Software People Stories

In this conversation, Ranjani Mani shares her experience stories with Chitra on

• Her belief in making a world that our children can live in
• Product management, analytics and consulting for 14 years, customer experience & startup mentoring
• 3 things she's passionate about - Reading, Writing about Tech & AI, becoming better
• Doing her bit to enable women with choices
• The impact of growing up in an environment of equality and mutual respect
• Taking a user centric approach to designing solutions
• Why she did an MBA, how it helped open her mind, deal with ambiguity and welcome diverse views
• Why so many AI projects fail
• How Product Management experience compliments her analytics role
• Having multiple interests and curiosity
• Human centered AI
• Symbiosis of AI and human presence
• Why she believes we need more women in analytics, the broken rung and the 5C framework to own your career

Ranjani has over 14 years of experience in setting up and growing data science, product management, consulting, and customer experience analytics teams. Her interests lie in solving business problems through analytics, strategy and leadership.

Ranjani currently works at VMware India, designing and supporting SaaS transformation through Customer Success with business analytics and AI-driven customer experience. She also drives and collaborates VMware's site activities engaging with start-ups and VCs in the India ecosystem to identify collaboration opportunities.

Ranjani is a DEI evangelist who is keen on bringing more women into the technology space, specifically Analytics.

A passionate writer and voracious reader, Ranjani writes about Tech and AI, Future of Work with exponential technologies, leadership, and managing Analytics teams, book reviews on LinkedIn and her personal website. She also reviews interesting books and provides #2MinExplainer videos on STEM, Finance and Behavioural Economics on her YouTube channel 'Reviews with Ranjani'.

Ranjani holds a bachelor's degree in Engineering (Electronics & Communication) and an MBA from MICA, Ahmedabad.

She can also be reached via LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: All views expressed are personal in nature and solely that of the speaker/author.

In this conversation, Hamsa Ravikiran and Sivaguru exchange Japanese language and Sanskrit snippets as Hamsa shares her stories on

• Working after her BE and getting exposure to a breadth of software development from coding and testing to project and program management at Exim Soft
• Taking a break, doing an entrepreneurial program at IIM Bangalore and getting the first prize for her business idea
• Joining IBM to conceptualize and implement a knowledge management system
• Taking another break and starting a company to deliver marketing services, by women working from home
• Discovering Youth for Seva an NGO, and finding her calling
• Working with corporate CSR’s on awareness around waste management & segregation
• Hooked onto learning Sanskrit since 2013 and conducting workshops on spoken Sanskrit to doing her MA, MPhil and now planning to do her PhD in Sanskrit
• Experiences working from home and finding a balance between remote and in-person working & setting boundaries when working from home
• Contrasting being an entrepreneur and a project manager in a corporate setting
• Relevance and applicability of techniques learned as and entrepreneur and/or working in corporates, to the social sector to help sustain those activities
• Continuously motivated and challenged while learning Sanskrit
• Translating principles from the Ramayana by examining its stories like case studies to apply in daily life, today
• Finding one’s calling or purpose in life and a message in Sanskrit 

An engineering graduate who joined the IT industry as a programmer,  moved on to become project manager working in Indian software company  and later an MNC. Hamsa completed the Management Program for Women Entrepreneur (MPWE ) from IIM Bangalore and  co-founded an IT & Marketing firm named AddTo . She then worked with an NGO called Youth For Seva as a coordinator for Environmental issues and Corporate Social Responsibility. She took up Sanskrit Studies, conducted  spoken sanskrit workshops, organised exhibitions and events to teach and promote sanskrit . Hamsa completed her MA - Mphil in Sanskrit and is currently pursuing a Phd in Sanskrit.

