VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: It's not about how big the program is, but how fast you started releasing value to the clients. How fast can you get things done?
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: I'm Alex Kahn, Global Head of Content at Publicis Sapient, and today I am joined by Tilak Dodapaneni, who is our Global Head of Engineering. Tilak, thank you so much for joining us.
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: Thank you.
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: How are you doing, Alex?
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: Doing pretty well. So what time is it for you there?
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: I'm in Bangalore. It's 7.30 p.m.
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: So tell me, what is the top line for what your job entails?
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: My job is to make sure the teams have everything they need, including the talent. My job is not just to manage them or run them. My job is really to say, hey, how do our teams at Sapient, our engineering at Sapient, are really 10x, doing 10x worth of work?
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: What energizes you about that job? What do you find exciting about it?
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: I mean, see, a lot of it comes from me being a deep engineer for almost 15, 20 years in my career, and understanding what were the things that, like looking at different managers, different leaders, what they did at the ground level, how it actually helped me or didn't help me to be really productive. What were great things I learned, what are the great mistakes, not just me, but things around me caused me not to be productive.
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: It sounds like you've almost learned as much from things that have gone wrong as things that have gone right.
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: Exactly. That's a very engineer's way to look at things.
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: I mean, whether you're an engineer or not, one thing that I find interesting is that going from doer to manager is one of the hardest transitions that someone can make.
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: Yes.
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: And never mind managing, but then also leading. You lead our engineering function at Publicis Sapient. So can you talk to me a little bit about that? Was that a challenging transition for you?
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: And actually, that's one of the reasons why I took that role at Sapient. I mean, I've been an engineering leader for, let's say, teams of 500,000 people. It's not just your engineers. We work with, at Sapient, we work a lot with client engineering teams. And that is an entirely different ballgame. It's a very heavy influencing role.
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: Talk to me a little bit about that. Why can't, I mean, you've worked at companies before, being a leader in their engineering departments. Why can't companies, why can't our clients build this function internally? Like, what's the advantage of working with a digital business transformation partner like Publicis Sapient?
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: So there are many, you know, I mean, some clients, you know, when they start thinking of this journey, I mean, I've had clients where, you know, they didn't have their internal teams. Pretty much everything is, you know, outsourced. And, you know, as they're going on this journey, they say, oh, hey, we need a different type of partner. So you have one set of, you definitely have a set of clients like that. Then you have a set of clients who, you know, have their own engineering teams who are usually, you know, doing high-level policies and, you know, guidelines, plus things that are needed mostly, you know, baseline. But when you have, you know, needs for large transformation and strategic programs that need a huge burst, right, they struggle. And, you know, they need help. So that's a second set of clients. Then there is a third set of clients who actually have the capability, right? Like, they have the capability, you know, they can do this. But the analogy I give, right, and, you know, why sometimes, you know, even I try to tell clients, hey, you need us, is think of, like, you know, the booster rockets, right? We help you, you know, escape the gravity, right? And at some point, we might peel off, right? But you need those boosters, right? And we are, you know, we are those boosters. That means the clients are also pushing you, right? They have fairly sophisticated engineering teams. They're challenging you day in, day out. You're actually, you know, you get into client situations like that. You actually sometimes, you know, you learn from the clients. They've solved, you know, basically everything that could be solved, and they're really asking you to solve something that couldn't be solved.
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: What I keep hearing more and more of is that India is not the place to find cheap talent. It's the place to find the best talents. Is that true? And has that evolved over time?
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: The engineering team is global, right? We have teams in North America. We have teams in London. We have teams in Romania now. We have teams in LATAM, right? But, you know, 75% of our team is in India. That's the reason I decided to be out of India. It's not about cost. It's about scale of the talent. It's a little different. Sometimes, hey, I need something critical done at a fast pace, and I need, let's say, suddenly 100, you know, talented engineers, right? You know, there's a good chance of, you know, getting that in India. So that's a scale aspect. The other aspect is definitely, you know, the sophistication because, you know, in India, you have not just, you know, companies like Sapient. You also have, you know, companies like, let's say, you know, Goldman Sachs or, you know, Target who have their, you know, development centers, right? And then you have, you know, a huge, you know, Indian ecosystem, you know, of companies, right, Indian companies, right? So you have, you know, who are very modern. You have, you know, like this, you know, talent pool that is highly sophisticated. And the reason, you know, you could say, hey, what about other countries? They also have, you know, their own local companies. But you look at the scale. So let's say, you know, you look at, you know, the five, ten payment companies in India, right? They're dealing with like 100 million transactions a day, right? So you tap into an engineer from there, right? It's a very different scale they have dealt with. The complexity of the problems, right, and the things they need to think to solve it, right?
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: Are there any trends that are happening in India that you think are going to eventually spread to the rest of the world?
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: I mean, definitely the whole payments, right, the digital wallet, right? You know, I mean, India and China are leading it. If you look at, right, Google Pay, you know, and Amazon Pay, you know, have been, you know, ironed out and smoothed out in India. The second thing is, you know, e-commerce logistics and delivery, right? Ordering food, right, the scale. Third is education, ed tech, right? The strides that India is making in education, ed tech, you know, is just, you know, incredible. The fourth one is India is a budding, you know, ecosystem of sports leagues. The level of tech in those, right, and the way they're using the tech because a lot of people don't have, you know, TVs, right? A lot of people, you know, don't have, you know, electricity, right? They just have a phone, right? You know, all the sophistication around, you know, gaming, gambling, right? You know, fantasy themes, right, is another area that's like really, I mean, some of the, you know, the innovation I see is just incredible. And I'll just give a simple example, right? Even on my interactive TV or, you know, on my phone, let's say if I'm watching, you know, one of these league games, you got like 20, you know, choices in the bottom of the language, right? And when you click, it's actually a different set of commentators, different types of, you know, like let's say an ad, it's a time for an ad. You're actually seeing a different ad. And like dynamically on my phone or computer, right, I can just click on English, I can click Hindi, I can hit Telugu, right? So that is just, you know, because there are like 20 languages and in each one is like 60, 70 million people, right?
SPEAKER: Alex Kahn: So engineers are often viewed and often what their skill set is, hey, you're going to execute something, you're going to go build what I tell you. You've worked at lots of other places. You see what the culture is and you've helped build the culture of Pobst & Sapient, which seems to be very different in that engineers are in the room from the very beginning. But in some of the companies that we're trying to transform, that might not be something that they're used to is having engineers in the room from the very beginning.
SPEAKER: Tilak Dodapaneni: No, that is a differentiator, right? And that is what the clients also see, right? You know, when they talk to us, oh, okay, hey, right? So that's part of our methodology, right? And, you know, because it's part of how we do things, I'm not worried, you know, who's talking to the client because the moment anything that we think could influence engineering, you know, engineering leaders, you know, got into the room. Definitely different for our competitors, so that's why it's an advantage for us. And it's definitely, you know, a new thing for some of our clients. I have seen, I have enough examples of where because the engineering leaders were in the room,