Name: Jared Miller
Position: AMB Sports & Entertainment Senior VP/Analytics & Technology and Chief Digital Officer
Age: 40
Where I’m from: Seattle, but moved around quite frequently -- 13 different states.
Where I call home: Atlanta.
Focusing on right now: We are absolutely shifting into the operation mode right now, which is new for our organization. We are moving from design and implementation to operational planning, given that we’ve got our first event just over a month away. We’re going to get the keys to the building, now we have to make sure that we know how to drive it, to run it and to create the experience that we have envisioned.
Best advice: Walk a mile, or a hundred, on the front lines. Really immerse yourself in the front line of your business operations so that you can understand the interaction that you and your business ultimately have with your customers.
A must for a new hire: Identify who some of your peers are in other sports teams or leagues and reach out. We talk a lot to each other and we share information with each other and there’s a much higher level of willingness to help each other out, to help get each other up to speed and to test ideas or understand how one team or league may have dealt with a challenge that you may be now tasked with trying to find a solution for.
Exec I admire most: ELON MUSK. What excites me about what he has done, and I’m sure will continue to do, is nothing he has done is incremental in approach. It is truly how you disrupt, completely disrupt, a line of thinking in an industry.
Best book I’ve read this year: Most of the books that I read lately are kids' bedtime stories. The one that I would have to say is "HARRY POTTER & THE SORCERER'S STONE." I have four kids and I just recently finished reading that one to my third son. It’s a great book, regardless of age.
Talking tech: The halo board (at Mercedes-Benz Stadium), it’s just unlike any other video board in any building, anywhere in the world. It's a completely new canvas for our production team to produce onto. Every time I walk over to the stadium, I’m still awestruck when I look up and see that our team is running test scripts and putting different types of content up there.
Must-have music: The go-to, more often than not, is FOO FIGHTERS.
Food for thought: I pretend to be a chef, although my wife would tell you that usually if I’m grilling everything comes out burnt and dry. So, I’ve got a lot of work to do there. I love spicy foods and Cajun foods, in particular.
First thing in the morning: There’s a phone check and it’s usually not email. I’m a sucker for daily deal websites, so I’ll check out a couple of those just to see if there’s anything enticing, a new gadget that perhaps I don’t need, but I’ll find a way to pull myself into believing I should buy it. I’ve got to have my morning cup of coffee or espresso and then I try to spend as much time as I can with my kids.
Day in the life: I’m spending a lot of my day actually in the field, going out into the stadium and having meetings in the stadium, making decisions. Then by myself moving back and forth to a lot of our other office facilities throughout the Atlanta area, making sure that we’re constantly connected to, at the end of the day, my customers, who are our internal business partners and delivering on the expectation they have so that they can run this building as efficiently as they need to.
How I unwind: I enjoy going for a run. It kind of just helps clear your mind and get some good energy back into you, and I enjoy a nice glass of wine -- trying to start a small collection, although that can be an expensive habit.