Hamsa can be reached through her email [email protected]

In this conversation Shane Hastie and Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting talk about

• Shane starting his career in South Africa in 1982
• Getting a solid grounding in mainframe programming from an intensive training program & programming in Assembler for a teller machine software for a financial institution
• Working on ‘End User Computing’ approaches on the mainframe, very closely with the business users - very similar to the Agile approaches of today
• Being one of the early users of a PC, and with the limited capabilities, considering the mainframe as the best peripheral that one could attach to a PC!
• Starting a company with his wife, focusing on solutions in a PC
• Building solutions for small and medium airlines in Africa
• Moving back to New Zealand and joining a company there
• Leveraging his experience in business analysis and project management as a trainer
• Getting an opportunity, in 2002 - to have close interactions with many of the signatories of the Agile manifesto - and understand the intent behind many of those ideas
• Working with ICAgile for the last four years and how ICAgile has internalized Agile thinking, particularly the humanistic values and in the ways of working
• His transitions to various roles over his career
• The excellent support he got from his wife all through
• The transition to a trainer, wanting to share his knowledge and experience with others & training over 40000 people
• How he could easily adapt to ambiguity and taking to the Agile approaches [including precursors such as Rapid Application Development etc]
• A bad experience in delivering to specs, but not the need
• Most people who come to classes want to learn and they are ‘participants’ in their own learning journeys
• The impact of the pandemic on in person learning and the effectiveness of remote learning and his tips on adapting in person delivery to remote learning
• On the ethical coaching framework initiative
• How to find out if one has in them, to be a trainer or coach

Shane Hastie, MIM ICP-PO ICE-AC

Shane joined ICAgile in 2017 as the Director of Agile Learning Programs and is now the Director of Community Development. He contributes to the strategic direction and expansion of ICAgile’s learning programs, including maintaining and extending ICAgile’s learning objectives, providing thought leadership, collaborating with industry experts, and supporting the larger ICAgile community, which includes more than 150 Member Organizations and over 100,000 ICAgile certification holders.  In the Community Development role, he is responsible for building and nurturing the community of over 500 ICAgile Authorized Instructors.  

Shane is a TBR certified Trainer and is authorized to teach the Facilitating Exceptional Remote Learning class from Judy Rees.

 Over the last 30+ years Shane has been a practitioner and leader of developers, testers, trainers, project managers and business analysts, helping teams to deliver results that align with overall business objectives. Before joining ICAgile he spent 15 years as a professional trainer, coach and consultant specialising in Agile practices, business analysis, project management, requirements, testing and methodologies for SoftEd in Australia, New Zealand and around the world.

He has worked with large and small organisations, from individual teams to large transformations all around the world. He draws on over 30 years of practical experience across all levels of Information Technology and software intensive product development.

Shane was a director of the Agile Alliance from 2011 to 2016 and was the founding Chair of Agile Alliance New Zealand. 

He leads the Culture and Methods editorial team for InfoQ.com where he hosts the weekly InfoQ Culture Podcast.

He was one of the authors for both versions of the Agile Extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge and a member of the core team for BABOK V3.

He is co-chair of the Agile Alliance Agile Coaching Ethics initiative, working to produce a code of ethical conduct for agile coaching.

He is co-author of the recent book #noprojects - A Culture of Continuous Value, available on Amazon and from InfoQ

“I firmly believe that humanistic way of working and the agile mindset are desperately needed in organisations all around the globe today.  Taking agile values and principles beyond software is important and making sure they are properly embedded is absolutely crucial for success – we’re in an industry that touches every aspect of people’s lives and massively influences society as a whole and I want to be a part of making sure that industry is both ethical and sustainable.”

