Techstrong Gang – April 23, 2025

Hi, everyone. Are you ready for dynamic pricing? You're watching Textron Gang.

Hello everyone, and happy Wednesday to you. Welcome to Techstrong Gang. As we kick off a full day of Techstrong tv, we, we have, uh, some great tech field day stuff going on immediately.

I don't know about immediately following gang, but as part of our tech strong tv uh, lineup today. So stay tuned for that. It's on, uh, digital infrastructure, AI infrastructure, actually.

So that should be fun. Let me introduce you to our gang lineup for today. First of all, she's, she's sharpening her pencils and questions for RSA conference coming up next week.

She is our, uh, Silicon Valley reporter on the scene. Lisa Martin. Hey, Lisa, how are you?

Hey, Alan. I'm great. I'm so looking forward to co-hosting RSIC with you next week.

We're gonna have a Breakdown. I think we're gonna have a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to it.

All right. Moving on from Lisa. We're gonna go up to the north country.

I don't mean like Napa or Marin County, I mean all the way up to Canada. Uh, he's not on a boat there in the, at the moments, no, in working in the proverbial garage. Uh, right.

I have a broke boat project. I have a boat that I've had since, uh, 1976. You know, a a, a Chrysler Mutant Ear 16 foot sailboat that I'm gonna be rehabbing this spring, so, very cool.

There will be both A great project. He's our cyber expert, Chris Blak. Hey Chris.

Good to see you, man. Good to see It. Popping from Canada back down to San Angelo, Texas.

Could be the data center capital of the United States. Who knows? She is our, uh, managing editor, Amanda Ani.

Hey, Amanda, how are you? Hey, doing well, and I'm trying to push San Angelo on the map. We're getting so much tech companies coming to San Angelo.

You are, you are going to be the queen of San Angelo Tech. Uh, moving on from, uh, Amanda though, up to Harrison, New York, our Chief Content Officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike.

How's it going? It's going great. Spring has sprung.

It's gonna be a lovely 70 degrees all week. The Yankees Nice. You know, it was a tough, it was a tough Yankee loss.

They, they just, I don't know. Anyway, yes, I'm glad Spring has sprung there. You know, I hope Spring has sprung in San Francisco next week, Lisa, but we'll talk about it offline.

I don't know. The weathers been great. What to pack.

That's what I heard. I'll, I'll Hook you up. Okay.

Um, let's jump into today's, uh, episodes though. Our first, our first segment is on this digital price checkers. You know, I mean, everything's digital.

Mike, what's the deal? Well, we're taking it to the next level with something called the digital shelf Labels. And this will enable companies like, uh, Kroger's and uh, Walmart to change pricing more easily as circumstances might warrant.

And while that may be, uh, a great boost in efficiency for them, a lot of folks are talking about how this will just change the entire shopping experience. 'cause well, you might show up in at noon and then the price will be different two hours later, and everybody doesn't know if it'll be up or down. And, um, it seems like right now everybody's really sensitive to pricing issues, given what's going on with, uh, tariffs and inflation.

But Lisa, what's your take on what's going on here and just how dynamic might pricing get That it developed concern that consumers have? You know, and, and what we're seeing is that traditional prices that we see on grocery store shelving may soon be on their way out in favor of what you mentioned, like these digital shelf labels or these electronic shelf labels. And basically they work by using wireless technology to display and update product information digitally on retail shelves.

Each individual display, they look kind of like paper. They're electronic paper or, uh, liquid paper display, um, is connected to a central communication network. And that computer allows the price display to be automatically updated whenever a price is changed.

Generally, they work by Bluetooth. So retailer, um, workers can use mobile funds to update them. But the absolutely valid concern is dynamic pricing.

There's already, I didn't realize this, there are over 30,000 stores globally have digital shelf labels in place. So we're not talking about new technology. Walmart said by 2026, which is less than a year away, more than 2000 of its stores are gonna have these digital shelf labels.

We're seeing retailers across the US and Europe. You mentioned Kroger. Instacart is testing it.

Now, there are benefits for the retailer, but the dynamic pricing concern is valid. It's even got some US senators involved. And the concern is that businesses will take advantage of, uh, factors like the data they have, weather demand, uh, inflation, and dial up pricing on automatically on their own.

