to collaborate. So I started in telecom.

[00:01:56] Alex Seidita: Um, I did, uh, terrestrial cellular and satellite telecom. I’m sure all of our viewers here have, uh, have cell phones. And I was at, uh, Motorola back in the nineties when, uh, we were developing CDMA, uh, which is a core technology, which is the foundation of cellular, um, technology in the United States. Um, I also spent time with Citibank, both as a contractor and then as a full-time associate working on data warehouses, credit card analytics and so forth.

[00:02:25] Alex Seidita: Um, I did spend a, uh, a stint in military avionics, uh, working on leading a software engineering team, uh, on army helicopters and F-22 Jets, which was a very interesting, uh, experience as well. Uh, and then I also, um. Was with the Home Depot for about eight years. Uh, I started building data warehouses for sales inventory and labor information to make the company more efficient in all of those areas.

[00:02:52] Alex Seidita: Uh, and then, uh, became the, uh, the head of data architecture. Eventually the chief architect of the company, uh, I ran IT services, developer tools, data center, distributed infrastructure, and so forth. Um. And then, uh, uh, from the Home Depot, I went to First Data Corporation, which actually got me more into not just the kind of scale like we had at the Home Depot, but also uh, the international, uh, perspective.

[00:03:17] Alex Seidita: 50 plus countries, 11,000 transactions per second. Uh, when you think about payment processing of credit cards, debit cards, gift cards, food stamps across 6 million plus retail locations, we were doing probably over a billion dollars of transactions a day just for Walmart alone. I remember, um.

[00:03:34] Alex Seidita: Then to bring together both the international piece, uh, the global piece and scale. I was at MetLife for nine years. Um, I started at as the chief, uh, global technology architect for the company. Uh, and, uh, about, uh, 2017 or so. I was asked by my boss to take a, a stint in being the CIO for the Latin America business to cover for an exit we recently had. I was only supposed to be there for about three months or so, covering until he backfilled the position. But I ended up doing both jobs for about five years after that, the tech, the chief technology architect, and the CIO for the Latin America business.

[00:04:10] Alex Seidita: And about two years ago I came over to a Aspida, where I’m the CIO for the entire business reporting to the CEO. Uh, we, we actually have the, uh, the benefit of, uh.

[00:04:21] Alex Seidita: You know, not having that legacy boat anchor as I like to call it, so we’re so nimble and so quick in being able to, you know, uh, deliver our, um, our projects on time, uh, new products, new digital experiences and so forth. We, we can give autonomy, I can give autonomy and empowerment to each of the squads that are working, uh, under my purview so that we can deliver with. Uh, speed and be nimble in everything we do.

[00:04:45] Alex Seidita: Um, the other thing you said, Tessa, is that there have been, you know, some transformations along the way and AI is just the latest, right? It’s the biggest, it’s the most, it’s the most recent in, in people’s minds and they all build upon one another. But if you’d like, I’d like, I can talk about some of those transformations that I’ve seen throughout, throughout my history.

[00:05:04] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I think that would be very interesting. ’cause my career isn’t as long, but. One of the stories I always tell people when they’re starting to freak out is, I remember working in desktop support and giving people their first computer and what that change looked like and what it meant moving from a typewriter to a computer.

[00:05:25] Tessa Burg: So you have been in leadership positions through these technological changes. What have some of those major shifts been throughout your career?

[00:05:33] Alex Seidita: That’s a great question. Um, so I guess, um. I won’t go all the way back, uh, but I, I’ll, I’ll go back, let’s say to Citibank. Um, and, uh, the advent of data warehousing kind of in the mid nineties, um, and there were, you know, books from Inman and Kimball I remember around, you know, uh, dimensional models and so forth.

[00:05:55] Alex Seidita: But the key was how do you take more and more data? With the infrastructure we had available back in those days to be able to bring data and analytics, you know, to the business. And we had to figure out, I remember it was such a big deal back then to be able to join tables that have like one and a half billion rows in one table and a billion rows in another, and try to come up with an answer in a number of seconds.

