First and Foremost, a Fan

Matt: I'm Matt Moreno, the Senior Product Manager for the Chicago Bulls.

Suzanne: Having grown up in the 80s and through the 90s, have a very specific memory of the Chicago Bulls, of an era. This feels really cool.

Matt: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. We've got a rich history with the Chicago Bulls. Obviously with the six championships from the 90s and Michael Jordan. Even onto some of our more recent players that have been here with the team. We've got a lot of history here that I think excited our fans and they pass it down to their generation as well. That's what helps bring us a lot of love to the team.

Suzanne: Seems like the kind of brand that people would be prone to getting tattooed onto their bodies as well. Do you ever see Bulls tattoos walking around?

Matt: We do. We get them sent to us a lot through our social media channels as well. Some not always as great as others but you know, we do love their spirits and they're definitely excited to show that on their body and we embrace that a lot. It's great.

Suzanne: I'm making a judgment here, but you seem like you're a young guy and I looked into your background. Normally we kick off the episode by talking about your path into product management but your path is sort of pretty direct. It was like school, a brief stint as a web developer, Chicago Bulls for a decade.

Matt: Close, yeah.

Suzanne: You've been with the company for almost a decade. Tell us a little bit about how you kind of went from A to Bulls.

Matt: Sure. I grew up in a town two hours away. Kind of a small farm town. I guess I played that farm boy to city boy stereotype. I was real excited to get to a larger city and just kind of embrace myself and show my creativity and really start to feel the art side of what the city has to offer. I went to school for graphic design. Unfortunately I wasn't a very great drawer. I decided to switch over to something else a bit more computer based. They had a program for interactive media, which was at the time building more Flash website, doing tables for websites. I learned from that, then when I got my first job out of school working for a web agency downtown the technology really evolved from there and I had to learn how to do more CSS driven websites and no Flash. It was kind of learning as I go with that. Then I found the opening for the Chicago Bulls. They were looking for a developer to kind of help build their digital brand here. It was a very small team but they needed someone that had a little bit more hands on experience and that's where I came in. That was in 2009 when I came in so iPhones were just kind of getting out there. Sad to say but we had, our first app was actually a Blackberry app.

Suzanne: Really? What did it do?

Matt: It just kind of had recaps of the game. There wasn't a whole lot of interactive stuff that was there. It was more of some stories that were up there, who the roster is, just some very basic knowledge that was on there. Then, we went from there and kind of tried to build more of a digital strategy of how we can help build our website to be something a little bit more so we started getting involved with more video. We started Bulls TV the same year that I came in. We really tried to bring in a little bit more of inner activity to our website and have that become our main stay for the flagship site.

Suzanne: For my benefit, for the benefit of our listeners, help us understand first and foremost, what's the product that you're managing? My impression is the Bulls, the team, is the product.

Matt: There's definitely two sides to what we're doing. There's the basketball side of the Chicago Bulls and there's the business ops side of the Chicago Bulls. Obviously the five guys that are on the court that are playing, trying to win a game 82 times throughout the regular season, that's the product that I think most people understand. My side of the product is on the business side and I work part of the digital team where we control our website, we control our Bulls mobile app, we control our email marketing and also social media. Those are the four kind of umbrella products that we have from our digital side that I help control and make sure we're getting the best out there to our fans.

Suzanne: Do you have a favorite out of all of those products by the way?

Matt: The mobile app is my favorite.

Suzanne: The mobile app, okay. Supported across all platforms?

Matt: Sure is. It's more of like a ... I'm just a real big nerd for mobile products. I just have a lot of love to just really see how people are using them. I have a habit of kind of peeking over people's shoulders, not because I want to see what's on their phone. I just want to see what they're doing with it.

Suzanne: Be careful with that behavior by the way.

Matt: Well, when I'm at the arena sometimes I'll kind of peak over and see if they're on Facebook or if they're on Twitter, if they're using their mobile product as a second screen when they're at the arena. Those are the things I want to know, or are they just having fun on a social game or something like that. Those are the things I want to see, sort of the trends of what our fans are doing at the games. It's no secret that not everyone is always watching the product that's on the floor. Sometimes they get bored and they want to kind of look at something else on their phone. I'm just really trying to gauge what that is and then how we can try to incorporate something similar to that into our mobile app that we have. I just think it has the most growth for us so that's what excites me when it comes to those four products.

