Software People Stories

In this conversation, Nash Narasimhan, GM of Ecommerce business of HP India, shares his experience and perspectives related to 

• His academic qualifications include being an engineer and MBA
• Starting his career with Eicher and then moving to Muscat and becoming a product manager for a Ford dealership
• Returning to India for a role, actually two - with HCL and then moving to DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) 
• Getting an intrapreneurial opportunity to set up the online store for Compaq, when internet and ecommerce were just beginning in India
• Becoming the largest ecommerce company in India in a very short period
• Moving to Singapore for a Channel partner development role
• Returning to India to head the technical services division
• Playing the CMO roles for large business units in APAC
• Coming back to India to play a leadership role with the ecommerce and PC business and also hold the responsibility for the digital GTM
• Having witnessed 4 major and many small mergers
• Cars to computers to cloud to commerce- 4Cs
• His approach to manage and perform in these transitions across domains and businesses
• Risk appetite, being a Biker, taking calculated risks, 
• Transition 1: leveraging the marketing experience [4Ps being the same across industries], product management was the same
• Transition 2: company was the same
• Transition 3: leveraging the BCP experience in the services business, to make ecommerce available 24x7
• Anchoring on onen common factor to leverage and one uncomfortable or new factor to spur learning
• Letting results speak for oneself
• Being a good manager helps in thriving in a merger
• The strength of empathy for people needed for a leader to bring about a smooth merger
• The shift in thinking and approach needed when moving from selling hardware [boxes] to selling software, services and solutions that may be less tangible
• The idea of products being consumed as services
• Apart from product, price, place and promotion, one has to add process, people and proof
• His experience of working with software delivery teams
• Career advice: 

1. courage to go after your passion and keep reinventing yourself
2. Look for satisfaction over success
3. Do your job as an act of service

Nash Narasimhan Tupil is Digital Business leader with over 3 decades experience in the IT industry. He is currently country GM of Ecommerce business of HP India. Prior to this CMO of multi billion dollar HP Asia Pacific and Japan enterprise business. 

He is a motorbiker, blogger, photographer and digital enthusiast.

Can be reached @ https://in.linkedin.com/in/nashtupil

In this episode, Raghu Srinivas, Change and Transformation Lead in HSBC, is in conversation with Gayatri Kalyanaraman sharing his career journey and decisions that led him to where he is

• Raghu started as a developer in TCS after completing his education in Bangalore
• He was inspired by him mentor to broaden his horizon and desire to move to Business
• Made an internal transition to business and now leads the strategic transformations in HSBC
• Raghu believes that having a good business sense is like a spine that has to be strong and flexible based on conditions
• He talks about the business disruptions that have happened and compares consciousness and understanding of the ecosystem
• Raghu shares the experiences of working in business starting with the business case and seeing the change through the lifecycle
• Raghu shares his stories on being a technocrat of bridging the business and technology seamlessly and sharing his wisdom in a wise manner
• Common sense of vision, purpose, commitment that’s built over trust brings large teams together to work, communicate and collaborate better
• Raghu shares the constraints that his generation has put on self and how that needs to go off as we usher in the millennials
• Raghu shares a vision of banking that would lead to normalised set of offerings prior to taking off

Raghu Srinivas is a VP, Strategic Business Change Manager in HSBC. He has 2 decades of years of experience in shaping, managing, delivering and embedding strategic organizational change and delivering cutting edge technology solutions.

His vast experience covers a range of activities in project/program lifecycle involving hiring, budgeting and forecasting, contracts management and Request for proposals(RFP), project initiation project planning/execution, leading to benefits realization tracking and project/program closure.

His expertise in Business Analysis has enabled to apply the right tools and techniques for enterprise business analysis, assess capabilities, perform the required gap analysis, assess “Where to play”/”How to Win” strategies, identify strategic choices and make the right recommendations. 

Raghu has more than 10 years of experience in playing people management roles, capability building, motivating individuals to achieve team objectives and at the same time enabling them to achieve their individual career goals.

His vision is to be actively involved in driving department/organization strategy, enabling business units, people, teams and be the driving force for business change management overall

Raghu can be contacted @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/raghu-s-51b07a11/ 

In this episode, Krishna Prasad, known as KP - Coach at PM Power shares his experience related to

Being a coach

Why middle management is usually underserved in terms of coaching help

How he had handled his own personal transition from an individual contributor to a middle manager

His expertise Areas – New Product Development, Product Management, Lean-Agile Transformation, Digital Transformation, Leadership

His education background includes, Ph. D from Indian Institute of Science, Masters in Software Engineering from BITS, Pilani and Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from NIE, Mysore, India.

