How did you overcome a major issue or setback in one of your projects?

The software supply chain security improvements for Dart  & Flutter required generating a signed bill of materials for every artifact shipped to final users. Even though the complexity of the implementation relied on proper isolation of the build process from the process of collecting the bill of materials and providing a remote signed workflow a setback came from the most unexpected place.

The project to protect the software supply chain was already completed and the final step in the release workflow of the feature required publishing a public key so that the final customer could validate the signature. However, being the first Google open source project implementing a software supply chain I didn’t account for the complexity of releasing the public key associated with the Google signing key. Solving this problem required a lot of negotiation with security teams at the Google organization level.

It was frustrating that everything else was completed and the only thing missing was releasing a key. However because the processes associated with that key was making Google accountable for the artifacts signed with the associated private key. The security and legal teams wanted to be extra careful before releasing it. I had to provide documentation and support for a few extra audits before the key was finally released after a couple of months of negotiations and collaboration with security and legal teams.

Due to Government Regulatory changes, we had to collect GST from the domestic learners who were earlier bypassing it if they are enrolled for an intl Non-GST program.

The ticket size being $3000 and the learner base of 10000.

Now communicating this regulatory change becomes a reputation risk as well as revenue risk for the company as the learners were already promised a fees before enrolling for the program and it might come across to them as we are demanding more money than promised.

I took the onus to fetch the data of all domestic learners and coordinated with other operations team members to inform the learners about the regulatory changes and that they have to comply to it by paying the entire fees before the end of 30th Sep failing which they will have to pay 18% GST additional on their fees.

I was able to recover 90% of the payments from the learners through constant communication, rigorous follow-ups and maintaining data.

At Centercard, I was leading a team of DevOps team - being a startup we had to make some choice due to budgetry constraints. I had to choose between Hosted ELK or hosting our own ELK on EKS. Initially it sould be a good idea to go with EKS option as It would enable us to save around 30% as opposed to Hosted ELK based on our calculation at the time. Team went ahead and deployed and for a while it worked, before going to prod. while doing load testing there was an update to our K8 cluster causing ELK to go down, it took DevOps team sometime to figure out the root cause. This caused dealy in the project, I had to revert course and go with Hosted ELK as at that time, I realized my team was not prepared any downtime in production. In the end the migration was smooth and we did not have any customer impact, apart from the slight delay in the release. Lesson I leant is that I should be able to access strenght and areas of improvement for my team and play to their strength.

In one of my program, QA had identified more integration issues at the last minute. This became a risk for delivering the project as planned. To handle them, i had proposed the stakeholders by asking the devs to test the bug fixes with the help of testcases return by QA and get them reviewed from lead QA. BY doing this, we were able to deliver the project on time as planned

In my latest opportunity, we had a setup in rollout Lot Control. The setback came as noncooperation from the business due to failure to involve the business at the start of the project.We overcome that by presenting to the business the objective and value addition to the business in executing the project with their OKRs. we also highlighted what is the help required from the business and their responsibilities in moving the project further.