Suzanne: Presumably the present day mobile app is a little more robust than that early Blackberry edition that you were speaking -

Matt: Just a little.

Suzanne: One or two extra features. Tell us about the mobile app. From a use case perspective, who wants that product theoretically and why do they want it? What's the value that it creates?

Matt: Sure, the first user that probably uses our product is obviously a big fan of the Chicago Bulls so they want to engage themselves with more content, more videos, more stories about the game, more humanizing stories about the players and just get to know a little bit more about what the team and the organization is doing. The second use case of that is for season ticket holders. We have basically a way for them to control their tickets throughout the regular season so they can transfer them. They can donate them. We have digital ticketing for our United Center games here so when they come in they can load up the ticket on their phone and they can easily come into the game that way.

Suzanne: That's all through the app?

Matt: That's all through the app.

Suzanne: Versus ... Who does ticket sales for United Center here? Is that TicketMaster?

Matt: Ticket Master, yeah.

Suzanne: Versus that, it just gives them a nice clean interface for managing their tickets, doing all of these things.

Matt: Absolutely. We give them the option to just basically use it that way. They also have the option to print at home but we want to give them something very easy that they can just load up their phone and show the QR code and they can get right into the arena as fast as they can.

Suzanne: Awesome. The idea is the mobile app creates an extended experience for connecting with, I don't know if primary product is the word, but certainly the team as product. What else can I do once I'm in the stadium? You're looking over and you're hoping that I'm going to open up the app. Any other cool things I should know about for how I can enjoy the second screen experience?

Matt: Sure. You can actually upgrade your seats as soon as you get in.

Suzanne: What?

Matt: Yeah.

Suzanne: I'm in crappy seats up in the top row. I can look for better ones when I'm there?

Matt: Absolutely. There's a part in our app that you can go in there and get a list of what's available and you can decide, okay well if it's an extra $50 and I want to impress my date or maybe a client that I'm with, you can just purchase from there and it knows already, if you're using our digital ticketing, it will know exactly where you're sitting already and how that compares to where you could upgrade to and the price difference between them.

Suzanne: I'm downloading this as soon as I get out of here. These are nice. I live in Los Angeles, as I've shared with you. Granted, I don't know if the Kings or the Lakers are listening in, but there's an app where tickets that you buy for Staples Center come through. I think it's called Flash Seats or something. It's the worst ticketing ... None of the stuff that's cool. How can you fail so spectacularly at ... because these a value adds. I want a seamless experience. I want to walk right in. I want it to feel modern. Sounds like you're hitting on all of those notes.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. We're even exploring for in seat ordering, so right through the app if you want to order a hot dog and a beer, you can just click on it there on your phone, press what you want, pay with it through your card that's already stored on our app and then you just walk over to the concession stand and pick it up, no waiting.

Suzanne: This is my exact dream. The only thing I would change about that is that I don't have to get up to get the stuff so I would order it and then it would know what seat I'm in and it would magically appear.

Matt: That would be great. Absolutely.

Suzanne: Maybe that's Phase 2.

Matt: Phase 2.

Suzanne: Okay. Let's go back in time a little bit, you're newly out of school. You start doing media interaction design because you can draw with rulers instead of with free hand. That was the -

Matt: Lines and boxes.

Suzanne: Lines and boxes. You end up as a web developer. You applied, online by the way, this is a good testament to why people should visit the websites of companies they want to work for because there's actual real opportunities to get jobs.

Matt: There is. Yeah. Usually towards the bottom of the site. That's how it was on Bulls.com when I was searching around and I saw that there was a career opportunities button and I figured why not.

Suzanne: And you did it.

Matt: Yeah, and I did it.

Suzanne: Man, amazing. You joined early on. Your original title wasn't product manager.

Matt: No, it was web coordinator at the time.

Suzanne: Web coordinator. What was the kind of stuff that you were doing in those early days?

Matt: Sure, we were doing some basic recaps of the games and telling stories of our players and just kind of simple website stuff that was there. Just content about our dancers and stuff that's happening throughout the organization. Then that developed into, well Matt knows how to develop and do a little more cooler stuff so I was tapping into some APIs and doing stuff with that. We were doing some unique things with some of the feeds that the league was providing us. We were just kind of creating all sort of new experiences that was a little different from what other teams were doing.

