Software People Stories

Today, my guest is Shekhar Chandra - the Global Practice Head at Irs Software Inc.

Here are the key themes from the conversation: 

• Shekhar initially disliked sales because he is more of an introvert.
• However, he was eased into the role by his company and his technical background helped him gain the confidence to sell because he understood the product.
• Building a brand: Shekhar highlights the importance of building a brand for oneself, especially when venturing into entrepreneurship.
• Shekhar talks about the concept of building practices within a company to focus on specific areas of expertise.
• Shekhar emphasizes the importance of trying new things and learning from failures.
• Shekhar highlights the need for salespeople to have a good understanding of the technical aspects of the product or service they are selling.
• Shekhar then talks about the challenges faced by Indian companies trying to take their products global.
• Marketing is crucial: Building a good product is not enough.
• Companies need to focus on marketing and building alliances with other companies to be successful in the global market.
• Shekhar describes three different methods for partnering with other companies:
• Highlights some challenges faced by Indian companies when they try to take their products global.
• Shekhar also offers his advice for people in two different career stages:
• Mid-life career crisis:
• Late career:
• Shekhar Chandra - aka SC Shekar is the global practice head at Iris Software Inc.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shekhar-chandra-740953/

Shiv our host is in conversation with Harpreet SIngh, CO-founder and co-CEO of Launchale Inc. Harpreet has been associated with conceiving and launching many innovative products that have become a standard among developer community. 

In today's conversation he talks about

• How he started his career in India and then moved to the US.
• He emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and self-improvement.
• He mentions his growth mindset and his habit of reading and taking courses to stay updated.
• Harpreet acknowledges the challenge of scaling himself as a leader alongside the company.
• He talks about managing time for both work and personal growth. He highlights the importance of clear communication and context setting to empower his team and free up his time.
• He also mentions using a prioritization technique where he identifies the top three important tasks for both work and personal life.
• Harpreet acknowledges the resistance developers often have towards documentation. He discusses how he built his team by looking for individuals who value clear communication and writing skills.
• He describes how he identified a niche in the developer experience (DevEx) domain. He noticed that even after implementing CI/CD practices, companies weren't seeing the desired benefits quickly enough. This led him to explore how AI and machine learning could improve software delivery pipelines.
• Launchable's product uses machine learning to predict which tests are likely to fail based on code changes. Launchable is now expanding its offering to include intelligent test failure diagnostics using AI and machine learning.
• Harpreet acknowledges that coding style can influence the likelihood of errors. Launchable considers this to some extent, but the focus is on broader patterns and historical data to predict test failures.
• He emphasizes the importance of lifelong learning for personal and professional growth.
• He also talks about careers in testing and tech in general:

Harpreet is an entrepreneur, innovator, developer, and creative product leader who has dedicated his life to building new solutions for software teams. His latest iteration is Launchable Inc, an AI/ML company to help developers and QA. A seasoned DevOps leader, Harpreet has been building products for developers for the last 25+ years.

Previously, he was GM for Atlassian Bitbucket and VP of Product at CloudBees. At CloudBees he helped create the Jenkins business that scaled to multi-millions in ARR.

He has an MBA from Santa Clara University, an MS in CS from the University of Cincinnati, and a Bachelors in Computer Engineering from Pune University, India.

Today, my guest is Vinaya Mallya, is a seasoned IT professional, who has played leadership roles in the corporate sector, then was an entrepreneur building a team and moving on to create solutions to impact the social sector.

In this conversation, :

• Vinaya shares her career path, including experiences in corporate IT, startups, and the social sector.

Early Career in IT

• Vinaya's original plan was to study civil engineering, but her principal encouraged her to switch to computer science due to her gender.
• Despite initial challenges and limited practical experience, a project in COBOL sparked her interest in software development.
• Her husband, an IT engineer, encouraged her to pursue a career in the field.

Finding Passion at Infosys

• After getting married, Vinaya joined Infosys despite initial reservations.
• The initial training period was difficult, but the collaborative work environment with diverse teams motivated her.
• She discovered her passion for problem-solving, particularly collective problem-solving in a team setting.

Work-Life Balance Challenges

• Marrying young and having a demanding job at Infosys presented work-life balance challenges.
• Her supportive in-laws and husband, who encouraged her to focus on her career for the first five years, helped manage the situation.
• Traveling abroad for work required additional compromises to maintain family harmony.