We also know that already Amazon and other online players are already adjusting and evaluating prices based on real-time supply and demand. Walmart has said publicly, they're insisting the technology is not gonna be used for any controversial practice of dynamic pricing, but it is a valid concern that consumers have. Um, there could be some benefits to the consumer, for example, if there were to be food that was about to expire, um, the price could be lowered.

So, but shoppers would benefit in that sense. But I think much more needs to be, uh, understood and maybe regulated about this to make sure that dynamic price gouging and search pricing that we've seen from Uber and Lyft doesn't happen in retail stores. What could go wrong?

You know, in 2019, uh, I spent some time, so in, in, uh, Amanda, not, not, uh, not far for you in Texas terms in Irving, Texas, seven 11 has its US headquarters. And in that, uh, campus, they have a store. They have a seven 11 store open to the public where they test out all sorts of things, right?

And this topic was among them, you know, so that's where they look forward, you know, look forward, implement things, try them out. And, you know, so I've been thinking through this since then and, and it runs from my heart to see us having this kind of conversation because as a security person, as the first thing that comes up, you know, I see this, you know, like UPC barcodes. I mean, not only is this, you know, is this going to happen?

It's been inevitable all along, right? You know, the, the, the efficiencies, however, right, the actual security issues, and as we're talking about here, fairness issues. How, how is this perceived?

So it's, it's good that we're having this conversation now. I think that I, I think that the market will, will frown on abusers and, you know, hopefully, you know, our open market, uh, mechanisms, you know, discourage that and, and reward transparency and so forth. And because not only will it be, you know, dynamic pricing in the store, it might be dynamic pricing because you are the one walking down the aisle because you have a status with that retailer and it recognizes that you're in the store.

So when you look at a price tag, it's different than the next person who sees it. We're already trying to navigate all this stuff with airline tickets and concert tickets. So it's just being applied more broadly, I think.

But the opportunity to abuse people by gouging them. And then, um, ultimately, are you not charging somebody more just because of who they are, because you don't know them or can't identify them as one of your most valuable customers? I mean, ultimately, is that fair?

I am. And, and I can also think of a few ways tech might be used to counter this. Um, imagine if you would that I'm gonna build an app for consumers, and consumers will be able to compare and shop across all these digital shelf labels.

And I will just bid everybody down because I'll know what Walmart is charging versus Kroger's versus Target until somebody cries uncle. Well, I guarantee it. Not only that, but when the, when, when the personalized, uh, dynamic, uh, uh, shelf pricing happens that I'm thinking about, I guarantee one of the first hacks we'll hear about is somewhat, you know, something that makes you look like their best shopper, right?

You know, just put this on your phone and look down the island, you get the best pricing. Well, I had a few thoughts about this though. Uh, I don't know about anybody else, but I've had plenty of experiences where I go and I try to buy a product and it's labeled as one price, and then I get up to the counter and it's wrong.

And there's this big argument about pricing, or they can't find the price, the price is missing, and they're unsure, and we're sitting waiting around for 10 minutes for price checks. So I think that would, um, eliminate that issue. They would be accurate.

Um, and I also was thinking about the fact that, uh, in the article they saved, they said they saved a lot of time on store sets and re-merchandising. So that could be put toward, um, um, it, that could be put toward better, um, um, processes, I think for the store, instead of wasting all that time on re-merchandising on a regular basis. You know, let me get everybody in line knows what you're buying and how much it costs.

'cause somebody's yelling down the way about, Hey, what's the cost of this is? But that's a good point, Amanda, in terms of, of pricing errors, um, that there are clear benefits in there for retailers. And one of them is, I, I think I read that it, it would take if, if a, if a shelf had to be completely restocked and repriced, it could take up to a work or up to a week to get that done.

And now it's a matter of hours or, or minutes. Um, so there's definite value in it, operational efficiency in it for the retailer. Like I mentioned, there are potentially some benefits for the consumer if prices are able to go down based on whatever the, the data point may be.

If it's a product about to expire or whatnot. I think it just has to be message very clearly, what's in this for me as a consumer, and how do I know Walmart who says, we're not gonna do the dynamic pricing, or Kroger or Instacart or whoever the next Kohl's, for example. How do we know that they're actually going to be following a practice that doesn't gouge me or doesn't search price?

We don't know that yet. I like that aspect of the food waste reduction too, because how much food is thrown away by grocery stores? Maybe it would get purchased.

