Harness India – 100 & Growing

Posted in General, People & Culture, Software Delivery

This week we celebrated our 100th hire join Harness India center. This is a big landmark for us in our journey. Starting in 2018 with big dream and aspiration of helping companies improve software delivery, we have come a long way to make our customers successful and grow Harness.

I am very proud of what the team in India has accomplished over the past 2 years as we continue to expand and grow. Some of the key highlights:

  • Complete ownership of key products and key technical areas on all products.
  • High customer focus, delivered many features, enhancements, fixes.
  • Thought leadership with early participation on research & product engineering of new products.
  • Cohesive collaboration with engineering, product & business across time zones – one team!
  • Strong focus and building scalability and stability of the platform.
  • Improved automation, quality processes, daily release and testing.
  • Key driver and execution on UI – platform, usability & quality with introduction on new concepts and thought leadership.
  • Complete ownership on making Harness secure – customer security support, application security, compliance, vulnerability scan, bug bounty.
  • Emphasis on learning from the initial days with TLS program (Thursday Learning Sessions).
  • One team, one dream on Harness mission

Thank you team, upwards & onwards!

Rivigo Hero’s Journey (RHJ)- Embark on a life changing experience

Posted in People & Culture, Rivigo

Hero’s journey vs leadership program

‘Hero’s Journey’ program at Rivigo (based on the work done by Joseph Campbell many centuries ago) is a two-year life changing experience is aimed at unleashing the potential of the talent we hire by facilitating them with unique and challenging work experiences and a conducive environment. This program is uniquely different from other leadership programs and is built on the following principles –

  • Heroes aspire for the “unattainable”; Leaders aspire for the “best”
  • Heroes develop an irrefutable inner strength and power; Leaders develop strength and power to create impact
  • Heroes are perfectionists; Leaders better previous work
  • Heroes thrive on challenges and obstacles; Leaders manage/avoid challenges and obstacles
  • Heroes are hugely inspirational and help people discover their own path to success; Leaders lead people through a common and well laid path

The hero’s journey is a program to develop a new set of heroes, who will go on solve complex problems, become entrepreneurs and CEO’s and help build a better India and a world

Rivigo – A natural world for heroes

Rivigo wants to open up the path toward accomplishing whatever you feel compelled to do in your own life. We have an absolute confidence in the ability of humans to overcome anything. Rivigo provides a truly diverse experience from managing truckers to building breakthrough technology products. It has set new global standards of excellence in delivery times, business scale up, infrastructure, project execution and in everything we’ve done so far. Rivigo is here to mentor and nurture heroes who can challenge the status quo, rewrite the game, push the boundaries, expand the horizon, think the unthinkable, solve unsolvable problems and improve lives of our people, clients in their quest to become their own best.

Rivigo ensures that this journey is intense yet reflective; engaging yet fun; tough yet protective in order to bring the best out of its people. It is a journey of crossing the threshold between the unknown and known in us not only to leave our mark on the world, but to make it a better place. So, here’s a call for adventure!

Write to us at hero@rivigo.com

Reproduced from linkedin article by Deepak Garg, founder & CEO, Rivigo.

How Rivigo is contributing to the future of internet!

Posted in Hot, Leadership, People & Culture, Technology

For many of us Internet is all pervasive. It is essentially a medium without which we cannot imagine our present day lives. What started as a mechanism to connect several machines has grown to break political and social boundaries of the physical world that we live in.

And it has a profound impact in India too. The impact can be seen in all walks of life – banking, travel, social, politics, entertainment etc. The list is endless. However, the reach and penetration of internet is still limited to the big cities. Not surprisingly, lot of new application development is biased towards places where internet usage is already dense.

internet-rivigo

At Rivigo, we are changing that. Our business model involves thousands of people who are part of the logistics value chain to deliver business benefits to our customers. These people are connected to Rivigo technology platform from many remote places in India. Learning, understanding and using new age technology is how they go about doing their day’s job. And that is mandatory. Rivigo is making technology accessible to people in such remote places and creating a real need for them to be part of the internet.

This is what I believe is the future of internet – connecting people who are already not connected! And Rivigo is just doing that with its technology platform.

