When the team grows you constantly need to find a relevance to you and continue to work with them. Elevated to the role of Managing Director to focus to add physical games and other areas into our kitty. New focus areas are:- Business vision, Strategic Planning, Roadmap and Strategies- Skill development games- New partnerships in terms of both Production (Physical Games Manufacturers, Offsite working teams) and Distribution (Schools, NGOs, Telcos, Digital Distribution Platforms etc) - Build B2B eCommerce partners and channels for Skill development gamesGreat learnings/experiences:1. Lean Business Canvas and Mind-maps development2. Strategies to acquire partners and clients3. SWOT analysis, Data driven decision making4. Working with distributed teams (Matrix Organisations) 5. Managing big teams and Freelance partners spread across India and Philippines 6. B2B Offline distribution model and the challenges7. Expertise in development and deployment cloud solutions

All new journeys starts with a rosy picture... we started our new new journey and this time as Co-Founder of KLAP Edutainment and into EdTech space. The original goal is to bring early child education through gamification with digital games. Our solutions are targeted towards both preschoolers and primary school going kids.After initial hiccups.. within an year we mastered the art of making games and publishing them on to iOS, Android, WP8 and Blackberry platforms. By end of 2014, we developed 80+ games that covers all the spheres of early child education and published on all popular platforms that generated around 3.0 million installs.During the process nicely attached with Gamification. Gamification is an interesting area to present education and changes the way education is provided to students. Being CEO throws limitless opportunities that helped me in shaping a new vision, goals to help company and society as well. In next three years we are transforming education through gamification and new suite of solutions to target to schools. New focus areas are:1. Innovation and Research always pays off. Worked on a new framework for my team to implement gamification in the field of education2. Partner with fund houses to infuse additional capital required to develop new solutions3. Partner with schools, NGOs, Telecom operators and Digital Distribution Platforms to deliver educational products 4. Build branded educational gamesGreat learnings/experiences are:1. Gamification and its uses in Education, Training etc2. Understanding Finance & Marketing - The missing portions of my earlier experiences3. Need of compliance and its complexities in India4. Power of a strong team in building a completely new products 5. The cost and implications associated with adhoc decisions6. Budgeting

Engineering Manager was my next role.. this role at EFI is a combination of Individual Contributor + Team Management + Product Manager + Program Manager + Business Support + Customer Support.... oh what not for anything and everything its Engineering Manager is point of contact.Work wise its 2 agile teams that comprises roughly 16 engineers and QA members. Me being the pseudo product owner and scrum master in the development of EFI Send Server Enterprise Software Suite and EFI Send Server + Ricoh's Global Scan integration products. Overall its like entrepreneurial kind of experience and got exposed to all sphere's of an organisation that motivated to start a new startup KLAP Edutainment Pvt Ltd that is focused on kids early learning and skill development. Great Learnings/Experiences are:1. Architect & Development of Enterprise solutions 2. Use of cloud with Enterprise solutions, IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS etc3. Perspectives of Product Owner, Engineering, QA and Sales teams4. Handling Integration project expectation, execution and product delivery5. Performance management, Team budgeting, Resource Planning etc

Got a bigger role and team to play with...in addition to Fiery Client applications got enterprise document/content management applications into my projects kitty and EFI SendMe/IKON DocSend are first set of them. This paved a new road to start working Client/Server Enterprise development. Another big challenge is working with Matrix Organisations, Global teams, Support centres, Sales Teams in US, UK that are from different time zones. Another big change is to adopt Scrum/Agile methodology.Great learning/practices are:1. Scrum/Agile methodologies2. Enterprise Content Management Systems architecture and integrations with Documentum, OpenText, Captiva, Alchemy, Hummingbird, Interwoven etc3. Cloud Technology4. Enterprise systems architecture

Rose from a single person to 3 member team and first glimpse of a mix of individual contributor + mentor + little team management. Work wise a big chunk is Universal Binaries support on Macintosh that runs on both PowerPC and Intel processors. Addition of new features to Fiery Remote Scan, HotFolders to support new Fiery variants.Big learnings/experiences are:1. Code versioning using CVS and supporting multiple versions at a time2. Universal Binaries architecture and conversion process3. Small team management skills like Task estimation, scheduling, allocation, dependencies resolving, code reviews, brainstorming etc.

Joined efi (another Matrix Organization) based on my working expertise on Macintosh and knowledge of TWAIN, Image processing and Printing knowledge. Its a perfect match of skills loved working with great engineers.In this great period worked on cross platform versions of Fiery client application Fiery Remote Scan, Hot Folders and few prototypes for Office Scan.Great Learnings/experiences are:1. Working with complete Matrix Organisation2. Development of cross platform client applications that work for both Mac OS and Windows3. Implementation of design patterns with C++

Picked Wipro as my next company.. how ever too much unmatched expectations and experiences made me to move out quickly. In this short lived period worked on Carbon porting of Kodak 1D image analysis system for Macintosh variation.Learnings are:1. Working nature of Product vs Service based organisations2. TWAIN Image capture protocol and Image processing techniques3. Working with Soap protocol

Over the time promoted to Senior Software Engineer courtesy added experience, root cause analysis and problem solving skills, willingness to pick new challenges and additional responsibilities.During this period heavily involved with Quark XPress Arabic 2.0 document printing both PCL and PS. For the first time learnt PCL, PS and rendering engines, rose to the level of PS file editing through notepad to achieve needed outputs. Great learnings/practices of the period are:1. Understood printing architecture and learnt PCL and PS2. Synergies working in small teams3. Practiced Extreme/Pair Programming methodology4. SOAP protocol

Boom.. after an year of working got promoted to new role with added responsibility. Work wise this period is really high with a lot of learning, became a mentor to new associate executives and travelled to Quark headquarters to work with global heads. During the period mostly associated with development of Right to Left document layout for Quark XPress Arabic and XML Import/Export to Quark XPress 5.0Life time learnings are:1. Settings up right expectations2. First glimpse of Matrix Organisation3. XML/XML Processing4. Both Joy and Pain related to team movements5. Mentoring 6. Code review and bouncing mechanism7. C++ programming language with industry usage8. Plug-in (Quark XPress XTension) architecture and communication mechanisms9. Distributed Source Control and Management and Versioning etc 10. Document Layout concepts like Story flow, Document flow, Sections, Chapters etc

Joined Quark with great enthu and the place Chandigarh was pleasant and peaceful. During the initial days learned to understand how media houses use Quark XPress and visit to both Dainik Bhaskar, Hindusthan Times are quite eye-openers about the massive + time sensitive industry.It was the days where SDLC heavily on waterfall model, first few months or work is to explore requirements to make Quark XPress Arabic version (Jerusalem 1.0) and the areas were Spellcheck, Word dictionary etc.. Later months are all about development and testing activities of the modules. Great learnings of the period are:1. Need of Coding standards and how to write optimal code to produce less foot print on OS2. Use of SCM and Defect tracking systems 3. Transparent and Open communication4. Etiquettes needed while working with huge teams 5. First glimpse of corporate rat race6. Practical use of C programming language with Pointers, Structures, Unions, DLLs etc