Contact info:

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @shanehastie

LinkedIn: shanehastie  

InfoQ Author Profile

In this conversation Sunil and Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting talk about

• How he accidentally joined his friend in a startup, when his campus offer from a larger company was put on hold
• His liking for software, right from the 6th grade, influenced greatly by his father
• How various experiments and explorations he undertook, helped indirectly and subtly build his brand and portfolio
• How the startup experience is like an adrenaline inducing activity and one has the opportunity to pick up anything related to the product and learn, as a startup is always short on hands
• Learning the ropes of programming in the large - as a team and the interfaces and experience of working with hardware that will run your software
• That inputs could be from beyond just keyboard and mouse
• The added complexities of enterprise software, where your code needs to integrate and work with other pieces that move on their own
• Why one should design enterprise products that are least disruptive
• The unique experience when you see your first customer actually deploying your solution in the enterprise
• This is an experience that one can get only in startups and a story where this learning happened
• His transitions from a startup employee, one of the initial employees  (founding members) in a startup to a co-founder
• Understanding the impact of ‘not now’ situations and decisions
• The significance of explaining the process, when someone is not clear about decisons
• On what he considers non-negotiable
• The key skills and aptitudes necessary for anyone to get into a startup
• His guidance on finding the right reasons to change, particularly mid-career
• How founding teams assemble themselves and an optimistic outlook for a career in IT

Sunil Mukundan likes to describe himself as a startup junkie who loves to build products from ground up and be a part of primal decision making in a company. He has, over the years, dabbled in video, compression, networking among others. co-authored multiple patents in the video delivery and networking domain.

His linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunil-mukundan-9881563/

In this episode, Mahalakshmi and Lakshminarayan  share their perspectives with Sivaguru on:

• How they got into IT
• Maha finding her liking for bug fixing with some development, over development only
• How a production support role gave her more flexibility with her time
• Having a supportive environment at work and home, and more flexibility with time after having a kid
• Being lucky to be on a project that allowed this flexibility
• How, for Lakshmi, while there were changes in the work hours, there was no change in terms of the understanding and support for women colleagues
• Chipping in to support Maha with some of the child related activities
• How, working from home has increased the expectations on availability over extended hours
• The growing mutual understanding among peers and teams or the need to balance personal and work demands, particularly while working in a dispersed model
• The significance and benefit of discussions on the nature of work with one’s spouse, even before getting married for better understanding

Lakshminarayanan Natarajan, has been in the IT industry for 12 years and is currently working as project lead in development work.

Mahalakshmi Ganesan has been in the  IT industry for the last 7 years and is presently a technology analyst , working in an application support team .

In this episode, Manju and Rajiv Kuchhal share their perspectives with Shiv on:

• Manju starting her career with TCS and taking a break to take care of kids, then getting into the social sector
• Rajiv, about how he got into IT accidentally
• How his knowledge of Pascal got him into IT/Telecom work and later, how he got into Infosys
• Leaving the corporate world about 13 years ago and being active in the startup and social sector spaces
• How Manju wanted to have flexibility at work even while in the corporate sector and how the social sector has given her that optionHer ways to encourage women in her team, to get back after a career break
• Rajiv talks about the opportunities for women in the startup sector, possibly part time as well
• Variations in the clarity of work to be done and pressure between corporates and startups
• Opportunities to contribute to various aspects beyond just writing code
• Manju also talks of the need for a support system when working from home
• Rajiv mentions how some societal attitudes need to change faster, when it comes to men taking a pause or going slow in their careers
• About any differences faced by women in startups and social sector
• About encouraging women and enabling them to get back to work, while respecting their freedom to to not re-enter the corporate life
• Support groups that can help women in transition 

Manju Kuchhal has nearly 20 years of experience in area of technology. For last 8+ years she has been associated with Dhwani Foundation which works towards providing technology solutions to NGOs. She is currently Trustee of Dhwani Foundation. At Dhwani she works with NGOs in identifying the areas where technology can help their operations, engages with relevant technology solution providers and help them with implementation of such solutions. Before that she worked with Tata Consultancy Services in their software division.

