CTO of Equinox Fitness Club: Eswar Veluri

Currently, I serve as the Chief Technology Officer for Equinox Fitness Clubs. And in that role, I lead product engineering, data and operations for our best known and biggest brand within the Equinox Group. Equinox Group also has SoulCycle, Blink, and Equinox Hotels.

So yeah, so happy to rewind almost 14 years ago if you want me to start there. 

That would be awesome. I think the journey of how, I believe you spent a lot of years in Equinox. The journey, how did you start? What was your first role in the company?

Definitely. I'll just do two minutes of background because that'll help you understand the challenges and why I look forward to the role. My background is primarily in electrical engineering, and I worked in semiconductors for 11 years. So working for West Coast, VLSI companies and so on. So definitely the role of Equinox was not what I studied for or I trained for. But having moved to East Coast, I started liking more the digital type of roles versus what I was doing with semiconductors.

And for six months, I had worked at JetBlue to get my basic understanding of product, creating customer experiences, and the general world of product management.

And in June 2010, Equinox was starting a small yet to be named brand called Blink. And as part of starting that brand, they wanted to build for the first time, e-commerce experiences around selling memberships. Till then, the memberships can only be bought with advisors in a club, and they wanted to actually create that experience of buying memberships on the website, and they were looking for someone to come in to help them do that.

So I was extremely fortunate with having not that much experience in this particular area for me to have landed and you know that role. And then within three months, I was actually given an opportunity to build a team. I was the only digital product director at that particular point, and I hired the first UX research and designer, the first analytics person to help us with Adobe measurements, and three product managers to help on, you know, kind of like building stuff.

So I would say that for the first two years, I almost learned more from the people who were working for me than anything else, right? Because these were fantastic people that I'm still in touch with all of them. They're no longer at Equinox, but they're in good leadership roles in New York City. And I chat with them, but I learned the general kind of concept of that is when we introduced Jira in our company to talk about how do you do sprint planning and how do you do story points?

How do you run an agile process, and a standup should be 10 minutes and not one hour, all these principles. And then the concept of leading and lagging metrics when you're measuring with Adobe, understanding how do you do A-B tests and, you know, removing or not removing our point of view, but definitely kind of making sure that the consumer's point of view is included when you're doing product development to understand, you know, what are the jobs that they need to be done?

How do we validate it? How do we make sure that the solutions we are developing actually satisfy their constraints? And then more functionally, when you create a workflow, how do we do that? How do we validate functional validation of those designs? These are early concepts that I picked up. And also it helped with the team and the company coming to understand what product management was. Because if you go to a traditional brick and mortar company.

Equinox is not a technology company. At that particular point, our department itself was considered IT, not technology as it is today. And information technology, most times people just executed on projects that other business units gave them. And that's fundamentally different than product management, which is we align on what the problem is and the product managers are the ones who actually devise the solutions versus being given a set of requirements and a set of objectives and are being told, now go construct this building exactly according to this spec.

So that was the really interesting and intriguing aspect of the first five years was to help transform the company to be able to understand what product management means and how we change the department from information technology to technology to be able to kind of like tell, we're not just here to serve your IT needs, but we are here to help the business achieve its goals. We're here to help the growth, and we are here to help consumers have delightful experiences through the means of technology.

Very interesting. When it comes to the athlete experience in these five first years, you mentioned 50 destinations and what was the focus of Equinox in these days and did it ever change from what it is today?

Yeah, so the core principles are still the same, which is you want to acquire our members, retain them, and grow revenue through greater revenue per member. Those goals haven't fundamentally changed. But if I were to put a little bit of the technology hat, to answer this question, I'll definitely remove the hat to answer it too. Definitely the first phase included a lot of, I call it digitization, right?

Like, you know, it's kind of like, we have something that is being done by humans, can we automate it? We have some process that is leaking, can we make it better? How do we increase efficiencies? How do we increase throughput, right? So it did not affect the customer experiences as much. but it definitely kind of affected our staff where the manual tasks that they were doing were digitized.

So I'll give you a good example. In personal training, the appointments used to be written in notebooks. And when someone finished a personal training, someone had to go to a computer and tell, can you remove, you know, from John one session so that someone else basically, a trainer, you know, kind of gets paid. So that was an interesting project of digitizing it and doing it. Towards the end of that phase is where I call our digital transformation kind of coming in, right?

Where we went to Salesforce, we went to Amazon, we switched our ERP systems, we broke away from, we used to have Microsoft or kind of like enterprise service bus where deployments used to take sometimes, six to nine hours. We went to a microservice architecture so that we would not have these monolithic systems that would make speed slower and so on. So it was an interesting thing. As far as the company was going, you know, kind of like the concept of delighting customers was something that our CEO always had, but it was through more of the physical touch points, right?