[00:06:16] Alex Seidita: Right. And we had to figure out. To do that and to load all the information from all the credit card transactions that were happening across the various brands. Um, so that was one, I think the, the advent of data warehousing and dimensional models and, and the able, the ability to do, uh, things that we nerds call star schemas and so forth, to be able to, uh, to be able to support that.

[00:06:36] Alex Seidita: I think another big one that happened, uh, while I was at the Home Depot was virtualization. You know, companies like VMware came to the fore and we wanted to squeeze out every bit of. Uh, you know, efficiency that we could, out of every server we had in the data center, you know, there were a lot of things that were running somewhat idle and virtualization allowed us to run a lot of workloads on the same servers.

[00:06:58] Alex Seidita: Right? And this is well before cloud, right? So we were, we were in the, in a world where we had to run things in the data center. And then certainly right after that was the drive toward cloud and containerization. Right, and the beginnings of things that became, you know, AWS and Microsoft Azure and, uh, GCP, you know, Google’s cloud and so forth.

[00:07:19] Alex Seidita: Um, I think that, uh, that was another big push. Folks originally thought it was just about cost save, right? When you talk about big businesses, but a lot of it was efficiency and speed. And I believe actually in many cases, that sometimes speed is more important than the cost save. ’cause you’re getting after more revenue in some cases for some of these companies, um, after cloud and container, I’d say some of the software based things that were coming were service oriented architecture and microservices, where you could start, you know, slicing out pieces of capabilities and sharing them across various.

[00:07:50] Alex Seidita: Systems. Um, then there were methodology changes. Methodology changes like, um. The move from Waterfall to Agile, uh, where instead of saying, you know what? I need to know everything about this project, what it’s gonna cost and what benefits it’s gonna bring me before I write, before I start the first part of the requirements and design.

[00:08:11] Alex Seidita: Right? And knowing everything before you do anything is the antithesis to where we are now with agile methodology where you do something before you know everything. And you work in an iterative fashion. Um, I’m really proud that, you know, all the teams here that I, that I have in Aspida are, uh, are driving with very nimble, agile processes.

[00:08:30] Alex Seidita: We just moved to, on our digital front ends, weekly releases now, uh, as opposed to where we were with, uh, biweekly releases. But the point is that. You have to actually balance kind of the risk and the reward and the ability to get something out into production, uh, that’s low risk and always thinking progress over perfection in those spaces.

[00:08:49] Alex Seidita: And that’s what the move to agile has taught us. Um, and then to be able to move quickly and keep everyone collaborating correctly, um, it’s not really a methodology, but a mindset of, you know, what we refer to as product aligned teams. And that’s where we wanted to build. You know, and, and some of this goes back to I think the Spotify model of like circa 2012 or so where, um, you know, there were the chapters, which is kind of your homeroom of where you work, the software engineering team or the project management team or the, uh, infrastructure team, et cetera.

[00:09:22] Alex Seidita: And across those chapters you’d create squads, which is the work that actually had to get, had, had to be done. And the squads actually were like, in our case, we have squads for our client experience. For our operations experience, for our distribution network experience, and a number of other, uh, squads that we have.

[00:09:40] Alex Seidita: But you bring kind of in a matrix model, all of the folks that you need, the developers, the testers, the scrum master, um, and you bring in business operations compliance so that they’re working in a squad. They are working in those, you know, two pizza teams, right? A team small enough that two pizzas can feed them, right?

[00:09:58] Alex Seidita: Because smaller teams. Then have the autonomy within some guardrails to be able to deliver as fast as they can with quality. And you know, I think. Being able to do that, um, in, in those product aligned teams that are focused lot and more narrowly, uh, uh, uh, gives us the speed that we want. Um, and then of course now we have AI, right?

[00:10:17] Alex Seidita: And AI, like, like we were saying is, it’s just the next, I don’t want to say that it’s a, a small thing, but we’ve heard people talk about the advantages AI will bring. People are worried about, oh, are we all gonna get laid off because AI is gonna do our job? Actually, what we like to say is that everybody now has an assistant.