Suzanne: Do you remember one kind of early feature project in particular that you were especially proud about?

Matt: I really liked my Game Day page that I had started. We'd do kind of a takeover Game Day page, so an hour before a game is going to start, so your game is at 7 o'clock, we would load this up at 6 o'clock. This is kind of this major hub of who the starting line up is going to be. What's the injury report? What's the story behind the game? Maybe some curated Tweets that are coming in from our fans, then just basically put that all together into one stop shop if you will for Bulls.com. We were one of the first teams to ever kind of do something like that. Now all the 30 teams are doing something similar to that but the league caught on and thought that was a great idea and that was something that I'm pretty proud of.

Suzanne: That's really cool. Did that mean that you had to essentially cobble all that content together and publish it same day? How much lead time were you able to get when you had to put that information in?

Matt: Definitely all through the same day. You never know what's going to happen from Shoot and Round Up until game time.

Suzanne: Someone twists an ankle and the whole lineup goes.

Matt: Yeah, something could happen or maybe they want to start this player instead of somebody else. I would always keep up with what the team's doing and update in real time as we can. Now all that stuff is automated but at the time it was more of a manual labor work.

Suzanne: It was like 5:54 pm and you're scrambling to get the last...

Matt: ...Make sure we got it up there. Now there's feeds that I've created that basically just automatically populates that stuff and I don't have to touch it but that's a wonderful thing to have.

Suzanne: You mentioned the League, and you and I spoke about this briefly before but I think this is fascinating, the NBA itself is a collaborator of yours and the other teams. There's a sense of, if somebody over here is doing something that's good, let's shine a light on that and invite others to leverage that as well. Can you talk a little bit about how that works in terms of you're providing product management guidance for the league.

Matt: Absolutely. I like to say that while we compete on the court, off the court we don't really compete like that. We collaborate every week. We have league calls every week. Sometimes throughout the year, a couple of times throughout the year we'll meet up together as a group and we'll discuss things that are happening throughout the season. What do you guys do with the corporate sponsorship segment? What do you do with social media? What kind of rate cards are you guys doing for partners? Basically these are all things that we try to help each other route. The NBA knows that to succeed, all 30 teams need to be basically working with each other to make sure they're putting out the best product that's out there. The NBA is really, they support us in everything that we do and with other teams. We'll converse and talk to each other and be like, "Hey what is this side project they did over here at that works?" They'll send us some ideas on how that could work with us and then we'll kind of shift it into how that would apply with us.

Suzanne: Maybe some of the folks on the west coast can get connected with the work you're doing here on the mobile app and leverage that a little bit.

Matt: Absolutely.

Suzanne: I'll call them up when we get done. They're listening in going, "Who does this person think she is thinking about our crappy app like that?" Okay. You're doing these Game Day takeovers. Were you writing the content as well? I mean, just to go back. Everyone talks now about content marketing. I know that it's not a new strategy but it's definitely its own kind of product and people have mobilized more significantly around it but back then was it like, well we have a website. I guess we need to put stuff on it. Did you also have to do that?

Matt: There were times when I had to write some stories but thankfully we've been blessed with having Sam Smith who is a Hall of Fame basketball writer. He's well known in the basketball game. He actually wrote The Jordan Rules, which is kind of a very popular book about the Bulls in the early 90s. We were able to get him to be our head writer for the team and he's still with us today and he's still writing everything for us. He's been a huge asset for us to have.

Suzanne: How did the role evolve? How did you go from Web Coordinator to Senior Product Manager? I would imagine it's not just about promotions in the traditional sense. It seems indicative of an evolved understanding of what is product or how to be product centric within an organization.

Matt: Absolutely. Basically it came out of my love of just trying to develop more and more for our digital team. I wasn't just coming in and doing what my job was. I was trying to expand and really get a lot more coming out of this team and that's where the mobile app started coming in. We're adding more things to that. Creating new ways to collect data from our email marketing side. Really trying to take control and just build more and more out of it. First and foremost I'm a fan. I'm a fan of the Chicago Bulls. I was born and raised and grew up as a fan of the Bulls. For me, when we work on our digital products, I have to ask myself, is this what I would have wanted when I was just a fan and not part of the organization, just making sure that that really speaks to me whenever we're trying something new. It's all about ease of use and convenience and really getting that out there for our fans and that's where I start to ask myself more and more when it comes to working with my products.

