EH realizes that, JD had ambitions of Silicon Valley grandeur that ain’t fit for Beaverton and sports.
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Nike is at its best when it's supporting greatness, and it never had greatness in tech because of the huge amounts of tech debt amassed throughout its massive ecosystem of tech.
It's not the fault of contractors or women or leadership or any one group, it's a failure of the entire stack from principals to line engineers, and literally everyone's answer to anything going wrong is to blame someone else. That's gotta stop if it wants to self-correct.
I really hope EH sees that and does a much bigger surgery to GT. The culture CAN be corrosive, but it can also inspire great things and has a lot of very intelligent and dedicated people still putting time in. Gotta support them better, and get rid of the toxic people trying to blame something else for problems.
Let's be real and stop making up excused for the mess. The company is struggling because of poor choices in leadership.
Period.
The real problem is that Nike hired a bunch sh---y contractors to do tech. They hired more sh---y people to do tech and their relatives. They built a sh---y system that costs to much and delivers marginal value.
Nike is a sports company. Always has been.
Tech is infrastructure — like electricity. We invested in it to modernize operations, not to become a tech company.
The real mistake wasn’t tech. It was forgetting that Nike’s edge has always been innovation for athletes. Marketing didn’t make us great — Jordan was great, and we rose to meet him with performance innovation. We got drunk of Jordan success and started thinking we could turn every athlete into the next Jordan thru marketing… you can’t.
We win when we focus on product and performance. That’s our lane.
Dear VP. If you were fired, just move on
But Nike needs Tech…. A lot.
@ae even being a marketing led company, which is an accurate statement, has set this brand up for minimal long-term growth. People buy Nike because they are cool (marketing), how they look (design), not how they perform (product). And in a world where there is more data, more easily accessible reviews and details into the reality of the product performance, and a lower barrier to entry to compete (production, marketing spend, .com storefront), more and more consumers have moved away from the brand because product quality, integrity and comfort takes a backseat. True for both footwear and apparel. Consumers are over the smoke and mirrors that Nike puts out.
Nike will never be a tech company, is not even a retail company, at its core is a marketing company that used to value ingenuity and incentivized design. Too much money has been wasted for the last 15 years buying pseudo tech companies, migrating thru multiple databases, trying and failing at using Agile, forcing AWS tools, Databricks, Hadoop, O9, Celect, etc. Every year a new software is pushed as the best, as the solution for everything. Focus should be on understanding what are the strengths of the company and fixing the weaknesses with committed teams that solve the problems with a long term mentality instead of the short term mentality that forces any team to scrap their work after 1 year as executives have the attention span of a squirrel.
offshoring and inshoring with people that have a juicy resume but can't back it up once hired is a constant issue. cheap employee though, and willing to work 70hr weeks to be in america so better than greedy oregon natives?
Nike isn't a tech company, but tech is part of the companies necessary, enabling infrastructure. Offshoring or outsourcing that infrastructure might not work out how the C suite thinks it will.
Nobody that knows tech or ever came from a tech company would claim Nike is a tech company. JD saying it was crazy.