00:10.20 The ModGolf Podcast Welcome to the ModGolf Podcast. We speak with the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the disruptors, and the influencers who are shaping the future of golf. I am Colin Weston, your host. 00:20.57 The ModGolf Podcast Thank you for joining us today. And I'm really excited about this conversation because I am with someone who I met six months ago in Belfast. We had to go almost halfway around the world to finally meet in person, even though we're back and forth on LinkedIn for years and finally got her to free up her schedule to come on the show here and that is Devon Fox who is the senior director of digital programs with the PGA Tour and we're going to dig into a lot of great things what the tour is doing but what she does her life sports and we got a little bonus at the end here but I'm not going reveal that right now we're going to do something a little bit fun taking over that to the ModGolf YouTube channel but you're going have to join us over there. But to start off, let me introduce Devon and welcome her to the show. Thank you for joining me. 01:13.40 Devon Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. I think we've been going back and forth on LinkedIn for like eight years, maybe seven, eight years. 01:24.47 The ModGolf Podcast i think since I started ModGolf back in 2017, so I was starting to get a bit of a complex that maybe Devon really doesn't like me. Maybe our show wasn't big enough for her. 01:37.34 The ModGolf Podcast and then when we met in Belfast over a drink, you just said, you know what? I've been really busy and I'm also a little bit shy. So there we have it. But I've managed to cajole you into being on the show here today and sharing all the good things that you're doing. So thank you for taking the time. Eight years in the making here, but here we are today. 01:57.18 Devon Absolutely. My pleasure. I'm glad we're here. 01:58.42 The ModGolf Podcast Good stuff. Okay. So let's start off with, I'm going to ask this question. It's my icebreaker question. I know a little bit of the answer to this. And that question is your relationship with golf. 02:10.46 The ModGolf Podcast And i usually frame this question as when was the first time you ever picked up a golf club and who invited you to have that experience? But spoiler alert, you are not a golfer, even though you're in the golf industry, which I love. Rebel. 02:18.66 Devon Hmm. Okay. 02:25.87 The ModGolf Podcast But you do have a golf experience that you did kind of tease me with off camera. So I want you to share that. So share with us your first and maybe your only golf experience to get us going here. 02:41.36 Devon I will. Okay. So yes, I don't play golf. I have swung a golf club. This was in 2016. It was either late June or early July 2016. And I had just moved from Oregon. 02:58.20 Devon I was working at Nike when I lived there. And so all of my clothes were still very much colder climate clothing. So it's Florida, Jacksonville, St. Augustine area, Ponte Vedra Beach area of Florida. 03:14.17 The ModGolf Podcast Yes. 03:15.22 Devon It's the end of June, early July, super hot. I'm wearing wool pants and a long sleeve shirt. 03:20.70 The ModGolf Podcast Nice. 03:21.08 Devon And I had nothing to eat, nothing to drink all day long while I was at work. I was still very new. I'd only been there for a few weeks. And so I went to this golf clinic after work, which was like maybe like five, six o'clock. 03:34.80 Devon so I'm hungry, I'm thirsty and I'm hot and someone's trying to teach me how to swing a golf club and I'm swinging over and over and over again. It turns out I'm terrible at putting, but I'm very good at chipping. 03:47.74 Devon but I overheated and I got really cranky and it was like, I don't want to do this ever again. 03:48.09 The ModGolf Podcast Really? 03:53.28 Devon I'm good. And so that is my experience with golf. But I want to say that I think for me, at least in the early days of working at the tour, not having golf experience was really important for me, especially for the work that I was doing then. 04:08.38 Devon My role then was building out our technology innovation program. And I think one of the things that happens in golf is people are so respectful of the traditions and history of golf that it prevents them from asking questions. 04:25.34 Devon And it prevents them from thinking differently about how things could be or how things should be. And so I really held on to this lack of golf experience and lack of golf knowledge to give me permission to ask those weird questions that nobody else would ask. 04:42.69 Devon And I think at least in those days, it really benefited me. 04:46.23 The ModGolf Podcast Nice. You wore your golf ignorance as a badge of honour, it sounds like. 04:50.81 Devon Yeah, in the early days, for sure. 04:52.66 The ModGolf Podcast You did. oh That's kind of like me in the slightly different ingredients. Myself, my background in architecture, I'm in sport architecture and stadium and venue design and Olympic game events and that type of thing, but not in golf at all. So when I stumbled into the golf industry, the same thing, people were asking, how do you come up with this stuff? How do you do this? It's like, because I don't know any better. 05:13.20 The ModGolf Podcast It's like, I don't know all the stuff you've got stuck in your brain from the last couple of decades of being in the golf industry that I'm liberated from that because I don't even know what you're talking about. 05:13.62 Devon Exactly. 05:22.74 The ModGolf Podcast So it works out very well. 05:24.12 Devon Exactly. 