And I'm sure that there are a lot of pressures from, you know, the investors from the senior leadership team. And so with that in mind, what would you say are some of the top challenges that you have faced and overcome during these post merger situations?

Pallavi Hanson

Typically what happens is you come into the merger and then you set up a timeline and you keep going until you're done. But that's not how it should work. The challenge is to ensure that the timeline is not endless, that we keep an eye on what's happening in the market, the relevancy and coming into the market with rationalized products is essential to be timely. So that has to be taken into consideration while prioritizing and planning. If that's not done and creates a big challenge for completing the effort.

Maureen Farmer

When you say keeping an eye on the market, what what do you mean by that? Specifically, what does that mean?

Pallavi Hanson

If there are competitors, if the investors need a certain turnaround in their timelines for their investment, if they're competitors, if there's trends in the industry that are happening that require a certain approach for either b2b or b2c, whatever the business is to be present and available for consumption in a timely manner. So this is for new products. But if we are busy integrating existing systems and products, and lose the sight of what we need to put forth for our top line, and our bottom line into the market that is impactful. So it's also essential that we create this dedicated Task Force to complete merger and post merger integration and not distract away from our ongoing revenue roadmap and efforts and product development. So that's a big challenge. And so if we do not prioritize the work stream, if we do not focus the work streams on specific aspects of the integration, while keeping the regular revenue generation activities intact, that would create a challenge, communication, accountability, ownership, the clarity and explicitness and communication is imperative for the integration to go smoothly.

Maureen Farmer

What does that look like? Is that look like endless staff meetings and report outs are what does that look like Pallavi?

So, we utilize tools to communicate constantly. So there's slack that is being used now, Teams, WebEx Teams. So, that's for ongoing continuous communication. But then, if we utilize the Agile development methodology, that can be utilized not just for product development, but also for integrations, any kind of initiatives and strategy implementation. The safe methodology, which is Scaled Agile Framework has many tools, many aspects that can be utilized within different contexts and applicability. And it has a lot of different ceremonies that can be utilized for clear and ongoing and frequent communication, you can close it out with a certain action being completed, it doesn't hurt for the steering committee to be abreast and updated on a very regular basis doesn't hurt to have cross functional collaborations doesn't work to have dependencies identified and work scheduled to take those predecessors and successors into account while organizing the work. So that's where also the 90 day planning for timeboxing activities. You know, even if the acquisition, merger acquisition integration spans probably like six to 12 months, but the individual smaller chunks can be executed within 90 days, and it will have or should have, for that matter. Very clear and precise playbook to appear to with respect to communications, executions, tracking monitoring.

Maureen Farmer

You had mentioned before, I believe that one of the tools that you use or approaches to product integration and getting the product to market on time, is helping your teams do development in parallel. A lot of times people don't know how to do the project management piece.

This is my favorite topic, the time to market in product development. I'll give you a simple analogy. If we throw a party and it's a certain party, we have to throw if we have a list of recipes and our pantries are well stocked we can put together really good array of dishes and not have to be frazzled. Product Development is the same way the playbooks that we create and the procedures that we have that are proven with proven standards that we have already established. That's our recipe book. And if we utilize modular development, taking architectural best practices and industry trends into consideration, then that's our, you know, ingredients. It's fully stocked and if we invest in automation that creates It's a rapid application development aspect added to the whole development cycle. So whether it's a new feature or an additional enhancement or a completely new product altogether, because we have the architecture identified and the best practices set up, and we have components created in the form of libraries that we can plug and play, these are based on standard development patterns or design patterns, we stay a stickler technology relevant. What it helps us do is bring together ingredients of bringing together components based on the desired experience of the feature and put it together quickly. And I'll come back again to the Scaled Agile software development practice, which has concepts of enablers and spikes that can be interleaved are interfaced during the time boxes to keep the whole engineering organization ahead of the curve by researching by evaluating tools, evaluating new design patterns, new DevOps practices. So when the feature is in development or completed, the different ways of doing innovative development has already been identified, documented and catalog. So it can be picked up from the arsenal, you know, quiver of arrows, picked up and put together rather quickly.

