Episode Details

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