05:25.09 The ModGolf Podcast Okay. So sounds like your first golf experience and maybe even your only golf experience was, let's say not a positive one. 05:32.89 Devon It wasn't great for me. It was, yeah. 05:33.88 The ModGolf Podcast No, it wasn't. 05:34.75 Devon Yeah. 05:34.76 The ModGolf Podcast But ironically, you focus on positive experiences with the PGA Tour for fans. So why don't you let everyone know, our listeners, what your current role is and perhaps what your role was when you first started with the PGA Tour and where you are now. 05:51.90 Devon Yeah, let's start with what my first role was, because I think that that will have more of a fan focus probably than what I'm doing now. 05:58.83 The ModGolf Podcast Okay. 05:59.85 Devon So I was hired in 2016. And at that time, my assignment was to establish ah a digital media and technology innovation program. We talked about that already. um And at the time, the the tour really, I don't think at that time was seen as a sort of forward leaning technology organization or company. 06:17.97 Devon and we didn't really play a lot in emerging technology space, a little bit in the Shot Link area. And you can talk with, Ken level or someone else about that. But I was trying to figure out how do i create opportunities for an explorer forward leading technologies that are going to drive interest in the sport of golf, but also help us tell the stories of golf, whether that's inside or outside the ropes. 06:26.65 The ModGolf Podcast Yes. 06:44.24 Devon It didn't really matter. It was just how do you tell stories better with this you know new and emerging technology? So I'm working with content and product and all these different operations teams and trying to figure out how do we do all that. 06:55.64 Devon And so one of the first things, actually, before I tell you the first thing, I'm going to tell you when I interviewed, because this is interesting. When I was interviewing, one of the questions that I got asked was, why should we hire you for this role in particular? 07:02.52 The ModGolf Podcast Okay. 07:10.32 Devon And I really thought I was going to lose the job opportunity with my answer because it really didn't seem like an answer anybody would want to hear. But my answer was that while there are probably a lot of people out there who have a lot of ideas, is that I was not going to be the idea person. 07:28.44 Devon I was not going to be the idea person because I don't know the sport. But what I could do is build out a framework and a process that would allow us to mine ideas from all over the place, whether that's to our employees, other industries, fans, whatever. 07:44.51 Devon doesn't matter. Good ideas come from a lot of the lot of different places. And so as part of that, and I'll get to the fan thing in just a second here, as part of that idea of trying to like build this framework, I was like, well, one of the things we have to source is ideas from fans. 08:00.74 Devon And so the idea to build the fan council was the very first project that I did when I was at the tour. So we can talk about that if that's interesting to you. 08:09.05 The ModGolf Podcast yeah let's dig down into that. So tell me about the fan council and what came out of that. 08:14.87 Devon Sure. So Fan Council launched in 2016 sometime. But it was basically set up to collect our core fans, and give them opportunities to share their thoughts, their opinions, their feedback on mostly digital products and services. 08:34.14 Devon We've since expanded that outside of digital. So the whole company has access to the fan council now, but at that time it was really like a digital thing. And it was like, let's do a quick poll. What do you think this or that is let's do a deep, extensive online survey and study of behavior and how you use the platforms. 08:46.71 The ModGolf Podcast Got it. 08:52.51 Devon Let's do focus groups on site where people are attending tournaments and things like that. um So like regardless of the approach, it was really giving us an opportunity to have real conversations with our fans and to get real data from them, which would allow us to develop insights and then turn those things into you know product development, product roadmap, changes on our digital platforms and stuff like that. We've since added in user research capabilities as well. 09:19.89 Devon And so that's a little bit different than the fan council. The user research stuff is really focused on how people actually use the platforms instead of what they tell us they want and what they like. 09:31.16 Devon And so it's more like usability and things like that. 09:31.35 The ModGolf Podcast Right. 09:34.36 Devon So how easy is it to find information when you're navigating around the platform? you know Can you find the information that you're looking for? Are you getting the value that we want you to get from the platforms? 09:46.08 The ModGolf Podcast Got it. Got it. So when you started, and because also now it's always evolving, but what... kind of herder hurdles or barriers or pain points did you see with fans or or what were they pushing back on or not getting that perhaps other sports, I know with the NBA and Major League Baseball now, how they've grown up to that fan engagement, they've really been focusing on that. 10:08.34 The ModGolf Podcast So I guess this question without actually expanding too much and making it too complicated, let's start with that. like What have you learned from other sports as they evolve to then bring kind of the positives of their fan engagement forward? 10:21.08 The ModGolf Podcast into what the PGA Tour is doing. 