In your current role, what do you consider your biggest achievements?

During my career I manage a large number of projects, but one of the most challenging ones was the development and launch of a Electromechanical module for HP. This was very challenging for all parts involved, our company and the customer because this was the first high-speed Inkjet printer designed for high-volumes. I remember we had to manage a huge BOM with more than 3000 coponents.

As Program manager my role was to lead a cross-functional team including Design Engineers, SW Engineers, Operations teams, Material procurement teams, quality and logistics, among others to successfully launch the product to mass production.

First, I kicked-off the project. For that, I shared with the team the project scope, the goals to achieve, I shared the project plan with key milestones and defined the roles and responsibilities for the different team members.

During execution, to maintain a clear communication, I set up design review sessions with the entire engineering organization to ensure everyone was aligned and fixing potential issues in advance. Besides, I led a weekly core-team meeting where we assigned tasks to team members, and setting clear deadlines for each task. To make these tasks easier to manage, I made sure tasks were broken down into manageable sizes with clear descriptions and acceptance criteria. This helped the team to stay focus on their deliveries and maintain speed.

Another important part was to manages Risks. I worked with the team to identify and classify possible risk that might impact to the project deliverables. We created a Risk matrix to monitor during the development process, and also a project board with the main KPIs to achieve during each stage of the PDP.

To ensure quality, we defined different testing processes focused on the design, and the process. We installed specific quality check for the documents and devices delivered for each of the milestones of the PDP, as well as a clear quality control in mass production.

Finally, for transparency, I reported on monthly basis to our company leaders and customer about the project status, focusing on Timing, cost, quality and scope.

By employing these strategies, we successfully launched our module on time matching with all the requirements defined by our customer. This was a great example of teamworking, and taught me the importance of breaking down large projects into smaller and easy to manage pieces. Transparent and clear communication was also a great lesson learned. This approach helped me to improve in leading teams through complex problems.

My biggest achievement in my current role was when I identified issues with the current procedures, and addressed them; for example one process was entirely manual, and I found a way to automatize it; I developed a new tool, collaborated with several teams to make sure the tool was really efficient, took their feedback into account, trained them. In the end we got rid of the backlog, we could process 3 times more cases, and we could detect significantly more suspicious transactions.

I believe my biggest achievement is building a high performing team amongst a lot of chaos. I started as an engineering manager for replenishment team, soon due to restructuring I was asked to lead a different BU called Parcel and I was given the team from scratch, 8 months into this I heard the leadership is deciding to put Parcel on KTLO and give me a new tier 1 service called channels. This service was highly unstable with a lot of issues and tech debt. This service was transitioned among 4 engg manager in past three years (4th me). 

TASK

My job was to do a successful transition of this service and keep the team motivated

Actions

- When I got to. know about Parcel KTLO and having a new product under me, I wanted to ensure this is communicated to the team clearly with empathy and I wanted to ensure the team that this will only benefit their growth

- I started with a team meeting, shared a couple of wins that we did in parcel, shared even though we did so much, Parcel is being put on KTLO for various xyz reasons.

- I told them every crisis situation is an opportunity and by channels coming under us, we can showcase that even the toughest of the services can be maintained if the tech debt is continuously addressed

- Post team meeting I kept 1:1 with every member and listened them, helped answer their questions

- A couple of team members did share that they felt proud about what they developed in Parcel and were feeling sad that it was going in KTLO.

- I shared that products coming in KTLO happens sometime and this in no way reflects the teams performance, infact our teams reputation is very good amongst the leaders thats why they have given us the most important service (which is also in the worst shape)

- Under previous engg managers there was minimal to no improvement in the service on tech and product side because they were busy fixing on call issues

- I worked with the team to fix this by assigning ywo people to on call and rest two on fixing the issues from root cause. 

- In a couple of months this gave us brwating space since the oncall issues reduced directly impacting reduction in customer queries

- We got appreciated by leadership for this

Result

- Team members were highly motivated

- Learnt a lot

- Got appreciated by leadership for this hard works

After reviewing all of the HR processes, HRIS system I implemented Trainual Software to have a better online SOP and training program for each department. 

What am I most proud of, or what is my biggest achievement? I think the product that I'm currently working on is something that I am most proud of. It is a product that we call Journey Platform, and this is essentially a workflow logic mapping tool that can be triggered real time by customer behavior and or events in the app.To firm up the example, we wanted to explore creating a platform where when the customer opens the store page, we are then informed of this opening, and then we can send them a push notification with all the relevant details, as an example, the promos that are available to them, and so on. We could also then use this information to inform how the feed should change, what types of restaurants we should show, and so on.Building a platform tool like this has been very complicated because there are hundreds of thousands of different behaviors on the app that we need to first understand what is useful in onboarding, and what I mean by that are what are the key behaviors that get customers to convert, that get them to routine, that increase their order frequency, order size, and so on, and really leveraging what those behaviors are and turning them into accurate indicators of events on the app that we could then use.This platform not just powers the audience targeting piece of things, but also does evaluation of logic and says, hey, if this customer was targeted, but they ordered a grocery in the last seven days, then don't do this or don't do that, based on the campaign, specifically.In addition to that, it is becoming a one-stop shop where we are able to not just look at audience targeting and promo eligibility, but now we're going to be able to send in-house communications, trigger placements within the app, trigger dynamic content, and so on. Historically, this has been done by seven or 10 different products across the app, each with their own PMs, engineering teams, mandates, growth goals, and so on, so really centralizing it in one app not just allows for easier implementation, but also allows for coordination across different programs and better customer experiences.

In my current role, there have been both personal as well as professional achievements

First is that my current role is based away from my hometown. This has been the first step towards pushing me out of my comfort zone and has helped me learn some important life skills - negotiation, relationship building and healthy living

My role requires me to turn around research(s) in a short span. This barely leaves us any time to find an agency, delegate the recruitment and interview. In order to deliver, it was important to ace the skill of interviewing via cold calling which we also know as CATI interviews. So, building on a pitch that earns you trust of someone who you’ve never met is a skill that I have learnt here.

I sharpen and grow different skills for different roles that I play. For the role of a leader, the ability to Build and grow a team, provide a buziness roadmap, a technical charter is important which I got multiple opportunities in my tenure. My leadership style is being Democratic, inspiring and collaborative. In my current organization I built fundamentals team from ground up, let this team to deliver mutiple charters around security, reliability , resource governance. I further expanded the group to own back end store layer components. This ability to build and lead a team helped me in my current endaevour as well.