Um, rather than thrown out This whole thing is making me a little nostalgic. 'cause in high school, this was my job. I was the kid on Saturday who walked around with the price changer in the back of his pants there and changed all the prices with the little stamper thing.

And I had ink stains all over my pants every day. And I don't think my mother really appreciated that fact. But I gotta say it wasn't a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon in high school, but I guess that's never gonna happen again.

Well, you, you remember the, you know, before UPC codes, you know, as a little kid going shopping with my mom, right? You know, sometimes you go to the store and it's closed for inventory. Remember that closed for inventory, you know, those of us a certain age have seen that, right?

And yeah, thi this isn't a matter of efficiencies. What would it cost us to go back to closing every retail location, all the bloody time to physically count everything, you know, this same sort of thing. How much time does it take to put paper labels on everything as opposed to just not doing that?

It's gonna happen. So Here, here, here's my take on this. This sounds like a fine idea, and it could be really efficient and we can cut some food waste out of it.

And it's such an a, a poster child for digital transformation. When did these things ever work out? Not to the benefit of, of the man, of the big guy, right?

And so, somehow or another dynamic pricing will lead to us paying more, I'm afraid. And that's, that's just the way of the world. And we can rationalize it and stories around it and, you know, feel good and all of that, but it's going to make, drive higher profits for these retailers.

Well, but everything related, you know, this, this, at the end of the day, you, you're right, this is a marketing exercise. And if we can't, if consumers can't have transparency, and actually no, right? You know, I, I'm a big, you know, I'm a big fan of, of competitive, you know, uh, economics, right?

It can be a good thing if it's done in the open, if it's transparent, if it's clearly, if consumers can be led to believe that they're getting a good deal and they're not, then it doesn't work anymore. So the same sorts of mechanisms we talk about in cybersecurity, whether it's for threat intelligence, supply chain, I believe, you know, over, over time, come to bear on, on commercial enterprises, you know, giving, you know, I, as, as a commercial enterprise want to give my customers transparency so that they can actually believe what I'm telling them, you know, change in as much as that have not a competitive advantage, then we have real problems. It will change shopping behavior though, and I don't know how you guys shop, but at least in our house, we take, you know, there's three grocery stores we typically go to, and we have kind of a go-to for the ones based on pricing that we like to buy certain things from, or they carry something that's not available somewhere else.

And, but if the pricing is dynamically changing between those entities, it's gonna make it harder to kind of identify who in any given time to go buy what from where. And so it will change the way we approach shopping for groceries and other things. And I'm not quite clear how we're gonna counter on that ultimately.

But, um, you know, the days of kind of just flipping up your phone to see how much somebody's charging for something across the town might be not as easy or reliable as it once was. I envision some kind of regulation. I mean, again, we, we, they're already trying to, you know, put some in.

But if we could have some kind of regulation where they look at the books and it's illegal if you're constantly, you know, if you changed the price every other day, uh, you know, they get deemed for illegal activity or something like that. Yeah, I think regulation's gonna be important here. But you bring up a good, Chris, you brought up a good point about this is the marketing exercise.

Mike, you brought up a good point about consumer behavior, behavioral changes. I think those are things that from a marketing perspective, what the, what the companies, the retailers need to do is really evaluate how are consumers adapting, changing behaviors. Because ultimately it's about getting what the consumer wants at the right time and the right place, but obviously for the right price as well.

So there's gonna be a lot of data driven, I think, um, initiatives going on here to, to really ensure that the consumer is getting what they're looking for and, and that the retailers are getting that feedback from consumers. If they're, if they're not buying at, uh, Walmart or Kroger because the prices are changing and they're going somewhere else, they're churning, then from a marketing perspective, the retailers will know and they should be able to address that. Agreed.

Let's see how it plays out. We will see. All right, let's take a break here on the gang.

We're gonna come back and talk about, uh, AI taking on Red red teams. This is gonna be an interesting show, Deb. No, it's not WrestleMania, it's Textron bang.

We'll be right back. Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT, leaders and practitioners worldwide.

Our secret impactful content that sparks awareness, engagement, and top quality leads with us. You'll access editorial websites, streaming videos, virtual events, custom content analyst research, and more. Join our satisfied clients.

Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back.

And there's a, a report that's been written about on Security Boulevard detailing that, uh, phishing attacks created by AI or now becoming more sophisticated than what a red team can create using humans. And it suggests that we've crossed some sort of Rubicon here. 'cause the assumption is bad guys will be now making use of generative AI tools to create phishing attacks that are more difficult to detect, if not impossible, because well, even the best humans can't keep pace.

