Many people recall childhood dreams of wanting to be a doctor, lawyer or even president of the United States. Not so for Ricky Engelberg, experience director of digital sport at Nike and longtime enthusiast of the brand.
"The mission of the company is bringing innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world," says Engelberg, who has been with Nike for 11 years and personally works on Nike+, Nike+ Fuelband and Nike+ Running initiatives. "There are infinite possibilities here." He's gotten to work with some of the world's leading tech companies to create products and services for digitally-minded athletes and notes that a big part of the job is to "suspend disbelief to focus on what a few years from now can look like," a sentiment to which most startups can relate.
How does Nike keep up?
"Every few years it feels like the company reinvents itself," says Engelberg. "Every day feels like a different adventure."
Is working for Nike your dream job? Find out more about opportunities at Nike here.
Q&A With Ricky Engelberg, Experience Director of Digital Sport at Nike
Tell me about your role at Nike. What is it you do?
I'm an experience director for digital sport at Nike. Digital sport is synonymous with Nike+, Nike+ Fuelbands and Nike+ Running. Digital sport are products and services that motivate athletes to do more. I've been at Nike a little over 11 years and have worked in different digital capacities and have watched this evolution of digital to where we're creating all these amazing products and services, like the Nike+ running app that are seamless parts of athletes' lives, every single time they move or run or whatever the case may be.
My particular role as experience director is to oversee the end experience. In a lot of cases, I'm asking a lot of questions -- why are we doing things, how are we doing them, who are they for, what are we actually going to go and do for it, and then at the nuts and bolts level, there's the design of the apps like the FuelBand app or the running app, and I work closely with our industrial design team on overall product design.
How did you land the position?
I was an intern at Nike twice, interning in basketball sports marketing, actually focused on how to use digital to connect with coaches and teams and athletes in different ways. So that was an incredibly fun internship, and then I just maintained helping out on a few things while I was still finishing up school. After I graduated I got the call one day that there was a pretty interesting position available to work on NikeBasketball.com. I came out [to the Portland area from Georgia] and talked to them, and a couple of weeks later they said they'd actually like to create a slightly different position for me, where I'd focus on digital innovation.
That was 2002, and to really focus on things like where we were going from a gaming standpoint, a music standpoint, instant messaging -- at the time, that was taking off, and online media was just in nascent stages, so really I was tasked with super fun opportunities to help shape what digital could be at Nike. Eventually digital kind of migrated from being a function to being the electricity that flows through the whole company.
Nike's a huge brand and has been around for a while -- before working for Nike, what was your impression of the brand? What was your first exposure to Nike?
Nike's been a part of my life since remembering anything. I'm a nerd for a lot of things, this is one of the largest things -- I grew up playing baseball and football, I've got Griffey '96 posters still, I've got a Lil Penny doll from when I was 16 years old, it's in my office at work. For me it's never been a scenario where anyone had to convince me of anything related to Nike -- it's been engrained in my life since I can recall things.
When I was working with people who were straight out of school for some jobs that had pretty significant creative judgment responsibility, I felt incredibly comfortable having these people right out of school make these calls because they'd loved Nike for 10 to 12 years, they knew their favorite ads, they remembered their favorite websites from us. There was this idea that they had years of Nike experience ... they grew up with the brand, and it inspired them growing up. I think there's a lot of people here that fit into that camp -- they ran in Nike in high school, wore Nike cleats or loved the Fab Five and wore black socks and black shoes because of them.
Why is this a dream job?
There are infinite possibilities here -- the mission of the company is bringing innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world, and there's an asterisk on "athlete" with a quote from one of the co-founders of the company, Bill Bowerman: "If you have a body, you're an athlete."
When you really take that to heart, it's really exciting. When I'm working on things like Nike Basketball, it's a completely different consumer problem you're trying to solve. You want to make basketball players' lives better, and when you're working on Nike+ Running, that might be creating things like "Cheer Me On." We get to collaborate with some of the most amazing companies in the world, from Apple to Facebook to Twitter to Path to Foursquare, we get to work with all these unbelievable companies in ways that people are excited about. We think about how we can motivate people to be more active, how we can make athletes' lives better. So for us, every day feels like a different adventure, and every few years it feels like the company reinvents itself, but still with the same core purpose -- "innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world" -- so there are never-ending opportunities here.
What makes someone a good candidate for Nike?
The unique skills and talents required are the ability to imagine how pieces come together and suspend disbelief to focus on what a few years from now can look like. Technology is on our side, it's always going to get smaller, it's always going to get more accessible. So if you let impossibilities of today get in the way of what tomorrow can be, then it's inevitable that tomorrow's not going to be amazing.
The first time we showed the FuelBand to our COO and our partners, it was a sketch that was 24 or 48 hours old and the response was, "That's awesome! Can we have it in six months? Nine months?" The company is willing to take major risks if you're willing to dream big.
Nike likes to make technology become invisible and really focus on how it's going to benefit consumers and fit seamlessly into an athlete's life. As we're bringing people in, we're constantly looking for people with a unique ability to make these incredibly complex things disappear and just focus on the actual value that exists for people. I think that's somewhat unique to Nike.
There's so much technology packed into the FuelBand, but really for a consumer, it's a button -- it's a wristband that you wear that you know is water resistant, you can wear all day, has a week-long battery life and tracks how much you move. There's one simple button to operate it, and it sends your data to the iPhone. We could go into all the amazing [capabilities], but for us, getting it to be as simple as can be was 18 months of stripping away things.