Maureen Farmer

I just want to talk for just a second here, I want to read something to you. Pallavi is an effective software development leader who has led our customer portal product to an industry leading position after a complicated post merger integration. In the third party study, the organization's Portal was recognized as the top provider across 14 dimensions, ranking in the top decile for customer value and ease of implementation. And so the reason I'm bringing this up now is when you walked into that organization with the two companies who had that had come together, you had to start from square one, I mean, you didn't have the pantry full or the libraries full. You you had to evaluate your people, and then figure out what tools you need it. Can you talk a little bit about that.

Pallavi Hanson

That was very interesting, exciting, and a challenge to solve that created triumph at the end, there were a lot of skilled team members present. And since the technologies came from established legacy companies, the stacks of technologies are well established, the products were fine on their own, but they still needed to have the unified brand in front of it. The reason we evaluate newer technologies for go forward is for operational maintainability. And cost effectiveness. So that's where the evaluation comes into place where people are skilled, but in what what technology? Are they skilled? Do we have the skills to support the extent or the development in the market for the future? So we can if there is turnaround in personnel, can we bring in the skill set easily? Or is the skill set the technology required skill set that has become archaic? So all of these are aspects, you know, interviews with the team members, understanding what the backgrounds were on, what the tools and and functionalities that had been developed? Was there a customer associated influence in developing the feature the way that it was developed, investigating similar technologies, similar experiences from our competitors, to see what is driving the customer base, in the market or in in the industry for convenience, ease of use intuitiveness, automation, ease of executing their business processes, what is it that sets the experience apart from what's available in the industry. So evaluating all of that, and then ensuring that our current tool set or the current product set has what the market and the industry needs, keep that intact or clean it up, put a bow on it and what's not present, make a plan and a roadmap to then rapidly put those aspects in place so that the experience for the customers becomes seamless and flawless. So that took some time and initially also coming back to my product time to market. It's essential to continually deliver feature sets and not hold on to a longer build out period that is possible. Using robust DevOps practices, where we continuously integrate continuously deliver continuously elaborate, continuously test, and continuously deploy. So over a period of time, the feature set starts to become rich. And it then provides those, you know, convenience, automated business flows, intuitiveness in use and execution, all of it then comes into place very naturally.

Maureen Farmer

It sounds like you're building an aeroplane.

Pallavi Hanson

Yes, that is such a great analogy—you try to build it while flying it. That is very unusual for an airplane. But it's very possible given software engineering is one of those industries where this is actually possible to use and build at the same time.

Maureen Farmer

And that's how you got your portal to market. I think within nine months or something like that is that you were able to fortify your team, build the team, helping the team understand what the limits or the scope is, for each part of the project? You'd mentioned that before? Yes, rather than having it going on forever? There was a start and stop. Yes. And then you would have a product feature, or a feature set available while they're still working on the other one.

Pallavi Hanson

Yes, that is capacity and resource management, that is how to prioritize and how to allocate the capacity for different aspects. So is there enhancement, how much capacity to allocate there is it new feature development, how much capacity based on prioritization and wait, you know, the investors and the leadership wants the product to market, but they also want operational efficiency. So everything needs to balance with the assets and the and the tools and the people and resources that you have. So the way to do this is accurately identify the strengths accurately identify the resources, and then correctly prioritize and allocate by percentage and wait the time to then address every need that the leadership and investors have and be able to satisfy those needs, within the time that we have. So that it's essential to time box and do full stack. So every feature that we develop, should be small enough in unit that it's independently buildable, testable, consumable, and deliverable. So if we do that, then you know, you don't wait on something to build for a long time you kind of start and stop.

Maureen Farmer

You don't wait for something to be completely finished before you're working on something else. Yeah, I've seen that a lot in in my career as well that, that people feel as though the entire thing needs to be finished before they can actually start on something that's complimentary or something that you know, needs to be done in, in parallel, for example. And I would think that after an integration of two large organizations, I know that sometimes there's a natural turnover, right now, during the post COVID (or it's current COVID, depending on how you define it)—There is a tremendous turnover of people at every level. And so I do realize that when you were integrating these teams that we're talking about right now, it was before the pandemic, but I do know that there was some natural turnover there. And you had a skeleton crew while you still needed to get this product to market. So I'm very curious as to how you were able to motivate your teams to outperform their previous complement, while dealing with a shortfall of skills. I'd love to talk a little bit about that.

