CAREERS BLOG
CAREERS BLOG
Jul 12, 2022
Arvind Saraf is an experienced engineering leader and entrepreneur trained at IIT, MIT and Google. Skilled in building technology products from scratch, Arvind has a strong interest and understanding of deep technology and emerging markets.
His current goal is to change the manufacturing industry through the application of AI, computer vision, product platform (thinking and building) at Drishti.
Arvind is known among his teammates as the person who not only encourages skill development beyond the current need, but also creates opportunities for new skills that can complement the current development within the company and industry.
We recently had the opportunity to speak to him at the Drishti Bengaluru office.
Manasi KG:Congratulations on your promotion to Vice President of Engineering at Drishti, and thank you for lending your time to this interview.
Your focus has been technology (mostly SaaS & platforms) across various domains. Tell us a little about your experience in healthcare, retail (fashion), and what led you to the manufacturing domain?
Arvind Saraf:
They have not been as different as it seems — the common challenge has been digital transformation of otherwise traditionally entrenched sectors.
The healthcare and retail ventures were about using technology for social impact in emerging markets. The healthcare social impact venture (Swasth India) aimed at affordable healthcare for the poor, and business-to-business apparel retail tech venture aimed at making small businesses competitive.
Both were deeply immersive experiences. They took me to the villages, towns and slums of India, interacting with the residents, traders, manufacturers and nonprofits.
MKG: Talk about your work at Drishti, and what’s different from being a CEO/co-founder to moving into a technologist role at a scaling organization?
AS: I am essentially a technologist who enjoys looking at a process or a system and visualizing how it could be better and more efficient. That skill is fundamental to my role at Drishti, and what I love about it.
Be it iterating on a product, building a process, deploying a software solution, defining team/organization structure, or even putting accounting systems, in past roles, technology was only a part of my mind share.
I looked at each of them as a learning experience, which taught me the importance of factoring broader business implications in engineering decisions.
MKG: What are the three things every technologist should keep in mind to be successful, no matter what size the organization?
AS: There are some aspects that I learnt the hard way, and I think every technologist should keep in mind irrespective of the organization size:
Simplicity and consistency: Keeping designs and implementations as simple and internally consistent as possible is crucial. As problem solvers, we often naturally lean toward a complex implementation when a simpler one could suffice or even be better. We like using the newest tools or solutions, sometimes at the cost of a bloated stack.
Stalling or being indecisive may prove expensive: Often, while working on engineering products, one may not have full product facts. Stalling or dithering is an obvious outcome in such a case, but it is expensive, and in my earlier experiences I have seen it be fatal to an organization. Rather than building for all the use cases right away, it is often better to build as per the current understanding, taking good engineering decisions about clean logical data models, stack and logical services.
The concept of “toil”, brought up by Google in the SRE domain, is often underrated: We may want to make dashboards and write software, but often underrate the actual manual deep dive of individual data points, alerts or cycles. Incredible new insights (or even obvious mistakes!) emerge from that.
MKG: Give us your top three tips on time management.
AS: I’m a fairly non-tech with time management:
I have a paper to-do list that I use to rank items, usually by “earliest deadline first,” and try to knock off a few everyday. Typically, I try to clean up the list every 1-2 weeks.
Giving self-initiated commitments help bump up priorities of important, but otherwise seemingly non-urgent items. These commitments are important to me — and even though I often slip, I like to take it as my responsibility to own up even slippages beyond excuses.
If I am stuck with some open larger design/organization/engineering task, I start organizing the loose thoughts or design details on paper, then writing or inviting a team member for discussion. This inevitably gives me clarity enough to unblock and move ahead.
5. MKG: Last but not the least, what is your advice to aspiring IIT / JEE students?
AS: I didn’t expect to talk about IIT JEE at Drishti! My understanding is a bit dated, but like all things science and engineering, I will encourage a solid understanding of concepts, to the point of visual clarity. For example, when and which physical law or mathematical rule needs to be applied to which problem. Solving a lot of practice problems is always a plus.
