In this episode, Thyagarajan, known as Raja – a Senior Management Executive and Chief Operating Officer with nearly 4 decades of experience in the IT industry involving International and multi-cultural environments, shares his story including points related to:
- How his uncle and brother were influential in getting into software after doing an MS in management
- Being part of a team that started a company, and being an entrepreneur without knowing it
- Being a pioneer in the Indian IT industry, by having an approach of creating tools to improve development productivity or products to solve customer problems
- Innovating techniques to create solutions, long before others, when there were no standards to do some things
- Challenges of running a company that offered professional services as well as products
- Transitioning from a developer to more managerial roles
- Some of the lessons learned in being an entrepreneur
- Applying technology based thinking to create generic solutions
- Testing in a development environment versus running in a production environment and related lessons learnt
- Balancing and prioritizing requests from various users and having a process to build the solution in an evolutionary manner
- The ways in which software development has changed over the years
- What it takes for someone to shift from a service / project mindset to a product mindset
Raja is a Senior Management Executive and Chief Operating Officer with nearly 4 decades of experience in the IT industry involving International and multi-cultural environments.
His experience includes:
Managing operations of an IT company, with its offshore center in India and marketing/sales offices in the US, that has over 200 employees.
Handling IT projects and product development hands-on combined with heading the operations, ensures understanding of the operations in Toto.
All round leadership experience of managing all aspects of the business – S&M, Technology, Delivery, HR and Finance.
Innovatively creating products and services and delivering through hands on leadership
