On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself. Mark Simon is VP of strategy at intelligent automation software company Celigo, which works with companies like Therabody and PayPal. How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I start by telling people that, at the simplest, I work with companies to help them automate their businesses. While we can think of integration and automation as the “invisible plumbing” of retail—and for many companies it is—I work with companies to help them think strategically and use automation as a business differentiator to drive their top-level goals. At 90% of companies, when everything works, no one thinks about its integration and automation. When it doesn’t, it’s all anyone can talk about. You can take a look at Shopify’s Cyber Monday breakdown last year, for example, which showcased how important e-commerce infrastructure is to so many businesses. My job is to help retailers see the opportunity to accelerate their growth and ensure customer experience excellence by taking a proactive approach. We can make sure orders, inventory, payments, and customer data are all talking to each other (through integrations) so teams can focus less on putting out fires and more on actually growing the business. One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? Most people assume I’ve always been a retail consulting or strategy person at a software company, but I actually started as a software engineer in the wild west days of e-commerce on the front lines. Keep reading here.—EC | 