[00:10:35] Alex Seidita: AI is their assistant. You’re not gonna get replaced by the, by the AI. You’re gonna get replaced by the person that knows how to use AI to make themselves more productive. In every one of our areas, we promote, you know, the use of generative AI. Uh, in Aspida, for example, um, you know, our, our software engineers in the team are, are having AI write code for them.

[00:10:57] Alex Seidita: Our legal folks are, are reviewing contracts and summarizing contracts and also creating new ones. Um, our HR people are creating job descriptions and so forth. But in zero of those cases, is that AI generated thing, like going to production, so to speak? Mm-hmm. Um, it is always human in the loop or HIL as we say in the AI space where.

[00:11:19] Alex Seidita: There’s going to be the accountability on that human. They have an assistant, but the AI is helping them to go faster and do their thing more productively, not replacing them. So the person that is able to use AI more productively is the value, uh, is, is the person that’s gonna derive the most value, and those are the kind of folks that we want thinking ahead.

[00:11:39] Alex Seidita: Um, but in no way does AI you know, uh, concern me in, in, in, uh, in. Any more than any of those other transformations. It’s the, it’s the current one that we’re looking at right now, and there will be several future ones going forward.

[00:11:54] Tessa Burg: Yeah. And when we think about transformations and all the ones that you’ve mentioned, there’s uh, always some hesitancy, some fear.

[00:12:02] Tessa Burg: You know, we, even with cloud, there was a lot of confusion. I remember being at a marketing conference. And talking about our product and someone asking, can that be done in the cloud? And of course, at the time, yes, we hosted the solution in the cloud, but the, the feature I was speaking about was on a mobile device.

[00:12:23] Tessa Burg: And I, you know, I like, didn’t understand what they were asking, but people just started saying the word cloud is solving like every problem out there. And, um. Now there there’s not only confusion around like what it can do or what it should do, but fear. When you think about these shifts in the past, how did you navigate, like, misunderstanding, uh, maybe overhyping of what the solution is capable of and really bring people around the most effective and productive use of that technology.

[00:12:54] Alex Seidita: That’s a great question. Um, I do think that people end up using some of these transformational, you know, eras in, in, in technology. Um. In the form of buzzwords, right? So, you know, oh, do that in the cloud, or, oh, AI, AI can do that, right? And you’re right, they’re taking things out of context without knowing all the facts.

[00:13:17] Alex Seidita: And I think when it comes down to it, like in a company where you’re actually gonna put something into production that you wanna actually build or design or, you know, in the right order there, um, you, you actually come down to the facts and you create, you know, what does that case look like? You do a little bit of R&D.

[00:13:34] Alex Seidita: Right, you can play with something, but before you put it into production, because now in production, especially in regulated industries, it has to be a right a hundred percent of the time, not 99% of the time. Certain things you can take more risk with. Maybe customer experience kinds of things that you’re gonna ex experiment with.

[00:13:51] Alex Seidita: Um, and, and you have to always have that kind of risk versus reward perspective. But it reminds me of what we talk about here. It reminds me of something that Gartner has. Um. Hype cycle, which I don’t know if you’ve seen before. Right? And everything, you know, new technologies can be, um, can be plotted across the, this hype cycle, which it go to the peak of inflated expectations, which is where it kind of starts.

[00:14:13] Alex Seidita: It’s like the introduction, then the peak of inflated expectations is perfectly put, right? Then it all goes through the trough of disillusionment, right? Where people are like, oh. I thought all these great things, it was very hyped up. It was, you know, out of context. People were using it as a buzzword, right?

[00:14:29] Alex Seidita: And then you realize to actually make this industrial strength, to put it into production to work a hundred percent of the time as opposed to an R&D effort or something you might do in college as a college project. Right now, it has to be something that’s industrial and solid, right? So after that trough of disillusionment, there’s the slope of enlightenment.

[00:14:48] Alex Seidita: Right where people are starting to learn things, uh, and do things better and actually create, you know, processes around stuff so that it works a hundred percent of the time. And then you get to the plateau of productivity and every technology at a, you know, variety of speeds goes through that might take you 10 years to go through that.

[00:15:06] Alex Seidita: It might take you three years to go through that. Right. Um, and I think, you know, we see that the same thing, the same thing with AI.