10:23.19 Devon So in those early days, building out the innovation program, one of the things that I did was try to find the person at the other sports league that was doing what I was doing. 10:34.71 The ModGolf Podcast Right. 10:35.26 Devon So it was a very small group of people back then. There were maybe only four or four or five of us. And so one of the people who I connected with early was a gentleman called Scott Stanjack at the NBA. 10:47.55 Devon And so we would bounce ideas off of each other all of the time. And we were constantly chasing each other to be first at whatever. um it didn't matter what it was, but we were constantly chasing each other. 10:55.10 The ModGolf Podcast okay 10:58.47 Devon Who could do the first live VR? Who could do the first interactive VR game? Who could do the first volumetric capture? Who could do the whatever the thing was, right? And so we had a little friendly competition going. But yeah, just finding those people and connecting with them and building networks and relationships with them was really how I approached it in the early days there. But in terms of like what I learned from them, I think the biggest thing that I learned with the NBA and with the tour sort of chasing back and forth with the NBA was there's two ways you can approach innovation and emerging technology. One is sort of experimental and just figuring out how you can utilize that emerging technology. How do you build for those new technologies? How do you scale for those? 11:45.97 Devon How do you do KPIs and metrics for those if they're available um and making sure that if they come to scale, like if they come to fruition with the general public and everybody's doing it now, like mobile devices, for example, how do you make sure that your organization is ready operationally to to operate with that technology and serve fans where they are. 12:08.16 Devon And so that was really the space that I was playing in. And then the second lesson that I learned in this was you don't just do innovation and emerging technology for the sake of doing it. 12:20.93 Devon It has to have some value for the fan, right? So if you're going to do, and I'm sort of dating the content here, but we were doing live VR you know back in 2017, 2016, whatever. 12:33.64 The ModGolf Podcast I remember, yeah. 12:34.39 Devon Why would you be doing this content? Like, don't do this. Don't create this content in this particular medium to replace a broadcast, for example, because people can just watch the broadcast. But you have to have some added value for them to actually do it. So you don't just do it for the sake of doing it. You do it because it has a special angle or a special access or something that makes it more valuable than the thing that they can already do. And you have to find out what that is. 13:04.09 Devon And it's different per platform. So like versus you know AI, VR, AR, whatever, it doesn't matter. There's some value in that that you can mine that will be different from the value of the other digital offerings that you already have available to fans. 13:17.50 Devon Does that make sense? 13:18.33 The ModGolf Podcast I'm curious to learn how you managed, you can't please everyone all the time, but you've got traditional older viewers and fans, and then you've got younger ones and you want to grow and expand. 13:26.39 Devon Yeah. 13:34.08 The ModGolf Podcast So how do you reconcile that with, how can I put this? 13:41.24 The ModGolf Podcast With your fan engagement and digital technologies, how can you appeal to and attract new fans, especially younger fans, but not alienate the older fans? 13:52.89 Devon Sure. I'll give you a really good example of this. And it's a little bit older, but I think it's like it perfectly encapsulates the question that you're asking. So one of the projects that I worked on with a colleague of mine, her name is Wendy. She's awesome. 14:08.31 Devon She's Canadian too, by the way. You might want to meet her. 14:10.67 The ModGolf Podcast There we go. 14:10.79 Devon Anyway, we were doing this project and we were working with a vendor to create volumetric captures of like historic golf memorabilia from the golf hall of fame. 14:21.74 Devon And so we were creating these long form editorial stories that had baked in volumetric captures of actual like museum items, which was super cool. 14:33.35 Devon And so we did themes like we did one piece that was all on like historic hats that have been worn at different tournaments by iconic players. We did one that was like weird gloves and T-markers, ball markers things like that. 14:50.68 Devon So taking something that's history and interesting to an older audience and putting it and combining it with newer technology like volumetric capture where you can take the object and put it on your desktop and spin it around and look at it from every angle is a super cool example of how you kind of appeal to both sets of um, both sets of people. 14:50.69 The ModGolf Podcast Right. 15:15.04 Devon And I think in that case we were super successful, but when you look at how much it costs to do volumetric capture, especially back then, should we keep doing this? 15:26.33 The ModGolf Podcast Yes. 15:28.54 Devon Maybe not. it was really cool at the time. it achieved exactly what you're talking about, but it just wasn't a sustainable thing to keep on doing. 15:37.53 The ModGolf Podcast Right, right. So on that note, it sounds like you have the liberty to experiment and try certain things. 