Suzanne: I think one of the things that was certainly a trend, though probably not consciously for many years, especially in this sort of when everyone was figuring out digital, there was, "Let's create an app for this." It was almost like a game of how many digital assets can we create? Those assets themselves weren't really creating or necessarily creating value. I would say that's part one. Then part two is that there wasn't really a clear distinction about what is the value of this particular product versus this. It was just like, we're going to be in all of these places with an asset. Can you talk a little bit about how you have evolved the strategy or the product suite if you will so that all of the benefits of the mobile app for example as you described, are necessarily different from say, what's happening on social.

Matt: I will say that we probably started off in that aspect of let's get everything out there. Let's see what we can load up for our fans. Then we scaled back and started talking about what makes sense, not only just for the fan but also how we can use that information. Data collection has been one of our biggest things that we've been honing on for the past season or two. We're just trying to really get to know who our fan is and how we can start to market them a little bit more that feels personable. Something that's not so spammy and is really making sure that we're catering to their wants of the Chicago Bulls. We don't want to just send them any information about just ticket sales and any kind of specific game. We want to find out, okay well maybe they come to some of the more premium games. Let's start to focus more premium games to them. Then in return that just becomes a little bit more of a sales marketing tool for us to get a more understanding of who our fans are from there.

Suzanne: What constitutes a premium game? Is that when other really well known teams are in town?

Matt: Yeah, ones that are with a big superstar or have the best record or that kind of stuff.

Suzanne: What about for online? How does the online experience differ from what you're trying to accomplish with the mobile application?

Matt: In what way?

Suzanne: Yeah, are you on Snapchat? Are you on Twitter? How are those platforms fundamentally informing the strategy in a different way?

Matt: Our social presence has been one of our probably mainstays for the team. We've got a great following, not only just in the city of Chicago but all across the world. In fact, our large percentage is actually international and global. We know that we're able to reach those fans at any time of the day with some of the content that we're working on. We do a really, really great job of piecing content that's unique, that's timely, that humanizes these players, and we've really been able to showcase that and what we're doing from a social standpoint. A lot of it has to do too with the partners. We work with some great partners and they want ... Social is the big reach that we have so they want us to put together some kind of cool, unique content for them that doesn't feel sales-y. It's doesn't feel like, oh it's presented by so and so. We try to work them into some of our content that we have.

One of the biggest wins that we've done is with Snapchat. We did some Snapchat stories last season. Basically it was two, three minutes of content, of telling a story through Snapchat. One of our biggest ones that we did was a Beauty and the Beast spinoff. When that was big we got one of our players, Robin Lopez, to come in and be Gaston, as that character, and we basically built the story on Betty the Bull, which is our mascot. They're fighting for their love, which was Belle. That was one of the stories that we did.

Suzanne: That was a very unexpected ... First of all I'm a big Beauty and the Beast fan. Maybe even more so as a Bulls fan so that's an unexpected twist.

Matt: Yeah, yeah. We were just kind of doing different things. It's not just all basketball related. Our partner BMo Harris bank was completely on board and really loved the ideas. We did kind of a murder mystery CLUE story. We did another one that was with kind of an Office style of where our broadcasters were in the office and doing sayings of people doing normal stuff in the office. If I was on the telephone, someone would be like, Oh he got the telephone out. Just kind of being this broadcast type stuff out there. Yeah, those are some big wins for us. Alongside of that, we love to tell stories of the game itself so while we do standard Twitter updates of the game, we're also trying to bring the stories to the fans of what's going on in the arena. Some of the dancers that are happening, we'll showcase some of their habits that they have. Half-time performances that we do. We do decade nights where we have old musicians come in. That's been pretty fun. We try to bring everyone to the arena that we know can't be here.

Suzanne: I'm making the classic product manager mistake, which is like going straight to features, but I'm just so excited. Let me zoom out and talk a little bit more about the product management experience. First of all, it's not a large organization. It's definitely a big business but the team here is 100 people, something like that. What's your business ops side?