[00:15:14] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. It’s. Really, I like when you said the disillusionment part. I think it’s important no matter what seat you’re sitting at in a company, that you understand that there is gonna be that stage and phase of disillusionment and the best people or your most productive people, I would say your stars are those who lean into solutions and lean into hearing and feeling all the feels in that disillusionment phase.

[00:15:45] Tessa Burg: But knowing that they can be the person who helps navigate out.

[00:15:50] Alex Seidita: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:51] Tessa Burg: And. Those who don’t, those are the people who will be replaced. If you get stuck in that phase and you don’t come out, that’s not a great spot.

[00:16:00] Alex Seidita: Yeah. You want, I mean, we want people that are curious, that are always looking out, uh, to new solutions or, or new ways of doing things.

[00:16:07] Alex Seidita: We want people that do not have a fear to fail, and by the way, that means that their leadership, like myself and, and the CEO of my company, my boss, uh, will. We’ll always have their back, right? Because we wanna fail forward, right? Failure is just a step on the way to success, right? That’s not my words. I don’t remember where I read it one time, but I like it.

[00:16:28] Alex Seidita: And I think, you know, as long as we’re all, you know, driving towards success testing and learning. Right. Making mistakes and adjusting, understanding risk versus reward of, you know, where can we test and learn in a safe way, right? Then we’re gonna kinda get to the place where we need to be, you know, in a much more logical and, you know, correct way that’s gonna give the most value for our business.

[00:16:51] Alex Seidita: I mean, after all. We’re here not to just experiment with toys Right. And have fun. Right. But we’re here to drive a business, right, with revenue and, and, you know, driving costs down and trying to come up with a way to do things better so that a company can be successful or a society can be successful, or humanity can be successful.

[00:17:12] Alex Seidita: Right. We, we, we should be here for a larger cause. Um, than just the fun of working and tinkering with our little piece. And that means that you have to have those folks in the company that are curious and figuring out the ways of, of, of kind of bridging between just the technology for technology’s sake and the, uh, the purposes that it could have out in the world.

[00:17:34] Alex Seidita: Right. Uh, I, I think those are the kinds of folks that we’re always looking for.

[00:17:38] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. And what’s sort of been an interesting pattern that I’ve seen across businesses that we work with. And this just came up yesterday from a large client and they said, you know, it’s really our senior leaders who are struggling with adoption and it, when we listen to their feedback as to what the concerns are, why they won’t try using the tools.

[00:18:06] Alex Seidita: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:06] Tessa Burg: Why they might not feel the need to even tell clients or their end customers and publish out that they are using AI or that AI is a part of the process. Um, I feel like there’s a communication gap and there’s like, people have raised their hand and are in the know, but what are some ways that you’ve addressed like.

[00:18:28] Tessa Burg: Communication challenges, and I feel like this might be amplified by the news cycle. You know, like they’re hearing a lot of, uh, they’re hearing information about AI 24 7, but sometimes there’s this gap, especially senior leaders are, you know. They’re busy, they’re overwhelmed. This is a, they have, they are accountable for the business success.

[00:18:50] Tessa Burg: Like how can we bridge that communication as to where the business is driving and prioritizing technological change compared to what their entire career has told them, or the way they’ve operated their entire career and what the news is saying,

[00:19:04] Alex Seidita: number one. Um. Innovation is everybody’s job. I’ve been in companies that have formed like innovation teams.

[00:19:11] Alex Seidita: I remember once a colleague of mine and I went over to the, you know, the fancy new glass walled office, which is where the innovation team was housed, and we kind of looked in the window and we said, Hey, let’s watch them innovate. You know, and it was just kind of, kind of a joke, right? Because innovation isn’t a team, it’s part of everybody’s job, right?

[00:19:31] Alex Seidita: Invention is when you invent something new that didn’t exist before. Innovation is doing something better or different with stuff that you already got. Right, and that’s kind of a big difference. And so therefore, everybody who is in, you know, uh, the middle of working on something, whether they are managing people, whether they’re operating the phones, whether they are handling, you know, claims or incoming, you know, issues from customers, whether they are, you know, building software, they have the ability to innovate, so that needs to be top down, right?