Leaving Infosys and Starting a Startup

• Inspired by her father's entrepreneurial spirit, Vinaya dreamt of creating jobs someday.
• After 11 years at Infosys, the need to care for her children and the distance from her husband in Malaysia led to her resignation.
• Her mother's strong words about the impact on their children became a turning point.

Starting an Animation Franchise

• Taking a break from corporate life, Vinaya explored franchise opportunities
• Animation, a growing field, emerged as the final choice, and she started a franchise of an animation institute.
• While the business didn't generate significant profit, Vinaya takes pride in providing a platform for young talent to launch their careers.

Work in the Social Sector

• Vinaya's entry into the social sector was accidental. Initially, she volunteered one day a week, but her time commitment gradually increased to five days a week.
• The transition from corporate IT to the social sector required adjustments. Vinaya had to learn to appreciate the value of creative solutions and a less structured work environment.
• She also enjoyed building a team of all women who could relate to the challenges faced by the target population.

Challenges of an All-Women Team

• Vinaya acknowledges that managing an all-women team has its challenges, such as difficulty with travel and limited budget.
• However, she believes the team's ability to connect with the target population is a significant benefit.

Career Advice

• For Early Career Professionals: Vinaya recommends new graduates invest five years in their careers, being open to learning new skills and flexible in their work approach.
• For Mid-Career Professionals: She acknowledges that some individuals may need to decelerate their careers at a certain point due to life circumstances. However, Vinaya emphasizes the possibility of re-entering the workforce or even transitioning to a new field altogether.
• After 10 years of experience, Vinaya suggests that professionals consider how they can "give back" to their field or community.

Overall

• Vinaya's career path demonstrates the value of flexibility and lifelong learning.
• Her experiences highlight the opportunities for women in both the IT sector and the social sector.

Vinaya has close to 24 years of varied experience in the IT services industry, and more recently in the social sector. She started her career with Infosys, where she spent a decade amassing technical knowledge and honing her management and customer relationship skills. During her stint in Infosys, she got the opportunity to work in different geographical cultures spanning America, Europe & Asia. During the phase of motherhood, she shifted from the hectic corporate job to founding her own startup, a design services company for training and development of multimedia solutions. She was selected for Goldman Sachs-ISB sponsored – “10000 World Women Entrepreneurs Management Program” in 2011. 

Through a common network, she found an opportunity to get associated in the social sector. At Dhwani Foundation, Vinaya engages with NGOs to help them adopt technology platforms to smoothen their operations. Her motto in life has been to keep an open mind and contribute towards any opportunity that comes along. This attitude has helped her have a very diverse career in her 2+ decades of professional life and hence has not had a boring moment so far !

Handles:

Linked in: linkedin.com/in/vinaya-mallya-a30109a

EMail: [email protected]

Today, my guest is Amita Ardha, an enterprise architect who has been focusing on sustainable development solutions.

In this conversation;

• Amita started her career in engineering and transitioned to IT due to her interest in the "why" behind

the coding.

• She realized the importance of understanding the business world and pursued an MBA with a focus on

IT and software engineering.

• She eventually became a certified Enterprise Architect but took a break to focus on personal goals and

explore sustainability.

• This entrepreneurial experience involving a reuse studio helped her develop a broader understanding of

connecting business with sustainability.

• Currently, Amita works as a part-time Enterprise Architect and is involved in sustainability initiatives.

Being a Woman in Tech

• Amita acknowledges the challenges women face in tech but emphasizes focusing on the work and

enjoying the journey.

• She advises against attributing missed opportunities solely to gender and highlights the importance of

recognizing individual journeys.

• Amita encourages women to take breaks without guilt and to keep striving towards their goals.

Sustainability in Computing

• Amita views sustainability as a journey from finite to infinite resourcefulness.
• Focus on Achievable Goals and Resource Efficiency
• Amita emphasizes using resources efficiently and highlights cloud computing as an example of improved

resource utilization.

• She shares an example of identifying hygiene issues faced by sanitation workers and the potential

benefit of providing antifungal cream.

• She recommends offering online sessions like storytelling or technology workshops to contribute

remotely.

You can see some of her work at https://www.instagram.com/bharatireusestudio/

Every year, the Software People Stories dedicates the month of March to women guests, to call out their contributions and highlight some women’s perspectives.

