Changing industries and getting to technology leadership

I’d love to start broad, tell us a little bit about who you are and how you came to be here.?

I am a mom and an engineer. I had a tremendous passion for the sciences and math through my formative years. When I was growing up in India, you became either a doctor or an engineer. I knew I didn't want to be a doctor, so engineering was a natural choice for me. I am an electrical engineer by education, my undergraduate degree was in power systems and machines. I worked for a transformer company in India for a couple of years where I was designing large furnace and power transformers. When I moved to the United States, electrical engineering was focused on large scale integrated circuit design so I chose that as my Master’s Major. I joined AT&T Bell labs where I was a chip designer before moving to more application architecture and system design roles. From there, I joined Verizon Wireless where I led various roles before I moved to Capital One last year.

You spent nearly fifteen years at a single company in four different roles. Do you have any advice for people on how to identify and pursue internal opportunities within their organizations? How did you know when it was time to move on?

I joined Verizon in an IT operations role which was a phenomenal learning experience. It’s one thing to build something and put it into production, but it’s another thing to make sure it continues to work as it should. I was then tapped by the Director for Point-of-Sale (POS) Applications to join his team in building the first mobile POS solution. I was hesitant because it was a lateral move, but it was one of the best moves I made in my career. The upside was tremendous and it is an experience that I still take pride in today especially when I walk into the Verizon wireless stores. Myself and a small team pioneered that application and it expanded to become THE sales and service application portfolio that I managed throughout my time there. Later, when our CIO asked if I wanted to manage the Service application portfolio, I took the jump. It was another lateral move but I had the opportunity to learn both sales and service. In my last role, I was tapped by the CRO who was looking for somebody who understood the tech landscape to come and lead a new product organization.

Each time I moved, I did not actively seek these positions but I was tapped and asked to go. My recommendation for folks is that it’s important to go out and get varied experiences. If you feel like you’ve been in one role for too long and you’re not tapped for something new, you should go seek out the role you want. When Capital One reached out to me, I figured that it was an opportunity for me to learn a new domain. I had spent 25 years in the telecom industry, and I had never worked in the finance industry. It was a good opportunity for me to learn a different domain and come back to tech from a product perspective.?

You recently moved industries. Because tech-leaders need to be business-aligned, it is so important to know the key issues in your industry. What did you do to prepare when you switched industries from telecom to financial services??

I don't think any amount of learning on the outside would’ve prepared me for this space. It’s been a lot of learning on the go. I didn't anticipate how big the regulatory differences would be. Even though the telecom industry is regulated, it doesn't impact you from a tech perspective. You still have tremendous freedom to build functions and features for the business. In the financial industry, there are regulations that control what we can deploy, how we stay on top of cyber risk, etc. It’s really been a process of learning from the fire hose, understanding your application vulnerabilities, your cloud compliance issues and the importance of being well managed.?

You have several patents, women make up 13% of patent holders (with numbers even lower in technology), will you tell us a little bit about your patents and your experience getting them??

The first patent I got was in my very first job as a chip designer building chips for HD TVs. I was working on a small piece of the chip called the Demodulator, which takes analog signals and converts them into 1s and 0s. My patent was for an algorithm for the symbol to byte converter. My second patent was from my mobile POS portfolio. We had a unique challenge where we had a combination of iPads and desktops that store representatives were selling with. I wanted to do the reverse of what Apple TV does where you take what’s on your iPad and project it on a larger screen, I wanted to take what’s on a larger screen and project it on the iPad. We came up with a unique way to do that that Verizon still uses today in call centers and retail stores. It is amazing when you come up with these ideas to solve certain problems and then realize that you have the opportunity to file a patent because it’s a unique solution and there’s nobody out there in the industry doing it.

Read the rest of our interview with Radha here- https://meytier.com/blogs/changing-industries-and-getting-to-technology-leadership