Goal of the Platform

Develop platforms that seamlessly liberates and exposes data in an easily consumable manner for integrations (internal and external), analytics , machine learning.

Summary of Work

Challenges faced

Strategic Approach

Tactical Approach

Leadership

• Siloed Product teams with their own domains data

• Ambiguity on the goals of the platform

• Brand new technology framework ( distributed computing with Kafka based ecosystem)

• Few comparable options in the market to do a comprehensive market research

• Very few success stories with this tech stack in the market (Lyft, Google and just few tech unicorns were using this or similar stack @2018 and 2019)

• Assisted leadership to define and refine the "Where to Play" and "What are the Capabilities" by asking right "Whys?"

• Did extensive collaboration with technical leaders within and outside of organization to define the "Winning features" for the platform (near and long term)

• Broke down the "Vision" from organization leaders to achievable smaller platform goals and features that paved way to defining the right engineering work

• Defined the "Processes" and "Support frameworks" required for the platforms to be delivered and maintained (for budgeting and execution purposes)

• Played a mission critical role in helping leaders understand where to invest and where not to (technology, engineering budget)

• Mentored and led a Product team of Product owners and BAs helping them to become awesome (6 - 8 during various time frames between 2018 - 2023)

• Built and maintained a unified reporting framework to visually depict the current status and immediate and long term plan for all the platforms in my space.

  • This was one of the high traffic pages used all the way from engineering leaders to VPs of the Org for planning and budgeting

• Kept platform investment intact during several key leadership changes by providing the right data to build trust on the platforms

Contextual view of platforms managed

Nov 2018 - Mar 2023

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered with technology and business leaders to define winning features, align on trade-offs, and shape the long-term technology strategy for integrations at UKG.

• Roadmap Alignment: Created and maintained short- and long-term roadmaps, driving consensus across engineering, operations, executives, and product teams.

• Data-Driven Prioritization: Established metrics and data parameters to prioritize features, enabling targeted improvements and influencing best practices across product teams.

• Execution Excellence: Authored PRDs and user stories, prioritized tasks, and facilitated seamless delivery of high-priority features while ensuring alignment with organizational vision.

Highlights

• The streaming data platform efforts facilitated UKG/Ultimate Software to become leaders in HCM reporting and analytics

• Data was federated and exposed within and outside the organization in minutes compared to days earlier

• This internal iPaaS which encompasses the platforms I managed, facilitated one of the biggest ever data integrations in HCM space (Ultimate Software and Kronos merger)

  • The integration was completed and deployed to market in record time, aided by the iPaaS platform

• Hired and mentored Product folks who have become great Product Managers and leaders in their own space

• The extended road map ideas around extensibility, meta data repo are currently being executed by the organization show casing my long term thinking of defining winning choices
  

Technology stack

• GCP Cloud

• API design and management

• REST, gRPC,GraphQL

• AuthN and AuthZ for API

• Kafka ecosystem

• CDC (Change Data Capture)

• MuleSoft (for ETL engine)

• SQL (hands on)

• Swagger (hands on)

• Event driven architecture

• CQRS

• Distributed Computing

• Microservices architecture

• Schema design and management

• Observability

• Integration Patterns

Product Tools

Communication Tools

• Slack

• Teams

Documentation Tools

• Open AI Spec (swagger)

• AHA!,Confluence , Sharepoint (writing PRDs)

• Jira (User Stories)

Planning Tools

• Microsoft Project

• Smartsheet

• Jira (Sprint planning)

• AHA!

• Trello