Rajiv is an active angel investor and mentor to multiple startups in the social enterprise and technology space. He is an Advisor and Board Member of many such companies. Rajiv spent more than 2 decades in IT/BPO industry, mainly with Infosys group. He led Infosys’ foray into telecom and product engineering services space in early ’90s. He became one of the youngest Business Head and Management Council members at Infosys. He led Infosys’ foray into BPO as a founding team member of Progeon (now Infosys BPO). He was Chief Operating Officer of OnMobile and was part of senior management team instrumental in helping OnMobile scale as an organisation and consolidate its market leadership.

In this episode, Priya and Sridhar Parthasarathy share their perspectives with Sivaguru on:

• Priya's determination to do MCA, after missing an opportunity to do engineering in Bidar
• Starting her career with Robert Bosch and moving on to Mascot and Wipro as a project leader and getting into ERP solutions
• Setting up the EAI practice in Cognizant
• Wanting to contribute to the Digital India initiative and taking up a role in NASSCOM
• Sridhar's journey starting at BITS Pilani and a small firm before doing his masters and then to Tata Unisys, before joining Wipro
• Now, a cybersecurity consultant, managing his own venture, Purple Team
• How the excellent support from family has been helping Priya both at home and career, complemented by the guidance from supervisors and managers at work
• Priya's experience of setting up and growing the EAI practice
• Sridhar shares how he saw his mother being a career woman and was keen on marrying a career woman
• His philosophy of having relationships based on equality and mutual respect
• The support he gets from Priya in his career movement decisions
• Being sounding boards from the industry for each other
• Sridhar also shares instances where he was able to encourage and support women facing some challenges at work, due to demands on their time or commute
• How, Having a woman entrepreneur in the team helps create the empathy needed at the workplace
• Possible reasons why we find few women in cybersecurity
• The impact of working from home on balancing work and personal demands
• Their views on IT as a career choice and mid career questions that many of us face

Priya is spearheading NASSCOM's Future Skills initiative with the remit of skilling/reskilling/upskilling of over 4 million people in cybersecurity for India by 2025. She has seen all the opportunities and challenges that women encounter both as an engineer and as a leader. Prior to her stint in NASSCOM she was heading Cognizant's Security practice. Priya is an alumna of SJCE Mysore.

Contacts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priya-madhavan-b79a3714/

Future Skills: https://futureskills.nasscom.in/

Sridhar heads the cybersecurity consulting firm Purple Team, specializing in cloud security. In the 30+ years he has been in the Indian software industry he has been trying figure out what makes it tick. Every time he thinks he has, they change the rules!  

Reach him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridharparthasarathy/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sridhu

Webpage: www.purpleteam.in

This podcast was created on Hubhopper studio. If you wish to start your own podcast for free, visit www.hubhopperstudio.com. Hubhopper is India's leading podcast creation platform. Start your podcast with Hubhopper studio & get your voice heard across platforms like Spotify, Gaana, Google podcasts, Wynk Music and more. Click on the link in the episode description or visit www.hubhopperstudio.com

In our episode, the first of a series to mark women's day 2021, Chitra from PM Power consulting is in conversation with Pratibha Batchu, General Manager heading the India Operations for Bosch Service Solutions Business unit of Bosch and Sirish Batchu, Managing Director of Danlaw Technologies India Ltd.; where they share -

• How they chose careers in in software and technology
• From one being rooted in Bangalore, to the other having lived in different cities
• Their thoughts on diversity - of people, places, experiences, and careers
• Bringing empathy to and from the workplace, through their relationship & work experiences
• Going back to first principles when in doubt
• Approaching inter-generational engagement at home and in the work place, through recognizing workplace diversity, learning and un-unlearning to have conversations at every level
• Leadership tips through 3P's, 3A's, empathy, making an effort to understand "why" and enabling an environment to embrace & minimize inequalities
• Making each day your day & respecting diversity of all kinds - thought, experiences & inequality

Pratibha is a Business leader with 24+ years of experience at Bosch, India with a passion for engineering, solution design, problem solving, process engineering and leading teams. She is currently General Manager heading the India Operations for Bosch Service Solutions Business unit of Bosch. She has experience in various roles ranging from software development, project management, quality processes, Head of L&D function in HR for technical competency development and knowledge management to being a leader of business teams in the IT services domain. She has worked on long term assignments at Germany and USA Bosch units, giving her a perspective on intercultural aspects and leadership.

