What is a Tech Transformation Strategist ? ... A reflection of my journey so far.

I can safely introduce myself as a seasoned tech transformation strategist and team builder. From my 20yrs of technology experience, I’ve spent the last decade helping medium to large companies, transforming their tech, building awesome tech teams (including stints of managing over 250+ technologists at a given time), migrating from legacy systems, building new in-house products, designing big data systems, multi-cloud setups and so on.

All the jargon aside, my expertise lies in ensuring simple things are done efficiently, cost-effectively, and scalably. Here’s a deeper dig into the same

What change to bring and Why?

One of the most common mistakes I have seen with senior folks joining an organization is the attempt to bring a lot of change, all at once. They think that they will be valued only if they bring in the changes immediately, at a rapid pace. I believe the key is to first absorb and understand what's going right, what can be improved, and what is not working. Of course, everything can't be wrong because it's a running business even before you. Also, one needs to understand the capacity and speed of change that a company can absorb because tech changes are not the only thing a company has to worry about. They need to run all functions and focus on revenue on a day-to-day basis while keeping an eye on the future. Migration is an easy word to bounce around, but technically it's a big task. It's not about upgrading systems, but also about getting people to adopt new systems and changing their habits, which is a much bigger battle. Imagine it to be changing the tires of a car, while you are driving it!

Bigger Picture with minute details.

I have worked with organizations that have the highest intent of bringing about technology transformation. However, most organizations with legacy systems have very limited in-house expertise to provide a comprehensive project plan or even a detailed mandate to do so. Best case what you have is a 50k feet view of the end objective. My job begins with zooming into the view by asking the right questions so that the picture can be complete - in line with the business requirements. The intent is always to keep a pessimist's view of what all can go wrong and an optimist's view of what can be disrupted.?

Respecting the capital

Technology is one place where there are tangible places of saving costs (infra, hardware, cloud to name a few) and intangible ones (team productivity being the most critical). I have always taken a lot of pride in the fact that every place I’ve worked, cost optimization is the first impact I’ve been able to prove, without compromising on the speed & quality of implementation. Of course, cost alone is never the factor alone. It’s always the combination of? Time, Cost & Moot of business. Basis the need of the hour, the three variables can be optimized to make the strategic build vs buy decisions.?

The criticality of culture in technology teams

The key to a strong culture is always hiring people who are better than you. I’ve taken pride in building teams that are high caliber and challenge oriented. High-quality tech always gets made by high-quality engineers with an inherent culture of valuing other people’s time and work. Another critical part I’ve always successfully ensured is sensitizing the technology team to the goals of the business so that they are more solution focused. In the course of my career, I’ve groomed several technologists who’ve taken leadership roles across organizations over time.?

Strong processes lead to faster rollouts

In my career, I have developed a few practices that align technology teams strongly with business stakeholders by ensuring smooth knowledge transfers. Minimizing too many email exchanges; encouraging in-person conversations for understanding the exact needs; documenting using the correct tools and processes for complete transparency; identifying and resolving bottlenecks are some important steps to ensure that technology is constantly aligned with the ever-changing needs of the business. These practices ensure faster rollouts while building a culture of harmony between stakeholders. If people have the right information and clarity on business direction, they can take the right technology decisions with short-term objectives and long-term vision. Also, these processes ensure everyone is valued and answerable at the same time.

Smartest guy in the room

The unfortunate reality of most technologists is their inability to acknowledge that other people might be right as well :) The key is to understand while they know technology well, it's the sales guy who knows how to run the sales or say the marketing guy who knows how to manage their marketing dollars. Technology has to play the role of an enabler for the business and its processes. Technology enables and if done right disrupts - but only when done in accordance with the business functions which know how to do their job. So again, the focus for technology is always to understand the exact business needs, suggest what can be done to improve what’s working, and fix what’s not. And once the problem is identified, always ensure the right (time x cost) math to roll out basis the need of the hour.

The role of a CTO

While a CTO or tech transformation strategist’s primary role would be building tech & teams for technology transformations for the key business objectives, in reality, he/she is one person who is in a unique position to help provide solutions wherever the business touches technology (which is practically everywhere nowadays). It could be simple automation ideas of mass emails, intelligent tools or processes to help with documentation or proactively building internal tools to improve operational efficiency. The job is to provide solutions that can help the business in improving in any/every dimension.

While what I’ve written above on my role on a more philosophical level, I felt its also essential to mention the usual stuff I do as part of my existence like choosing the right technology stacks, and frameworks, designing scalable architectures, building new in-house products, building data analytics systems etc. I’ve done this for big monolithic legacy systems and for fast-paced evolving systems and I love to get challenged with new & bigger problems.

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Rahul Agarwal