In this episode, Naresh Jain, Developer, Consultant, Conference Producer and Startup Founder of Xnsio  shares his insights and experiences related to 

-  Starting his career 20 years back building Neural networks for ISRO,

and how he got into corporate life

-  His experience reading the paper “Test infected” by Kent. How it

helped him see the value behind extreme programming

-  How he and his friends put together the first Agile India conference

from 2004

-  Challenges that comes across while organising different community-

based conferences

-  How to build communities using conferences

-  His approach to put a good program/conference together

-  How to balance the aspiring and the experienced speakers, which

gives equal opportunities to both

-  How he landed up as a coach/mentor and influence people while

working in Thoughtworks

-  Differences between roles of coach, mentor, trainer and a captain

-  His love for coding and difference between code room (one step at a

time) and board room (quantum leap)

-  How he handles a board room coming with expectations and big

transformations

-  How to unlearn what you think is the best practice and how it helped

him. Re-evaluate yourself

-  What you can expect in the upcoming “Agile India conference”

-  How Ward inspires him as a great speaker

-  His view on full stack

-  His advice for aspiring coaches/Mentors

-  Agile India conference to be held : Nov 18th-20th a 3 day conference

  More details at: https://2021.agileindia.org/ 

Naresh Jain is an award-winning, internationally recognized Technology & Product Development Expert. Over the last 15 years, he has helped many Unicorns and fortune 500 companies like Jio, Google, Amazon, JP Morgan, Hike, Directi, HP, Siemens Medical, GE Energy, Schlumberger, Shell, Dell, EMC, CA Technologies, etc. to streamline their product development. His hands-on approach of coaching teams by focusing on product discovery and engineering excellence is a key differentiator.  

In 2004, Naresh started the Agile movement in India by creating the Agile Software community of India, a registered non-profit society to evangelize Agile, Lean and other Leading-Edge Software Development methods. He is responsible for creating and organizing 100+ international conferences. 

In recognition of his accomplishments, in 2007 the Agile Alliance awarded Naresh with the Gordon Pask Award for contributions to the Agile Community.

You can find more about him here: https://confengine.com/user/naresh-jain 

Contact handles:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nashjain

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nareshjain/

Website: https://nareshjain.com/

In this conversation, Dr Asoke Talukder shares his experience and perspectives related to 

• His aspiration to be in performing arts, when he was young
• Winning in a detective story writing competition, getting into puppetry and becoming a leading shadow puppeteer in Kolkata 
• Wanting to get into a teaching role, attracted by the vacation periods, to pursue his other performing arts interests
• Starting his programming as a research scholar at Jadavpur university
• Then joining the National Informatics Centre (NIC) before moving on to ICL India (ICIM)
• Taking on challenges when others had given up and this beginning the inception of his interest in multiple areas
• The regulations, restrictions and other technical constraints as well a customer expectations required him to design and implement solutions that were somewhat unprecedented in the Indian context
• A tricky issue caused by unstable connectivity over low speed lines in reverse emulation of terminals in India 
• Delays caused by satellite link latency that had to be overcome through an innovative setup, in a matter of a couple of days, to make things work for an important customer event
• Getting new customers by taking on problems that have been lying on their plates for a long time and solving them
• His getting into genomics and startups
• His passion for teaching, to ignite young minds to get into academics and research
• Writing a syllabus making book based on his entrepreneurial experience with mobile computing
• The importance of security aspects to be treated as functional requirements
• Converting a mis-use case into a functional requirement when it comes to security
• His current interest areas of AI, machine learning and deep learning
• Being still hands on and writing code in R, Python, C/C++ or javascript, node.js, to create proofs of concept that can be enhanced by others
• How his width of knowledge and experience helps him solve or relate a problem to something he might have seen elsewhere
• Synthetic systems and the challenges in understanding and solving healthcare related problems and there is no one-size-fits all
• The need for horizontal knowledge, to be a successful solutioning architect
• His approach and process for quickly leveraging existing knowledge and experience to build more complex solutions
• His career advice, in particular about being a lifelong learner and possibly getting into academics / research

