Project Overview

  • This was the first project I took on in the tech leadership role, that exposed me to a new world of heavy stakeholder management from clients and product managers to engineering and sales
  • This was also a SaaS project with no priors in place, since it involved each client coming in with their own data schema and cloud setup and to provide a unified, useful and consistent experience was a challenge
  • The project roadmap was drafted to start with a rule based system to get all the boundaries right, and later we went to an ML system based on SVMs and decision trees to discover new boundaries in a explainable way
  • There were also frequent client engagements to communicate the current capabilities and collect future requirements, followed by planning meetings with the product manager to go through my proposals for system architecture and roadmaps
  • At the end, it was one of the most critical projects that helped with client retention and satisfaction

Skills

Context switching and using a multitude of skills

This was the first time I discovered that I do excellently well with context switching, since I treat each switch as a chance to gain refreshment and hollistic view to go back to the core. While it was still a difficult thing to do, managing and streamlining these multitude of skills, helped set my reputation quickly in this new role

Stakeholder management

This project involved the most human interaction I have experienced so far, but that also put into perspective how many people and processes are affected by and invested in this work. Engaging with clients to help them build from ground up, a system to get insights on their private cloud, which no other vendors support well, was a delighful experience

ML is just a battery powering a bigger apparatus

The amount of non-ML work involved in this project made us realise that ML is just a battery that go a system go faster and make the system more generic. However to get to that system and architecture, there has to be a lot of understanding, critical thinking and plan on what's required and what is the skeleton that needs to be built for the powering battery to sit in