Amit Kumar

First article of the series of 5 posts describing the journey to build Product & Engineering for Financial Services

I have been part of building Product & Engineering teams and Digital Transformation setup for almost more than a decade. My first experience was during the build of MDL (McKinsey Digital Labs) by our leaders: Satty Bhens and Biju Bhaskar - a startup-like setup (for both engineering and business building) inside a large organisation. Both strongly believe in a garage-like setup and gave full support to establish guard-rails in protecting the culture of working as a startup.

We are engineers (can be safely generalised to humans), who at heart enjoy building not extending/enhancing/improving Disclaimer: doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy extending/enhancing. I strongly believe in the philosophy of – You touch it, you improve it! This is driven by the fact - programmers think old code is messy as Joel Spolsky writes – It’s harder to read code than to write it Having said that, programmers use tonne of external libraries & modules to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

I haven’t written much in recent years, at least not through blog posts. I thought 2021, would be a good time to start penning some of my thoughts & learnings I have had in the recent past years. Team formation, functioning, reporting are the most common challenges every organisation have. Lately, I have been involved in discussions related to Team Autonomy. Hence, this article. Autonomy has different meaning based on context: political, medical, HR, organisation.

Agile development has become the backbone of modern software development process. In a nutshell, it can be defined as - iterative, self-evolving incremental development that demands high collaboration and flexibility to change. Component driven development on the other hand augments to building reusable and testable components that be plugged together to form application foundation for delivering business functionality. In our current engagement with Firm Account, they have started providing IT tools/solutions to their clients supplementing the strategic solutions they have been providing so far.