Isaac: Hi Sathiesh, I’m Isaac from the Marketing team at DCS. It’s great to get a chance to talk with you today over a cup of coffee. I’m looking forward to getting to know a little more about you and the in- house Design & Innovation team. Can we start the discussion with a quick introduction about yourself?
Sathiesh: Hi Isaac, sure. I’ve been looking forward to this myself. I’m a Principal Decisioning Architect working with DCS and have been here since March 2022. I split my time between client projects where I’ll often work as a Lead Architect in a Centre of Excellence or as a Design Authority as well as a Lead Architect in the Design & Innovation team at DCS. Before that, I worked as an Architect / Technical Product Owner at Pega as part of their Product team – with a particular focus on their Paid Media solution, amongst other things.
Isaac: That’s sounds interesting; and it’s great that you get to split your time between two very different roles. You mentioned about Design & Innovation squad. That’s quite unique for a consulting organization of the size of DCS to invest in something like that. Can you tell us about it?
Sathiesh: Sure, and you’re absolutely right. I feel it’s one of the things that differentiates us from other consulting organizations of our size. The squad was primarily established to develop accelerators, packaged service offerings and integrations that supports better outcomes for Pega Customer Decision Hub clients. We want to be able to provide clients with solutions, and we’re constantly looking at things that can enable them to get extra value from their investments.
Isaac: That makes sense. All clients are looking for something to differentiate themselves or to accelerate their time to market. Can you explain a bit about the squad and the ways of working?
Sathiesh: Just like our partners at Pega, and many of our clients, we follow Agile development methodologies working as a scrum team. We have bi-weekly sprints which include all of the sprint ceremonies except for daily scrum calls as some of the team have client commitments and it is hard to find common availability every day. One of our Directors, Sunil Lodha is our Product Owner, and the wider team is made of up of a variety of skill sets and levels of seniority. We actively encourage everyone in the company to participate where possible to help with their own personal learning and exposure to innovate solutions with the Pega Product.
Isaac: That’s great to hear about how inclusive and accessible the squad is. I guess the big question is, what capabilities have you been working on so far?
Sathiesh: I’m glad you’ve asked, and I can certainly say we’ve been busy. The DCS Test Automation Suite is one of our unique value propositions that we’ve been working on and its already adding value to our clients – including the largest telecommunications provider in the UK. We’ve extended some the features in a new version of the suite and can found on Pega Marketplace here. We see this adding so much value; people often talking about complex decision making and increased time to market so its only rationale that you need a testing capability that goes hand-in-hand with that too.
Aside from that we’ve developed and published a couple of packaged service offerings including our Personalized Pricing and Paid Media Manager in Pega Marketplace which can be found here.
Action proliferation can be a common problem at many industries like Telcos because of how product catalogues traditionally work. Our Personalized Pricing service offering provides solution to this exact problem. More details can be found here.
With Google announcing the end of third-party cookies within next two years and other browsers have blocked third-party cookies for a while now, it is important for enterprises to use first-party data for their digital advertising. Our Paid Media Manager service offering provides established patterns and best practices to do just that. More details can be found here.
Isaac: It certainly sounds like you’ve been busy. Are there any other achievements you can tell me about since you’ve joined?
Sathiesh: We certainly have. In terms of other achievements, I’d probably say that it’s our participation in Pega Hackathon 2022 that comes to mind. We had two teams enter this year. It was only our first time participating, but with so much demand we formed 2 teams with 8 members each and delivered two unique submissions. We took a sabbatical from our regular Design & Innovation backlog through September and re-focused our attention to it. If I’m honest, we started a little late but there’s some good lessons learnt and the teams enjoyed it because they got to explore different parts of the product. Whilst we didn’t win this time, we still made sure to celebrate our successes anyway with both teams!
Isaac: That’s brilliant. That level of participation speaks volumes for how you must run things. Are you working on anything else currently?
Sathiesh: Yes, of course. We maintain our backlog in Jira roadmap. Currently, our backlog is filled with loads of ideas both innovative and based on use cases we’ve seen and heard from customers and prospects. I probably can’t say too much but we are actively working on some interesting things like the Customer Decision Hub’s integration with a variety of social channels.
Isaac: Sounds intriguing. How should people contact you if they want to find out more?
Sathiesh: Watch this space – we hope to have more updates soon. If people wanted to find out more, they can reach out to us at [email protected] or via the Pega Marketplace.