[00:20:01] Alex Seidita: Mm-hmm. The inquisitiveness, the curiosity. Um, another thing that’s important I think, and I’ve seen this in some companies, is at the exec level, we sometimes can suffer from what I have called high and mighty disease. Right. You know, you need to bring everything to me and, you know, share it with me and take me through it like I’m a 3-year-old or something like that. And that doesn’t need to be the case, right?

[00:20:22] Alex Seidita: The, the, instead the folks that are at the top of the company need to be thinking, you know, I, I loved it. Um. When I was at the Home Depot, we talked about the upside down org chart, right? You know the CEO’s at the bottom right?

[00:20:36] Alex Seidita: The execs are at the next layer, and it goes all the way up to the individual contributors at the top, and then eventually there was the stores and the customers and the stores. But customers are always at the top, and the idea is that you are bearing the burden of the weight of the organization above you.

[00:20:50] Alex Seidita: Right? Mm-hmm. And you are responsible for everything, right? They are you and you are them. So you need to be able to be inquisitive and to be able to talk to anybody in the organization and try to challenge them to think differently. So I think instead of being fearful of the thing, like back in the, uh, you talk about the news cycle.

[00:21:08] Alex Seidita: Back many years ago it was, oh, he’s on an airplane and he is reading the In-Flight magazine, right? Because that, that’s where the article was, Hey, what’s this thing on cloud? Right? Or you know, now you know, we, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, um, Tessa, and it was like, um. It’s like you, you get it on social media, right?

[00:21:28] Alex Seidita: You get it on your news feeds and so forth. And so, um, as opposed to fear though, it needs to be curiosity is the thing I’ll continually say. And to allow others to be curious, to test and learn again, not to just go play with toys because this is a business and we’re here to. Ultimately, you know, uh, make a profit or be successful, uh, for some purpose that we have.

[00:21:49] Alex Seidita: Um, but make sure that folks are using that curiosity to learn things to better something to innovate. Um, yeah, so that’s kind of my answer to your question there.

[00:21:59] Tessa Burg: I absolutely love that answer and I’m gonna ask a question to help myself because I lead the innovation team at op. Mm-hmm. And it is a team, but we, instead of having it be.

[00:22:12] Tessa Burg: Like a strategic business unit. We have it as a practice group, and I always say that we are in service of all of the strategic business units, but what I like more about your statement, innovation is everyone’s job is inherent and it being my job is accountability that I am responsible. For how we are changing the way we work and how we’re going to market and how we’re serving our clients and customers.

[00:22:43] Alex Seidita: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:44] Tessa Burg: Are there, have you ever used any types of shared goals or shared accountability metrics to kind of help people embrace innovation being a part of their job?

[00:22:55] Alex Seidita: Absolutely. So number one, uh, and the first thing I did at a speeda and what I had done in prior companies is to make sure that as a, uh, as a senior leadership team in it, you know, we would always have a strategic session.

[00:23:08] Alex Seidita: We’d get away from the office for a day and a half and make sure that we’re talking about the big elephants in the room that never get a chance to talk about, because, you know, I, I love the. Who is it? Patrick Lencioni’s. The five Dysfunctions of the Team. Yeah. It talks about you gotta build trust, right?

[00:23:24] Alex Seidita: That’s the first thing. The absence of trust. Um. Prevents you from having the next thing up in the triangle of five things, which I think is, uh, conflict, right? Because you wanna have productive conflict. Without being able to have conflict. I can come to you, Tessa, and say, I have a conflict with you. We have to have trust to be able to make that productive, right?

[00:23:42] Alex Seidita: Without that, uh, com conflict, you can’t get to commitment, which then gets you to accountability and then gets you results. I think I remembered all five of those. But the point is to get to that trust, you have to have that. Trust amongst the leadership to be able to promote that across the team so you don’t get the silos.

[00:24:00] Alex Seidita: So you have to have shared goals. And it starts with me with purpose. So our IT purpose right, is two strategic imperatives, and that’s been the same for me, uh, since MetLife and into here. Maybe with some different words, but like our, our two imperatives here are to deliver, um, innovative tech, innovative technology capabilities to the business.