Matt: About 100 people. That includes our community relations people, our corporate partnerships, our branding team, our creative team, which is our designers, our ticket sales team, premium seating. There's all kinds of departments that are working to help the organization. My team is digital and it's a team of four. There's four of us. We have a Director that's above me and then we have me that works with all the products. Then we have a content and social media person and then we have one that focuses also strictly on social media as well. Between the four of us, we wear a lot of hats. While my focus is on all the products, I may ask them to help me out and try to build some of the stuff for us. Now, they don't have some of the technique that I have to some of it but they are willing to help me out when it comes to certain things of content that we want to put on the app and build this story that we want to have on there.

Suzanne: Right. For me, it brings up a conversation that I've surfaced a lot, which is the requirement for product managers to move between strategy and tactics. For some reason Chicago seems to have a lot of large scale product organizations. That's one of the things I've noticed as I've been going through and meeting different folks here. You've got a lot of big data science companies. You've got Venmo and Paypal and Braintree are all here. Groupon is sort of the monster. These are organizations with thousands of people and the product management experience can be very different because you might have seven PMs on a single team for a single feature within a product. In those models I think where the challenge comes up is you're used to being strategic and then you forget how to be in the trenches. For other times, certainly when we're working in smaller teams, I think it can work in reverse where sometimes we're so much in the trenches that we forget to zoom out and be thinking about the more holistic strategy. Can you speak from your own experience about that? How do you remember to switch gears from actual coding if you're doing coding, versus thinking about what is the next phase of the app, where do we want to evolve this experience into, which is a different mindset.

Matt: You're absolutely right that sometimes we do get caught up in the trenches, especially when the season is happening. The grind of the season can feel so long. When we're doing so, we kind of forget some of the strategy side of what we're doing and we're just focused on the now and making sure that we're getting all of our products out and all the content that rides with them. That's where the off season really comes in right now is we really get to see the big picture of what we want to do coming up for this season. Now, the off season is relatively a short amount of time. We're talking anywhere between three and six months so really try to focus in on what it is that we want to do. We also scale back and see what won last year, what didn't win, and then how we can make it better or maybe drop what it was and then try to focus on something new. There's always something we're trying to touch when it comes to the off season.

In-season, because of the grind, we don't always get a chance to scale back as much but we do look things over kind of midway season and figure out if there's some ways that we should adjust with some of the campaigns that we're doing. That's an overall group decision that we work with the digital team, our analytics team, our creative team. That's where all that comes in from there.

Suzanne: Yeah, I mean it speaks to roadmapping and part of the thing about 100 Product Managers as a show and it's mission is Product Management can look so tremendously different so what does it look like over here, what does it look like over here? How does that role kind of change. One of the big hot topics for people is roadmapping. For some PMS, they're never even going to touch that process. The bureaucracy in the organizational structure is such that they're going to basically be delivered a list of features or maybe one step above that, an initiative and say make this happen and make it cohere with this top down strategy. Other organizations are iterating on their road map. I've had people talk to me about, weekly I'm revisiting the road map and making changes. It sounds like for you and for the Bulls this is sort of like a twice a year kind of course correction, this looking at what we're doing using this down time to really map out some of the initiatives, and then of course iterating in real time as you need to if you're finding things aren't working, but that's the rhythm?

Matt: Sure, we do meet once a week and just kind of discuss our KPIs and what we're looking and making sure we're hitting the numbers that we've set forth going into that season. Then from there we can adjust based on content or maybe moving some things around or trying out some new campaign. I would say we do have road maps on there, but we don't necessarily always ... They do change quite a bit depending on where the teams at, what our focus is at the time. We're able to kind of adjust as we can. I would say we try to look into that every other month or so, just to kind of get an idea of what's out there and what we need to try and do but the real kind of bigger road map stuff comes in during the off season and that's when we try to react off of that.

Suzanne: Right. Are you going to stay with the Bulls forever? I know if you're not going to, you're not going to say here on the interview but you've been with the organization so long. What's next for you? Assuming you continue on here, where would you like to take the product team toward?

Matt: I think there's still a lot of growth that we have here. I think there's a lot of new things that we can bring to the organization, to the arena, the United Center, and just how we can kind of do things internally. Not only is my product side for the fans but it's also what we do internally and how we can collect some of the things that we want to have and build off of that. I'm excited to help expand the organization and see what else it is that we can build here and bring together. It's an interesting question.

