Ayan's TechTalk

This has been marinating in my head for a while, it's time to spit it out. I will cover my approach at F****A around why, what, who and how I helped mature the organization. To give a brief background, when I landed there, I spent some time meeting with my peers, leaders and team to gauge the current state software architecture and delivery. I was also given a list of objectives from my leadership team, most of which were multi year scope, but I was able to start on the top few priority items immediately. I decided to jot these down so that I could spread this across the organization. The What and Why? This set the foundation of the capabilities and why they are important for the organization.  Why Not? I also decided to create some distinction of why we decided to move towards Platform Engineering from DevOps . It was important to capture this distinction for everyone.  Who did What? The next big question was how to structure the team around these capabilities (What). It's n...

I constantly see that almost every software organization claiming to be Innovating. In my decades of software engineering experience working for organizations that are 50+ years and very recent startups, a very handful of organizations are actually innovating, but most are renovating. Let me explain what I mean by that.  Innovation is typically means a radically new business idea or product, much like VoIP, ride-sharing (when it came out) etc. Thanks to my time as a technology leader at a large insurance company's Innovation department, it became clear to me that making incremental technology changes to enhance the existing product is more aligned with renovating. Innovation by accident is rare, but innovative organizations make a dedicated and long-term effort at ideating over different ideas gathered from various sources to understand their feasibility, profitability etc. These ideas can be dozens or more in a year taken via innovation-funnel using a fail-fast principle. Only a h...

I'm not surprised by this report. In decades of technology leadership, here are the key strategies I follow: ✅Prioritize the team's goals over personal agendas. ✅Cultivate expertise aligned with business objectives. ✅Acknowledge and reward effort alongside outcomes. ✅Uphold fairness, honesty, and impartiality. ✅Provide factual explanations for decisions. ✅Foster collaboration across all team directions. ✅Remove obstacles, distractions, and promote open feedback. Recognize signs of dysfunction: ❗Absence of clear roadmap, processes, services, or products. ❗Disregard for innovative ideas and experimentation. ❗Serial top performer or promotion. ❗Tolerating bullying or harassment for control. ❗Discouraging facts, questions, or feedback. ❗Fixating on gaps rather than achievements. Consider a successful sports team where each member has a defined role, redundancy, and enjoys the journey to victory. Achieving excellence demands strategy, skill, dedication, and continuous learning. U.S....

The platform engineering (PE) evolved from a community of engineers around 2021 and is based on the PaaS concepts. It has been several years that I have been heavily engaged in platform engineering at several organizations. These are net new initiatives and I would still put them in early adopter bucket. Prior to that I have partnered with a dozen+ fortune 100 organizations helping them achieve architecture and process maturity via cloud-native architecture and DevOps culture.  What is platform engineering? If you are new to PE, please feel free to read up:  https://humanitec.com/platform-engineering   How to get started? Like any other capability, platform engineering should be based on business and customer value. Being relatively new concept, it is difficult to identify the benefits from PE for customers and business. Use current state analysis to define a path to different levels of maturity as target states . This will also help justify the business and customer bene...