Pallavi Hanson

Yeah, it's a lot of care. You know, a lot of care and a lot of listening and a lot of understanding of concerns. People want to thrive, people want to do people want to give all of this happens when they understand and know that they're heard what they're doing, what impact does it have on the overall goals of the organization, if they understand that they're very, they're much more invested.

Maureen Farmer

It's like they're buying into the change management process that they feel heard. They feel safe, they feel taken care of. And my sense is that even though they would have to work extra hard, it sounds to me as though that they've been very committed. And I think that that is a good recipe for engagement. When you take the time to listen and understand, and you know, I would imagine there's a lot of recalibration of skills and and within the priorities of the team.

Pallavi Hanson

Yes. So they had a lot of turnover from leadership point of view. Before I came into picture, a lot of people had been promised path for career growth, which due to the merger, due to the leadership turnover, we've kind of disappointed for not having been able to walk that path that they felt was promised to them. It is counterintuitive, but that was a time when what I actually did was interviewed, every person listened to them understood their inclinations and interests, and restructured the organization, taking them into consideration people first to set up the teams in such a way that they could feel they're on the right path. And the organization and the deliveries were on the right path to software engineering requires specific types of structures where you know, you do development, you do DevOps, you do quality assurance, your business analysis, all of these foundational elements of software engineering, were absent. And that was actually an easy thing to fix. Because something that's not there, you can always put in place something that's already there not functioning correctly, that becomes a little tricky, right, both of those, both of those things were, to a certain extent present, but with putting in the right structure with putting in people with the right approach, and with the right skill set, because they wanted to be there, and they wanted to buy in, and they were getting something in return, what we're getting was learning new technologies, new best practices, a new product, and a new way of doing things. So, there was a lot of learning, sometimes people get tired of doing the same things over and over again. But when you shake things up, when you show there is a different way or a different approach or a different result or different triumph to be had it creates excitement, and you know, if you show okay, this is what is it, it is going to do for the organization and you are doing it you know, you are the reason why there is going to be many full results and returns and you get appreciated that creates a by and also in a large way. Another big thing that I have realized over time is have the diversity. Classical diversity creates this interest and understanding and knowledge between people. But the diversity in terms of skill set tenure, maturity, learning and understanding. Also kind of, you know, you create leaders, you create mentors within the teams, you bring in a new junior people, you have mid level engineers, we have you have senior engineers, and you create that communicative collaborative culture within the teams where you do not let silos happen, do not let people write, you know, go into a corner and do their own thing.

Maureen Farmer

I've heard a lot about silos lately, people are talking a lot about silos. And I think it happens when there's lack of communication within an organization. That's what I think...

Pallavi Hanson

Yes, sometimes you want that focused time, sometimes the communication or it becomes noise, where a lot of people want to talk a lot and you you are asked a lot of questions, but then, but then it becomes noise. And you know, the focus kind of dissipates a little bit. So there's a balance there. Sometimes you need to leave it alone and have it have the complicated if it's a complicated as have focused time and get it done. But more times than not, it is essential for team building. It is essential for coaching and mentoring. It is essential for pair programming, it is essential to create small ownership groups of mini projects that account towards the bigger project and bigger features to cross pollinate. Get team members to learn and understand aspects of you know, either it's a functional aspect, or does the technical aspect is the front end aspect or the back end aspects or platform aspect, and have them cross pollinate and encourage and provide incentives to learn, even if it's not associated with a direct task at hand. So that's growth. My team members look forward to doing hackathons and they come up with such great ideas.

Maureen Farmer

So, tell us for non software engineers, tell us what a hackathon is.