Today, I am very happy to introduce our guest, Krishna Kumari, who is also a podcaster, hosting the New Indian Woman podcast.

In this conversation, Krishna talks about:

• Her first association with computers during her engineering student days and her first job
• Reflecting on the novelty and curiosity around computers and software that generated an attraction to this sector
• Being a campus hire at an IT organization and moving across various roles over the next 22 years
• Leaving the software industry and volunteering at various NGOs for about 7 years
• Getting back to IT handling the applications portfolio at a large university
• How programming languages were associated with an invisible class system among the developers with developers wanting to work only on specific languages
• Getting an opportunity to talk to one of her uber-bosses and complaining about not getting an opportunity to work on a language of her choice and how he could make a difference
• How she kept learning new technologies as they evolved, and as she moved from domain to domain
• Her tips on cross leveraging one’s experience when moving from one domain to another 
• How it is important to understand the user experience and design for that
• Seeking inputs from others as feedback, one gets opportunities to discover one’s strengths
• How it is important to nurture the quality of transparency to gain the trust of team members and how she discloses her strength areas
• How a mentor was instrumental in guiding her in switching to the social sector, by making her think what her contribution to the social sector could be
• Finding a niche to contribute, by bringing her experience in process management in the corporate sector, to the social sector
• How forming genuine relationships with people is very important
• She shares the reason for starting the New Indian Woman podcast, to share experience and perspectives with more women 
• Her career tips: the importance of the qualities that a person brings to the table

Listen on!

More about Krishna Kumari:

I am Krishna and I currently live in Bangalore.​

I have been interested in planning, productivity and time management related topics, right from my middle school.​

Over the years, this expanded to a journey of continuous improvement and learning from others and examining of how I can live my life in a better way. Better for myself and for the people I care.​

These learnings have helped me a lot, no doubt. I have been looking for ways to share the same with the larger community of people around me and learn more and more. And that is the genesis of this blog 'New Indian Woman' and many more things to come…​

And if you are wanting to know more about my background. I come from a small town called Alleppey(now Alappuzha, famous for its backwaters), in Kerala. My mother tongue is Tamil. On the academic front, I have done Engineering in Computer Science and then worked in the new IT industry. I started as a software developer, worked many roles in a leading IT organization. When I was performing the role of General Manager, I decided to leave the corporate world and explore. 

This led me to start volunteering for different causes . During this period, I have

• been a volunteer with NGOs and citizen groups involved in a range of activities from structuring and managing a variety of programs, translating ideas to project opportunities, interacting with partner organisations to facilitate IT implementation, creating visibility of organization's operations towards stakeholder agencies and so on.
• been a visiting faculty for Undergraduate students at a University for Data Management course .
• engaged at my children’s school for multiple activities including implementation of new library software using open source tools
• helped with teaching a Sewing course for Undergraduates at a University as part of their Creative Expressions programme
• launched my own podcast(yes, available in this site)
• pursued my hobbies - the ever common reading and of course, you guessed it right, sewing!​

My learnings come from the 2 decades in the IT world (after a simple small town upbringing), my current explorations and interactions with a wide variety of people from all backgrounds . My learning also comes from being a mother to a young adult daughter and teenage son.

Get in touch

Website : http://thenewindianwoman.com

Facebook : http://facebook.com/newindianwoman

Email : [email protected]

Twitter : https://twitter.com/thenewindianwo1

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thenewindianwoman

Happy Women's Day!

This whole month we have all women's special podcast.

Today, Malini Gowrishankar , Founder and CEO of F5escapes is in conversation with Chitra sharing her experiences as below

 - Describes herself as a nerdy 1st bencher with interest in music poetry, screen tested with Doordarshan

- Support role resolving backend issues, strong fundamentals in delivering high quality software

- the disconnect between developers v/s requirements and realizing business value, software products v/s services

- An understanding of the "why" as key to building good software

- Building software is NOT a transaction, empowering people to encourage curiosity

- A process of keeping many identities, thriving and not just surviving

- Voice acting, scripting and weekend hobbies becoming her career

- Starting f5 travels post the Nirbhaya incident to create an impact

- A trip to Sikkim to prove some perceptions otherwise and travel as a transformation

- create feeling of safety through establishing local connections and traveling in groups, solo women travel

8 years in IT as a techie / project manager, 10+ years in media as voice-over/dubbing artist and creative writer, 8+ years in travel as Founder/CEO of F5 Escapes. Passionate about women empowerment, entrepreneurship and sustainable travel. Lover of rains, books, music, nature, performing arts, animals and children. In her free time, she also trains people in voice-overs; mentors young professionals and women wanting to return to the workplace.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/malini-gowrishankar-40210515/

In second part of this episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Bharath Kumar who is a Marketeer from a Technologist, Head Of Marketing & Cx - Zoho Creator and he’s a Marketing and Content Specialist.