Now, Chris, have we reached some sort of moment here where phishing is just gonna become almost indistinguishable? Well, well, No. Right?

But, uh, because as Terry Robinson's, uh, article goes on to say, you know, after stating the facts, is these tools can be used by defenders as well, right? And this has been on a rising slope, you know, anybody, you know, putting together defenses or, or, or pen test or anyways, in the security space, who hasn't been able to tell that we're gonna get to about this point about now. And been thinking about this in advance isn't, isn't, isn't, isn't paying attention.

I'll keep it at that. Um, yeah, defensive teams need to use these same tools. You know, the, I as thumbs up over and over and over again in security with, with, we're going this, what we call AI today.

So many things that you had thought were impossible before can now be done, right? You know, um, recording a, a inev curve episode with Mike Uchin, that'll be on the, on the air in the next couple weeks on this, right? And we're talking about, we're at this point right now where 10 and 20 and 30 years ago, if you said, I just wanna record all the information coming from every device I have, all the logs people look at, you're like, you're nuts.

Too much information. You can't even absorb it. Now we can.

And we're at this point, you know, and, and I'll try to bend this back to phishing, but at each domain and each intersection of security, we're saying, were there things in the past that were so large scale that we couldn't even assume we'd do them? And do they apply now? So in exactly the same way as yes, adversaries using, uh, uh, uh, launching phishing campaigns will be, are using these tools.

Now, what we're in defense three years ago, but what can work in defense is, are the same tools. Will there be a gap between the bad guys having those tools and the good guys having those tools? And so we might see in the short term at least that a period of time where things are getting worse before they might get even.

And they Yes, yes. Again, and they always are, right? Because as a company, as an enterprise, I can't predict exactly which one of these things are gonna work in advance, you know, as the security function inside a company, I can, you know, make forecasts and help them, you know, decision makers and executive teams look at multi-year budgets.

But, you know, can I say that we need to do what we need a year or two in advance, you know, early enough to get things done in exact lockstep, lockstep with what the average adversaries are gonna present. And in, and the short answer is sometimes yes. But, you know, adversaries just need to be right once and with millions and millions of enterprises.

It will always be the case that as emergent attacks begin to be effective, the majority of, of, of organizations and enterprises will be a step behind for a while. Alan, does that mean that we have more or less stumbled into an AI arms race in the land of security? I don't think we stumbled.

I think we went into it with our eyes wide open, right? This, this was, but it, so today the battlefield or the front is in ai, but we've always been in an arms race insecurity, right? You know, the bad guys are smart, well equipped, well financed and ruthless and, you know, and the good guys are also smart, well financed, maybe not as ruthless.

And, um, unfortunately it's a cat and mouse game, and the mouse is always, you know, like Tom and Jerry Mouse is always a little, a little one step ahead kind of thing. And, and so, you know, they're u they're going to use AI the same way we use AI Of, it's that Whole quote. It's not the tool, it's how the tool is being used.

Mm-hmm. So let's look at, let's look at the tools we currently have though, and 'cause I'm wondering if this transition's gonna force us to consolidate a lot of those tools today. They all generate a lot of different telemetry data that I gotta collect and normalize.

So will people be more inclined to shift towards more of a platform that, um, makes it easier to collect that data, to train the AI models and the AI agents that I'm gonna need to respond to all this stuff? And have we reached some sort of moment in time where maybe we do need to rethink our defenses? Chris, what do you think?

Uh, I'll go with, yes, in general, you know, know, simplifying things in platforms, there's all sorts of benefits in that space, but I think at the same time, we have a sort of brute force, uh, benefit advantage, right? The, the scale of, of of, of orders of magnitude. You know, our ability to process information implied by all of this stuff that we, again, incorrectly call ai, um, changes things.

And I will let my, you know, boundless optimism for the future come through on this one. Because I think what we're really seeing is an era in cybersecurity where we can do a lot of the things that we never thought we could do, ever, right? Just because the scale and phishing is a perfect one.

You know, I I, I love, you know, blessed by my community's hearts, but we spent the last decade or two saying, alright, that thing we built to send you messages, to click on links in, don't click the links, and we're training people. You know, that's, that was our best effort because there's no way you could have systems that are cognizant or sophisticated, sophisticated enough to actually stop, you know, spearfishing. But that's not off the table now.

