Why this finalist deserves to win Best Tech Manager:
Synopsis
Dr Anita Jindal is an accomplished leader with passion for technology and is leading global organization at NetApp that delivers innovative customer products using cloud and big data. Active IQ developed by her team correlates 200B data points across 300,000 NetApp data fabric endpoints provides actionable customer insights. These insights are used by NetApp customers to optimize and avoid disruptions in their Next Generation data center. She leads by example, fosters and encourages teamwork, collaboration, and open communication across teams for effective and quality product development. Her teams are constantly learning and adopting new technologies for accelerating development and delivering innovative products.
Anita is a regular speaker and moderator to support STEM and Women in Technology (WIT) goals globally. She serves as Board Member for STEMentors Silicon Valley (a California non-profit) that promotes STEM for underrepresented children in the Bay Area.
Anita has multiple software patents and publications. She holds a PhD in computer science from University of Illinois at Chicago.
Leadership
Anita takes ambiguous problems and leads cross-functional teams to deliver successful outcomes. She defines and articulates clear vision to the members of her organization through Monthly meetings; helps team members understand how vision ties to the overall company objectives. She works with her teams on defining specific organization goals and objectives. These goals and progress are reviewed quarterly for adjustments and tracking.
Anita fosters environment for personal growth and professional development as follows:
• She empowers her team members to take technical and project decisions. This enables her global team to function with autonomy and promotes confidence. Over past few years, her managers and architects at Bangalore, RTP, and SVL have become independent in making key decisions. They know that Anita will support their decisions and if needed guide them. She is also making decision making process data driven by creating a key metrics and performance indicators.
• She fosters collaborative environment with internal and external teams. Her team delivers complex projects, which are usually the first of its kind in the company, and need buy-in and collaboration across several cross-functional teams. For example, her team delivered 1st data science, microservices, and API platforms based on Big Data and Cloud technologies. This requires collaborating cross-functionally on defining Enterprise Architecture; setting up brand new VPC (Virtual Private Connect) environment by IT and Security teams. She worked with the leaders of those teams to get their buy-in to the project which enabled her team to collaborate and move forward for successful project execution.
• Industry is changing at accelerated pace, which requires organizations to be agile and nimble in delivering new capabilities for staying competitive. Anita’s team was originally a team of Java developers. To accelerate product development, they needed to embrace cloud and big data technologies and acquire new skillsets. She encouraged her team to learn new technologies through POCs, online courses, trainings and free conferences. Anita’s organization of Java developers have acquired skills for big data and cloud. This motivated her employees, as they are able to learn and use new technologies for building innovative products. Anita herself is very much interested in technologies and attends conferences and trainings to keep herself current.
• Anita grew from technical ranks into leadership. This enables her to connect with the engineers on her team to understand technical issues, providing guidance as necessary. Engineers in her organization freely contact her as necessary for 1 on 1s, discussing issues, and getting guidance.
Celebrating success, achievements, and rewards
Anita uses following approaches for celebrating success, achievement, and rewarding employees:
• Product releases and successes are celebrated with team lunches and team outings. The team members are awarded for their outstanding contributions with SPOT awards. The accomplishments of teams are highlighted to the management chain.
• The high potential employees in the organization are given an opportunity to present proposals and conduct demos. This helps them gain visibility within the wider organization including Executive Management, builds their confidence, and hones their presentation skills.
• Anita and her managers hold regular development and career discussions with employees to identify their career aspirations and collaborate with the employees to define development plans. The opportunities for exploring new areas, training and external conferences, constructive coaching and development feedback is provided to get them ready for next opportunity for career progression. Over years, several engineers and managers on her team have been promoted.
• Team members are given an opportunity to travel to different locations for technical project discussions and strengthening relationships with their peers.
Team culture
• Anita believes in accountability and delivering on commitments. These principals are very much ingrained in the complete organization (including individual engineers). The engineers hold accountability for their project deliverables and go an extra mile to deliver to commitments.
• The team uses open and transparent communication to ensure that other teams are aware of the project issues and progress. If there is an impact to the schedule appropriate communication is done to the Stakeholders with the reasons for the delay.
• Team learns from failures and mistakes to improve their future work or process. For example, any issues or bugs in production are fixed, however, it is also used to improve the engineering processes to avoid recurrence. The team also reviews the design flaws, project plans, and takes steps to improve to avoid recurrence.
• Anita and her management have built the organization based on TRUST. There are clear set of expectations and goals for employees, and employees have flexibility in their work hours and location to deliver the project. This has led to the highly motivated team, which goes above and beyond to meet the organization and company goals.
• Anita promotes the culture of alignment among development teams. She guides and encourages her team to build platforms that can be leveraged to simplify their own development and for leverage by other NetApp teams. NetApp teams are leveraging the Microservices and Data Science platform built by her team for quickly developing and deploying services in cloud for use by NetApp customers.
Team Achievements
Anita has led organizations to deliver several FIRST platforms within the company:
• At NetApp, her team delivered 1st data science, microservices, and API platforms based on Big Data and Cloud technologies:
o The data science platform is used by NetApp teams to derive insights from data for: (a). understanding product adoption trends and driving decisions for targeting marketing efforts; (b). product roadmap decisions based on product usage in the field; (c). building machine learning models for delivering actionable customer insights.
~1200+ NetApp employees use this platform for deriving insights.
o Microservices and API platform simplifies development and deployment of analytical services and APIs using hybrid cloud to NetApp customers and Partners.
This platform is used by several NetApp teams for quickly delivering insights from data to hands of NetApp customers and partners through Active IQ application. This reduced the development time for services from 1 month to 1 week.
• At NetApp, her team delivers Active IQ Application that correlates 200B data points from 300,000 NetApp Data Fabric Endpoints for providing actionable customer insights.
~7000 customers use Active IQ insights for optimizing their data center operations.
Community involvement, Women in Technology, and Board Affiliations
Anita is a regular speaker and moderator to support STEM and Women in Technology (WIT) goals globally. She serves as a mentor for women inside and outside of her company. She represents NetApp at industry panels.
She serves as Board Member for STEMentors Silicon Valley (a California non-profit) that promotes STEM for underrepresented children in the Bay Area. She organized and led NetApp session at STEMentors Silicon Valley in 2018 to teach children “How Data is changing our world” using online shopping exercise. As a Board Member, she led the launch of new website for STEMentors Silicon Valley (https://stementorssv.org). She is collaborating with NetApp Diversity team on increasing NetApp presence at upcoming STEMentors SV expo to be held on Nov. 9, 2019.
Anita has delivered Guest lectures on Data Science and Agile development to share practical industry experience with Golden Gate University students.
Anita is affiliated with Toastmasters International and is working toward a goal of completing her “Distinguished Toastmasters” by June 2020. She is serving as c6 Area Director for term 2019-2020. In this role, she is overseeing 5 Area cubs and providing guidance to club officers on achieving their club goals. She is a member of Cupertino Toastmasters, where she has held Club President and Vice President Education roles.
You can learn more on Anita Jindal from:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitajindal/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnitaJindal12
Blogs:
1. https://blog.netapp.com/active-iq-api-development/
2. https://blog.netapp.com/how-we-use-the-netapp-data-fabric-to-innovate-with-active-iq/
Awards:
• Awarded Delhi University Gold Medal, 1st among 1000 students in B.Sc (Hons) Physics, 1982.
• Awarded Sun's “IEC (India Engineering Center) Best Remote Manager”, 2003.
• University Fellowship, University of Illinois at Chicago, Sept. 1986 to June 1989.
• All India Post Graduate Scholarship, July 1982 to April 1985.