15:45.76 Devon Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 15:46.58 The ModGolf Podcast So I'd like you to pull the curtain back a little bit and let us know With the PGA Tour, the culture of innovation there, is does it take more of a startup mentality in some cases that you're able to come up with ideas and then vet them and then decide what you're going to do? So tell us a little bit of the process when you're envisioning ideas or seeing other sports that are trying things that you perhaps want to embed into an experiment or a trial. So yeah, tell us a little bit about that as far as the process of how you choose ideas, reject ideas, and then decide to move forward. 16:19.90 Devon So this is a two-part answer. In those earlier days, it was very much a process where it would be like design thinking workshops to solve different problems by applying specific emerging specific types of emerging technology, right? 16:35.21 Devon I'm not sure if you're familiar with design thinking at all. 16:37.57 The ModGolf Podcast I certainly am Yeah. 16:38.68 Devon Okay, we won't dive too far into that. But like using that process in the early days was really helpful for me. And then working with a group of sort of company wide enterprise advisors who had tons of golf experience and knowledge and years of service at the tour, vetting those things against that group of people first and then along with the fan council. That was how we did it back then. Now, I did this thing where i kind of worked myself out of a job on purpose because my opinion is that innovation and change and driving new technology and emerging technology to be baked into what we do every day is not something that can sit with one person or two people. And that's where it was. It was just me and Wendy. 17:25.16 Devon And so to me, that's a very narrow and not sustainable model for developing innovations for the tour. 17:38.18 Devon And so what I was trying to do was build in design thinking into the product development process, build that into and build people up who are part of our product development organization and bake that into what they do every single day. 17:52.53 Devon so that we don't have an innovation team, we don't have an innovation program. 17:55.40 The ModGolf Podcast Right. 17:57.05 Devon It's just now part of our product development process. And so, working myself out of that that gig was great because now I have a different one and I'm doing lots of interesting things. 18:07.96 Devon But I also think long-term it's great for the tour, it's great for the sport, that that way of looking at things and trying to be the most innovative and trying to bring the coolest new features to fans is it's just part of what we do now. It's just fully baked in 18:27.38 The ModGolf Podcast Got it, got it. So that notion of cross-functional teams, it sounds like that's something you really embrace then, not having not having people siloed and you unsiloed yourself, it sounds like. 18:32.89 Devon Yeah, for sure. 18:37.62 Devon I did. Yeah. Worked myself right out of a gig. 18:41.33 The ModGolf Podcast Nice. Nice. I find it very intriguing talking to you and seeing your career trajectory so far. The fact you did not have a connection with sport, but that started off with, I believe with NASCAR. 18:57.85 Devon yeah 18:58.17 The ModGolf Podcast Someone that wasn't in sport at all and looking at you, I wouldn't see you as the typical NASCAR person, not saying you were a fan. So tell us about how how you applied for that job and what your role was there and also what you learned from your NASCAR experience and you're applying to what you do with the PGA tour now. 19:17.50 Devon So NASCAR was such an interesting time in my career because I was moving from like banking, credit cards, mortgage insurance, like e-commerce stuff into sports. 19:27.35 The ModGolf Podcast Yeah. 19:29.50 Devon And the reason I targeted sports was because I knew i would never be like a fanboy working in the business of sport. But I also know that what I was doing before was like sucking the soul out of my body. You know, working in banking, credit cards, mortgage insurance is like, you have no soul anymore. 19:50.65 Devon Or at least I didn't have any soul anymore. So for me, I had to get out of here. 19:55.13 The ModGolf Podcast Right. 19:56.15 Devon So making that switch was really important to me. And the moment that i joined NASCAR was really pivotal for me for two reasons. One, because I was switching from mid-level management into leadership, and that was a big, a big change for me. And then at that time, NASCAR was buying back their digital rights from Turner. 20:23.35 Devon so don't know if you know about the history there, but they had sold their digital rights to Turner a million years before that. 20:25.81 The ModGolf Podcast I don't. 20:30.15 Devon And in that time, things like mobile phones became available and things like social media happened. 20:30.33 The ModGolf Podcast Okay. 20:37.87 Devon And so what NASCAR realized was like, there's this wave of, you know, connecting with fans in the sports industry. And they were not able to do that because they had no rights to their own digital you know, experiences and properties. 20:52.05 Devon And so they bought those rights back and we ended up having to build out this new department to take on all of the platforms and the product development for digital. And so I was one of the first five people that got hired to build that all out. 21:04.49 Devon So it was super fun. Like this is probably the most fun I've ever had in my career other than like working in a nightclub when I was in college. But that's another podcast adventure we can have later. But yeah, so my role was twofold. When I joined NASCAR, the first part of my role was to manage the transition from Turner to a vendor that was you know going to be managed by NASCAR. And The reason why we were transitioning to a vendor was because we hadn't yet hired out all of the people for NASCAR to take it on directly itself. 