And most phishing attacks and most email based attacks are so brutally stupid that any decent system, uh, applied consistently could defeat them. We just haven't ever been able to get that quantum. But it's not, this is not, uh, a perpetual race, you know?

Well, Alan's right, you know, cyber security, we're always, you know, uh, going back and forth with the adversaries, but we have yet to finish building one internet. You know, we have structural components and concepts that aren't even built into it, that if they were, would make this greenfield opportunity for attackers not so lush and, and conducive to their, to their, to the, to their wishes. So would you have to be careful though, is don't build the Mao line, right?

For a modern army on in tanks that's just gonna go around the line. The Lord don't fight the last war. You gotta fight the next war.

So while we're all busy saying, Hey, we could stop spearfishing the way we know it to exist, now the bad guys are saying, how can I use AI to do what's next? Right? Let these guys go do spearfishing.

We're coming up with hyper spearfishing or whatever we are gonna call the next iteration of these kinds of attacks, or a whole new kind of attack. Um, you know, deep fake spearfishing where, you know, you're, you're getting voice messages that sound like your wife or ca child, you know, to asking you to do something. And then, you know, how do you know it's them?

So my, my fear is, how do you anticipate what the next frontier, what the next attack surface surfaces? What's the next vector that we have to defend? Because the bad guys will be probing, they, they, and they will be thinking about the next vector.

And, you know, protecting the vector last vector doesn't necessarily help you there. And I, I, I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but this is, this the security warrior's dilemma. Mm-hmm.

Lisa, lemme ask you this. How will marketers respond in an era where increasingly over time, we're just not gonna trust anything that comes in? And if, especially if you're asking me to click on something, the answer is probably gonna be no.

And, um, so it's kinda, you know, one of the joys of the internet has been, you know, this communications capability that we've all leveraged for the last couple of decades. But is that in danger of being upended by these more sophisticated phishing attacks? I think it can, is definitely in danger of being impacted.

I think that, that we'll see varying degrees of impact based on the organization and based on their relationships with their customers and the trust that they've already built. 'cause we, we tell people all the time, if you get a text or an email with a, a QR code or a link, um, or a PDF that you weren't expecting, don't click on it. And so check the, you know, the validity of the URL.

Is it, is it accurate? If you're not sure, type it into your browser versus clicking on the link. We tell people that all the time.

I think from marketing perspective, the transparency is gonna be really key there, um, to being transparent with their customers, to establishing that trust and doing everything they can to maintain it throughout the, the journey and the lifecycle of a customer so that, that CLB stays nice and healthy. Um, but marketers will have a challenge there because there's, there's going to be a lot of, a lot more skepticism, I think, on behalf of a buyer. Is this legitimate?

'cause we know that we're getting it through text, we're getting it through QR codes, we're getting it through email links, PDFs, it's everywhere. So it's only spreading. And we have to be just continually aware and, and cr and making that awareness consistent.

And marketers can do a great job in doing just that to their, uh, their customers and their prospects to make sure that communications that they're delivering can be trusted, but that they need to be transparent with their target audience to ensure that trust is built and maintained. I've noticed a lot more messages when I'm on a website and it will say in bold letters, we will never send you a text message. We will, we will never call you, we will never ask for this.

So kind of to protect the company, because if they have told you multiple times not to, and then you do, that protects the company as well. I think a lot of it is that we, you know, we, there's no other better way to put it. We've been doing this long all along.

You know, Helen, as you say, you know, we we're, we, we will respond to things because we hear a voice that sounds like someone we know. And I've always partnered my, my dual role in operational technology and information technology because in ot, you know, we're just, there's still a large mis mismatch because, you know, infrastructure has spent not just decades, but centuries coming up with ways to not kill everyone by opening up the dam at the wrong time. Right?

So just the fact that someone whose voice you recognized said, open up the dam is not gonna work. And cyber attacks against, against infrastructure have never been as successful as, as the sun people think off the top of their heads because the people running these systems aren't idiots. And for the, for the purpose of that analogy, we're a bunch of idiots.

You know, we build all these systems and we be, and I'm not saying we shouldn't have, there was no way to deliver the kind of the liability that we're talking about at the beginning of this whole internet thing, right? It's just that we haven't got it there yet at all. We're finding out that we've been doing things all along that nobody in a critical location would've ever done because we're new.