She thrives on her interest to learn and lead topics that are challenging, with an opportunity to grow the business - emphasizing on stability, creativity and growth with high customer and market focus. Pratibha is a certified Prosci Change Management Professional, EFQM business excellence assessor and CMMI qualified assessor.

She is also a certified graphologist, a calligrapher and an avid traveler in her free time.Pratibha can be reached via

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pratibha-sirish-batchu-322545b/

Sirish Batchu is a technocrat who is passionate about bringing technologies to life to solve real world problems. Being a Computer Science Engineer in the Automotive world for about three decades, he believes that Software will entirely transform the future Mobility solutions.

He is currently the Managing Director of Danlaw Technologies India Ltd. and responsible for the managing the group companies in India for the products, services and manufacturing for Connected Vehicles and Automotive Electronics solutions. Prior to this, he was the Vice President - Digital Technology at Ather Energy Private Ltd, responsible for the Software and Intelligence solutions for the Electric Scooters.

He has led leading pioneering efforts in the ACE (Autnonomous, Connected & Electric) domains through his work at organizations like Mahindra & Mahindra and Bosch & has been instrumental in bringing many new technology concepts/ideas to life. He has a strong foundation in R&D by virtue of his initial experience at Indian Space Research Organization.

He is recognized as a Thought Leader and an influencer in the industry in the Connected Vehicles and EVs space and Distinguished speaker in various national and international forums and was conferred the ‘Digital Transformational Leader’ Award by CeBIT India in 2016.

He has to his credit, the creation of “Mahindra DiGiSENSE”, a first of its kind Connected Vehicles Platform for the entire Mobility Sector across Mahindra & Mahindra and had major contribution in the development of the first Driverless Tractor in India at M&M.

On the personal front, he is passionate about music, an avid singer, movie buff & loves to travel.

Sirish can be reached via https://www.linkedin.com/in/sirishbatchu/

This podcast was created on Hubhopper studio. If you wish to start your own podcast for free, visit www.hubhopperstudio.com. Hubhopper is India's leading podcast creation platform. Start your podcast with Hubhopper studio & get your voice heard across platforms like Spotify, Gaana, Google podcasts, Wynk Music and more. Click on the link in the episode description or visit www.hubhopperstudio.com

In this episode Naresh Bansal, Co-Founder, Kleeto.com and Next gen paper solutions Pvt Ltd is in conversation with Gayatri from DBS India. Naresh shares his experiences on

• Starting his technology journey inspired by Rajiv Gandhi’s vision of tech enabled India
• Hard work and Education as 2 pillars that drove his entire family towards success
• Interesting narrative on his experiences with visa consulate and trysts in US
• Making a career in network management and telecom domain providing core and value added services
• Found an opportunity in the Digitization of documents and started Kleeto.com
• How connections have played an important role by connecting customers with solutions
• Life as a founder where you hold bottom line for staff, customer outcome and technology 
• His passion towards environment and urges everyone to look at taking less from the environment and contribute more
• His dual predicament where business understanding has to be in balance with Technology solutioning in harmony

Naresh Bansal is co-founder and CTO at kleeto. He is a Technology professional with 30+ years of experience in technology based companies based in the US and in India. Kleeto provides end to end intelligent solutions for information and document management. kleeto have services and technologies to help customers with indexing, automation, and encrypting flows related to information and documents. kleeto provides document storage with anytime anywhere access to documents with intelligent, and customized access control. 

