The Importance of Data with AutoZone’s Jason Vogel

Jason Vogel, the IT Manager at AutoZone, joins Lauren to talk about how he is a major influence on how AutoZone is using data to make business decisions.

Key Takeaways

• It’s not where you start, but where you finish. If you are someone that is brought into a company to do a job, don’t approach day 1 as if you’ve been there for years. It’s important to start any venture small and grow from there.
• You need to adapt to your surroundings. With everything that is on in the world with COVID, companies like AutoZone needed to change the way they attracted customers to go to their stores and that is part of what Jason and his team need to figure out on a daily basis. 
• Having a plan is one of the most important things when it comes to working with a major company. It’s easy to say you can’t do something, but if you head into every job or every project with a plan and a template it will help you be able to handle whatever gets thrown your way.

Quotes

• “ In my case, it has been showing how much project work we can do versus how much support work we have to do. It’s easy to drift into, “we can’t do that now. We don’t have the bandwidth, we can’t do this because we don’t have enough people to support it”, but we spend a lot of time designing and architecting and we have developed a series of, I call them recipes. You could call them templates, but it’s reusable pieces of functionality that have become tried and tested, they’re like building blocks.”
• “I always tell people that you need to find something in it that you can relate to. If you’re a programmer, if you’re a data analyst or data scientist do something that you actually would want to use.”

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