21:44.74 Devon And so we had to do this interim step where we went to a vendor that was you know under our control, and then we would build out our team, our process, our tools, our technology, and then transition from the vendor over to NASCAR owned internally. 21:59.49 Devon And so that's what i worked on there. And it was super fun. The people were awesome. Like that time was really exciting. It was a challenge for me in leadership. 22:09.61 Devon I was also working on my MBA at that time. So it was just like, everything was nuts. 22:12.14 The ModGolf Podcast Right. 22:15.48 The ModGolf Podcast So before you came to the PGA Tour, I believe you bought some wool pants and you moved to Oregon and worked at Nike. 22:15.58 Devon Ha yes! 22:20.96 The ModGolf Podcast So tell us about that experience and what that position was. And again, building on the foundation of those career moves, what did you learn at Nike that now you've applied to the PGA Tour? 22:25.62 Devon Sure. 22:34.28 Devon I'll start with what I learned. Operating in a matrixed global company of 20,000 people with thousands of locations all over the globe was like insane and very much prepared me for the role that I'm in now, but we'll get to that in a second. Nike was also super interesting, very stressful, but I got recruited to go out there and build out a global operations and support organization, which would service all of the infrastructure apps, web, all of the technology in the retail stores globally. So every single Nike owned store 23:13.08 Devon And it was it was just like a lot. It was like always on. The decision making there was really tricky. And because the organization is so highly matrixed, you basically have to socialize every thought with every person who's entangled into the matrix. And so decision making can take a long time, but the work happens really fast. People like go, go, go. And so the whole premise of what I was trying to build was they didn't have this team. It didn't exist before. And the retail store leadership had been like, you guys are terrible. 23:51.48 Devon When we have something that goes wrong in our stores, We call into this call center in Manila, we report the issue, and the ticket basically disappears. It either gets closed or rerouted somewhere, and we never know what happens. And so they would never get their issue solved. And at that time, agents in the call centers were incentivized to close tickets as quickly as possible because they used average handle time. for their one of their main like one of their main KPIs and metrics to rate how agents were doing in their careers. After a few years of that type of approach to solving in store problems, the Nike store leadership was like, you guys are awful. This is horrible and you need to fix it. So I enter the picture and we got to figure out how to like repair these very broken relationships and build a more proactive system. 24:42.32 Devon And so the first thing that we did was focus on like instrumentation and monitoring the systems in the stores. So that way we could like look at the health of not just the devices in the stores, but also the infrastructure of the stores. So networks and things like that. 24:59.04 Devon And then we added in another layer of like incident management, essentially. So if something does go wrong, how do we handle it? How do we triage this? How do we troubleshoot it? 25:10.18 Devon How do we fix it if it's broken? And so we flipped the model of you call us, tell us when it's broken and we ignore you to we're now watching everything happening in your stores and we're gonna call you and we see something that looks off. 25:25.71 Devon Hey, are you cool? Do you need help? So it was really it was a really cool transformation that ended up happening. 25:27.83 The ModGolf Podcast Yeah. 25:31.23 Devon And it was when I first started it, it was something that I had planned on. I roughed out like a three-year plan for it. 25:41.24 Devon And they were like, yeah, that's a great plan, but can you do it in six months? I was like, what? 25:47.13 Devon Would you accept nine as an answer? And they were like, yeah. So we did in nine months. It was a lot. But it was super fun, very exhausting. The team was spread across the United States. 26:00.25 Devon China, India, the Netherlands, and a few other places. And I was always on, always on. I was just exhausted. Like I was managing a global team and never slept. 26:11.05 Devon So it was like, I gotta to get out of here. 26:13.13 The ModGolf Podcast Yes, I saw that you had that role for a year and a bit. I guess you were fried to a crisp after that. 26:17.96 Devon I was completely fried and I was like, I need to go sit in the sun in Florida. Bye. 26:24.41 The ModGolf Podcast here we go. And buy some lighter pants. 26:28.41 Devon I don't own any wool pants anymore, by the way. 26:31.03 The ModGolf Podcast Well, I guess you're not going back to Portland then Anytime soon. 26:33.14 Devon No. 26:33.89 The ModGolf Podcast There we go. 26:35.05 Devon Nope. Nope, nope, nope. 26:40.34 The ModGolf Podcast Let me do that again. Well, I'm north of Portland up in Vancouver here. So you may need to pack those wool pants if you're going to come up here, especially on a day like today. It is wool pants weather. Definitely. 26:50.73 The ModGolf Podcast No question. 