Suzanne: I mean just good things to think about. It goes back to what you said earlier about having grown up and been a fan and then always trying to remember ... Sometimes when we are users of our own product it can be a bit of a blessing and a curse. The blessing of course is I'm deeply connected to what the user wants because I'm that person, but the curse is that we can sometimes forget to check outside of that. I think to go back to you talking about the reward of this particular position being able to contribute meaningfully to a brand that means so much to you, I think definitely is very exciting in terms of where to sort of go from here. Again, it really strikes me that a lot of what you're leading is a new era of product thinking that if we talk about shifting between strategy and tactics as individuals, if you look at just the arc of what you've done in particular over the last decade, that arc is we went from being very, very tactics oriented to being much more strategic, to thinking about product, to thinking about each of these channels as having these own purpose, supporting the other channels and needing to do different sets of work for each one.

Matt: Absolutely. The strategy side is definitely what drives me. Also, when I'm in the arena for each one of these games we have, I love just seeing people using it. I can see them from the side. It's part of me looking over the shoulders of seeing what they have. I like to see that what I'm building and what we're using is actually coming to life for our fans and they're embracing it and they're using it the way that we had hoped that they would. That's what drives me to be like, Oh maybe we should try this or maybe we can expand a little bit more on this and give them more options. That's what really drives me to make sure that that can continue to live here.

Suzanne: Have you ever actually gone up to a fan using the app and said, "Excuse me. I'm Matt. I'm actually the Product Manager here for the Bulls. I helped create this app that you're using. Can you tell me about why you love it or can you tell me why you skipped that feature?" You have?

Matt: I have, yeah. I've actually just asked for feedback off of people who are using it. I even do that when it comes to our social channels. I like to ask friends and family and you know, just give me some honest critiques of what you would like to see. Like you said, sometimes I do get kind of stuck in the tunnel of what the Bulls are doing when I need to know maybe what someone that's more critical of the Bulls would rather have for their content. I do ask for that feedback a lot.

Suzanne: Are there any cues, you spoke earlier about the involvement of the league and all of the teams sort of being collectively vested in an overall digital experience for all fans. Are there any cues that you've taken from products outside of the realm of sports that have specifically informed the way that you think about the kinds of experiences you want to deliver?

Matt: Yeah, one of the big things that I'm really interested in is mobile payments and using mobile walleting.

Suzanne: Well, go talk to those BrainTree folks over there.

Matt: That's what I need to do. I mean yeah, absolutely. I really love that it's the convenience part. That's really what I think we all aspire for. I just want to whip out my phone and just have everything be on there. My whole life is really on these devices. Just to have that access, just to quickly do something with my phone and just move on. That's what I would love to see happening more with that.

Suzanne: Matt, we do a segment here on the show called Get the Job, Learn the Job, Love the Job. I'd love to know if you have any advice for our listeners about how they can break into product management. I mean your particular path was, you started as a developer, worked your way in and up at the same time. What would you say to somebody else who maybe wants to follow a similar path?

Matt: Sure thing. Obviously you've got to know what the path is to go from knowing what a product even does to begin with so for me, I came from the start of where sports digital was starting to grow and I saw where the mobile apps was starting to go with that sports industry. I guess you can consider me lucky of having those aspects together. Really it was the love of both of those, of sports and digital products that really brought me in and why I've stayed here as long as I have. It's an interesting ... Product Management is something where you see a lot of people bounce around and go from one job and how they can help them and then go to another one, how they can help them. For me, I really enjoy the love of what sports has and what our fans feel towards the team and how we can make the digital products better for them. For me, my advice is just I really love what you do, really get to know the organization in and out and how you could really help them and that's been a huge benefit for me.

Suzanne: What about hard lessons? Do you remember a significant failure, a significant mistake, maybe early on where you thought uh-oh, I shouldn't have done it that way or if I could go back and play it over I would definitely skip over that mistake.

Matt: Well, some of the mistakes from our digital side is more of just maybe we don't ... I wouldn't say that we've done any kind of specific mistakes but I feel like maybe we also don't think outside the box as much as we want. We try to stay pretty focused on what we do for our organization day in and day out but sometimes we don't also think of some of the crazier ideas that are out there and maybe that could be because we're afraid to fail but we should never be afraid to fail. You should always want to try something new and if it doesn't work, you can move on and try to make it better for the next time. You definitely live and learn from some of the mistakes that you make. I think because of that we've done a lot of winning on social. We've tried some crazy things. There's all kind of different things that we try that five years ago we never thought that we would ever do. I think the growth of that has really kind of helped us out with that.

