38: Photo Processing to Product Management

Here's a conversation between Sairam and Sivaguru of PM Power consulting as they uncover facets of Sairam's journey from when he began working in film technology and film manufacturing to his extensive experience in software design and development. Sairam has worked alongside industrial engineers which helped him to learn, understand and associate his thinking with JIT, Lean, Kanban, BPR etc.  He has adopted IID [Incremental and Iterative Development] – (unknowingly) as early as 1994, to turn around a thrice failed software project, which further helped him later to establish contacts with some of the thought leaders in UML, IID, Scrum and XP.  For the last over 15-years, his focus was on applying these alternate software development models to data intense projects like Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Big Data & Analytics. Listen on as he shares stories around - How unit card readers helped him pivot to software from being a chemistry professional Scientific programming to MRP 2 Having the advantage of being close to his customers Taking up a project that nobody wanted to be part of, as a one-man army Learning from the success of the project: secret - keeping extensive notes How that helped in the conversations with Craig Larman to decode the success formula Characteristics of industries where repetitive processes are most suited Applying concepts of incremental work in exploratory [R&D] situations How even a simple program development may be incremental and an analogy of [old style] film processing The anti-pattern of measuring team velocity The concept  of shared understanding Advice for aspirants to the industry, particularly students