26:51.33 Devon I'm mildly concerned about my lack of wool pants because i scored last minute tickets to the Radiohead show in Berlin next week and it's cold and I don't have any wool pants. 27:01.71 The ModGolf Podcast Uh-huh. 27:04.43 Devon So I'm very worried about going to Berlin right now with my summer clothes. 27:08.16 The ModGolf Podcast You should have tucked that pair away. Well, I have a feeling you could always buy a pair. I think there's still wool pants out there. 27:13.43 Devon I could. There are. 27:15.29 The ModGolf Podcast You might be in luck. You might be in luck. Okay, I want to switch gears here a little bit because when we met in Belfast at the Golf Business Technology Conference, you were there to speak. The work you're passionate about with LGBTQ plus advocacy in sport. And you were really calling out the golf industry there as far as the work that needs to be done to up their game. 27:31.83 Devon Yeah. 27:38.94 The ModGolf Podcast But I'm sure you don't see that in just in golf, but across sport. I'm sure you saw that in NASCAR. So can you share with us the work that you do with your community and the work that still needs to be done? 27:52.34 Devon Yeah. If it's okay, I'll start with why I got into it in the first place, because I think that's always an important context to provide. 27:56.68 The ModGolf Podcast Yeah. 28:02.85 Devon My personal journey with LGBTQ plus inclusion started with two things, one being closeted queer at work. 28:13.69 Devon And the second thing was, and that was fine for me. 28:14.14 The ModGolf Podcast yeah 28:17.77 Devon You know, I personally didn't feel like very affected by that in any major way because I'm a very private person anyway. So I wouldn't be talking about my personal life anyway at work. 28:27.32 The ModGolf Podcast Okay. 28:29.94 Devon But when my brother came out to me as transgender in 2019, that hit me in a way that i like I really felt like, oh my God, i need to do something because here's this person in my life who, I mean, we're 16 months apart. 28:47.26 Devon We're very close in age. So we've, we're very close. 28:50.02 The ModGolf Podcast Yeah. 28:51.26 Devon but he goes to work every day and his life depends on whether or not somebody supports the transgender experience in general, right? 29:01.37 The ModGolf Podcast Yes. 29:02.28 Devon He's in law enforcement. And so, this idea that if you go to a scene as a law enforcement officer and someone doesn't have your back because you're a trans person, that's really scary. And so I was like, wow, that I don't have any influence in law enforcement whatsoever. I have zero ability to influence that industry. But where I do have influence is in sports and in golf and at the company that I work. 29:30.30 Devon And so I thought this is the right time for me to get involved, not because of my personal experience as a queer person, but because of what I felt like my brother was about to go through. 29:44.33 Devon And so yeah, I started this group called PRISM at the PGA Tour, and this was in 2019. At that time, we had a handful of other employee resource groups, but we did not have one dedicated to LGBTQ plus inclusion. 29:59.17 Devon And so i was like, I'm here. I'm already doing weird emerging technology stuff. I might as well get weirder. Let's do this. And so I started this group and yeah, that's how it started. 30:10.86 Devon And when I formed the group, I just needed five people to agree to be with me. That was the rule for starting a new employee resource group. 30:22.15 Devon You needed to have at least five people who would support it and be a part of it. And so I recruited my five people, I found them and I took it to our talent and culture team, which is the equivalent of HR. 30:33.43 Devon And they were like, yes, yes, absolutely. Yes! So found myself an executive mentor. Her name is Julie Tyson. She's amazing. And she helped me accomplish a lot of the things that we were able to get done in the early years. 30:48.20 Devon So some of that work was based on this idea that I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, but it's basically a benchmarking tool that assesses how well-suited companies are to provide support and resources for LGBTQ plus employees. And so it's a very widely known benchmarking tool. Tons of Fortune 500 companies are on it. And anyway, I was like, this is a really interesting way to think about roadmapping with PRISM. Can we build our roadmap to look at the criteria they use to rank companies and start to chip away at those criteria and build those things into the tour culture? So rather than throwing a pride tournament. Why don't we look inward and look at ourselves and see what we're doing for our employees before we ever start to look at what we could possibly do for our fans or for our players or for the public or for whoever, right? 31:56.03 Devon So it was really a hard look at ourselves. 31:56.17 The ModGolf Podcast Mm-hmm. 31:58.79 Devon And so we did things like, "do we have domestic partner benefits?" At that time, we didn't. And so we added them. Do we have gender affirming care options for transgender people? At that time, we didn't. And so we added them. We, like I said, we started our employee resource group. We call them connection groups at The Tour. We created a whole bunch of learning and development opportunities about ally-ship and advocacy and like things like pronouns and really tangible things that people can do in the workplace to better support each other and building relationships and partnerships with groups like 32:35.67 Devon Athlete Ally and the Trevor Project and a local organization here called Jasmine, which provides health and wholeness services to housing insecure LGBTQ youth. And just in general, normalizing talking about queer lifestyles and queer topics and queer challenges. 