Software People Stories

In this episode Raksha Rao, CEO and Co-Founder of Parjanya Creative Solutions using interactive media technologies in the space of health, fitness and arts, is in conversation with Chitra GurjarA trained classical vocalist, starting at age 4 and working with music via interactive mediaMelding technology and health & fitnessLearning and pushing herself with challenges and problem solving, always interested in the "Why", beginning of entrepreneurshipA desire to see the larger picture and the timing being right Trigger to move back to India, technology, family, supportStarting a company in just before the pandemic brokeInspiration from remote music concerts, influence on building interactive apps, spatial audioBody movement tracking app and teaching yoga remotely, help people visualize where they need helpHer experiences around building the company from hiring, building a culture of adaptability and changeWork, passion and hobby being oneLessons a woman entrepreneur - Learning from others, value yourself, be your own championLife lessons - Building the right thing & build it the right way; have a learning mindset; be open to change"Raksha is the CEO and Co-founder of Parjanya Creative Solutions. Born in Bangalore, India, Raksha worked as a software engineer for a few years and then moved to the US in 2012. She pursued her MBA in Information Science at California State University and worked as a backend engineer at several different firms small and big including Zillow, one of America’s largest real estate tech firms. Being a professional musician with over 20 years of practice and performing experience, along with setting up and getting the bootstrapped company off the ground, Raksha also pursued and completed her Masters in Music while being the mother of an active 3 year old. At Parjanya, Raksha is passionately focused on building user centric, cutting edge products that push boundaries of technology. As the CEO and a woman entrepreneur, Raksha is determined to grow Parjanya as a company that can offer the most incredible and innovative solutions while helping and mentoring other young and determined female developers and designers “Social media handles:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/raksharaoTwitter: https://twitter.com/raksha_raoCompany website: www.parjanya.org

