After my summer visit to Shillong, I raved about the beauty and the NGO ecosystem out there, and the Tech4Dev team decided they wanted to do our next “sprint” in Shillong. It’s a long way off for all of us, and we ensured that folks made use of the location by coming a few days early and/or staying a few days later. I’m glad we decided to go there since we had a blast, and the best sprint ever 🙂
As always, a list of some of my observations and thoughts, on the sprint and our evolution. What has changed, where we’ve stepped up, and some reflections
• I need to start by acknowledging that our team meetings have been planned well. This sprint was a perfect combination of the right number of meetings, a couple of excursions, and enough time for in-depth conversations and some work time. Kudos to the organizers: Diana Gomes, Radhika Bhagwat, Pratishka Rao, and Priyesh Sikariwal, for a job well done.
• Starting the sprint with a walk to nearby Wards Lake was a stroke of genius. It got everyone outside, the weather was quite good, and we got some exercise but set the overall tone of the sprint, relaxed and focused simultaneously.
• Always amazed at many of the things Ashwin Srinivasan does. This time, we did a retrospective exercise of each of our groups (Glific, Dalgo, Fractional CxO, HR & Finance). We got the teams to reflect on various aspects of group dynamics, personal growth, and product questions. Later in the week, he also coordinated a hackathon, which was nominated as the favorite activity by many of us. It was interesting to see a few quick PoCs developed and demoed.
• I took the opportunity to go on a few long treks with some of the team members the weekend before and after the sprint. Managed to knock off Double Decker Bridge, David Scott Trail, and the Bamboo Trail. It was nice to have long walks and conversations with people outdoors while we were huffing and puffing. Also learned a lot more about a few of our team members over conversations at the bar. I do hope we can maintain the culture of our “tribe” as we grow and evolve.
• We had a few folks who were relatively new, with Saurabh (our senior AI person) starting at the sprint. It was interesting to see their perspectives change over the week as they had more conversations and interacted with NGOs
• We’ve done a “Chai pe Charcha” event at our last two sprints, where we invited local NGOs to our event to learn more about our work, as well as for our team to understand their needs and challenges. This year we extended it by also providing a one-on-one session with our senior technologists for a smaller group of NGOs. Overall this is a great experience for the team, and I hope quite useful to the local community also.
• We do a happiness survey with the team twice a year to get a pulse on how the team is feeling and areas of concern or improvement. Erica, Vinod, and I discuss this along with other relevant topics as a reality check of the state of Tech4Dev. Overall things are progressing well and folks are happy, but we do need to ensure that we meet the career goals and aspirations of the team.
• At the sprint, we started work on the design and architecture of our AI Platform (coming early next quarter). We also kickstarted the planning of our pilot on the Tech4Dev Grassroots Initiative. Happy that we are experimenting and attempting to meet the evolving needs of the sector
• We had a few good meetings with The Change Engine, Veddis Foundation, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on our work, our goals, and how we can potentially integrate our work with government systems. We do think that usage of our platforms at the government level will increase and we’ll need to ensure that we are sustainable with this work also. We will need to start thinking of building our System Integrator (SI) network to help us with this work both from an implementation and sustainability viewpoint