Asoke Talukder is a creative individual with expertise from Compilers to Cancer and Puppetry to Precision Medicine. He worked in India, USA, UK, and Singapore in technology domains for companies like ICL, Fujitsu-ICIM, Microsoft, Oracle, Informix, Digital, Hewlett Packard, Sequoia, Northern Telecom, NEC, KredietBank, iGate, SRIT etc. He cofounded companies like Cellnext and InterpretOmics. He Internet enabled Microsoft PowerPoint. He engineered the first 64-bit database (Informix) in the world for Digital DEC Alpha. He engineered Oracle Parallel Server for Fault Tolerant computer Sequoia, and developed many killer technologies and products. He engineered the first secured international communication network for Hong and Shanghai Bank Bombay and British Bank of Middle East, Dubai. He setup the first X.25 network in India for Department of Telecommunications (currently BSNL & MTNL), and the first Java Competency Centre in India.

He engineered the Network Management System for Queen’s Award winning PDMX. He is recipient of many international awards for innovation and professional excellence including ICIM Professional Excellence Award, ICL Excellence Award, IBM Solutions Excellence Award, Simagine GSMWorld Award, All India Radio/Doordarshan Award etcetera. Asoke has been listed in “Who’s Who in the World”, “Who’s Who in Science and Engineering”, and “Outstanding Scientists of 21st Century”. He authored many research articles, book chapters, and textbooks. Two of his books have been translated in Chinese language. Asoke did M.Sc (Physics) with Bio-physics major and Ph.D (Computer Engineering). He was the DaimlerChrysler Chair Professor at IIIT-Bangalore, Visiting Professor at VIT University Vellore, Adjunct Faculty at ABV Indian Institute of Information Technology & Management, Gwalior and Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, NIT Warangal. Currently he is an Adjunct Faculty Department of Computer Science & Engineering, NITK Surathkal teaching Machine Learning, and Chief Science & Technology Officer at SRIT India. 

In this episode, Seema Joshi, global product leader at NICE is in conversation with Chitra Gurjar sharing her insights and experiences through

• Qualifying as a Civil Engineer, and doing site work, to pursuing an MBA and her first job in tech
• Moving into tech and landing different jobs, finding what she wanted to do
• Working on the frontlines of technology
• Her life as a technical account manager and helping close sales deals
• Learning about personas, how customers buy, who influences, who uses
• Wearing different hats each time every day
• Deal or no deal, a zero or a one
• Contrast in experiences based on what she felt was a good deal and how things turned out
• Using various approaches to prioritization of backlogs like
• 3 P approach - Persona, problem and pervasiveness of the problem
• Thinking in line with a top down business strategy
• creating delighters for the customer, the KANO model
• Building a great product team, starting with product managers themselves feeling comfortable with ambiguity, taking decisions with little data and being under the spotlight in a room full of stakeholders
• Building partnerships of trust and collaboration
• Staying in the problem space, wearing different thinking hats, assumptions, solutions and discovery
• Having a sports mindset in your work - her volleyball analogy 
• Working with engineering teams, incumbent on the PM to find the rhythm of the team and keeping a good tension across different teams by having all ideas on the table and open discussion
• Her suggestions for people wanting to pursue a product management career or a career in technology

Seema is a Product Leader by profession, Engineering & Management graduate by education, voracious volunteer by belonging, sportsperson at heart, and poet by hobby. With 20 years of experience across Product Management, Innovation & Entrepreneurial roles, she is passionate of building products that delight customers and create business impact. Currently a Global Product Leader at NICE, she heads CXone India Product Management and UX teams.

Passionate about community building & diversity Seema actively contributes to various industry initiatives, is Secretary at SEAP (Software Exporters Association of Pune), ex-founding Board Member of Product Leaders Forum, and is a TedX and keynote speaker.

LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/seemajoshis/

In this conversation, Tom Henriksen talks about

• Starting a career in sales and then getting into tech
• Getting into Agile, as part of a team adopting Agile practices, under a manager’s guidance
• His experience of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager
• Understanding the importance of human skills in agile teams
• Some interesting learnings from patterns of behavior in teams, particularly those based on misconceptions
• The fact that humans are hard, code is easy
• Learning to ‘talk their terms’ when connecting with executives, from the Dale Carnegie’s book
• The importance of empathy, to be able to understand the other person’s perspective and context and use appropriate language and create solutions that would meet their needs
• How a visit to observe users for a day gave insights into the what their solution needs to do
• Having an experimental mindset
• The importance of managing up, when it comes to adoption of agile practices in a team
• Why rinse-and-repeat would not work when applying what worked in one context identically in a different context
• Context matters - and, like many agile coaches say, it depends.
• Stop selling agile, start aligning
• Being aware of the dangers of gaming the system, when there is too much stress only on quantitative measurements and metrics
• The trigger for Tom to launch the Agile and DevOps online summits, long before the pandemic hit and all conferences moved online
• How he is able to bring in multiple perspectives by having track chairs
• Some experiments being tried in this year’s summit, such as live sessions, gamification and the structure of the three days along the Shu Ha Ri themes
• Some changes or shifts in themes he has seen over the last 5 years
• His thoughts on curating the content from the summit over the years
• His suggestions for early stage and mid-career professionals

For more details on the Agile Online Summit happening this year between October 25 and 27, you can visit https://agileonlinesummit.com/

Tom Henricksen is a problem-solving technology professional. He has worked in various roles in technology for over twenty years. Tom has learned how to solve challenging issues in technology and lead technical teams

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhenricksen/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TomHenricksen

In this episode Ramesh shares his experience and perspectives related to

• His interest in software and programming that was fueled by an IIT professor teaching programming
• One of the very few who did a software project as part of his degree and then joining Tata Burroughs from campus, as the first batch
• Getting back to academics to get his Master’s degree
• How his extra learning at IISc and the work experience in the first couple of years helped him skip a few courses and jump into more advanced topics during the Masters’
• Joining HCL in their Singapore venture, Far East Computers Limited
• How his experience with facing customers helped in the assignment of setting up a QA environment at Oracle headquarters
• Moving to management roles in engineering management
• Jumping at the opportunity to start a development center in India from scratch
• Thinking that he could do that for a year and then get back to the USA
• How he had to take on various responsibilities of not just delivering, but also establishing processes, building networks for recruitment etc
• Realizing the need to take innovative approaches to attract the right talent, when competing with other companies that would hire in large numbers
• Taking up a teaching role at Anna University 
• How that gave him an opportunity to observe the students over a semester, and not having to learn by interacting for 20 minutes in an interview
• Extending this learning through internships 
• Starting to love teaching
• The trigger for his getting into writing [and authoring books], some of which are standard curriculum recommendations in about 50 universities across the world
• “Transferring knowledge to others will have a bigger impact on Society as a whole”
• Enjoying the role of a teacher at various institutions
• How some interests popped up by necessity, 
• Slicing time every day for work, education and family - to make time for all 
• Taking risks knowing that all options may not progress as desired
• Some tips that would help selecting the right candidates
• How everyone should feel comfortable to disagree, but not be disagreeable
• how , as a technical guy, you can have all the answers, but as a leader, you should have all the questions
• His career advice:
• Being passionate about what one does
• Do not undervalue the importance of keeping your skills up to date
• Why you should become useless for your job

Please bear with some audio distractions in the background in patches. You will love this story..

Gopalaswamy Ramesh is an independent consultant, eminent author and has served as visiting / adjunct professor in several reputed universities and an acknowledged thought leader in the areas of global software project management, software testing and related areas as well as on soft skills. He has over three decades of experience in industry, consulting and teaching. He played a key role in establishing Oracle’s India Development Center and grew it from zero to close to 500 people. His contributions to this phenomenal growth were acknowledged in Oracle International magazine  When he left Oracle in 2002, he was their Senior Director, heading the engineering team at Bangalore.

Before returning to India in 1994 to set up Oracle IDC, Ramesh worked in Oracle Headquarters in Redwood Shores, California, holding several technical and management positions. He also headed pre-sales and post-sales support of Oracle products in the ASEAN countries while working at Far East Computers, Singapore from 1982 till 1988. During this stint, he actively participated in launching and supporting Oracle in several countries in the region.

Since 2002, Ramesh has been an independent consultant, offering consultancy services in the areas of global software project management, software testing and soft skills in India and abroad. His passion for teaching and sharing his vast knowledge and rich experience have resulted in his writing eight books have become best sellers and two of them being also translated to Chinese language. His books have been widely read and used as prescribed or reference books in a number of universities in India and abroad. The book Managing Global Software Projects won the National Award for the Best Book.

