Faster, Better, Cheaper - Together

A bird's eye view of software project management.
2023-11-03 12:00 - 12:45 UTC | Online/Bangalore
What makes software project management hard or distinct? How would you guide today’s engineering leaders to situate themselves in the vast software delivery landscape? Do people apply processes without understanding why they work? Ranjan Sakalley will share his perspective on these and more such questions.

**About the speaker**
[Ranjan Sakalley](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rnjns) managed engineering for an Indian edTech company called Vedantu. Before that, he worked for GoJek as CTO and VP of Engineering. He has been a software developer since 2002, and prior to GoJek, worked for about a decade at ThoughtWorks, a software consultancy firm.

**About the Moderator**
[Rubela Bhattacharya](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubela) has led technical project management teams across organisations like Oracle, Visa and is currently at Conde Nast. She has worked across and managed globally distributed teams.

**Venue Details** (livestream also available)
JioCinema
Smartworks Co-working Spaces Pvt. Ltd., Global Technology Park,
Tower-D, 9th Floor, Outer Ring Road, Bellandur,
Bangalore, - 560103

Software Delivery: Prioritizing and optimizing for impact
2023-11-29 15:30 - 16:30
Any startup has more things to do than it has engineering bandwidth for. Yet, a common mistake fast moving teams can make is to pick projects without enough diligence on the potential impact. When the project is delivered, they don’t see the expected impact (or worse, don’t even measure it), theorise why, and then move on to the next project.

One thing I learned at Facebook was to invest time on understanding the problem, identifying levers, calculating the potential impact, and then agreeing on appropriate data to measure impact and progress. And when projects don’t deliver the expected impact, there is even more effort spent to understand why, and potentially iterate (or halt when appropriate).

I’m going to share a few examples and pitfalls, and maybe talk about cupcakes too. This is relevant to EMs as well as ICs, since impact is universally loved 🙂

**About the speaker**
[Gaurav Lochan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gauravlochan) is a Head of Engineering (and US site lead) for PhonePe, where he manages the app platform team. Prior to that, he worked at Meta and WhatsApp for 8 years on mobile platforms and market specific efforts, at Little Eye Labs, Flipkart, his own Android startup (in 2012), and companies like VMware and Microsoft

**About the moderator**
[Sanchita Agarwal](https://in.linkedin.com/in/sanchita-agarwal-b59b1419) is an engineering leader with more than a decade of experience building mobile first products. In her last role, she was Head of Engineering at Obvious, a digital product consultancy where she led delivery of multiple cross platform projects for products like Swiggy and Slice. Before that, she helped build the Android Partner app at Ola and the Health & Chat apps at Samsung R&D India.

When Quality Matters: Transcending resource barriers during software delivery
2023-12-21 12:30 - 13:00
Can the pressure to satisfy short term deadlines be detrimental to solving genuinely hard problems? Does it prevent you from iterating upon what you have achieved so far? How do you decide when to dig deep and ask for more time and resources in the best interest of a project's success? Deepti Agrawal will reflect upon these questions based on her experiences.

**About the speaker**
[Deepti Agrawal]() is a Director of Engineering at Flipkart. She is experienced in building large scale systems, managing teams, building scalable architectures and infrastructure. She likes to build products that are functional, resilient and have a great user experience.

**About the moderator**
[Mayankk Banerjee](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayankbanerjee) is an engineering leader with 25yrs+ of hands-on technology and management experience. He has built deep tech and high throughput solutions, and works as an executive coach and fractional CTO.

Moderated Q&A
2023-12-21 13:00 - 13:30

Exploring connections between project management and queueing theory
2024-02-01 14:00 - 15:00
In this talk, [Harsha Honnappa](https://engineering.purdue.edu/SSL/about), an Associate Professor at the School of Industrial Engineering in Purdue University, will use his academic background to explain some basic concepts in queueing theory and probability.

We're hoping this will provide software practitioners with the building blocks to think more systematically about delays, variability, resource utilization, service times and so on. The talk will reference ideas discussed by people like Donald Reinertsen regarding product development flow: http://reinertsenassociates.com/videos/

We will try to run a queuing theory related simulator live to understand the concepts introduced, or look at some simulated results!

Harsha is happy to go off script if the audience has interesting questions or points to raise based on their experience. So do come armed with your questions :)

This session will be hosted by [Pramod Biligiri](https://in.linkedin.com/in/pramod-biligiri).

Measuring engineering productivity: Old pitfalls and new approaches
2024-03-01 13:30 - 14:30
Can you measure how efficient and productive your engineers are? Or is it a fraught notion? Can you go beyond gut instincts when it comes to measuring how well your team is doing? Are there new metrics and analytics tools that can help you in this regard? What are [DORA Metrics](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/dora_metrics.html)? What are [SPACE metrics](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3454124)?

Join us for this talk as [Sudheer Bandaru](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sbandaru), the CEO of [Hivel.ai](https://www.hivel.ai/) walks us through the pitfalls of measuring engineering productivity, and some new approaches that are more promising. With some actual, concrete war stories!

**About the speaker**
[Sudheer](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sbandaru) is the CEO of [Hivel.ai](https://www.hivel.ai/) and is striving to create an integrated platform that engineering leaders can use to make data-driven decisions.

As an engineering leader he struggled to tie in his engineering org’s value proposition to business outcomes. He was flummoxed to see tech leaders relying on their gut to take decisions around hiring, work allocation, project pipelining, and feature releases. Micromanagement and asking for constant updates were not his style. So currently he is on a mission to make engineering organizations data-driven and objective in their decision-making.
