Software People Stories

In the first part of 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:

• Shortest stint in Robert Bosch for 2 years and talks about today’s trend of people moving out in less than 2 months
• Been an automotive engineer for the better part of his career and worked in different parts of business with . Premadhas jokes that he was getting only one firm to get a pay check but very different clients and even mail ids
• Shares his view of the automotive industry - number of chips in a car to number of people who used to work in the software side during the entire transformation 
• Proliferation of companies coming in the space - shortened the cycle of development - want to keep up with technology and mimicking the cellphone designs
• Talks about the connected cars and keeps the conversation on what’s happening on the road in a real-time basis. 
• Shares the need to adapt in 2-3 year period to new roles (within or outside the firm) to ensure that we continue to learn from our ecosystem
• Premadhas talks about mentoring and how that support has helped him identify newer roles that he has just joined in as a Product Lead in Electrobit
• Prem shares some of his personal decisions and shares his change from being a manager to an individual contributor and it brought him to a new city to write C++ code

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

In the first part of 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:

• Shortest stint in Robert Bosch for 2 years and talks about today’s trend of people moving out in less than 2 months
• Been an automotive engineer for the better part of his career and worked in different parts of business with . Premadhas jokes that he was getting only one firm to get a pay check but very different clients and even mail ids
• Shares his view of the automotive industry - number of chips in a car to number of people who used to work in the software side during the entire transformation 
• Proliferation of companies coming in the space - shortened the cycle of development - want to keep up with technology and mimicking the cellphone designs
• Talks about the connected cars and keeps the conversation on what’s happening on the road in a real-time basis. 
• Shares the need to adapt in 2-3 year period to new roles (within or outside the firm) to ensure that we continue to learn from our ecosystem
• Premadhas talks about mentoring and how that support has helped him identify newer roles that he has just joined in as a Product Lead in Electrobit
• Prem shares some of his personal decisions and shares his change from being a manager to an individual contributor and it brought him to a new city to write C++ code

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

In this conversation with my colleague Srinivasan Sundararajan - aka Srini, we touched upon many topics related to personal finance as well as non-financial planning, including:

• His passion for data and analytics
• Understanding that behavior matters as much or more than data and how his own approach to analytics has evolved over time
• The year end being a logical time window to reflect and plan
• Start your reflection and planning from self
• Picking the vital few aspects that need to be addressed and focusing measurements and analysis on that
• His reflection on the past year on a personal level
• While he may not be very excited about planning quarter in quarter, using a quarter as a window to review financial investments , but shorter windows based on what the goals are
• Aspects one should be clear about, both when planning and reflecting on the progress on plans
• Having discretionary and non-discretionary aspects in the goals and aspirations
• The importance of making a public commitment or having an accountability buddy
• How to use four words of Intrinsic / extrinsic, need/want driven to test motivation

The link to the blog post referred to by Srini on the four words related to motivation: https://pm-powerconsulting.com/blog/4-words-test-motivational-level/ 

In this conversation, my colleague Mohan Ram shares how

• His reflection and planning cycle is not necessarily synchronized with the calendar year
• His preference to not think too far ahead in the future, but focus on the next 3 months
• How the thought process is always on in the back of one’s mind
• How to avoid the analysis paralysis, but move towards action with a golden optimal rule
• His experience and learnings from two of his bosses
• The significance of journals and journaling
• His preference for more visually laid out elements in a journal and fitting a note within half a page or one page max

In this conversation, my colleague Mohan Ram shares how

• His reflection and planning cycle is not necessarily synchronized with the calendar year
• His preference to not think too far ahead in the future, but focus on the next 3 months
• How the thought process is always on in the back of one’s mind
• How to avoid the analysis paralysis, but move towards action with a golden optimal rule
• His experience and learnings from two of his bosses
• The significance of journals and journaling
• His preference for more visually laid out elements in a journal and fitting a note within half a page or one page max

As we approach the end of a calendar year, many of us have the practice of looking back on the year that was, reflecting on the highs and lows of the year - and shape our dreams and aspirations for the coming year.

At Software People Stories, we are running a special series of conversations with people on their own approaches as well as practices and stories of how their thinking has changed over the years.

Today, it is a conversation between the two co-hosts of the podcast, Chitra and Gayatri. 