But it, it's gonna get clever, right? I can imagine the world probably already occurring where, um, a deep fake version of Alan is gonna call me up and tell me that he is gonna send me a text and then I'm gonna trust that text, and then I'm gonna click on that and all hell will break loose. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Possibility. Well, it's more than possibility it will happen.

Oh yeah. It'll happen. Yeah, It'll happen.

Especially among the elderly too. They, they're the most likely to be conned. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Underestimate kids, young people as well. Yeah.

You know, and, and, and none of us are immune from this guys, you know, done well, and that's the whole point of this article on the Boulevard done well, and AI is doing it well. Lot of people are gonna be full. We, we've gotta, I mean, the only, the, the way I see it, the only way is, is we gotta use fire to fight fire.

So if they're using AI to scam these, you know, cook these up, we need to have use AI to, to, uh, to, to find them out right? To, to recognize them. We'll see, it's the cat and mouse game that is security, job security for lots of my security friends out there, right?

Anyway, let's take a break. We're gonna come back and get into our C block here on Textron gang making platform engineering. Great.

com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry. com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more. com has the largest selection of security content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts, and more.

com to learn more. com. Home of security bloggers network.

Hey folks, we're back and we're talking about one of our favorite topics, which is platform engineering. com talking about how well you really need a product mindset to succeed, but it's always not clear to me what if that means to have a product mindset. com for us, and you were the editor for this article, but how do, explain to us a little bit about what is it that requires a different way of thinking to be a platform engineer?

Yeah, so, so the article talks about how, um, a lot of times people approach platform engineering as a very technical infrastructure job, but they really need to view it with, um, the experience of developers in mind and, um, the problem, uh, solving that they would as product managers. Um, and to quote something from the article, it says, great platform teams obsess over developer experience with the same intensity that product teams focus on end user experience. They understand that adoption relies on adding value, not mandates.

So I thought that was key to bring up. I think this is at the heart of the whole movement, and, and I come to that conclusion for the following reason, historically, centralized IT teams existed and kind of service developers with a, shall we say, totalitarian approach. And this kind of gave birth to a lot of developers saying, see you later.

We'll go build our own step. But if you're gonna become a trusted platform provider, you need to think about those developers as customers. And if so, they're customers, then you're building a product, and then you need to think about managing that product in a way that makes people wanna use it.

It's kind of a simple concept, but Alan, it feels like it's easier said than done. Um, well, but that's the whole premise of platform engineering, right? Let, let's look at this.

Mike, you, you took, you enunciated a very common view towards platform engineering is we're gathering up a lot of these ops kind of, and CIS admin kind of roles and, and putting a new name on it, platform engineering. But I think you gotta go a little, you gotta peel that onion back another layer or two. What really has led to the genesis of, of platform engineering is in many ways a reaction to what DevOps wrought, right?

This whole shift left part of the whole shift left movement, and there were a lot of great things about shift left. One of the things maybe that way we went too far was we're going to shift creating the platform that developers develop on all the way to the left, right onto the plates and shoulders of the developers. So that now developers had to develop the very platform they were working on.

In essence, the platform that they were gonna develop on became yet another product that they were building. And I think that's where you over shifted, left, if you will. The developer shouldn't be responsible to develop the platform that he, he or she builds upon or they build upon.

And so platform engineering at its very core is we're going to give you the platform for you to build your products on. We, you don't have to treat the platform as yet another product you built because it's the product we're building. So platform engineers are product builders.

The product they build is the platform. And that's, to me how this all fits in very nicely. What I saw here was, oh, go ahead, Mike.

Well, I just wanted to ask you, you know, a lot of these are kind of new concepts to IT people, but building products have been, you know, a concept for companies forever. Is there something about building products that it, people might want to keep in mind as they go down this path? Because, well, it's all new to them in many ways.

Yeah, that's a great point. What I saw with this article, it really kind of fired me up because, and a goodbye 'cause I saw a lot of marketing parallels. Basically what platform engineers need to do is they need to follow some basic marketing principles, which is, to your point, Mike, that's new culturally, you know, different.

But, uh, get a deep understanding of your audience, of your buyer personas, your buyer of this in this theme, the developer, what are their pain points? Amanda, you talked about that. Efficiency, ROI risk mitigation.

What is the customer journey map look like? What's the lifecycle of a developer? So if platform engineers can understand the pain points, um, the persona, the customer journey, then they can position and message value over hype, really clearly identify what value is delivered over time, deliver those trust signals and speak the language.