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 MBAStarting his career with Eicher and then moving to Muscat and becoming a product manager for a Ford dealershipReturning 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 IndiaBecoming the largest ecommerce company in India in a very short periodMoving to Singapore for a Channel partner development roleReturning to India to head the technical services divisionPlaying the CMO roles for large business units in APACComing back to India to play a leadership role with the ecommerce and PC business and also hold the responsibility for the digital GTMHaving witnessed 4 major and many small mergersCars to computers to cloud to commerce- 4CsHis approach to manage and perform in these transitions across domains and businessesRisk appetite, being a Biker, taking calculated risks, Transition 1: leveraging the marketing experience [4Ps being the same across industries], product management was the sameTransition 2: company was the sameTransition 3: leveraging the BCP experience in the services business, to make ecommerce available 24x7Anchoring on onen common factor to leverage and one uncomfortable or new factor to spur learningLetting results speak for oneselfBeing a good manager helps in thriving in a mergerThe strength of empathy for people needed for a leader to bring about a smooth mergerThe shift in thinking and approach needed when moving from selling hardware [boxes] to selling software, services and solutions that may be less tangibleThe idea of products being consumed as servicesApart from product, price, place and promotion, one has to add process, people and proofHis experience of working with software delivery teamsCareer advice: courage to go after your passion and keep reinventing yourselfLook for satisfaction over successDo your job as an act of serviceNash 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 isRaghu started as a developer in TCS after completing his education in BangaloreHe was inspired by him mentor to broaden his horizon and desire to move to BusinessMade an internal transition to business and now leads the strategic transformations in HSBCRaghu believes that having a good business sense is like a spine that has to be strong and flexible based on conditionsHe talks about the business disruptions that have happened and compares consciousness and understanding of the ecosystemRaghu shares the experiences of working in business starting with the business case and seeing the change through the lifecycleRaghu shares his stories on being a technocrat of bridging the business and technology seamlessly and sharing his wisdom in a wise mannerCommon sense of vision, purpose, commitment that’s built over trust brings large teams together to work, communicate and collaborate betterRaghu shares the constraints that his generation has put on self and how that needs to go off as we usher in the millennialsRaghu shares a vision of banking that would lead to normalised set of offerings prior to taking offRaghu 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 overallRaghu 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 toBeing a coachWhy middle management is usually underserved in terms of coaching helpHow he had handled his own personal transition from an individual contributor to a middle managerHis expertise Areas – New Product Development, Product Management, Lean-Agile Transformation, Digital Transformation, LeadershipHis 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/nashjainLinkedIn: 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 youngWinning 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 interestsStarting his programming as a research scholar at Jadavpur universityThen 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 areasThe 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 contextA 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 eventGetting new customers by taking on problems that have been lying on their plates for a long time and solving themHis getting into genomics and startupsHis passion for teaching, to ignite young minds to get into academics and researchWriting a syllabus making book based on his entrepreneurial experience with mobile computingThe importance of security aspects to be treated as functional requirementsConverting a mis-use case into a functional requirement when it comes to securityHis current interest areas of AI, machine learning and deep learningBeing 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 othersHow his width of knowledge and experience helps him solve or relate a problem to something he might have seen elsewhereSynthetic systems and the challenges in understanding and solving healthcare related problems and there is no one-size-fits allThe need for horizontal knowledge, to be a successful solutioning architectHis approach and process for quickly leveraging existing knowledge and experience to build more complex solutionsHis career advice, in particular about being a lifelong learner and possibly getting into academics / researchAsoke 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 throughQualifying as a Civil Engineer, and doing site work, to pursuing an MBA and her first job in techMoving into tech and landing different jobs, finding what she wanted to doWorking on the frontlines of technologyHer life as a technical account manager and helping close sales dealsLearning about personas, how customers buy, who influences, who usesWearing different hats each time every dayDeal or no deal, a zero or a oneContrast in experiences based on what she felt was a good deal and how things turned outUsing various approaches to prioritization of backlogs like3 P approach - Persona, problem and pervasiveness of the problemThinking in line with a top down business strategycreating delighters for the customer, the KANO modelBuilding 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 stakeholdersBuilding partnerships of trust and collaborationStaying in the problem space, wearing different thinking hats, assumptions, solutions and discoveryHaving 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 discussionHer suggestions for people wanting to pursue a product management career or a career in technologySeema 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 aboutStarting a career in sales and then getting into techGetting into Agile, as part of a team adopting Agile practices, under a manager’s guidanceHis experience of transitioning from an individual contributor to a managerUnderstanding the importance of human skills in agile teamsSome interesting learnings from patterns of behavior in teams, particularly those based on misconceptionsThe fact that humans are hard, code is easyLearning to ‘talk their terms’ when connecting with executives, from the Dale Carnegie’s bookThe 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 needsHow a visit to observe users for a day gave insights into the what their solution needs to doHaving an experimental mindsetThe importance of managing up, when it comes to adoption of agile practices in a teamWhy rinse-and-repeat would not work when applying what worked in one context identically in a different contextContext matters - and, like many agile coaches say, it depends.Stop selling agile, start aligningBeing aware of the dangers of gaming the system, when there is too much stress only on quantitative measurements and metricsThe trigger for Tom to launch the Agile and DevOps online summits, long before the pandemic hit and all conferences moved onlineHow he is able to bring in multiple perspectives by having track chairsSome 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 themesSome changes or shifts in themes he has seen over the last 5 yearsHis thoughts on curating the content from the summit over the yearsHis suggestions for early stage and mid-career professionalsFor 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 teamsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhenricksen/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TomHenricksen

In this episode Ramesh shares his experience and perspectives related toHis interest in software and programming that was fueled by an IIT professor teaching programmingOne of the very few who did a software project as part of his degree and then joining Tata Burroughs from campus, as the first batchGetting back to academics to get his Master’s degreeHow 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 LimitedHow his experience with facing customers helped in the assignment of setting up a QA environment at Oracle headquartersMoving to management roles in engineering managementJumping at the opportunity to start a development center in India from scratchThinking that he could do that for a year and then get back to the USAHow he had to take on various responsibilities of not just delivering, but also establishing processes, building networks for recruitment etcRealizing the need to take innovative approaches to attract the right talent, when competing with other companies that would hire in large numbersTaking 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 interviewExtending this learning through internships Starting to love teachingThe 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 institutionsHow 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 desiredSome tips that would help selecting the right candidatesHow everyone should feel comfortable to disagree, but not be disagreeablehow , as a technical guy, you can have all the answers, but as a leader, you should have all the questionsHis career advice:Being passionate about what one doesDo not undervalue the importance of keeping your skills up to dateWhy you should become useless for your jobPlease 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 gopalaswamy_ramesh@yahoo.com

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 improveShares her humble beginnings from the temple town of Trichy and joined Robert BoschHigher education after a marriage break gave way to structured thinkingJayashree shares her passion in music and how her current work in Amazon music has brought her two world togetherShe 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 processesShe 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 careerProgressively 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 forCreating 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 timesJayashree 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 reachedShe 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 oneselfJayashree 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 UniversityShe can be reached @ Linkedin/Jayashree