Product Innovation Transforming Business Dynamics of the Software Industry
Ranga Shetty, General Manager India Subsidiary, Granicus India, 0
Could you tell us about the evolution of product innovation from the century’s engineering development in India, to how it’s changing business dynamics of the software industry?
India has come a long way from being the IT back-office of the world to becoming a power house of product engineering and innovation. This has primarily been driven by the steady and fast-paced growth of skills across the talent pool in the interconnected facets of product engineering, viz. product management, system architecture, solution design, software development, quality engineering, process automation and tools development. The emergence of a world-class talent pool made it a no-brainer for global technology companies to set up R&D centres in India.
When a talented and motivated team is let loose in a market space, that has a vast potential for innovation, the results can be dramatic. Granicus operates in the GovTech space, ripe with opportunities for digital transformation of how governments serve their people. Our India Innovation Centre will be a hub of product innovations powering our growth for years to come.
Specify the company’s leadership role in software development and how is it contributing in the GovTech space?
Granicus’ India Innovation Centre houses the full spectrum of capabilities across the technology product engineering domain. We have leadership roles in product management, software architecture, cloud engineering and devops, quality processes, technical support and data science (AI). Our scrum teams take complete ownership and responsibility of products/systems and are responsible for them throughout their lifecycle. As a result of the robust product engineering and innovation capabilities of the India Centre, Granicus is able to address the large scope of opportunities in the GovTech space and thus fuel its journey of fast-paced growth.
How is lean product innovation adding value in software product innovation and how is the company addressing citizens’ governmental requirements?
Lean product development is the mantra for software product innovation today. Lean innovation by definition implies rapid development of a minimum viable product and continuous, incremental enhancement of its value proposition in short, iterative cycles tightly guided by a data-driven process of customer feedback. Technology platforms and architectures such as Cloud, SaaS, microservices and WebService APIs have evolved to support lean product development.
At Granicus our systems generate and process massive
amounts of data, as our business involves large communities of citizens interacting with their governments. Our lean innovation initiatives are addressing requirements that are hyper-scale. We have developed technology platforms such as our massively scalable, highly fault-tolerant publish-subscribe infrastructure to process millions of transactions an hour, to speed up our product innovation initiatives.
What are the foremost qualities for technology leadership and product innovation and how can you confirm the strategies are the finest?
Long-term business success requires a fanatical and consistent focus on execution excellence. Technology business is driven by a high degree of rigor in engineering processes. However, the fast evolving technology world creates risks caused by a newcomer, and execution excellence does not protect you from this risk. Thus technology leadership needs to create an environment that nurtures alternative points of view. Two unique values practiced by Granicus’ engineering organization are (i) Code as craft and (ii) Humanity of developers. Code as craft ensures that our product teams blend their creative energies with their technical expertise to design purpose-built solutions that delight the customer. Humanity of developers creates a collaborative space with each team member is respectful of the other’s opinions, thus creating a friction-free environment churning ideas into an impactful outcome. Technology leadership that role models our values is key to our success.
State your thoughts about the potential skills for product innovation and what is the future of the application development business?
Product innovation requires one to develop a higher order awareness of the problem space. Let us look at an example - For Granicus, the problem space is government – citizen engagement. Creating a run-of-the-mill website or a portal to address this need would be a superficial approach to this problem. A deeper look at the problem space will lead to the realization that there is an opportunity to expand the scope of engagement by crafting solutions that activate the silent majority and not just the vocal few who tend to dominate government – citizen interactions. This deeper understanding is what creates the opportunity for innovation.
Successful innovations also require one to build relationships with a larger cast of characters. Your ideas get polished into true innovations only after facing the fire of a diverse set of stakeholders. Once the stakeholders have invested in giving shape to your ideas, the buy in for adopting it becomes much easier. At Granicus’ India centre we are developing connects with our globally distributed teams to channel our ideas across various groups and forums thus creating a platform for our innovators to find collaborators across the company and our customer base.
As India’s talent pool continues to grow and mature, we can proudly expect to contribute an ever-increasing share of product innovations to the world. At Granicus India, we are inspired to bring the power of digital technologies to revolutionize how governments serve their citizens around the world.
What are the foremost qualities for technology leadership and product innovation and how can you confirm the strategies are the finest?
Long-term business success requires a fanatical and consistent focus on execution excellence. Technology business is driven by a high degree of rigor in engineering processes. However, the fast evolving technology world creates risks caused by a newcomer, and execution excellence does not protect you from this risk. Thus technology leadership needs to create an environment that nurtures alternative points of view. Two unique values practiced by Granicus’ engineering organization are (i) Code as craft and (ii) Humanity of developers. Code as craft ensures that our product teams blend their creative energies with their technical expertise to design purpose-built solutions that delight the customer. Humanity of developers creates a collaborative space with each team member is respectful of the other’s opinions, thus creating a friction-free environment churning ideas into an impactful outcome. Technology leadership that role models our values is key to our success.
At Granicus India, we are inspired to bring the power of digital technologies to revolutionize how governments serve their citizens around the world
State your thoughts about the potential skills for product innovation and what is the future of the application development business?
Product innovation requires one to develop a higher order awareness of the problem space. Let us look at an example - For Granicus, the problem space is government – citizen engagement. Creating a run-of-the-mill website or a portal to address this need would be a superficial approach to this problem. A deeper look at the problem space will lead to the realization that there is an opportunity to expand the scope of engagement by crafting solutions that activate the silent majority and not just the vocal few who tend to dominate government – citizen interactions. This deeper understanding is what creates the opportunity for innovation.
Successful innovations also require one to build relationships with a larger cast of characters. Your ideas get polished into true innovations only after facing the fire of a diverse set of stakeholders. Once the stakeholders have invested in giving shape to your ideas, the buy in for adopting it becomes much easier. At Granicus’ India centre we are developing connects with our globally distributed teams to channel our ideas across various groups and forums thus creating a platform for our innovators to find collaborators across the company and our customer base.
As India’s talent pool continues to grow and mature, we can proudly expect to contribute an ever-increasing share of product innovations to the world. At Granicus India, we are inspired to bring the power of digital technologies to revolutionize how governments serve their citizens around the world.