Pallavi Hanson

Okay, it's fun. It's where you set aside your of course, you need to provide for the hackathon time in your plan so the regularly scheduled programming doesn't get impacted but once everything you know the program increment is complete, and all of the work is complete. Then release will be set aside like three or four days where all of the team members come together in one location. And now it's virtual, of course, and create ideas, create teams, they are the owners of the whole planning and execution. So they form teams, and they create projects. So there could be technical projects, that could be procedural projects, there could be research projects, and then within two to two to three days, they will start to finish design and execute a proof of concept on different kinds of, you know, enhancements that may or might not have been asked off them. But they would have thought about it and put it in practice, put it in place. And that creates that catalog that creates the arrow within our quiver. So we have already done some research, some execution, implementation and proof of concept. So for example, what one of my teams did was facial recognition. Wow. instigated, yeah, sophisticated and complicated items, that people are interested in some kind of analytics or machine learning aspects, where we look through the customers analyze the behavior, and look at the data data center, their their infrastructure, and how they work with their infrastructure, analyze their behavior, and then provide them first right of refusal opportunities. And then you know, how you have customers that bought this have also bought that as a recommendation systems that you come across. Usually, when you do online shopping, or something like that, you know, things like that, where we have the data, we have the behavior, we just have to apply some analytics, it's in our roadmap for the future, not in the immediate roadmap. But we would provide, I would provide a few days to the team members to just try out things that are coming in the future. Try them out. Now do some proof of concepts now and show it working. People are very excited to see the results of hackathons to see the demos, because it's working demos, natural speech recognition, you know, talk to text. So now you can actually talk into and have it react. So things like that are very advanced and very interesting for technical minds. Sometimes you don't get to do them during your regular work time. So you set up hackathons for them to just burn off their energies.

Maureen Farmer

Yeah, it sounds very entrepreneurial, and very creative. And this has given me a really a valuable window into software development, the function of software development, because I am as far away from software development as you can possibly get. But I do see a definite parallel between creating strategies, products and services, regardless of whether it's software development, or whether it's professional development or, or service creation. It sounds as though a lot of the same skills are required.

Pallavi Hanson

Absolutely. And it is very creative. You know, you can't physically touch it. You can because you know, you can touch the screen and look at your code. But there is no physical form to it. But it is a creation. Nevertheless. It is so integral to everyday lives now, because life is about using technology. Now more than anything else. Talk about metaverse.

Maureen Farmer

And in terms of your teams, you've integrated teams, you've done a lot of vendor management. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because everyone who I know I've actually interviewed some people about you talk about your, your amazing ability to pull resources together and I don't want to unnecessarily expose your intellectual property. But can you talk a little bit about how you've been able to work with with third party vendors and establish a real growth mindset within that team, whether it's a third party team or your own team? How do you do that?

Pallavi Hanson

Yeah, the growth mindset is essential to figure out what is possible when there are situations where things don't look like they're going how we would have anticipated or planned for. So that's the growth mindset and I always encourage everyone to stop and take a step back and kind of just take a breath and rethink it with respect to the the vendors or the third parties. You know, the relationships are important creation of the plan and utilization of time are key. You know, we say time is money but money lost. can be earned back time last cannot be the time is going to pass either way, whether you utilize it in the best possible manner or not. So why not utilize it in the best possible manner? And then, you know, teach that what is it to utilize time? What does it mean to utilize time in the best possible manner? So, these are all the aspects, you know, whether it's a team, my team, that is my employees, or it's a vendor and a team of contractors, you know, there is no differentiation. What I'm trying to do here is utilize that time that I get, because of the geographical distribution across the world. I mean, the world has shrunk considerably. And, you know, what do you say it is? Happy Hour somewhere? So, it's always a productive hour somewhere!

Maureen Farmer

Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. I was talking to somebody in another industry, although it was in the technology industry, but in a different kind of technology. And they have teams spread across the world as well. And so they're able, again, to take advantage of the 24 hour clock, because of the geographical distribution, what I'm hearing you say is that it doesn't matter whether it's your own team, or whether it's a third party team, the principles are the same. It has to do with ensuring psychological safety, interest in work, appreciation and recognition for work well done. And seeing each person on the team, regardless of whether they're a third party or your own, as a real person, and someone who has an integral contribution to the team.

Pallavi Hanson

That's exactly it. I couldn't have said it better.

Maureen Farmer

That's amazing. So what would you say to an organization out there? Maybe it's a private equity backed organization that is planning an acquisition of another company, same size? What would you say is the key principle or consideration to bring teams and and products together? What would be the the the number one thing that you would recommend? Or two things!

Pallavi Hanson

Value the people, first of all, but also ensure that you're not completely dependent on a specific person, if there is a single point of failure with a single person, because of either long tenure or subject matter expertise, then the value driver aspect or the growth aspect kind of starts to hinder? Because you cannot scale? So in order to scale, the scale doesn't happen just with how an application performs on a larger user load. The scale also happens on how much can you get done with limited amount of resources or the current amount of resources that you have? Can you deliver more, that's your people scalability in do you do? Would that be through cross training? Would that become into a cross training to build in redundancy on the team is that and also coming back to my library or catalog of components, utilizing design patterns and best practices, standardization...