Suzanne: Right, so don't be afraid to fail, try things, see what happens. I mean the beautiful thing especially about digital products is it's easy to iterate on a mistake so I like that. There's been an undercurrent of what you love about the Bulls and this particular job but what do you love about Product Management as a path. If you could go back and rewrite your history from that defining moment of studying interaction design, would you do anything differently or do you just love it, and why?

Matt: I would probably try to learn more about behaviors of individuals a little bit more and how they would interact with these apps and how that they would use them in a way, for us as an organization to figure out a way that we can start to personalize things more and more out of it by knowing these kinds of behaviors that people might have by the apps. Some of the things that I've really been into lately is kind of just reading up on data and just seeing what it is that's out there and what are people using it for and learning that behavioral science. In fact, we have a guy that's amazing here that actually helps us with some behavioral science stuff with the analytic team. He really teaches us some crazy things that we never really thought of that someone would think of it in a way. Are we using the right words? Are we using the right headers? Are we even using the right colors on certain things? It's kind of learning all of that to see how that we can use that towards a product has been really interesting.

Suzanne: Cool. What about recommended resources? Any books, blogs, podcasts that you personally listen to or subscribe to that you think you've got to check this out?

Matt: I read Sports News.

Suzanne: Shocking.

Matt: Shocking right. Sports Business journal definitely. Trying to see the marketing side of what's being done. There's a great blog out there, Sport Techie that really brings in what sports and tech and what teams are doing outside of ... That includes wearable, mobile products obviously, email strategy, things of that nature. Sports Techy is a really big one that I use. Then for me, just kind of personal reading, I like to read like I was saying earlier, books on data. I really like to kind of learn more about what the individual's doing. One that I just started reading just now is Everybody Lies by a Google data scientist that wrote that. Just trying to learn about how it is at some of the stuff that we're searching or what we're looking for, kind of builds us and who our character is. It's been really neat to learn more from that.

Suzanne: One of the things I say to students in my Product Management class on day one is that there's all these skills that you need to learn and the speed at which you learn them and the depth to which you need to learn them is debatable and certainly will vary from place to place but there are other things that I think are less negotiable like softer skills, confidence, curiosity, and hunger for knowledge, which I think you're speaking into both as you describe kind of a new appreciation for user experience design and behavioral sciences and talking about data. Everybody working in this field needs to recognize that a lot of the ideas that are in place right now, many of them are less than a decade old and five years from now, well this podcast will be irrelevant probably, five years from now there will be a whole other new sets of ideas that are guiding how Product Management is being ... That are guiding Product Management processes across organizations. Staying hungry for knowledge I think is an essential skill for all product managers. I think that's great.

Do you have a side of the mug, inspirational poster type of mantra that you use to guide who you are in the world or who you are within this organization?

Matt: We have a brand purpose statement. It's to, "Unite and inspire through legendary experiences." What that means is taking each individual moment of a fan or even with a partner or even with ourselves as individuals and how are we creating a legendary experience within the Chicago Bulls and are we inspiring and uniting the fan base by doing so. That's one of the things I take into account with anything that I do every day, even when I come into the arena, even when I come and watch a Bulls game. It's one of those things that you never know when you're going to see something legendary. It's up to us to make sure that we're providing that memento for the fans anytime they come to the arena because this is a once in a lifetime experience for them.

Sometimes we get lost in the focus that we see these games every day but people come into the arena for the first time and we have to make sure that we're providing them everything and giving them this great once in a lifetime experience that they can go back and tell their friends or they can tell their kids and then as their kids grow up they'll be like, Oh I remember when my dad took me when I was five years old and now I'm a Bulls fan and I'm going to teach my kids to be a Bulls fan. All this stuff trickles down and that's the way that we really see things on a day to day basis is how are we uniting, inspiring, and creating these legendary experiences for our fans.

Suzanne: Beautiful. Matt Moreno, thank you so much for being a part of our show.

Matt: Thank you so much for having me.