Focusing on your Superpowers

Cloud has enabled many accelerators for business over the years. The usual suspects are agility, elasticity, scalability, and efficiency. 

This week, I had the opportunity to do a deep dive into the cloud journey for one of my favorite customers, the Boston Celtics, delivering a “chalk talk” with Jay Wessland, the Celtics CTO, in their new (gorgeous) offices.

Successful Beyond the Court

By all accounts, the Celtics are an impressive organization. 

As I walked the halls of their offices, I was reminded of all their legendary players and coaches and their history of success. 

Behind the scenes, though, there are some unsung heroes that are making a sizable impact on the Celtics' success.

Technologists Behind the Team

Jay has assembled a small but mighty team of talented technologists that turn huge volumes of data into actionable insights for coaches and players alike. 

The NBA has been collecting both in-game data and external data from NCAA basketball and international leagues for many years, and they supply this data to every NBA team. It’s up to each organization to use the data for their own purposes.

Jay and team have been pioneers in the basketball analytics space and are one of the top teams in the NBA when it comes to effectively utilizing data to win. 

Given the impressive amount of work that the Celtics have achieved with basketball analytics, you may expect that Jay’s team is quite large. 

On the contrary, the basketball analytics team can have their numbers counted on one hand. 

How have they been able to achieve so much?

Jay’s Game Plan

Jay has taken a smart approach to tackle basketball analytics, leveraging a combination of in-house subject matter experts and partner-delivered capabilities that have enabled the Celtics to harness the full power of AWS.

The Celtics are a wonderful example of how Mission supports our customers. 

For nearly a decade, Mission has provided a fractional team of AWS experts across a variety of disciplines that sprints alongside Jay’s in-house wizards. 

We work with the Celtics to optimize their spending so that they can reinvest the savings to make a greater impact on and off the court. 

They also lean on Mission to provide 24/7/365 operational support, monitoring, management, and incident response. As a result, Jay’s organization moves incredibly quickly, doing more with less.

The Winning Formula

While I would love to take some credit for their success, the mastermind here is Jay. He astutely recognized that the Celtics are, first and foremost, a professional basketball organization. 

By adopting AWS-managed services like RDS, ElastiCache, Fargate, and Lamba, his operational overhead is minimal. 

By leaning into Mission and his other technology partners, he can stay lean and focus on what the Celtics do best: basketball.

As we continue to see 2025 unfold, I would encourage you to consider your business’s core competencies. 

What are your superpowers? Are you focusing on these areas to maximize your strengths? Optimizing your identity is much easier than attempting to change it. Understanding that will sharpen your focus and enable you to do more with less, just like the defending NBA champs.