You know, you're speaking differently to A CFO versus a DevOps engineer. Make sure you know how you're speaking their language because they're the customer. So a lot of, uh, simple marketing parallels here that I think could be incorporated if the cultural mindset is there to embrace it.

Now what's old is new again, how many times have any of you heard a CIO or an IT leader say to their team, our customer is our, the employees of our company. We serve an internal customer. We don't necessarily build our IT systems for our people who buy product from this company.

Our customer are the product builders. Our customers are the HR team, the sales team, the business team, our customers are the employees of our company, is a very similar message. Our customer are the developers developing on this platform?

We're building our customers are the DevOps engineers who are managing those pipelines and CICD processes to deploying software. Our customers are the SREs who are making sure that this, the app sites everything are running in peak performance out. These are our customers and the platform is our product.

I don't think that's, that's a simple way of looking at this, Chris. There's a philosophy that says the customer is always right. So how do you deal with the scenario when the customer who might be a developer says, I want to use this new tool over here, but then I gotta go support it and it's not part of the platform.

So how do I say no if the customer's always right? Well, you forgot the other map of that old saying, which is acceptable for when they're right. You know, customers aren't always right.

Customers that are actually customers that are going to do business with you are real customers and people walking in and shouting that they want, you know, blue cheese on their hammers aren't customers. Um, but I like where, where a and Lisa are going with this, right? Because this, I I think we've done a huge disservice historically, centuries ago by dividing the earths and sciences, right?

And I'm always trying to encourage my engineering siblings to realize that we're building something for a human being who has behaviors but don't very like engineering. They in fact are the same as engineering, right? And if we can get our minds into this, you know, and say, I'm not just building this firewall or this, you know, card player or whatever it is, you know, so that it can do its thing.

I'm doing it for a person who's part of the system and they have a cycle and they have needs, and I need to build those in. And it's so many, you know, in the last segment we're talking about some of this, but it, it, to me, these flaws come up all the time in all engineering systems. And as I say, more really not ancient, I'm talking 150, 200 year old systems, you know, in, in infrastructure have reached a level of maturity where, where these things tend to be taken, uh, uh, um, taken into account.

But, uh, yeah, you know, if you can't recognize as an engineer building something, and in this case, you know, building platforms for, for developers that they're a developer using it, then, you know, the, you know, the customers aren't always great. Some people aren't customers, you know, we need to build things for people. I don't know a better way to say that, but anything that pushes engineers in that direction, I'm in favor of.

Well, I was gonna say, these platforms just can't be one and done either. Um, they have to be able to evolve with the needs of the developers Of, of course. You know, absolutely.

I mean, that, that was, you know, back to job security, who wants to build a platform and then have to move on to the next gig, building a platform, you build a platform, you maintain a platform, um, it changes as does everything else in this world. So, but you know, overall, you know, there was a lot of hand wringing and consternation over, you know, is platform engineering replacing DevOps? No, it's a very, it's a very different skill set.

It's a very different job function. It's a very different aim. I I think they work well together.

You, there's part of the modern software factory. Speaking of platform engineering, you know, I gotta tell you, I'm gonna be, well by the time you're watching this, I've already done it. But we have another one of our platform, the platform engineering show webinars that are gonna be on, you could catch it on demand and also, uh, I think it's June 25th, or perhaps it's June 26th.

That whole week is platform come the largest virtual platform engineering conference in the world. Anywhere from 25 to 40,000 people are expected to register. They're gonna be two in-person days for it.

One in London and one in New York City Techstrong will be live in New York City at that in-person day broadcasting live there and having fun and meeting all our friends from platform engineering. com, our platform engineering site, please do so. If you wanna stay up on this happening piece of the software factory, it's the place to go.

And we'll see you hopefully in New York. A platform con. If you can't make New York, come on on virtually.

All right guys, I think that wraps up our Textron gang for today. Um, Chris, good seeing you up there. Stay well, Lisa, I will see you next week in person.

Amanda, keep making San Angelo great, Mike, I'll be in touch. Remember, we've got a great tech, strong TV following up for today, including ai, uh, infrastructure, tech, field Day, uh, live out in the Silicon Valley area. Um, we will have that all week, by the way.

But for now, this is Alan Shimmer, will see you tomorrow. Have a great Wednesday, everyone.