Like we had the Kiehl's shampoos and conditioners. Then we had cold eucalyptus towels. But during that first chapter, we also started introducing digital TV screens so that, you know, the clubs could actually display some of the information.

We changed the way people could book classes so that people can book a particular bike. How do you, because otherwise people were coming into the clubs not knowing whether they had a spot in the class or not, or, you know, kind of like people who were rushing, which is not a good experience for a brand like ours. We want to make sure that people comfortably enter the space and their expectations are met.

So that was the focus had just started to kind of like think of how do you use technology to actually increase the value that our members are getting out of our clubs versus relying only on physical kind of, you know, experiences.

I think that's going to be a very interesting segue into the product. From what I've seen in Equinox, you have some of the best technology out there, and a lot of gyms can learn a lot from what you have built. What's the experience of a user today when they go through a gym facing technology in terms of maybe the app? And I've noticed like last time I went there, very easy to go in, you don't need to scan anything.

There is some sort of, I don't know, RFID or NFC picking things up and you go inside of the club and like technologies everywhere. So let's break this down a bit. What's from the user experience? How does the athlete today experience technology in the gym?

Yeah, so that's a good question. So like if you were to take the snapshot of March 2024 today, right, and then said, what does an Equinox member experience as they're kind of going into the club and, you know, which is powered by technology, I can, excuse me, break it into three phases, because one is the planning phase, right? Like the planning phase is where you're trying to kind of discover, what is available tomorrow.

So imagine you're trying to go to the club tomorrow. The app actually has a context to understand that perhaps your frequency is every two days. So it knows that you're most likely going to go to the club Saturday, right? And today being Friday, so it actually tells, hey, here are some of the classes that are happening today.

Here are some of your favorites, but also based on your goals, here is something that you might want to try. So we're trying to think of in the planning phase in two different aspects. One is if you're someone who knows who wants it, how do we make it very, very, very easy for you to be able to just tap a button and book? But also we want to be able to suggest something that you might not have previously tried, but we think you will like based on either collaborative filters in our machine models or based on like some of our experts who said that your goal of X and Y means that you should be doing this.

Or you might not be aware that perhaps tomorrow there's a special class and that's what you should be doing. So we're trying to break them down into, we call it your go-to list and then you might also like in the planning phase. So once the planning phase is over and the member comes into our club, you're right. We have a technology where we just use the iPad at the front desk that detects that you're close, you know, within like a certain feet of it.

And when you say check in, it allows the employee at the front desk to know that you're in good standing and your app turns green. You can just show it and walk away without having to stand in long lines. And there is no choke point, right? Otherwise previously, like five years ago, with a scanner, that's a choke point because everybody has to bring their phone, come to the scanner, and it creates a little bit.

And we know that, especially our members, time is very precious. So we want to make sure that, you know, they're not wasting time on standing in a line. And something new that we introduced about a couple of months ago, it's still only in a few clubs, is called a club mode. In a club mode, essentially, now your app knows that you're inside the club and it changes the features that are available to help you get the best out of what you need when you're in the club.

So the planning mode, then the club mode, right? In club mode, we allow you, it's like previously we used to, for new members, they had to like use a wifi password to be able to connect to our club wifi. But now we've actually integrated the app to the wifi so that if you're logged into the app, you're automatically connected to our club Wi-Fi. And that allows you being connected to the club Wi-Fi.

If you were to take a class where an instructor is speaking into a microphone, you can actually use your Bluetooth headphones, which are connected to your phone, to listen to the audio through the app. Or if you are running in front of a bunch of TVs and you want to listen to the football game on TV 11, that is also something that you can access through the app to be able to listen to the audio through the club mode.

The club mode also allows you to see services that are available at the club at that particular point. And in the future, we want to have an ability where you can request assistance from a floor coach who can come and help you. So imagine that you are in front of an equipment, you either needed help for spotting or you wanted to just understand how best to use it. Obviously, you can look up a QR code and see a video, but we feel that a human being who can actually come to you and help you is better.

And that's something that you can request assistance and through standard positioning, they would know who you are, where you are, and to be able to come and help you. And we have another three or four great ideas in terms of how during the time you're in the club and there's like a good roadmap for doing that.

The third construct of that is once you're done with the checkout, you know, like when you're done with your workout, you're done with your shower, if you wanted to order some food or a juice, that's going to be available for you, waiting for you, you know, as you're leaving. But then once you're outside the club, we want to recognize your achievements, right? Like, so if you take a cycling class, we might tell you, you rode four miles today at a pace of, you know, kind of like 14 miles per hour.

It's your best speed this week. Overall, you rode these many miles, just giving you some breakdown if you choose to, to tell in your demographic, you're doing this way, great job. And just helping you motivate, but also asking, you know, kind of like, how do you feel? And if you say that you feel tired, we can provide some nutritional guidance or any kind of guidance on the best stretch to be able to make sure that you're recovering well, because we factor in all three categories, movement, nutrition, and regeneration.