32:57.38 Devon And so that's really how I spent the first two years of PRISM was trying to do all that stuff. And not really, a lot of our employee resource groups are very socially focused. 33:10.54 Devon So like, let's do a golf outing or let's have lunch together or whatever. I didn't care about any of that stuff. I wanted to do things that mattered like policy and procedure and, benefits and tangible stuff that people could use either for themselves or for their or for their dependents too. 33:15.89 The ModGolf Podcast right 33:28.60 Devon So this stuff works for your dependents. If you have a kid who's going through something and they need resources, it's available to them as well. 33:37.08 The ModGolf Podcast Nice, nice. I should have asked this at the top of the show to give us some context because listeners may not know the size of the PGA Tour staff as a company and a nonprofit. 33:46.39 Devon Sure. Yeah. 33:47.89 The ModGolf Podcast So they may think maybe there's 50 people, maybe there's 50,000. So why don't you give us some context as far as the size and how you're spread out across the country? 33:51.61 Devon Yeah. So last I checked, we were roughly 1,400 people. 34:01.56 The ModGolf Podcast Okay. Okay. 34:02.52 Devon and we have offices in the States, we have an office in London. We have some, I forget where the Asia office but like we're spread out globally. There's a lot of remote people. And a lot of the people who work with us are not based physically in Ponte Vedra beach, which is where our headquarters is located. Because we obviously produce a telecast, a broadcast. 34:26.89 Devon We have people spread out everywhere and they travel. And so we have a lot of remote employees as well. So yeah, a big organization. it's probably bigger than most people would realize and very geographically dispersed. 34:40.20 The ModGolf Podcast Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. To finish up before we jump over to a video conversation, as I said, for the ModGolf YouTube channel, which as I mentioned at the top of the show, I'm going to shake them here for, so people can hear them. 34:53.40 The ModGolf Podcast So what I did when you and i were having a pint of Guinness or a scotch or both sitting outside at a pub in Belfast, I was telling you about these weird Canadian candies. I don't even know how we got in this conversation. It was weird. We weren't drunk. 35:12.73 Devon I probably was. 35:21.46 The ModGolf Podcast We were just having a conversation. and i don't even know what the segue was, but I mentioned this weird gum from the 1970s and 1980s when I was a kid that's only Canadian. Thankfully, the rest of the world is spared from these, called Thrills. And this gum actually tastes like soap and not but just a little bit like soap, not like cilantro, like you're talking like soap, which is the weirdest thing ever. 35:41.22 The ModGolf Podcast And it still exists. So when you and I talked about it, maybe this was the enticement of getting you on the show here that on the YouTube channel, so we can see each other with a reaction. 35:46.99 Devon Yeah. 35:50.30 The ModGolf Podcast This is going to be our equivalent of that show Hot Ones, but rather than having wings that are hotter and hotter on the Pepper Scoville scale. We're going to try different candies here. I've got another one here that's a throwback from the 70s and 80s here called Bottle Caps, and we've got Thrills. So we're both going to try that. We're going to have some fun. 36:14.11 The ModGolf Podcast I'm going to talk about some other things here, what's going on with the PGA Tour and the innovation side. But we're going to save that for the ModGolf YouTube channel. So I strongly encourage you, our listener, to join us over there. I will include the link in the show notes. So yes, I want to see, and you'll get a chance to see, 36:33.11 The ModGolf Podcast Devin's facial expression because she's already let me know she hates cilantro so this is going to be fun so join us for that. But before we finish up here Devon I want you to share with us in the time you've been with the PGA Tour, what would you consider one of the things that you're the most proud of that you've managed to build out as far on the fan experience side with you and the team? 36:39.70 Devon Thank you. 36:57.75 Devon This is interesting. There's so many things. The list of projects that have happened in 10 years is fast, to say the least. 37:07.29 The ModGolf Podcast Yeah. 37:08.63 Devon But I think there's a succession of projects that led up to something that i am really proud of. So I don't know if I should start at the beginning or the end. 37:23.24 Devon I'll start at the end. So spoiler alert, the Apple Vision Pro app, which I believe we're retiring at the end of this year, but that's not the win. 37:23.96 The ModGolf Podcast Okay. 37:34.96 Devon That's not the win. The win is the work that led up to that. So while the Apple Vision Pro itself has not been a super commercially successful device for Apple and really like our app there There's not a lot of viewership there because hardly anybody owns Apple Vision Pros. 37:54.55 The ModGolf Podcast Right. 37:54.66 Devon But the experience itself is absolutely stunning. I mean, it is one of the coolest, one of the best digital experiences i think I've ever worked on and ever been a part of. 38:08.58 Devon But the thing that I'm proud of with it is not necessarily the experience itself. It's that back in 2016, I started the work to get to that point. 