As a thought leader, Ramesh has been an active invited participant in several well known conferences and workshops. He has played the roles of Program Chair, Technical Review Committee Head as well as an invited keynote presenter in several international conferences.

Passionate about interacting with students and imparting relevant practical knowledge and training to students, Ramesh has been an Adjunct Professor in several leading universities and has taught in a number of very reputed institutions like IIIT-Bangalore, IIT Madras, Anna University, Chennai and Amrita School of Business. He was part of the Academic Advisory Board of Project Management Institute, India from 2009 to 2014, during which time he was the Technical Committee Chair for first two Research and Academic Conferences (RAC) on Project Management in India.

Ramesh is passionate about inculcating the right value systems in school children and about people with special needs. He has also written books on moral education நிச்சயம் வெல்லலாம் நேரான பாதையில் in Tamil and Virtuous and Victorious – Always in English for school children. He has translated from English to Tamil the best-selling book GIFTED about the achievements of fifteen differently abled people. He and his wife, Lakshmi Ramesh who is a trained special educator are active participants in initiatives on people with special needs.

Ramesh holds a B E Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, a M S Degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (the thesis on Automatic Programming won the National Gold medal) and M S Degree in Engineering Management from Stanford University, California.

Ramesh may be reached at [email protected]

In this conversation, Jayashree Rajagopalan, Engineering Lead in Amazon shares her experience and perspectives related to 

• Started technology journey by being inspired by peers and deeply passionate to improve
• Shares her humble beginnings from the temple town of Trichy and joined Robert Bosch
• Higher education after a marriage break gave way to structured thinking
• Jayashree shares her passion in music and how her current work in Amazon music has brought her two world together
• She shares how to make one attuned to always on streaming industry by creating availability and resilience in the hardware as well as one’s decision making processes
• She talks about times of immense pressure on her time to balance work and childcare and tapping on all the options at her disposal to keep continuing her career
• Progressively pushing the work area made her not only a reliable go-to person but also ensured that she keeps doing something additional to what the work asked for
• Creating that unique value prop that you bring to the table has been her mantra to not only continually learn and add value to her firm but also push her career goals 
• Jayashree shares some of the scaling mantras that she employs at home that has worked well @ covid times
• Jayashree shares of creating an environment of safety as well as continuous improvement in the fast paced tech environment. She has some of the basic audits that she does to ensure that goals are reached
• She shares how people and entertainment industry changing to a hub moving inside our homes 
• Jayashree shares that one should have a never quit attitude and continuously strive to move one notch better than the previous day for oneself

Jayashree is the engineering lead for the Amazon Music and based out of Bangalore. In her current role, she leads the latest disruptions within the streaming industry for the global outreach of Amazon Music. In her words ‘Leading platform teams on content and data to drive success, innovation and customer delight’ is what brings zing to her step.

Jayashree started her career in Robert Bosch India as a software engineer working in the telecom industry. She moved to the silicon valley to pursue her higher education. She has been part of the telecom industry in the first 16 years of her career and moved to the streaming industry as part of Amazon. Her initial career includes marquee companies such as Oracle, EMC, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia where she worked in several roles as an individual contributor to Tech Lead to Design lead prior to taking up leadership roles. 

Jayashree is passionate about music and is classically trained. Her daughters are also classically trained in music. Jayashree is a graduate of NIT Trichy and San Jose University

She can be reached @ Linkedin/Jayashree

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Thank you

In this conversation, Anantha Natarajan - known as Anand - a colleague and coach at PM Power Consulting, he shares his experience and perspectives related to coaching senior leaders and mid level managers

• How he had to rediscover himself and his approach while working with experienced managers and leaders
• Demonstrating your competence without giving solutions
• What he had to change about himself.. And knowing one’s place
• About the approach of earning the trust of one’s boss
• Helping leaders look great by helping them achieve their goals
• When you are quiet, you have to listen
• The impact of working in a dispersed mode in earning trust and establishing working relationships
• His thoughts on the continuous flow of value
• What is value - in value flow - and three dimensions to consider when discussing flow of value
• His views on flow of value and playing bridge
• The need for process and partnerships among managers
• The importance of experimentation and retrospections

Reach him @

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anantha-natarajan-pm-power/

Know more about him

https://pm-powerconsulting.com/experts/ananth/