Managing different functional teams

Posted in Leadership, People & Culture

As mentioned in my earlier post about support hiring, one of my tasks was to get the support team off the ground for one of our products.

There are some key differences in how different functional teams like development, quality engineering and support team operate and go about doing their day-to-day tasks.

Functional Characteristics

This is not an exhaustive list but this understanding has several advantages that a manager can leverage for managing the team, collaborating with others, build a rewards and appreciation strategy that can result in building highly successful teams. Managers can also leverage this core knowledge to remove any biases if they are coming from different background and have more empathy towards employee behavior and develop risk assessment strategies.

10 Things you should do to set New Hires for Success

Posted in Hiring, People & Culture

This is the time of the year when new campus graduate join their first organization to start their career.  And like everyone else, these first time employees want to be successful in their careers. If you are a reporting manager, how can you set them up for success?

In my recent blog on Law of Hiring, I wrote about how a new hire changes the average performance of the team. Now that a new person is joining, how can this be used as an opportunity to bring about a positive change in the team?

Here is my list of top 10 areas to cover for new hires as a reporting manager –

1. Product Related – Ask them to learn about the product they will be working on as an end user. If they don’t know how users are going to use their product, they have already failed. Ask them to install the product and write their first application. This should happen during the first week of joining.

2. Technology/domain related – Ask them to learn the technology required for the role, and related spectrum around it. Typically, this is a longer process and also related to on-job training. But having a plan around areas to learn is a great start.

3. Company related – Provide a quick understanding of company and its overall direction and strategy. If you can’t, your new hire is in a wrong team.

4. Business & customer related – Who are typical customers of your product. Why do they use the product to solve what kind of issues? What is the future roadmap or vision of the product? Depending upon the role, some amount of information around business should also be covered like pricing and how the product is sold.

5. Process related – There are several processes that a team follows. While most processes are understood once someone uses them, it is most important to talk about best practices to follow and bad practices to avoid. This is your opportunity to improve processes and set expectations before new hires pick bad practices by observing others. For example, for a development team, it can be about doing proper source code review , or doing appropriate amount of unit testing before checkin.

6. Soft skills for high impact – These qualities are subtle but many new hires and managers miss to develop them right from the beginning. Self-driven, low management overhead qualities and communication skills are desirable. New hires should discuss with managers and pick top 3 else the list is too long.

7. Time management – Yes, it should start from day 1. Managing office time, not indulging in time-wasting activities, managing web browsing and Facebook time are important. It is very difficult to achieve peak performance without proper time management. Add ability to prioritize work to that list. You must share your experience and expectations with new hires.

8. Innovation – Many companies and teams desire to build a culture of innovation. They are struggling. This is an area of big opportunity for both new hires and managers. There are several models and processes available, you help setup one for your new hires. This is a good long term investment for both.

9. Culture & Values – My simple ask is around hallway or water-cooler discussion. What topics helps to build positive impression? Explain new hires how to use the informal discussion time to generate new ideas, initiate interesting professional discussion and build relationships. These informal conversations define the culture of your team.

10. Plan for first 4 weeks to make an impression – All of the above should be part of new hires first 4-week plan. This is the time when everyone is forming an impression about the new hire and he/she should drive this plan – it is a matter of his/her career and success.

Entrepreneurship is #1 career aspiration today

Posted in Data visualization, Hiring, People & Culture

In April, I floated a survey on What do you want to be in your career and I received a great response from many folks within a week of sharing the survey. So much so that I had to purchase a basic plan on survey monkey to analyze the results properly and quickly.

In the 7-question survey, overall results from the four central questions are shown below.

1. What is you career development/growth aspiration?

36% folks want to become entrepreneurs followed by 35% folks who are looking for a new team or promotion to a new team. This is true for individual contributors and managers. This question allowed multiple-choices so do not try to add to 100%.

What is surprising is that almost 60% people are looking at new roles, new teams and new companies to meet their career aspiration. Very few people (31%) think of current team to be able to provide opportunities for their career growth.

aspiration

2. What actions can help you meet your career aspiration?

The top three choices here are – talking to seniors and colleagues (66%), acquiring new technical skills (57%) followed by acquiring soft skills (55%). As expected, individual contributors care less about soft skills but most about technical skills followed by talking to seniors and colleagues. However, managers care less about technical skills compared to soft skills.

