When the power of compelling product design merges with competitive engineering excellence, the possibilities of delivering an extraordinary customer experience exponentially increase.
Global capability centres are harnessing the power of in-house innovation capabilities and sophisticated engineering skills, becoming key business drivers by enhancing services portfolios and building efficiency to drive business growth.
Here are a few themes that are central to building high-end engineering centres on a solid foundation of visionary technology, market knowledge, skilled talent and invested leadership.
Sparked by Technology, Sustained by Processes
Engineering excellence thrives not only because of emerging technologies but also due to a robust process that helps close any tech debt gap. While engineering a product, capability centres must facilitate the engineering teams’ access to high-powered development assets, an environment to experiment, and tools that enhance productivity and innovation. Success is driven by automation across all levels, including adopting continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and unit and integration testing.
Know Your Customers
Driving engineering excellence requires vision and a roadmap for each core offering. When we talk about effective product engineering, hearing the voice of the customer and being receptive to listening channels is paramount. It is imperative to build a business case, coordinate with stakeholders, and obtain executive support for market launch. Leverage user research data to capture customer preferences with an intent to positively impact the end-user experience and design.
Skilled Talent at the Centre
Any team or capability centre is only as good as its people. One of the top priorities for engineering centres is to build a conducive and world-class workplace that attracts and retains top talent. Leadership skills, along with technical and functional fitment, are key to build strong teams of the future. But hiring is just the beginning.
Capability centres have realised the value of continuous skill development and talent advancement through upskilling, cross skilling, internal mobility, and professional development opportunities. Academia partnerships strengthen and augment the talent pipeline. With a talent pool skilled in niche and emerging tech, the capability centre has the potential to fuel innovation for the overall firm and bring new ideas for future growth.
Today, more than ever, engineering or product or innovation centres are investing in establishing a seamless combination of skill sets across their talent.
Led by Invested Leadership
The most important representation of a maturing product and an engineering centre is the emergence of an innovative and ownership-driven culture that can only be fueled by invested leadership. While building a product engineering team has many facets, the end is always to develop a high-performing and highly engaged team. Of course, recruiting the right talent and capabilities is foundational.
Leaders must enable their teams with the right tools and encourage them to experiment, to fail, to try new things and bring out their core strengths. Seamless communication and trusted international virtual networks allow for global collaboration, ideation, and incubation of new products.
Most importantly, this culture of invested leadership instils confidence and eagerness among global capability centres’ engineers to own the product and ensure that the global organisation drives the product roadmap from the capability centre.
By Abhishek Sinha, Vice President, Clover India Product Engineering Centre, Fiserv