38:19.62 Devon So when XR was first emerging as a viable category for sports and entertainment properties, I was like, "I'm going to build an AR experience." 38:32.13 Devon And people were like, "good luck with that". And so I went to this vendor and I found this company that would work with me and we started working on it. And what we realized very quickly was that not only could we not do it, but we didn't even have the data to do it. 38:47.84 Devon So we might have had X, Y coordinates, but we didn't have X, Y, Z coordinates back then. 38:48.07 The ModGolf Podcast Right. Mm-hmm. 38:52.32 Devon There were all these things that we didn't have. and so it was this progression of "well let's see what we do need to do it and let's go get after that and build it in and operationalize that" and so then it was like o"kay well we we did this and then apple AR kit came um out and then and then and then right so there's all these sort of things that got built over the years that led up to um to this experience in the apple vision pro and that's like early AR experiences it's stuff like the volumetric capture it's stuff like building the virtual golf experiences for Hololens and Magic Leap One and the Oculus Rift and so building out on all of those platforms made it possible for the experience in the Apple Vision Pro to be what it is. Like i said even though it's not commercially viable really it's just such a cool and visually stunning and very awesome experience. 39:46.17 The ModGolf Podcast Love this. So it sounds like you're getting out on the bleeding edge in some cases where the technology hasn't either been commercialized or hasn't been fully fleshed out yet, that you're just a little bit ahead of the curve, but eventually it'll catch up. 39:53.27 Devon Yeah. 39:57.84 The ModGolf Podcast And who knows, maybe that will be in another, don't even want to say the timeline on that, but let's say a couple of years that perhaps that it will be more commercially viable and then you'll have the opportunity then to to apply that. 40:10.14 Devon Yeah, I'll add one more on here, and I think this is a cultural thing that like was very cool to witness at The Tour. You were asking earlier about the process of, how do we get to innovation roadmaps and product innovation? 40:26.54 Devon And we talked a lot about design thinking and stuff like that. One of the things that I tried to do with The tour was not just within our own team, our own department, but i set up an annual hackathon that we used to invite the rest of the company to participate in that conversation. 40:43.92 Devon Because like I said, ideas come from everywhere, not just small group of people. 40:47.32 The ModGolf Podcast Yes. 40:47.40 Devon And so building this culture of a hackathon, even though like we didn't have a lot of tech resources back then, it was like, at least let's do the ideas and then we'll simulate prototypes instead of coding prototypes. 41:00.86 Devon So non-code hackathons with The Tour was something very cool that culturally was very rewarding because people were just so excited to participate in it. 41:11.74 Devon And they just wanted people to hear their ideas and like be able to do something different from their everyday work. 41:17.85 The ModGolf Podcast How did you find that originally the onboarding of introducing design thinking and people are like, what's this IDEO company and Tim Brown and who are these people and what are you even talking about? 41:29.24 The ModGolf Podcast Did you find that was a challenge at the beginning of going from zero to design thinking? 41:35.61 Devon No, I didn't because the way that you lay out the process for design thinking is actually really logical and clear. And when you talk about starting with a business problem to solve, people immediately are like, oh, I have 10 of those! 41:43.59 The ModGolf Podcast Mm-hmm. 41:50.68 The ModGolf Podcast Yes. 41:51.45 Devon So it's like super easy to get them on board with the idea that you can operationalize solving your business problems. 41:58.81 The ModGolf Podcast So it sounds like you approached it in a more of a practical way that it didn't come across out of the gate as being this woo-woo thing that people are like, really? No. 42:07.26 Devon Yeah. I mean, when you're hardwired to be a process person like I am, that's the angle that you would naturally focus on. I'm sure idea people would focus on that, but you're going to get these innovative ideas out of it. But that's not me. I'm a very process and operations oriented person. So that made the most sense to me. 42:27.14 The ModGolf Podcast You're not the person that's saying, well, how does this make you feel? No. And that's okay. You've got other people that take care of that. 42:36.25 Devon Yeah, we all go to therapists for that. 42:39.77 The ModGolf Podcast There you go. Well, on that note, why don't we finish up? And like I said, now we're going to jump over to the ModGolf YouTube channel for for some lovely candy confectionaries that you're now, I can see in your face, you're frightened. 42:46.12 Devon Sounds good. 42:54.42 The ModGolf Podcast Maybe that's excitement. I think it's sheer fright now, but it's going to happen anyway. So why don't we finish up with that? So Devon Fox, Senior Director with Digital Programs with the PGA Tour. 43:05.53 The ModGolf Podcast Thank you after eight years of making this happen and taking the time. This has been a great conversation and I really appreciate your time. 43:12.82 Devon It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.