3. How frequently do you think about career development & growth?

91% people actively think about career growth while only 3% do not think about it. Those who are frequently thinking about career development are looking at entrepreneurship and new teams. Entrepreneurship is the top choice for managers and new team for individual contributor.

It will be interesting to correlate employee engagement and career development results. A recent Gallup survey showed 87% employees worldwide are disengaged in their jobs. I see a strong correlation here and it is plausible that career growth issues are responsible for some of the disengagement. But I did not ask a direct question about current engagement.

4. How often do you check careers of your peers, colleagues & seniors to get some ideas for career path?

88% people check careers of others and 63% does so very often. I think this also tie down to 66% folks talking to seniors and colleagues when planning their career growth.

I calculated Pearson correlation coefficient using joint probability distribution between how frequently someone thinks about career development & growth with how often someone checks others career. A result of 0.57 shows a fairly good correlation between these two variables. What it means is that someone thinking frequently about one’s own career is often looking at others career path.

If you need raw results, please leave a comment below.

4 tips from an eight year old to become a star performer

Posted in Leadership, People & Culture

Kids keep it nice and simple – most parents of young kids will vouch for that.

This is how my 8 year old girl summarized a book on legendary women tennis player Steffi Graf.

Steffi Graf - How she became a star

So, what professionals need to do to become stars?

1. Play well – Do your work to the best of your ability. You need to demonstrate what you have got.

2. Work hard – Easier said than done. Perhaps some amount of planning is always helpful to make it a bit smarter.

3. Enjoy – Very important. Many researchs have proved that there is a direct correlation between productivity and having fun. I have written three articles on this topic. What makes us feel good about our work, Guiding principles on work-life balance and Whopping 87% of employees worldwide are dis-engaged in their jobs!

4. Listen carefully – Well the idea is to learn. And to learn not only you need to keep your eyes and ears open, you need to have an open mind to be able to take the feedback about your mistakes. All great athletes have this quality.

This book is part of my recently purchased books for kids. See details here.

What do you want to be in your career?

Posted in Analytics, People & Culture

Career development is a challenging problem to solve for most individual themselves as well as managers on behalf of their team. Many individuals find it difficult to clearly define their career aspirations and what opportunities or possibilities are available to them. One of my friends after attending a staff meeting of several managers said – “It is tough for all managers to get career development goal from their team members and I was thinking it was just me.”

This issue compounds for managers as they have to think on their team’s behalf – what is best for them and what aspiration do they have. The message is simple – you have to think about your own career development choices. But how? I created a short survey to find out more about people’s career aspiration and what the trend is.

I need your help in filling a 7-question survey on career aspiration. Here is the link https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GG36D2J

career

If it takes more than 5 minutes, I owe you a beer. Make sure to leave a comment 🙂

Update: Thanks to everyone for filling the survey. The current average time for filling the survey is around 3 minutes. No pressure 🙂

What makes us feel good about our work?

Posted in Hiring, People & Culture

In December last year I started writing a blog post “All employees want to feel special” that I am yet to finish. However, I came across TED video from Dan Ariely that talks about what motivates us to work?. I want to mention some of them that I have experienced and noticed them at work to work!

happy_at_work

1. Seeing results of your work and customer appreciation is a great motivator. Knowing that your work is helping someone, increases your own performance.

2. “Ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort before their eyes,” Ariely says. “The good news is that adding motivation doesn’t seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivation seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it.” I concur.

3. We erroneously think that other people will ascribe the same value to our own work as we do. This is specially true when we do work that involves good amount of effort. Many a times, outcome fetches higher value.

4. Positive reinforcement (from managers?) about our abilities increases our performance. A challenge state and not threat state helps with better results.

5. Finally, as Donald Driver, a noted football player and NY Times best selling author noted something very interesting in his article on “Why Do Kids Read What They Read?”

Kids read what they read to have fun!

I guess this feeling of having fun is independent of age, location, environment and many other things.