Pallavi Hanson
A resilient leader with a proven track record for reducing costs and maximizing revenues, Pallavi leads her teams to drive the flawless and on-time execution of products that delight Fortune 500 customers, thrill employees, and keep investors happy. She serves as a trusted C-Level partner while spearheading tricky post-merger integrations. She has mastered migrating legacy technology applications to modern, cloud-first architectures.
Transcript
Maureen Farmer
Hi, this is Maureen farmer host of the get hired Podcast. Today it's my pleasure to welcome Pallavi Hanson to the show, leading the team with a creative flair and a sharp technical wizardry Pallavi Hanson is an entrepreneurial business executive who designs builds and optimizes engineering practices and software assets to create profitable products that lead the market. A resilient leader with a proven track record for reducing costs and maximizing revenues she leads her team to drive the flawless and on time executions of products that delight fortune 500 Customers thrill employees and keep investors happy. Pallavi currently serves as the head of engineering for flex Central, an infrastructure company for colocation, connectivity, cloud disaster recovery, and managed services with 40 data centers across the United States. At flex Central, she was recruited to lead the digital transformation and rationalization of software products, processes, tools, and people during the post merger integration of two large organizations. One of her hallmark achievements at flex Central was increased employee engagement by 60% through creating a culture of empowerment, autonomy, collaboration and growth.
During a challenging change management initiative that was driven by the merger of these two large companies repeatedly promoted a lobbyist serves as a trusted sea level partner, while spearheading tricky post merger integrations or mastery at migrating legacy technology applications to modern cloud first architectures while keeping an eye on the p&l and leading effective teams is the hallmark of her executive competency and business acumen, skilled at identifying, recruiting, developing and retaining top talent for organizational sustainability. She is also known for her charming presence and quiet charisma and I can speak to that equally skilled in technology. She leads software engineering solutions through quality architecture, software development, quality assurance, DevOps and on time product releases, showcasing her flair for people. Alavi builds authentic relationships including colleagues, employees, customers supply chain vendors and business partners. In fact, she's known for amplifying business results using a proprietary approach with vendors. A prudent Resource Manager Pahlavi reduced the yearly licensing costs by $100,000 per year by consolidating tools and libraries while lowering product development costs by 20%. Her ability to do so is uniquely Pahlavi sweet spot by strengthening vendor relations, while improving customer service lowering customer churn and propelling employee engagement.
Educated at the University of Mumbai, India, Pallavi holds a Bachelor of Science Engineering degree with a special specialization in electronics engineering and computer science. And she also holds a graduate diploma in software engineering with excellent communication skills. She's also fluently multilingual in English, Hindi and Marathi. When Pahlavi is not busy serving customers, building talented teams and collaborating with her CEO in the team, she can be found at a Disney theme park with her family traveling to heritage sites in India or designing clothing fashion patterns at scale.
Welcome, Pallavi to the show.
Pallavi Hanson
Hi, Maureen. I am so delighted to be here. And thank you for having me!
Maureen Farmer
Welcome. It's my pleasure. And it's been on the calendar for a long time. We've had to postpone it a few times. But I'm so happy that we're able to have this conversation today.
Pallavi Hanson
Yeah, I've been looking forward to it for a while—it's been a long time coming.
Maureen Farmer
So, I'd like to start with a quote from the World Economic Forum. And I'd like to kind of use this as a kind of a backstage or backsplash to our conversation today because it is relevant and it's recent. So according to the World Economic Forum "managers are now navigating the ripple effects from the global pandemic as employees re-evaluate their careers and leave their jobs in record numbers. Companies have a record number of open positions right now in the United States. And according to a survey of 30,000 people across 31 countries, 41% of employees plan to leave their current jobs this year. The brands that align themselves with connection, progress and a commitment to employee development are viewed positively by both employees and consumers. While 72% of employees felt their employer was failing to deliver on all three, for the few employees that did, 90% of their employees said they intended to remain. Employees need to see their work publicly celebrated, their careers being supported and they need to know that their friends and family admire the company they work for. However, only 44% of respondents in our brand study felt their employers actually delivered progress in this area." So, I know that your sweet spot is post merger integrations of large systems, but Pallavi tell us a little bit about how that happens. I expect that is not going to happen without having great teams.
Pallavi Hanson
That is so true. And everything the Economic Forum has said is on the mark, obviously, from my leadership point of view, you know, it's more of thinking strategy top down, keep it customer focused, revenue focused, but approach the strategy for execution and plan for it from the bottom up. What I mean by that is the employees are your key, always to success. So, that has been always how I have thought about approaching any problem or any integration, challenge, or any growth plans. My people are the pride that, you know, I carry and that help realize all of these strategies. Strategies could be really grand, but unless the people are invested, and they are brought in and feel the ownership, nothing would ever get done. From the point of view of the integration, you know, the challenges are great if they create triumph after they are solved. But if challenges create suffering, then it is not so good. It could be that the way things are handled just are unnecessarily trauma creating for people, I mean, if you can catch those, and keep an eye on those and just create challenges, have challenges to be solved that excite the team members that have them, realize that this is a great challenge for them for their learning, for their progress, for you know, just to move forward in their careers. They're built, everyone will jump into it headfirst.