• Believing the part of Authentic marketing 
• Creating a Product first and playing secondary to product but how do you differentiate the values of Zoho organization along with product features
• Unlearning and becoming second fiddle to the Product
• Changing the model to inbound focus from an outbound
• Guiding through the vision instead of power 
• Bharath also shares how he believes that one has to understand their own vision
• Bharath further 

Bharath considers himself as an entrepreneurial marketeer. Bharath has 14+ years of professional work experience that helped him develop expertise in the areas of Lead Generation, Marketing communications, Brand management, Marketing strategy & Content marketing. 

Bharath is the marketing head for Zoho Creators for the last 5 years. Prior to that, Bharath was in the product marketing team for Ramco system and TinyOwl. He was the head of communication of Tamil Nadu Circle for Airtel where he was responsible for the content delivery and creating the brand promise for Airtel. Bharath was a software engineering in Infosys for 3 years. 

Bharath graduated from College of Engineering Guindy in Mining Engineering and Great Lakes Institute of management. 

Bharath can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bharathkumarb-marketer/ 

You can listen to the Part1 of the podcast below

https://pm-powerconsulting.com/blog/creating-your-great-day-every-day-with-bharath-kumar/

In this special episode, as part of our book launch "A Practitioner's guide to Enterprise Agility", we had a panel discussion on Enterprise agility. As part of this panel Sivaguru was in conversation with 3 eminent guest from IT industry, Ramkumar Venkatesan, CTO Cashfree payments, Vandana Malaiya, Partner Semcostyle and S Gopalan, MD Global automation Pvt Ltd.

Listen to this episode to know what were the views on enterprise agility of our guests .

Hope you enjoy the episode!



In today's special episode we have our authors in conversation with our host Chitra. They share their experiences and thoughts with Chitra about the story behind this book. Here is what Chitra has to say about this podcast.

The five tantras of enterprise agility which emerged from real coaching, business and consulting experiences of PM Power Consulting authored by Paramu Kurumathur only meant a sequel was a matter of time.

So when co-author and former colleague of mine Sivaguru asked if I be the host for a podcast on the new book,

I jumped at the chance.

In this conversation, the three co-authors of a practitioner's guide to enterprise agility, J.Veeraraaghavan, Paramu and Sivaguru shared their experiences around the process of creating this piece of work and what embodies its essence, working with their individual styles and ideas especially for which PM Power is a powerhouse and how it eventually all came together.

Apparently, a trio of authors makes for the perfect book recipe. They tell listeners not only about what the practitioner's guide is but also how it enables enterprises on their agility path practically with converting philosophies of the five tantras using tried and tested tools and practices backed by over 15 years of PM Power experience. Listen to this episode of the Software People's Stories podcast.

Listen on...

In the second part of the conversation with my friend Prema Dhas Mohunraj - aka Prem, Automotive Engineer, Product Leader in the Automotive Space, Electrobit(EB), we touched upon his career and reflections, including:

• Shares his decisions and the outcomes of moving roles, company and location
• Talks about family and decisions on moving career 
• Prem shares his learnings on being part of a legal case while dealing with a software quality issue
• Sharing his views on the role definition and switching his avatars based 
• Riding the high on completing a software code
• Working between different meetings
• Shares his learnings and 

Premadhas started his career with Robert Bosch and moved to Wipro where he led several roles for 14+ years. His most recent role was being the Quality Lead/Project Manager for a client. Premadhas moved to Electrobit (EB) as an automotive engineer and then to lead their quality practices and now in Product lead role. 

Premadhas is currently in the Detroit Metropolitan Area. 

Premadhas did his engineering in REC (now NIT) Trichy in Electronics and Communication Engineering. 

Premadhas can be connected at linkedin.com/in/premadhas