Sujoy: Yes, quite a few. Many years back, when I had only four and half years of experience, so we had built for one of our clients’ an engine which looked at computing how a telecom operator is able to maintain the promises it has made with respect to delivery and fixing charges. At that point of time, when I was in the very early stages of my career I got this opportunity. We made a very generic framework, which I hear is still used 10 years later on.

At Ericsson, I worked on one of the major challenges of telecom operators – how do you build a service network and maintain the SLA. So along with the already existing SLA monitoring system, we built a real-time prediction system. And that was a very innovative implementation system, which we built with a team of 3 to 4 people with core algorithmic work. And that is a part of Ericsson’s portfolio today.

In IBM, I worked with the Lotte department store in 2017 and built a conversational chatbot which not only provided me with a great experience and learning but what I am proud of is that our client Lotte won the Best Customer Experience Award at World Retail Congress which is equivalent to Oscars for retailers. Yes, there were a number of problems and the problem is a mix of business and technology. Of course, the core was the technology challenge, and as a technologist that was what excited me the most. But then the technology problem does not reside outside of the domain of business. It is not something when business drivers are not important. You would always need to understand that.

Also, one needs to understand the difference between Science and Engineering. Engineering is Science done under constraints. You always have constraints of time, you have constraints of money, people, and skills. You may want to get X, you may only be able to get to 0.7x or 0.8x because of these constraints. One of the major challenges of leading technology services is taking decisions on these trade-offs. For example, if I have to do one implementation, then there are challenges related to time, money, or people not having relevant skills. I then need to make tradeoffs. What and which trade-offs can be made are things which you can understand if you understand the impact of that trade-off in that business outcome. That is something, which is very important.