[00:24:22] Alex Seidita: And the second one is to maintain a safe, secure, and reliable operating environment. And I also want that to be everyone’s job. There’s not the haves and the have nots that some people get to do sexy work and other people need to do support work and so forth. That’s the part of the squads too. One of the mantras of the squads is you build it, you support it.

[00:24:39] Alex Seidita: You don’t throw it under the fence to some maintenance organization and everybody needs to have that, that buy-in and, and that skin in the game. So then we created a vision and a mission, right. Which is basically to give our customers and partners the world’s best in class, uh, digital insurance customer experience.

[00:24:54] Alex Seidita: That’s, you know, with the context of our company. And then some values. And I threw out probably six values to the team, but I don’t want to dictate them, right. We talked about it in this first strategy meeting, and then we came up with something that was consolidated and able to be, you know, remembered by most.

[00:25:11] Alex Seidita: And those include things like customer centricity. We’re infatuated with providing tangible value for our internal and external customers. Cultivating inspired and versatile talent, right? We wanna inspire our people to fulfill their highest potential, and we value everyone’s opinions and ideas. And then lastly, collaboration.

[00:25:30] Alex Seidita: We work cross-functionally as one team. That’s Capital One team, right? And cultivate a culture of trust. That’s kind of the. Where we start, but then we ultimately get to shared goals. Now our company and in other companies I’ve been in have had that goal setting, right. And it gets better year over year.

[00:25:48] Alex Seidita: Right. Within the regime of, of the leadership as you have various categories of goals and the parts that everybody takes in. And I always try to drive the leaders within my organization and make sure they tie the work of the individual contributors back to kind of how are they, you know, and why are they doing this?

[00:26:05] Alex Seidita: Um, I loved at the Home Depot where we had to work in the stores. You’re in it, you go work in the stores, feel what it’s like to walk around on the pavement, on that hard concrete for 10 hours and having people walk up to you looking for stuff. And then maybe there’s a tech thing that’s not working right.

[00:26:19] Alex Seidita: How do you feel? Right? Because that’s it’s hearts and minds, right? But like in, in, in our insurance company, we have six categories of goals that we’ve aligned to. And they’re not just, you know, the nerdy, propeller head stuff that we love to have fun with. I think nerds are cool, by the way. Um. But, but like the one is fortify the technology ecosystem, right?

[00:26:38] Alex Seidita: And that has all the stuff around making sure we can scale as we continue our explosive growth as a new insurance company, just three years old with uh, uh, fantastic sales. Um. Enhance and expand the product portfolio. So we need to build tech to be able to sell those products and service those products.

[00:26:54] Alex Seidita: Uh, drive operational excellence. I always say, let’s send operations team to the beach. Right? And what are you talking about, Alex? Well, what I mean is let’s automate everything that they do. Let’s continue to talk to them, be with them, understand where their problems are, and automate, automate, automate. I want everybody, and then let’s send ourselves to the beach.

[00:27:11] Alex Seidita: Let’s automate everything we do. Right. Not just through AI but through automation, right? Um, after all, automation is a big piece of what it delivers. And then we have, uh, the two last ones are delivering an exceptional digital experience for all stakeholders, right? Which is where we believe as Aspida is the special sauce, right?

[00:27:31] Alex Seidita: Our experience is fantastic, bar none. And then the last one is to continue investing in our employees and reward success, uh, which, you know, it’s pretty, pretty self-evident. But, uh, yes, those kinds of shared goals get people kind of in the same place, making sure those align, like my IT goals align perfectly with those of the company.

[00:27:50] Alex Seidita: ’cause we really, at the end of it, the most important thing is that everybody in the company should play for the name on the front of the jersey, not the back.

[00:27:58] Tessa Burg: So, yeah, that is, I, I love that answer. I know I’ve already said that, but it’s, it’s true because I, everyone can rally around the purpose and the vision of the company.

[00:28:09] Tessa Burg: But one concept that you keep bringing to the forefront is the word experience. And I think when people start to look at how do we roll down our vision and our purpose into what we’re actually going to do. Earlier in the interview you said the tribes and the squads, a lot of the things that they were solving were around the experience, and then in this example, we’re talking about whether those share goals.

