How I
Actually Work.
Technical depth gets you in the room. What keeps engagements on track — and makes them successful — is how you run programs, build relationships, and make sure the right work gets prioritized. This is that part.
$22k investment.
$100k annual savings.
Proposed, justified, approved.
During a SteerCo facilitation at a major retail enterprise, we identified that specific Fivetran connectors were consuming disproportionate budget. We built the business case: migrate those connectors from Fivetran to Airbyte using a short-term contractor engagement costing $22,000 — with a projected annual saving of $100,000.
That's the kind of work that happens in SteerCo meetings when the facilitator understands both the technical architecture and the business model. Not just flagging a problem — arriving with a costed solution and the data to defend it.
SteerCo Outcomes
Removed projects from the roadmap that weren't delivering measurable business value — freeing capacity for work that did.
Consolidated multiple separate inventory reports into one governed source — eliminating conflicting data and analyst rework.
Proposed and secured budget for the Fivetran → Airbyte migration: $22k investment against $100k annual savings.
Led the BigQuery cost optimization program that reduced monthly spend from $99,000 to $36,000 — a 64% reduction.
Program & Delivery Leadership
PI Planning. Product Ownership.
Cross-functional alignment.
Program Increment Planning
Led PI planning for Data & Analytics at one retail enterprise and Platform Engineering at another — spanning all IT functions including Supply Chain, Finance, Merchandising, Marketing, Customer, and Product Development.
Responsible for identifying cross-functional dependencies, ensuring related teams had epics on their backlogs, and resolving conflicts before they became blockers. PI planning only works when someone has the relationships and the organizational visibility to make it real — not just run the ceremony.
Product Ownership
Owned the product backlog for two enterprise platforms in retail: the enterprise data warehouse and Looker BI layer at one engagement, and the Internal Developer Platform at another.
Backlog prioritization wasn't a technical exercise — it was a business one. Every sprint cycle, the question was: what delivers real value to the organization right now? That discipline came directly from SteerCo alignment, not from engineering preference.
Documentation as Infrastructure
Documentation isn't a deliverable — it's how complex programs stay coherent across teams, time, and personnel changes. We use Confluence, Notion, Jira, and Microsoft Teams pages not because they're required, but because we've seen what happens to programs that treat documentation as optional.
In regulated and enterprise environments, the ability to reconstruct decisions, trace work, and onboard new stakeholders without tribal knowledge is the difference between a program that scales and one that collapses under its own complexity.
Tooling That Keeps Teams Aligned
10 years of daily Jira — not as a ticket tracker, but as a program management tool. Epics structured around business outcomes, not technical tasks. Roadmaps that leadership can read and engineers can execute against.
Confluence and Notion for living documentation that teams actually reference. Microsoft Teams pages for stakeholder visibility. The tools matter less than the discipline — but the discipline requires the right tools used intentionally.
Cultural Fluency
Onshore. Offshore.
One team.
Distributed team models fail for cultural reasons more often than technical ones. Time zones are schedulable. Communication styles, decision-making norms, and hierarchy expectations are not — unless someone on the team understands both sides.
Growing up in India and building a career in the US means we've operated inside both cultures — not as an observer, but as a practitioner. That context changes how you run standups, how you give feedback, how you escalate, and how you build the trust that makes offshore collaboration actually work.
Across three engagements, we've led distributed teams including developers at a pharma enterprise, testers in a retail environment, and a combined team of 6 data engineers and 3 BI developers — all based in India, all integrated into onshore delivery cycles without the friction that typically defines offshore models.
Pharma Engagement
Collaborated with offshore developers and testers in India over an 8-year embedded engagement — navigating cultural communication norms, structured feedback cycles, and the trust-building required for long-term distributed collaboration in a regulated environment.
Retail Engagements
Managed India-based QA teams at a retail enterprise and a combined team of 6 data engineers and 3 BI developers based in Mexico at another — integrating both into onshore PI planning, sprint cycles, and SteerCo reporting structures.
Technical Execution. Business Alignment.
If you need someone who can run the architecture and the program — who can sit in a SteerCo, manage an offshore team, own a product backlog, and still write the dbt model — let's talk.
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