Fail Faster

Rachid El Guerrab ex-Googler who is now the CEO of Haiba - a new interactive storytelling platform he's building to empower artists. He shares lessons from a project that was so successful it won him an Emmy yet, had many challenges and failures on the road to that happy honor.

My guest Chiranjiv Santhosh Malla is the senior Product & Strategy manager at American Express. He talks about his struggles growing up in a small remote town in South India with a pressure to outperform others and make a good living. He shares how even after failing multiple times, he kept trying and in the process discovered what his strength was. In this episode, he shares how he is creating new business streams, generating huge fundings for new ideas, and executing other business priorities at Amex.

Neha Dadbhawala is the Director of Digital Marketing Operations at McAfee but her professional life began as a flight attendant! This unlikely start got her hooked on the adrenaline solving problems and making things run like clockwork. She shares the lessons from her "crash course in customer delight" that help her plan for the unknown and prepare backup plans to make sure her goal land safely.

Sunny Dasari is the Software Engineering Director at Cigna and in this episode, he shares lessons from a failure even when the team "played a good game" and how his humble beginnings as a badminton athlete in India helped shape his thinking around digital transformation.

My guest Jacob Melchert is the Director of Strategy & Product at Carrier, which is a leading global provider of sustainable building and cold chain solutions. In this episode, Jacob shares his orgs big goal to substantially reduce their customer's carbon footprint year on year. He shares, in the near future, he is driven to make the impossible possible at a traditional industrial refrigeration equipment manufacturing company into a digital IOT and telematics powerhouse.

Jesse David is the Director of Business Development at WeWork. Jesse began his career as a corporate lawyer before a set of major and exciting life changes had him re-imagine his career. Following his wedding, he traveled the world for a year (more on the lessons on this within the episode!) before rejoining the workforce in a strategic setting within startups. You'll also hear how Jesse and WeWork have navigated the pandemic. His experiment-driven approach to partnerships and business development is exciting, especially when viewed through an industry-changing event such as COVID.

Ryan Frederick leads an elite team of product designers and data problem solvers at AWH which is a digital product company. He shares his interesting journey from a young high school boy with his small world and small problems from a small town in upstate new York to a product designer who solves complex problems by making simple and elegant software products now. His mantra is to always keep the problem at the forefront of the design and minimize product friction for users. Let's hear it all in his own words.

Our Guest Selcuk Baran is the senior data science manager at 2K Games, a talented team of developers and publishers of interactive games covering a spectrum of gaming genres including action, role-playing, strategy, sports, entertainment etc. out of California. In this episode Selcuk talks about his passion of Data science and how predictive modeling is used to foresee a player's behaviour. With that powerful insight how multiple Machine learning models are used to plan sales triggers to generate in-game revenue while keeping millions of players engaged.

Pankaj Dubey is now a Director of Engineering at Salesforce and prior to that, he's had a lot of experience in the tumultuous startup world. He shares in his journey from an individual contributor to the leadership roles he's in today and how his deep curiosity and empathy for customers helped guide his path. He feels everyone on his team and working with his team should be concerned with delivering solutions with a great user experience that will truly help people and make their lives easier.

Nikolay Plaunov is a Director, Technologist overseeing Service Design at Refinitiv, one of the world's largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure. Looking back on a career that's taken him from Siberia to New York, Nikolay shares lessons on the value of executive support and recognizing that real change begins with yourself.