Naresh joined workforce in the 90s with a keen interest in software and technology after finishing his B Tech in Computer Science from IET Lucknow. Naresh worked with Pertech Computers, HCL America and River Run Software Group during 1990s on many green field technologies. Naresh joined Cisco systems in 2000 as he decided to join the Telecom and Networking boom. Apart from Cisco, Naresh went on to work with Bay Pacekts, Genband Technologies and Comviva Technologies.

After working for 20+ years, Naresh decided to venture into the entrepreneurial world by co-founding kleeto with focus on the document management services for individuals which later pivoted to Document Management Services for corporate.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naresh-chand-b59461/ 

This podcast was created on Hubhopper studio. If you wish to start your own podcast for free, visit www.hubhopperstudio.com. Hubhopper is India's leading podcast creation platform. Start your podcast with Hubhopper studio & get your voice heard across platforms like Spotify, Gaana, Google podcasts, Wynk Music and more. Click on the link in the episode description or visit www.hubhopperstudio.com

In this episode,Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting is in conversation with Dr. Pramod Varma, CTO of EkStep and Chief architect of Aadhaar, where Pramod talks about

• His early school years studying in his mother tongue, Malayalam
• Getting into Applied mathematics for higher studies
• Joining Infosys and learning to address the challenges of teaching academically high performers
• His experience in using some of the earliest technology components of the internet
• How his research and teaching led him to conceptual thinking and architectural thinking, through a non-linear learning approach for himself
• HOw he developed the skills to communicate the big vision to individual contributors too - by thinking and working in a startup mode
• His principles to Abstract, Isolate and define interfaces first
• Making sure the interface and automation are sollid
• Building for refactorability
• Importance of understanding the why behind the why behind the why
• Design for a decade, implement for today
• His idea of coming up with an addressable recipient for payment
• His thoughts on Chief architect or design by committee model
• His four tips for an aspiring architect

Dr. Pramod Varma is the CTO of EkStep, a not-for-profit creating learner-centric, technology enabled platform aiming to provide learning opportunities to 200 million children in India. In addition, he continues to be the Chief Architect of Aadhaar, India's digital identity program that has successfully covered more than 1.2 billion people in a short span of 7 years. He is also the architect of various India Stack layers such as eSign, Digital Locker, and Unified Payment Interface (UPI) all of which are now working at population scale in India. He has, along with Nandan Nilekani, co-founded beckn.org a non-profit creating open source protocol specifications for hyperlocal commerce.

He is an advisor to Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), National Payment Corporation (NPCI), Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), National Health Authority (NHA), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and helps with many digital public infrastructure initiatives. He regularly speaks at technology conferences

and is part of advisory groups of various national projects from time to time.

Before joining UIDAI in July 2009, he was the Chief Technology Architect and Vice President of Research at Sterling Commerce, now part of IBM. He joined Sterling in 2005 when Sterling Commerce acquired Yantra Corporation, a leading supply chain software company based in Boston, USA. At Yantra Corporation he has been anchoring all technology and architecture strategies and has been key part in building Yantra’s founding team. He began his career as part of the research team at Infosys Technologies and has been part of team that built an Internet banking module and a powerful web application server as early as 1995.

Over the past 25+ years, he has studied architectures spanning from mainframes to web and has worked extensively with most programming languages, platforms, and databases. He has researched and taught various courses in Database Tuning, Distributed Computing, Internet Technologies, and Computer Architectures among others.

Pramod holds a Master’s and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science along with a second Master’s in Applied Mathematics. His interests include Internet scale distributed architectures and intelligent systems. He is passionate about technology, science, society, and teaching.

This podcast was created on Hubhopper studio. If you wish to start your own podcast for free, visit www.hubhopperstudio.com. Hubhopper is India's leading podcast creation platform. Start your podcast with Hubhopper studio & get your voice heard across platforms like Spotify, Gaana, Google podcasts, Wynk Music and more. Click on the link in the episode description or visit www.hubhopperstudio.com