[00:28:34] Tessa Burg: It’s all around the experience, and I think not only is it everyone should be playing for what’s on the front. But it’s also what’s on the front is for the experience you want to deliver. Mm-hmm. To your end customers and clients. And that’s another thing that can really start to bring people together and people can start to see themselves in those shared objectives.

[00:28:56] Alex Seidita: Yeah, absolutely. Um, in fact, we have, you know, uh, some experience squads. We have some squads that are associated with, like capabilities or platforms, right? So we need those folks that are handling those spaces and we, again, we’re trying to narrowly focus those teams so that they can go fast with quality.

[00:29:14] Alex Seidita: Um, but the biggest experiences we have, uh, in our, uh, uh, company, uh, are the ones for, we call them the producers, which are in the distribution, uh, chain. These are the folks that are. Selling the annuities, the insurance products. And then another experience is the client experience. And this is talking about the full end-to-end experience, not just the portal the client logs into, but the entire experience.

[00:29:35] Alex Seidita: They get in an omni-channel kind of way. ’cause they may end up calling the call center at some point and they have a full journey that they go through. And we kind of analyze those. We also have our product team, I have a, a digital product team in my organization as well. And they spend time with distributors.

[00:29:51] Alex Seidita: They listen to distributors, they listen to. Customers. So in the same way I was talking about, you work in the stores right at, at the Home Depot, uh, as an IT person to know what it’s like. We want people here to be working in the, in the, in the contact center. Right? With operations side by side to listen to the phone calls, uh, for folks to go to the distributor.

[00:30:11] Alex Seidita: Uh, trips that we have to various distribution network partners that we have to understand, you know, what do they need in the future so that we can add things to our roadmap. And it, it’s actually the biggest part of our special sauce and a lot of the testimonials that we get at Aspida is that we have, you know, the best customer experience or the best stakeholder experience, whether you’re an ops person, a distributor, a third party, a, you know, a, a partner or, or a client.

[00:30:36] Alex Seidita: Um, and it’s because we spend so much time on that, and that’s. Special sauce because digital is something that, believe it or not, is still breaking its way into the insurance industry, right? Banking long time ago, retail, long time ago. Insurance, we sometimes have to push people to get away from paper. I don’t keep a slice of paper slice, a p sheet of paper or a uh, or a pencil or pen anywhere near, you know, my desk.

[00:31:05] Alex Seidita: And I do that on purpose, right? ’cause that’s part of our. Our belief as a company there, we don’t want paper, we want everything to be digital.

[00:31:13] Tessa Burg: Uh, I will say we’re working on lots of different industries. Many industries are still catching up to digital. And you mentioned earlier that at Aspida, uh, it’s nice to be somewhere where you don’t have to address all the technical debt, but the truth is, like some of the largest companies in the world are having to deal with technical debt, with old legacy systems and ways of doing things.

[00:31:35] Tessa Burg: What advice would you give to them to be able to adopt this tribe squad agile mentality in order not to fall behind of this technological wave?

[00:31:46] Alex Seidita: So for the larger companies that I’ve been at, a lot of times you have, uh, you know, the legacy systems that are in place and, uh, you’re trying to build new things.

[00:31:55] Alex Seidita: And sometimes you say, Hey, we could build that product, you know, in, you know, three months. And then you realize, oh, we have to integrate to that one system that has, you know, 30% of our customer base. Oh, and I forgot the other thing that we have over here. And a lot of times it’s just through growth of a company.

[00:32:10] Alex Seidita: Um. Or, um, amalgamation of acquisitions sometimes that you bring in different systems that have to be integrated. You create complexity. Number one thing is to try to unwind that complexity. And I know it’s very difficult, you know, there’s, um. Replace all in one shot, which becomes a very slow waterfall project that doesn’t deliver value for a year or two.

[00:32:32] Alex Seidita: There’s the wrap, tap, and scrap that we’ve used in, in, in some companies where you’re wrapping services around various places, uh, various pieces of your various, uh, uh, legacy systems to pull certain capabilities out, and then you can build user experiences on top of those new areas. And eventually those.