In this conversation, they touch upon:

• Chitra’s practice of annual year end reflection
• Gayatri’s professional achievements in a large organization and being bit by the startup bug
• Having many goals at the start of the year and achieving many of them
• Planning for a college reunion that brought together over 250 persons
• Some ideas that did not see as much progress as desired
• Chitra shares her entrepreneurial journey in the learning space
• The strength of the co-founders supporting each other through tough times
• A new role in a new sector that she has recently taken up
• Her delving into authorship
• Their experiences and some practices as coaches and how that has influenced their ways of working
• The significance of time management and also ‘just be’ing.. And not doing anything
• What Chitra would like to build up as a practice in the coming year
• Managing your energy more than time
• Manage FOMO, by sifting through the barrage of information overload and pick the ones most relevant for you and how to get started
• The importance of having safe spaces to help explore problem spaces
• Their ideas for the coming year, that they want to work on
• Some of the techniques they talked about include: Atomic habits and pomodoro technique

Listen on, to be inspired.

As we approach the end of a calendar year, many of us have the practice of looking back on the year that was, reflecting on the highs and lows of the year - and shape our dreams and aspirations for the coming year.

At Software People Stories, we are running a special series of conversations with people on their own approaches as well as practices and stories of how their thinking has changed over the years.

Today, my guest is Paramu Kurumathur, a colleague and a published serial author.

He talks about

• Two types of books he writes
• How he motivates himself to make progress, even when there is no deadline
• How he plans and prioritizes time across projects
• The significance of a calendar
• His thoughts on year end reflections and analogies from astronomy
• And the repeating cycles in calendars and their relevance
• The usefulness of year end reflections and new year resolutions

You can reach him on

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paramu-kurumathur-01489a6/

As we approach the end of a calendar year, many of us have the practice of looking back on the year that was, reflecting on the highs and lows of the year - and shape our dreams and aspirations for the coming year.

At Software People Stories, we are running a special series of conversations with people on their own approaches as well as practices and stories of how their thinking has changed over the years.

Today, I am in conversation with S Gopalan, my colleague from PM Power and an industry veteran. He prefers to be called Gopal.

In this conversation he shares

• That reflections are good
• How his own perspective on annual cycles of appraisal [and feedback] have changed over time
• That he is not fond of setting goals such as losing weight within a fixed timeline, as effective, but rather prefers to take up things that would help make changes in his daily routines
• How taking micro goals per day, could possibly be accumulated and sometimes ‘binge’ completed
• The benefit of making commitments public
• How his approaches are different when reflecting on two different contexts that he is actively associated with: a loosely structured team and a more structured team with tight timelines
• What we, as coaches, need to think about differently - about tools to help us deliver more impactful engagements
• The value of reflections - to make one feel more secure and confident of the future
• You should have a plan, but be open to modifying that to adapt dynamically

As we approach the end of a calendar year, many of us have the practice of looking back on the year that was, reflecting on the highs and lows of the year - and shape our dreams and aspirations for the coming year.

At Software People Stories, we are running a special series of conversations with people on their own approaches as well as practices and stories of how their thinking has changed over the years.

Today, my guest is Paramu Kurumathur, a colleague and a published serial author.

He talks about

• Two types of books he writes
• How he motivates himself to make progress, even when there is no deadline
• How he plans and prioritizes time across projects
• The significance of a calendar
• His thoughts on year end reflections and analogies from astronomy
• And the repeating cycles in calendars and their relevance
• The usefulness of year end reflections and new year resolutions

You can reach him on

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paramu-kurumathur-01489a6/

As we approach the end of a calendar year, many of us have the practice of looking back on the year that was, reflecting on the highs and lows of the year - and shape our dreams and aspirations for the coming year.

At Software People Stories, we are running a special series of conversations with people on their own approaches as well as practices and stories of how their thinking has changed over the years.

Today, I am in conversation with Anantha Natarajan, my colleague from PM Power and an accomplished coach. He prefers to be called Anand.

In this conversation he shares

• How his approach has evolved over the years, influenced by the context and environment he grew up in and moving to a larger city for studies and on to professional life
• A question he was asked by one of his mentors, about 25 years ago, about his aspirations for the future
• His practice of writing things down in his dream book
• A model that has evolved and worked for him, that he calls i-fi; moving from the present I, to the future I
• The importance of the role of a mentor
• Whether discipline is essential for these resolutions
• How considering some responsibilities as chores, obligations or blessings changes ones complete perspective
• The high level overview of his i-fi model
• About improving the quality of the inner mirror
• The relevance of choosing timelines for future plans

For more details on the i-fi model, check out Anand’s blog post.

Accessible at: https://pm-powerconsulting.com/blog/i-fi-a-model-for-designing-your-future-and-personal-change/

I hope you got some ideas to help you reflect and plan for the coming year.

If some other practices have worked for you - or possibly not worked for you, would you like to share your story?

Reach us on [email protected]  and please do share with your networks to spread the word.