Maureen Farmer

Right, standardization. So standard operating procedures? Would that be part of your catalogue of resources?

Pallavi Hanson

I would call them playbooks.

They're similar, though, right? 

Pallavi Hanson

Similar to standard operating procedures, kind of, for technical minds, you know, because I work with technical geeks all the time...they would roll their eyes on standard operating procedures.

Maureen Farmer

It's a list of instructions that can be followed to achieve a specific outcome.

Pallavi Hanson

Yeah, exactly. Not verbose, very precise, very clear. Yeah. The cross pollination and the knowledge making knowledge persistent. So it will be have something like definition of ready or definition of done so definition of ready is Have you done it? It's as simple as a simple checklist. You know, there are things that would give you many false benefits if you just do these things. Yeah. And you can always point people back and it is so clear and so quick, that it is not hard to follow it is it is easy to implement, and it's lightweight. So you know there is no resistance to adherence. So that helps the scale. Making part, the persistence of knowledge helps the scaling part. And people, you know, if you make the environment safe, and you take that job security aspect out of picture, and give them, okay, these are like yours. If a person is like I will I do this, I'm not going to talk about it, because this is where my job security is. Make it. So the person feels that they are employment secure, they're learning so much are getting so much they don't have to give much to get a lot more where you know, technology, new technologies, Opportunities to learn new features, opportunities to learn, honing their technical muscles, opportunities to learn and opportunities to teach. And then the pride that comes from mentorship. And the pride that comes from getting a junior person up to a level where, you know, they become independent, and the growth part automatically then, you know, is created for them. So succession plan, the security in the mind, and the psychological safety is key, then you can impart that and create a safe space, then, then that siloing kind of starts to dissipate when the cross pollination starts to happen very easily. So that's where you get the scalability from people where you can rapidly develop and bring to market your product. And you can get more done with the people that you have, because you're creating those automated modules that you can put together faster for a bigger feature to get from inception to market, done very fast.

Well, that's amazing. You've certainly taken a lot of the mystery out of software development and scaling whenever sometimes I hear the word scale, and it confuses me, because I don't really understand what's involved. But now what I hear you saying is that you have to have the technology that is big enough and robust enough to perform. But you also need the team that is self sufficient and empowered, and working alongside the technology, but under the guidance of a leader who understands how it all works. Exactly. That's amazing. So I know a lot of people listening to this podcast are absolutely enamored with product development. It's a big topic today, along with the great resignation, I think we've talked a lot about how to reverse that trend. We just talked about that. And how to engage teams and get the best out of them, and also how to help a team grow leadership and mentorship skills, too. Because after all, that leadership capacity build scale as well, doesn't it?

Pallavi Hanson

Yes, absolutely. If you want to expand, if you want to create additional products, you're going to venture into additional markets. That's the best way I mean, your pool of leaders and a pool of teams is already ready. So you can deploy quickly. You can assess research plan and make an execution strategy and deploy it rather quickly to spin off and construct something that can be delivered into the market for something that is not completely diverse from your core offering, but adjustment and also satisfies a need that had not been previously met or even contemplated that it could be met.

Maureen Farmer

This has been fantastic. And I know that you have a reputation in the marketplace for delivering product ready features and products themselves to market ahead of time and ahead of budget. So I'm sure if the listener here would be interested in reaching out to you—Would you be open to having a conversation?

Pallavi Hanson

By all means! Always happy to connect and always happy to share ideas and thoughts.

Maureen Farmer

That's wonderful. So why don't we let people know how they can reach you and we'll make sure that that information is also located in the show notes as well. So how can people get a hold of you Pallavi?

Pallavi Hanson

LinkedIn is best. Pallavi Hanson on on LinkedIn is my profile. Yeah, and pallavi.hanson@gmail.com is my email address.

Maureen Farmer

That's wonderful. Well, thank you for joining me here today on the Get Hired Up! podcast Pallavi.

Pallavi Hanson

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for having me here. This has been a delightful conversation as always Maureen. Thank you!