[00:32:50] Alex Seidita: Those legacy systems would tri out. It’s different by industry, right? Insurance, whole life insurance is for your whole life. So in some cases you have systems that are out there where the code is all, you know, the, the, the business rules are all in code and it’s gonna cost quite a bit to have an, uh, contractors come in or your own folks go in.

[00:33:09] Alex Seidita: And go through all that code and pull those business rules out. They, they, you know, we didn’t have business rules, management systems like we do today, and have the ability to configure those things back when some of those legacy systems were built. Uh, but the other thing I would say is to make sure architecturally you have a couple things that are going on.

[00:33:27] Alex Seidita: I always, uh, stick to my, my core seven for architecture, which is having architectural principles for making your decisions, technology standards so that you can. Consolidate your technology stack, make the place simpler architectural roadmaps so that you know where you’re going and people agree to it.

[00:33:44] Alex Seidita: And the investments you make are, are in line and planned out. Um, some other things like reference architectures and prescribed technology stacks so that you have standards around how you build things. Keeping an eye on emerging technologies and vendors, and then architectural governance so that you can actually govern the things you’re doing and keep it in place.

[00:34:03] Alex Seidita: The thing we’ve been able to been able to benefit from here at Aspida is that I moved from, you know, consolidate the stack of technologies and trying to drive simplicity. Here I say protect the stack. Yeah. So many times you can have a new exec or a new leader come in and say, Hey, we used to use X, Y, Z tool at this other company.

[00:34:23] Alex Seidita: It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Let’s bring it into this company. And you look at that category of technology, you say, well, we already have one of those and well that this one’s better, trust me. Right? The person wants it maybe in one way because they’re used to that from their prior company, and they’re gonna have a leg up.

[00:34:37] Alex Seidita: Because they know how to use it better than anybody else in the new company. And now they make a name for themselves, right? But in the spirit of playing for the name on the front of the jersey and not the back, we should be looking at those categories of technology and saying, we already have one of those.

[00:34:50] Alex Seidita: If you’re gonna bring one in, the architectural principle is one in, one out. If you bring this one in, when are we gonna retire the other one? ’cause we wanna maintain simplicity. So to me here at Aspida, it’s been about protect the stack so that we can maintain no legacy boat anchor and move it speed of light.

[00:35:08] Tessa Burg: I love it. Well, that is all the time we have. This has been a fascinating conversation, and the takeaways that I hope all the listeners caught were one that I, I’m gonna repeat this statement to everyone. Innovation is everybody’s job, and you’ve provided so many insights on how we can use. Best practice frameworks, agile, creating those cross-functional tribes and squads to rally around our purpose, that name on the front, and come together to move faster.

[00:35:35] Tessa Burg: Whether you’re a small company now or an enterprise that needs to chunk it out and take one thing at a time, but know that getting through that disillusionment, that disappointment face is so important in keeping what you’re doing visible. To maintain trust internally and with all of your stakeholders.

[00:35:53] Tessa Burg: So Alex, thank you so, so much. I feel like you’re gonna have to come back at some point so we can just keep this going. And if people are interested in reaching out to you directly, where can they find you?

[00:36:06] Alex Seidita: Uh, they could see me on LinkedIn, uh, Alex Seidita, uh, and, uh, they should be able to reach me through that.

[00:36:13] Alex Seidita: Um, I will also, uh, be in, um. In Las Vegas in October, uh, at the InsureTech Connect, uh, doing a, doing a presentation, um, uh, it’s called, uh, Beyond the Build: Sustaining Tech Velocity through Culture, Collaboration, and Control. So those are a couple ways.

[00:36:34] Tessa Burg: That’s fantastic. I’ve never been as interested in insurance as I am now.

[00:36:40] Tessa Burg: Uh, that’s awesome that you’re bringing, you know, really efficient and highly product and valuable experiences, so be sure to check that out. We’ll have the name of that conference on our website where you can find all Leader Generation episodes at modop.com, modop.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:36:59] Tessa Burg: Alex, thanks again for joining us.

[00:37:01] Alex Seidita: Thank you.