So most people take advantage of movement, but to get your best outcomes, you also need to be cognizant of your nutrition and regeneration there. What do you eat? How do you sleep? How do you stretch? So that your body is in the best position to be able to kind of take advantage of the workouts. So that is the post club is the third mode, and then that cycle repeats. So we break the product and user experiences into these three sectors to be able to help them plan, help them have the best experience in the club, and after the club, congratulate, motivate them so that they're ready for repeating that cycle.

Super. It's where I believe you built as the chief technology officer of the company, one of the best engineering arms in this space. In terms of company culture or maybe engineering culture, how is the team operating today? What are your, maybe the values that you are looking for and what's the team looking like?

I think we embrace very firmly, you know, kind of it's, I don't like to use cliches, but this one I think I will, like servant leadership where no one is above or below doing any other task. And like, you know, we all get into it. The values that the team has out of collaboration, you know, kind of like being able to have good communication and so on. And I think many of us have been here for a while.

We were here during COVID and there was a lot of uncertainty and I think sometimes surviving that period of uncertainty and turmoil helps the bonds get better. So there's like a lot of camaraderie in our team. We embrace that, you know, kind of like there's always going to be interesting and challenging projects.

There is going to be small fires that need to be fixed, long-term initiatives so that engineers are empowered to bring new ideas. I think, as I mentioned, even with the product chapter, right? I am someone who believes that I learn from people who come into the organization. I do not have the answers. I'm not, I don't have all the ideas in the world, especially when new people come and they go, 'Hey, here's something cool we did in the previous company.' We fully embrace it and go, 'How do we incorporate that into our culture?' So engineers are empowered.

Engineers are valued. Engineers are appreciated. And I think we've also done a good job of making sure that... Well, if you divided the entire technology organization only into product and engineers, which is, you can almost do that. Then at least in some places, what I like, what I did not like was the engineers did not have the full grasp of why we are doing something, right? It becomes like, 'Well, there was a story, so we're doing it.' And I think in our organization in the last five, six years, we've embraced a rule that whether you're a tester, an engineer, a designer, or a product manager, if we ask these three questions, 'Why are we doing this particular story?

Why are we not doing that particular story? And how are you going to measure the effectiveness of what you did?' We should, all of you should have the answer so that they have the context and being that, you know, we work in a company where you can experience our product 20 feet away from where we work.

We're able to be the end users also where we can experience both the good and the bad of the services that we build. So working out, using our apps helps us come up with the pain points that our customers are feeling to be able to kind of correct them. So it makes the engineering team, you know, kind of like very clear on the value they're providing to the business, which is something that's lost in a much larger company, right?

Like, so when I'm one of my lines, when I'm, you know, telling people why it is good to join Equinox. I tell, you know, if you're working at like a Facebook or a Google, can you tell your parents, 'Hey, look, here is the feature that I developed,' you know, there, like, you know, nothing wrong, but we are a smaller company, which means that you have the advantage of being able to work on a singular feature and being able to show to your family and friends and say, 'This is something that I built and that's not available in many other companies.'

Thank you. Super. You mentioned collaboration. I wanted to ask you, like, if we go more specific, if you're testing for collaboration in an interview, how do you find it?

One of the simple things is when we ask about a project or when I ask about a project and I go, 'How did you do?' It's I tend to pick up on whether they use 'we' or 'I' right when they're talking about a particular project... It's not a big disqualifier, but it helps me understand how the user is kind of like thinking about it.

Very interesting. This is a very nuanced understanding from the way that people convey information. That's super, super interesting. Something else that you mentioned from the beginning that you joined as one person and the team with 10 people and 50 people and so on.

Yeah, I think here probably I do have more to learn in this particular phase, right? Like right now, I'm an EVP, which is in our general scale, like an E9, and I have people who are... Like an E1 right like joining as like a junior analyst or something else. Because it's a small team…

If we look into the future now and we say in five years, here's the achievements that the company is going to have, what would you say? What is the focus for the future?"

eswar: "I think it's, you know, taking what we've done in the space of movement and transcending to beyond movement, right? Like we've always kind of had our goal as high performance lifestyle... helping our members, let's say, scale Mount Kilimanjaro or go on Sahara deserts with a coach who gives you training…

For my last question, if we go 100 years into the future, you think we're going to say that those were really bad ideas when it comes to maybe engineering or gym experiences or studios or something along those lines about bad decisions and our ancestors maybe are going to be saying those were really bad ideas?

I think I'll be biased, but I'll go with Web3 as one of the probably, you know, baddest ideas in the last 10, 20 years, right? I think I could be proven wrong... But since you asked me to take a guess, I'm going to say that would be considered an idea that did not pan out.

Super, sure, thank you so much for the call. It's been a phenomenal podcast, thank you.

Thank you so much. All right. Bye.